How’d you like to get your business seen by 3.59 billion people? Sounds like a guaranteed way to find your perfect customers or clients. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C, small or large business, you’ll find a great part of your audience on Meta platforms.

Why are we so sure? Well, it’s not a secret that 4.26 billion people around the world now use social media. The average daily social media usage is 2 hours and 27 minutes. 

And what do representatives of different audience groups have in common? Like CEOs, students, dog owners, eco-activists, and DIY folks? When they step out of their role, they’re all more or less similar human beings willing to make their life easier and funnier. It’s where selling on social media kicks in since it encaptures those two, ease and fun. Both for sellers and buyers.

And this guide is a great starting point for advertising newbies, as it is for more experienced advertisers since it offers tips on how to improve campaign success for eCommerce.

Let’s get you through a really short and simple explanation of what it takes to run a Meta ad campaign:

1. Sign up for Meta Ads Manager to create and manage your ads.
2. Choose what you want your ad to do (like getting people to visit your website).
3. Decide who you want to see your ad (your audience).
4. Set a budget - how much you want to spend on the ad.
5. Create your ad - design and copywriting on point.
6. Keep an eye on how well your ad is doing (metrics).

How to set up Facebook Ads Manager?

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First things first! You’ll need a business profile.

Go to Facebook, and on the left-hand menu, choose Pages > Create New Page. You’ll land on Page Creator within Facebook.

1. Enter your page name and choose up to three categories
2. Type in a brief description (under 255 characters)
3. Click Create Pag

It’s time for things to get more personal between your future audience and your business!

4. Add contact, location, and working hours (optional)
5. Add a profile photo (170 x 170 pixels) and a cover photo (1640 x 856 pixels) and follow or skip further steps depending on your sharing preferences
6. And click Done

So far, Facebook has already moved you to the Facebook Business Page dashboard, where you can finish setting up other page aspects.

This may look like a lot, but trust us, it’s simple. Start by adding a username and action button. And don’t worry; anything is editable, so don’t put much pressure on yourself to make it perfect from the first attempt.

So, now you’ve set the core things for an operative Facebook Business Page. Explore further to optimize it to be as helpful and informative as your business demands.

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It’s time to run Facebook Ads!

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Technicalities and targeting

Compared to programming, this would be a backend job. At a concert, this would be the crew operating backstage. You get the picture, time to run the engines!

Go to the Ad Manager on Facebook:

• Go to the left-hand sidebar and tap on the “Ad Centre”
• Select “All Ads” from the listed menu
• Click on “Ads Manager” at the base of the Facebook page

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You’ll land on the Facebook Ad Accounts page, and there you will have a short summary of your Facebook ad accounts. If you have access to more accounts, choose which ad account to operate.

Now you’ll have to open the Facebook business manager to create your first (if not your first successful) campaign. Name it as you wish.

Or you can just follow this link https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager 

Before creating your first Facebook ad campaign go to Account Overview (on the left sidebar) and make sure you completed all the steps required to run ads. The first thing you need to do is confirm the Facebook page that you want to use to run your ads. This is important since every ad wil show your chosen Facebook page as the company running that specific ad.

You also need to add a payment method because you are running paid ads, so obviously, Facebook wants to get paid for showing your ads. Bammer, we know.

So click on add payment method, and when that's done, you’re ready to create your first campaign (Debit or Credit Card, or PayPal).

Now go back to your Campaigns and then click on Create on the top left. The first thing you must set in your campaign is the objective. Let’s suppose you own an eCommerce store and want to sell products online, you’d go for a Sales objective.

After choosing an objective and clicking Continue, it’s time to give your campaign a name.

Just click Next, or on an Ad Set to get there to continue creating a campaign.
Let's move on to Conversions - choose where you want to drive sales.

We’ll leave it on the website because we want to get conversions on our website.

Time to set up a pixel (data set). If you already have it, simply add it. If not, learn how to make Meta pixels here.

And then, for Conversion Event, choose between - Add payment info, Add to cart, Add to wishlist, Complete registration, Contact, Customise product, Donate, Find location, Initiate checkout, Lead, Purchase, Schedule, Search, Start trial, Submit application, Subscribe, View content.

For example, if you want people to buy products in your store then optimize your ads for purchase.

Budget and schedule 

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Just as an example, let’s set the budget to 20 dollars per day and set the start date and time. You can set the end date, but it’s best to monitor your ads every day and end if they don't work.

If you want an ad to start running on a specific date in the future, you can:

• Create your ad in advance and turn it off, then turn it on when you want it to start running
• Set a schedule while creating your ad set

We recommend always scheduling your campaign for tomorrow morning.

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Audience 

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Here you can narrow down the location that your ads should show up. By default, it’s set to your own country, and to change that, just delete it and then type in the country that you want to target with your ads.

Another tricky option is to Add locations in bulk.

For example, you can choose several towns and determine the precise radius for your ads to be shown within.

You can also use Custom Audiences to reach people who've already interacted with your business or Lookalike Audiences to reach new people who are similar to your existing customers.

Who are your buyer personas? If you don’t know yet, it’s time to figure it out since you’ll need that data to improve the deliverability of your ads to real buyers. 

If you have your buyer personas created, just enter the data in the corresponding fields. And if you know beyond just age and gender, something like their education, hobbies, and more under the detailed targeting section, feel free to use it whether to include or exclude those people from your audience.

But, if you’re in eCommerce, our tip is to choose the wider audience as is logically backed up. For example, Poland, 18-65+, both genders.

Regarding placement, for now, you’re good to go with Advantage+ placements. And for the curious ones, there’s always that Learn more button in each section. Happy exploring!

Time to click on the Next button you’ve been so craving for.

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Ad creative

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This is the part where you get on the stage! So here is where you're going to create the ad that people are going to see. 

The first thing is going to be the ad name (not important, it’s for you to recognize it), and choose your Facebook Page and Instagram account that’ll represent your business in ads.

If you choose Catalog under the Ad Setup it’ll just take products from your store and show them to your users. But here, we’ll show you how to make an ad manually. You can also use the Existing post option to boost it.

Just a hint, when people say creative in advertising, what they mean is the media that people see in the ad. So this could be a video or an image.

If you don’t have an idea how your ad should look, check out what businesses similar to yours use to get inspired → Ad Library 

Let’s proceed to manual upload and keep things as simple as possible by using a single-image ad.

You can notice we turned down the Multi-advertiser ads option, it’s because we want to get our ad a bit more singled out.

Time to add creative (in this case an image) by clicking on Add media → Add image and then just choose the image you want.

You can replace an image if it doesn’t fit all placements as we did above. Once you’re satisfied with your images, click Next.

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Optimize your ad with Advantage+ Creative

Meta can automatically tailor your ad for the person viewing it by allowing it to optimize your creative. They show an optimized version of your creative or your original creative based on their prediction of what will improve performance the most.

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This is what it looks like:

After choosing whether you want or not automatical optimization, click Done. Now you’ll have your Ad preview on your right side, and you can see exactly how your ad looks as working on it. You can also turn it off or click to see an advanced preview.

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Let's move on to Ad Copy!

Now, choose the destination you want users to land on. For example, your product page, collection page, homepage, etc. Make sure to Preview URL to avoid any mistakes.

And, that’s it. You’ve created your first ad, or maybe just your first successful one.

In any case, congratulations!

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Here’s how it looks:

Ad campaign

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What you can do now is create more ads within this ad set. All you have to do is go to the three dots→duplicate and then choose how many times you want to duplicate this ad. So let's just say you

want to duplicate it once:

Now you can change creatives and text or one single element. The point is, you can make as many variations of your ads within one campaign as you wish. The more ads you test for your product, the higher the chances that you're going to actually find an ad that will perform the best and make you the most money.

And, as from our experience, to keep things clean and extract all necessary information, it’s best to make 3-5 ads within one campaign/ad set.

For now, let’s keep it simple and stick with this image ad.

Here’s how it looks in the Ads Manager:

Here, you can see all your campaigns and track their progress, as well as turn it off in case it’s a fail (the whole campaign, an ad set within a campaign, or a single ad).

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You can track progress by default setup or customize metrics here:

Once you open it, you’ll see it’s a really broad selection (dependable on your offer and goal), so make sure to do proper research on common metrics for your unique offer.

Here, we’ll explain the most commonly used metrics in Ads Manager:

Click-Through Rate (CTR): It's the percentage of people who clicked on your ad after seeing it. A higher CTR means more people find your ad interesting.

Conversions: This metric tracks the number of people who completed the action you wanted them to take, like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.

Cost per Click (CPC): It calculates how much you pay, on average, for each click on your ad. A lower CPC is usually better for your budget.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): This metric helps you see how much money you make for every dollar you spend on ads. A higher ROAS is desirable.

Frequency: It tells you how many times, on average, each person saw your ad. A high frequency might indicate ad fatigue.

Effective Cost Per Acquisition (eCPA): Measures the average cost to acquire one customer through a marketing campaign.

Cost Per Mille (CPM): Calculates the cost for one thousand ad impressions or views of an advertisement.

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Wrapping up

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Hope this guide was helpful! Stick around for more eCommerce-wise useful content. 

And for more details on this topic - you can always count on our FREE advice or audit.

Simply contact us, and we'll get back to you in moments.

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