In this blog, WeBOOST will walk you through everything you need to know about advertising on Facebook—from planning your first Facebook ad to advanced strategies.

Creating high-converting Facebook Ads isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Because many brands and small businesses prefer Facebook’s Ads Manager to the more intricate Power Editor, we’re going to use the Ads Manager’s Create an Ad process for this Facebook Ads guide.

1. Develop Your Strategy First

Before you even get started looking at the Ads Manager, you need to have a strategy in place. Without this, you absolutely will get dazzled by all the options and you’ll end up creating an ad campaign that doesn’t target anyone useful because you’re creating an ad for no one in particular.

2. Choose Your Objective

The very first thing you’ll do when creating your campaign is to choose your objective. It’s important to choose the right one because Facebook will optimize ad placements based on your objective. In some cases, the right objective can lower your CPC and improve your results.

You can choose from the following objectives:

• Brand awareness
• Reach
• Traffic
• Engagement
• App installs
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Messages
• Conversions
• Catalogue Sales
• Store Visits

You want to select an objective that most cohesively aligns with your underlying goals. If, for example, you’re running a video campaign that’s designed to drive sales, choose the “conversions” option instead of the “video views” choice. Sure, you do want video views, but not at the expense of more conversions.

That being said, split testing objectives never hurts. I once ran a video ad campaign and it cost less for equal results to run it as an engagement campaign instead of a video view ad.

3.Target Your Audience

You should start creating your ad campaign with a strong idea of who you want to target—now’s your chance to flesh that out. You can use:

• Custom audiences, which target specific users from your email list, or users who have taken certain actions on your site, your Facebook, or your Instagram’s business profile
• Lookalike audiences, which replicate qualities from your custom audience
• Demographic targeting
• Location targeting
• Interest/behaviour targeting
• Connection targeting, which determines if you want your ads to be shown to users who are or are not connected with your brand.

4. Choose Where You Want Your Ad to Be Displayed

Next, at the ad set level, you’ll be choosing what placements, apps, and devices you want your ad to be shown on. You can choose mobile-only, desktop-only or both desktop and mobile. You’ll also have multiple options on Facebook, several on Instagram, and the audience network.

5. Set Your Budget

In the next section, you’ll be able to choose your budget, schedule your ads, and select an optimization method. You can choose a lifetime budget or a daily budget and you can either have your ads run indefinitely or be scheduled to start and end on certain dates. You can even choose to use dayparting, which allows you to run your ads only at certain times or on certain days of the week.

At this stage, you can also choose if you want to optimize your ads. For those who are wary of this, Facebook automatically has things set up for you and I’d only recommend going in and manually updating them if you’re familiar with the platform and have a reason for doing so.

That being said, you can choose to change what you’re bidding on (like link clicks or impressions), if you want to spend your ad budget as quickly as possible or spread it out over time, and if you want to set a cap on your bids.

6. Choose Your Ad Format

There are several incredible ad formats on Facebook. You can choose from:

• Single image ads
• Video ads
• Carousel ads, which allow you to show several videos and/or pictures
• Canvas ads
• Collections, which open up to be a full-screen mobile experience.

Each ad type as its own unique benefits, but video ads and carousel ads (with or without video) typically have some of the highest engagement and CTR.

7. Don’t Forget the Details

At the very bottom of the creative section, there’s a lot of small details that are easy to miss. These include multiple sections where you can put copy, along with things like CTAs and URL descriptions.

Take advantage of every single one of them. The CTA button will help drive conversions, and using the right copy in the right places will make a world of difference in your campaigns.

8. Monitor Your Ads Carefully

After you’ve started your campaigns, monitor them carefully. Some campaigns may start to see increases in CPC after the frequency gets too high and others may start at a significantly higher CPC than you’d expect. Others may just not be performing the way you’d like.

Facebook’s Ads Manager will show you the details of all of your active campaigns. Watch the CPC, frequency, relevance scores, and a number of actions taken particularly carefully. These are the most crucial metrics.

Facebook Ads has a lot of options to choose from, but once you’re familiar with the system, that will work to your advantage instead of your detriment. As long as you have a plan before going in, the campaign creation process will be a lot easier, and you’ll create much stronger ads as a result.

By the way, WeBOOST would like some help creating or managing your Facebook Ads campaigns, let us know.