How to run a Facebook Ads campaign step by step

Make the most of your investment with Facebook Ads and turn your target audience into a future customer.

Possibly in the last year you will have realized that with the same efforts or even spending even more hours, your organic content on Facebook does not have anywhere near the results that it had in the past. If this is not your case, congratulations! You have passed Facebook. But for the rest of the mortals, it is time to accept reality and enter the world of Facebook Ads campaigns.

Because indeed, to be able to compete, at least on Facebook, you will have to pay. This situation, which has been called in the sector as “pay to play” (“pay to play”), has its origin in the changes in the Facebook algorithm that Mark Zuckerberg already announced under the excuse of pursuing a greater connection with our Facebook friendships and that have been happening since then.

You have two options: increase your efforts to get with 10 posts the results you got before with 1, or get on with Facebook Ads. @marielespt Tweet this

But as a picture is worth a thousand words:

Facebook ads campaign structure

With that said, get to the point! The first thing you should know to get down to work is that Facebook Ads ads are composed and configured in three parts:

• Bell
• Ad Set or ad set
• Ads or advertisements

Bell

A Facebook campaign is like a matryoshka, each element that you configure encompasses the following, so that you advance from decisions that affect all parties, to decisions that only include one of them.

In this case, the campaign is the great container for everything that will come after it, so this is where you will have to decide your objective and the way in which you want to pay.

goals

In this image you can see everything you can achieve with your Facebook ads packed into three main objectives related to the conversion funnel .

• Awareness: if you want your content to have more notoriety, Facebook allows you to choose that your ads are distributed to the more people the better (reach) or to the people most likely to remember them (Brand Awareness). Quantity vs. Quality. In this case, what you will pay for is per thousand impressions, called CPM (cost per thousand).
• Consideration: a step further, since what the objectives of consideration are pursuing is greater involvement on the part of the user: go to your page (traffic), get some type of interaction, going from likes and comments to fans (engagement), download your app, consume your videos to a greater or lesser extent of time, get your data (lead generation) or establish a conversation (messages). Based on your choice, you will pay per click (CPC), per interaction (CPI), per view (CPV), etc.
• Conversion: to get direct conversions from Facebook. It will be essential that you have the corresponding pixel installed on your page (https://es.semrush.com/blog/pixel-facebook-que-es/).

As we said, in this step you will also decide how to pay, if in advance, so that you make sure that you are going to achieve fixed objectives with your investment "reserving" the audience to impact (what is known as reach and frequency) or by bidding.

If you have a small budget (under which we will follow the rest of the instructions), Reach and Frequency will be less accessible since the costs are higher. However, with the bid format you can decide for what price you want to compete to impact an audience.

Along with two other factors, related to the probability that your ad will like the selected audience, if your bid is higher than the rest of the accounts bidding to impact the same user segmentation, Facebook will distribute your ads. If it is not, it will wait for the price to drop to do so. This is why you will not be able to know in advance if you will achieve your target figures and you will have to work based on estimates.

Ad Set

Let's assume that our goal is to drive traffic to a blog. We will have selected this option in the campaign settings and now it's time to make the decisions related to the ad set: who to impact, where to impact, for how long and with what budget.

Audience

Ideally, you should be testing how your campaigns work in different audiences, so as you create them you will be able to save them to have them ready and fill out this step more quickly. But since this is about setting up a Facebook Ads campaign from scratch, we are going to stop at each of the steps to take.

You also have the option of using your own audiences (called custom audiences) based, for example, on the traffic to your website that the pixel has been able to collect or on contact lists that you can upload yourself.

This is not mandatory because you can also make segmentations based on the data that Facebook has of its users: location, age, gender, language (in which they have their account configured) and interests and behaviors.

The interests and behaviors are related to characteristics that users have manifested in their profile and consumption of the social network: their profession, their marital status, pages they like, etc. In the case of a cooking blog, we will have more possibilities of generating interest in users who are interested in this discipline, so we will select related interests: cooking shows, famous chefs, other cooking blogs, brands, etc.

Finally, you can also choose other types of connections related to your page, your app or the events of your pixel. This is especially useful for excluding users you don't want to impact. For example, if what we want is to attract new users to our blog, it would be interesting to avoid those who have already visited us.

As we fill in these options, Facebook will tell us what potential users we can impact with this segmentation and if our segmentation is too specific or too broad:

Provision

The possibilities of placements that Facebook offers is very wide and goes beyond the different formats that it can offer within the social network itself, involving other platforms such as Instagram or websites and pages within its network (Audience Network).

If what we want is to appear in some specific contact points, we must select ourselves from the "Edit Locations" option :

In addition, we can also choose which devices to appear on , so that if we were in the case of an application developed only for Android, we can avoid leaving on IO devices. Or if our audience is mostly mobile, eliminate the option to also appear on the desk to optimize investment.

Beware: if you select some specific sites, Facebook can distribute your content on platforms or websites with which you do not want your brand to be associated (example: Tinder or betting pages). Make sure to stop at the exclusions settings.

Budget and delivery

It is time to decide how much to invest and when we want to appear.

Regarding the budget, we can choose between defining a total amount for the entire duration of the campaign (I want to consume € 50 that is distributed throughout the entire campaign as Facebook believes optimal), or a daily amount (of the 15 days that My campaign will last, I want € 5 to be consumed every day). This will depend on how uneven or constant you want your investment to be distributed depending on what you are pursuing.

You can then decide whether to limit your bid to a specific time or not. In addition, a little later you have the option to choose what specific times you want your ad to appear and on what days . If your content plays with the context of time, it will be key. Imagine that your case consists of promoting an alcohol brand associated with nightlife, perhaps it makes more sense that your ads appear on weekends from afternoon to night, than on Monday at 8 in the morning (or not ... it is important that you try).

And it is time to decide your bid. Again, Facebook lets us choose, this time between automatic bid based on the lowest possible price, or maximum bid . Here the recommendation is that if it is the first time that you are working with a specific audience and therefore you do not know the market costs, choose the first option, and as you get to know the average prices.

Ads

The last piece of the campaign: the ad itself, or what is the same, the format, graphic resource and message with which you will impact the segment on which you want to achieve a goal.

At the beginning we talked about the fact that the decisions that are made in each of the steps affect the following, so depending on the objective and the location you have chosen, your customization possibilities will be one or the other. If, for example, your idea is to set up an Instagram Stories campaign with targeted traffic, Facebook will give you the option to upload 9:16 videos, but if what you wanted was to bring traffic from Facebook to your website, the options will be different.

Be careful: if you have chosen to appear in both, what Facebook will do will be an adaptation of the piece designed for Facebook in Instagram Stories, something that usually does not give a good image. If you want to be on both sites, our recommendation is that you make a specific ad set for each ad.

Facebook also gives you the option to promote a post that you have already uploaded organically as an ad. In that case you just have to choose it and that's it. A tip: if you cannot find the publication, you can locate it by entering its ID.

As this is about setting up Facebook Ads campaigns from scratch, we will continue on the assumption that you do not want to promote something from your wall, but rather that you want to make a publication in parallel. This is what is known as a dark post (because it is a post that cannot be seen on your page).

The first thing you will find is the format editor. As you mount campaigns you will check the effectiveness of each one for your business.

If what we want is to appear in some specific contact points, we must select ourselves from the "Edit Locations" option :

Finally, you can customize the call to action that you want to appear in your ad, depending on your objective: see more, buy, more info ...

As you fill in all the elements, on the right you can see the final result of your ad . Check well how it looks in each of the provisions you have chosen, because if, for example, you have chosen a too long headline, in the desk preview of the ad it may not be cut but in the mobile it does, and that could affect your results.

If you have followed all the steps, you should already have your campaign ready to publish by clicking on the green button that you will see at the bottom right of the editor. If there are any errors in what you have configured, do not worry, Facebook usually detects them and warns you through icons with exclamations indicating what the error is.

You know what happens now, don't you? Test, test and test to optimize your investment to the maximum. Cheer up!