You want to advertise your product or service with Facebook Ads, but don't know how to get started? No problem, Sven Scheuerle explains step by step how to set up your first campaign and reach your target group with Facebook Ads.

As of 2020, Facebook has almost two billion active users. This makes Facebook one of the most popular social media networks in the world. This factor naturally plays into the hands of companies placing Facebook ads. This is because numerous personal details are also provided on Facebook, which help you as a company to target your advertising. 

In the following article, I would like to show you how you can quickly and easily find your way around Facebook's Ads Manager as a beginner and explain how you can start a Facebook campaign. 

Facebook Ads: What you should know to get started

You're probably reading this article because you're interested in running Facebook ads. If I had to guess now, I would say that you also use Facebook privately to keep up to date with the latest news or to communicate with your friends and acquaintances - right?

What we are not directly aware of is how much personal data we actually leave behind in our profiles. For example, what interests we have, where we work, what our current relationship status is or even which other sites we like. 

However, it is precisely this information that makes the placement of Facebook ads so incredibly effective. Because in order to reach your chosen target group on Facebook, you can target your content in extreme detail using this and much more data. In the best case scenario, this means that your Facebook ads are only displayed to those users who should actually see them.

Why are Facebook Ads worthwhile for your business?

As already briefly mentioned, Facebook Ads are worthwhile simply because you can target (filter) your target group extremely well. In addition, Facebook offers you the opportunity to place ads from a daily budget of just 5 euros. 

Facebook offers a good opportunity, especially for beginners or people who want to advertise their products and services with a small advertising budget. This is because anyone, regardless of whether they are a coach, store, service provider or marketer, can place cost-effective ads via Facebook. All you need is a Facebook fan page. 

Facebook offers you these standard ad formats

Facebook offers you a variety of ad formats for displaying your ads. The most important options include the following: 

• Images Ads (product images, brand)
• Video Ads (moving videos)
• Slideshow ads (images/videos with text and sound)
• Carousel Ads (presentation of up to 10 images or videos)
• Instant Experience Ads (full-screen display for mobile devices)
• Collection Ads (several products as Instant Experience)

Depending on the campaign objective you choose at the start of your advertising campaign, you can choose from different ad formats. 

How to get started with your Facebook Ads

As mentioned briefly above, you need a fan page to run Facebook Ads. Ideally, you have already created one for yourself or your company. If you have not yet done so, you can do so via the following link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/creation/ 

Step 1: The Facebook Business Manager

I recommend that you use the Facebook Business Manager right from the start when placing Facebook ads. This is because you have significantly more functions and options available here to prepare and optimize your ads than if you place them directly via your fan page. 

I therefore strongly advise you not to place your Facebook ads directly via your fan page!

Therefore, click on the following link to create your company in the Business Manager: business.facebook.com. 

If you have created your company in the Business Manager and call it up, you will be taken to the following overview page, which gives you access to your company and the company settings. You can then use this dashboard to manage all your pages and advertising accounts. Provided you have linked these to the Business Manager. 

You can then create the link directly in the company settings under "Accounts". 

Of course, this applies to both pages and your advertising accounts. 

Step 2: Understanding the ad manager

You can access the so-called "Ads Manager" via your company's dashboard or directly via the company settings using the menu bars at the top left. 

If this does not appear under "Frequently used", click on "All tools" in the bar and all possible options will be displayed for you to select. 

Click on "Ads manager" to go directly to the Facebook ads manager, where you can run your ads campaigns.  

You can choose from various tabs within the ad manager: 

• Account overview
• Campaigns
• Ad groups
• Advertisements

Don't worry, the Ads Manager is simpler than it might look at first glance!   

Account overview 

Here you will only find an overview of the performance of your ads. This tab has nothing to do with the actual structure of the campaigns or ads. 

Campaigns

You can create a separate campaign for each advertising measure and the placement of Facebook Ads. For example, if you want to advertise the new "dog food", create a new campaign for this. 

Ad groups

Here, for example, you can define different ad groups for your campaign. This makes sense if you want to advertise to different target groups or test different placements, for example. 

Advertisements 

Under this tab you will find your actual ads that you place for the respective ad group. 

The exemplary structure of the ad manager is as follows: 

• Campaign (e.g. new dog food)
• Ad groups
  - Target group 1 / Display format 1
  - Target group 2 / Display format 1
  - Target group 3 / Display format
• Advertisements
  - Advertisements 1
  - Advertisements 2
  - Advertisements 3

Step 3: Create campaign

To create an advertising campaign, you must be in the "Campaigns" tab. Click on the "+Create" button here. 

In the next step, select the goal of your campaign. There are three overarching categories to choose from: Awareness, Consideration and Conversion.

These marketing objectives are behind the individual options:

Awareness

• Brand awareness: Increase the awareness of your brand
• Reach: Reach as many people as possible with the ad

Consideration

• Traffic: Send people to a destination (e.g. website, app, messenger)
• Interactions: Achieve more post interactions (e.g. "Like")
• App installations: Encourage the installation of your app
• Video views: Get your target group to watch your video
• Lead generation: Gain more leads (e.g. e-mail addresses of people)
• Messages: Receive more messages via Messenger

Conversion

• Conversions: Increase profitable actions (e.g. website)
• Catalog sales: Automatic display of items from the store
• Store traffic: increasing the number of visitors to the store

In our example, we opt for a fairly frequently used campaign objective, namely traffic generation. We want to get Facebook users to visit our website, landing page or blog via the ad. 

As soon as we select "Traffic" as the campaign goal, we can assign a campaign name and set a daily budget or duration budget for our campaign. You also have the option of creating an A/B test for this campaign.

Once you have entered a campaign name and your daily or duration budget, click on the "Set up advertising account" button. By default, the campaign is optimized or output for a "lowest cost" bidding strategy. 

Step 4: Set up an advertising account

If you have not yet placed any Facebook Ads, you must set up your advertising account in the next step. To do this, you need to enter your country, currency and time zone. This is usually already entered correctly. 

After checking, click on the "Next" button.

Step 5: Define ad group

In the ad group, define a name for your ad group and select where you want to generate traffic. You also determine your target group and the placements and specify what you want to optimize the ad placement for (link clicks, landing page views, impressions, individuals reached daily).

We select "Website" for traffic. Simply because this is most likely to apply to you as a beginner. We will leave the points "Dynamic ad design" and "Offer" out of this guide for the time being. However, this does not prevent you from placing profitable ads. 

Under "Target group", you can define a new target group or use a saved target group. For the target group analysis, I recommend that you always use Audience Insights. I will explain how to proceed in more detail in a separate section. Once you have defined and saved your target group with Audience Insights, you can select it via the "Use saved target group" option. (Attention, the "Audience Insights" feature will be discontinued on July 1, 2021 according to Facebook )

Once you have added your target group, you can also see how specific or large your target group is in the top right-hand corner under Target group size. The estimated daily results for your campaign target are also usually displayed here. 

As a beginner, I recommend that you leave the "Placements" setting on "Automatic placement". This allows you to leave the selection of placements to Facebook. Your ads will then be displayed on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger. 

Of course, you can also use the "Manual placement" option to specify where your ads should be displayed at any time. 

Under "Optimization and output control" you can determine what you want to optimize the ads for. The following options are available to you here: 

What you want to achieve by selecting a point, or to whom or how Facebook displays the ads, is described under each individual point. You can also choose whether the ad group starts immediately or is active for a certain period of time. 

You can also select a spending limit for the ad group and choose what you want to pay for. For the start and with a low advertising budget, you should always select "Impression" (playout of the ad), because you can't go wrong with this. 

Step 6: Design advertisements

In this step, you can now design your ad. Here you can define an ad name, select the Facebook page or Instagram account for which the ad is to be created, which format you would like to use and enter the relevant text and links. 

Under Format, you specify how your ad should be designed. You can choose between carousel, individual images, video or collection. For our example, we choose the classic variant "single image or video". 

You can also choose here whether you want to create a new ad or use the ad from an existing post that you have already created on your Facebook fan page. 

Under "Media", you can add media such as images or videos to your ad and create slideshows or videos. We have decided to add an image here. 

In the following window, you now have the option of uploading your own photos or using images that you have already posted on your fan page. Under the "Standard photos" menu, you will also find numerous Shutterstock images that you can use for your ad. 

Once you have selected an image, click on the "Next" button. The image will then be displayed in your ad. 

In the "Text and links" section, you can now enter appropriate text and a link for your ad.

Enter your text for the ad in the left-hand column. In the right-hand column, you can see a live preview of your ad. You can also use the middle bar to display the ad in various formats and check how it will be displayed on different platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Instant Articles, etc.

Under "Tracking" you have the option to use conversion tracking. You should always set up the Facebook pixel here by default if you have not already done so. You can set this up via the general settings or at the latest now, i.e. before you confirm your first ad. 

To do this, click on the "Set up" button. In the following window, you can enter a name and a website on which you have integrated the pixel. 

Then click on the "Next" button. In the following window, click on "Set up the pixel now". 

Now you can choose from three different options. We select the option "Add pixel code to website manually". 

You can now place the following basic code in your header area via the WordPress plugin, for example.

Once you have set up the Facebook Pixel correctly, click on the "Confirm" button at the bottom right. In order for your ad to be displayed, you now only need to enter a suitable payment method so that Facebook can debit your advertising budget. 

Target group insights

In Target Group Insights, you have the option of selecting your target group or putting it together and then saving it. To create a new target group for your advertising campaign, select a target group here at the beginning. In our case, this is usually "Everyone on Facebook".

You will now be taken to the menu where you can set numerous parameters for your target group. 

I would like to explain the whole thing to you using the topic of "dog food" as an example. Please see this really only as an example, because the approach and target group definition can always be very different. 

For the ads, we want to limit ourselves to Germany and target Facebook users who are interested in dog food or dogs in general. I have provided the following information on this in target group insights. 

I selected "Germany" as the location, limited the age to 18 to 64, selected "All" as the gender and entered "Dogs" and "Dog food" as the interests. I also selected "German" for the language to further restrict the target group.

In the middle you will see blue and gray bars (demographic information). These show you at the top, for example, how high the proportion of women and men is in the respective age group - on Facebook in general (gray) and in your selected target group (blue).

In the lower section, you can view further details such as relationship status, education and the industry in which your selected target group works. 

If you change the parameters in the left-hand menu, the statistics in the bar charts will change accordingly. 

Under the "Page likes" tab, you will also be shown pages that your target group likes. In our case, this looks as follows. 

As you can see here, the top three are exclusively topics that have to do with animals or dogs. In the following rankings we also find pages that are about dogs or animals in general. You can use this as a good starting point. So we are not entirely wrong with our target group selection. 

You can also see how large your currently selected target group is under (New target group). 

This can be decisive for how much advertising budget you have to spend in order to be profitable. The better you have selected your target group, the better your ROI (return on investment). You can of course narrow down your target group even further. The key here is to test, test, test!

If we now want to use this target group for a later advertising campaign, click on "Save" in the top bar to save the target group. 

In the following window you can give your target group a name and save it. 

The Facebook Pixel

You can also find the Facebook Pixel via the Facebook Business Manager. As mentioned above, you can set this up at the end of the campaign creation or directly via the menu bar, which you can find at the top of the Business Manager. 

To do this, click on the menu icon at the top left and then click on "All tools" to display all options. You will find the Facebook pixel under "Measurement and reports" → "Events Manager". 

To set up the pixel or to be able to call it up, click on "Pixel" here. 

You can find the Facebook pixel in the following overview. You can also see an overview of the activities, i.e. whether and how often the pixel was triggered on your website. 

You can also find the pixel ID here. You will need this if you want to integrate the pixel into your website using a GDPR plugin. If you need the pixel code to integrate it manually into the website header, you can call it up by clicking on the pixel name → Set up if you have not yet set up the pixel. 

Custom Conversions

What you should know in connection with the Facebook pixel are the so-called custom conversions. This is because you can track events with the help of custom conversions. 

Example: 

You want to know how many users have bought a product or entered their email address via your website. Then you can create a custom conversion for this. 

To do this, click on "Custom Conversions" under Event Manager. 

In the following overview, go to "Create custom conversion". 

The "Create a custom conversion" window then opens. Here you can now enter the website event, such as a purchase or lead. 

You also define the rule here that makes the event active. In the case of a purchase, this would be the URL of the "thank you page", for example. Under URL, you can define this with the parameters "contains", "does not contain" or "is the same". Of course, you can also define several rules of this type. 

At the end, you can of course also give the custom conversion a name and specify a value that triggers the "purchase". Once you have entered everything, click on the "Create" button and your custom conversion / event for your Facebook Ads is active. 

GDPR and Facebook Ads

With the introduction of the GDPR, the placement of Facebook ads has not necessarily become any easier. In simple terms, the GDPR clearly states that the user must give their consent before the Facebook pixel can become active. Even though this is still ignored on many websites, I would like to briefly explain to you today how you can be completely safe here. 

The easiest way is actually to use a corresponding GDPR plugin in which you can store the Facebook pixel via Pixel ID. 

As soon as the user visits your website, a cookie box should appear indicating that the pixel has been integrated and will only be activated after the user has given their consent. 

I personally use the "Borlabs Cookie" plugin almost exclusively for this , which I have also reported on in detail here. Users must also be able to withdraw their consent at any time. You can also do this with Borlabs Cookie and within your privacy policy. 

We have listed other very useful GDPR plugins for WordPress, which offer similar functions to Borlabs Cookie, in this article on BLOGGiraffe.

Conclusion

Facebook Ads offers you as a beginner the perfect opportunity to place cost-effective ads on Facebook. However, the procedure for target group research in particular should only be seen as an example here, as everyone's approach can be different. Of course, you can also target in much more detail than I have done here. 

It should also be said that you can also burn a lot of money with Facebook Ads. I therefore recommend that you read a book or work through a video course beforehand, especially if you are a beginner. Because with in-depth knowledge of Facebook Ads - also with regard to analyzing results - you can tailor your ads even better to your target group and react to successes and failures with appropriate measures.