Launched in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg’s venture – Facebook is now a one plus trillion company. As of this writing, Facebook’s stock value stands at $330.05. With more than 2.89 billion monthly active users, Facebook is undoubtedly the world’s largest social media platform.
This data chart represents the rise in the number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide.
Whether you’re planning to launch your business or have one already up and running yet are struggling with attracting traffic and lead generation, you can conquer your goals by launching strategic Facebook ads campaigns.
After all, it’s a platform of 2.8 billion MAU. This means your target audience is already hanging out on Facebook – all you need to do is build a fool-proof Facebook advertising plan, equip the right tools, conduct thorough market research, and launch strategic Facebook Ad campaigns in an efficient manner.
To launch a profitable Facebook ad campaign, it’s critical to know all the ins and outs of the platform and understand how all of it falls in place. And that’s exactly what we’ll be helping you with. Additionally, we’ll also guide you through launching your first profitable Facebook Ad campaign.
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Facebook Advertising Platform Overview
We believe – to truly unlock the full force of Facebook advertising – it’s really important to understand how all of it falls in place. If it’s your first time crafting and launching a Facebook ad campaign, you may find yourself all juggled up between Facebook Business Suite, Ads Manager, Ad Campaign, Ad Set & More.
That’s the reason we’re providing you with a quick overview of the Facebook Advertising Platform. Here’s a visual to help you gain clarity:
Let’s gain insights into each of these components individually:
- Business Suite – Here, you will find all of your Facebook & Instagram accounts under a single roof. From here, you can manage all your accounts in an efficient manner.
- Ads Manager –Think of Ads Manager as the host of all your ads accounts. Within Ads Manager, you can have multiple ad accounts. For example, if you run multiple businesses, you wouldn’t want to manage and run Facebook ad campaigns from within a single Ad account.
- Ad Account – Within Ads Manager, you can have multiple ad accounts. Here you can create and manage your Facebook ads efficiently. You can create ad campaigns, manage multiple ads at once and review how your ads are performing.
- Ad Campaign – Your Ad campaign is the foundation of you ads. When you are planning to run a Facebook ad, you’ll start with a campaign. You can select your advertising objective. For example – Promote Your Page or Get More Website Traffic – depending on your goals.
- Ad Set – Ad Set will tell your Facebook ads how to run. In a nutshell, ad set is nothing but your target audience – here you will create an audience for your Facebook ads via Facebook’s advanced targeting options.
- Ad – Finally, we have our advertisement – this is the ad that your customers, as well as prospects, will see. Here, you have to craft your ad and include things like videos, text, call-to-action, and more.
Let’s dive deep into how Facebook Ads Manager works.
How Does Facebook Ads Manager Work?
Let’s say you run multiple businesses:
- Business I – Ecommerce Store
- Business II – SaaS Business
- Business III – Consulting Firm
- Business IV – Online Food Delivery iOS Application
Now, obviously, with more than 2.8 billion monthly active users, you’d want to tap into Facebook’s brilliant advertising capabilities. However, while running ad campaigns for these businesses, you would want to keep them under different accounts – after all, you don’t want to get all jumbled up, right?
For different businesses, you will have different ad accounts. And you can access all these ads accounts in Facebook Ads Manager. Now, let’s say you want to run Facebook Ads for “Business I – Ecommerce Store.”
So, what we will be doing is – switching to the “Business I – Ecommerce Store” ad account. From there, we’ll create an Ad campaign. Here’s what the structure looks like:
Now, while creating a Facebook Ad campaign, you need to select the purpose behind running Facebook ads. For example, do you want to boost your website traffic? Or generate leads? Maybe increase your brand awareness?
Once you have selected, your Facebook ad campaign’s purpose, you need to build Ad Sets – these are nothing but different sets of the target audience (different buyer personas).
For example, if you are a real estate broker, you may want to target:
- Real Estate Buyer
- Real Estate Seller
- Real Estate Investor
But that’s just a really basic example. You can narrow down your target audiences and categorize them across different ad sets to build highly profitable Facebook ads.
Once you have built Ad sets, you can create Facebook ads and assign the ad sets to them.
And that’s exactly how everything falls in place. That’s how Facebook advertising works.
But at the same time, you need to make sure that you are running the right types of ads? What if you are running multiple Facebook video ads yet your target audience doesn’t watch videos at all?
Choosing the wrong Facebook ad type is one of the major reasons why most businesses and advertisers fail to achieve the desired results. And in the end, you’ll find these so-called conversion-focused advertisers posting “FACEBOOK ADVERTISING SUCKS” or “FACEBOOK ALGORITHM SUCKS” on their social media news feeds.
Trust me on this one – if you want to conquer your goals and achieve the best possible results with Facebook ads, building a profitable Facebook advertising strategy should be your highest priority. After all, you can’t go in all-guns-blazing without a plan.
That being said, let’s gain insights into the different types of Facebook ads you can run ☺
The Different Types of Facebook Ads
Following are the different Facebook Ad types you should be familiar with:
- Image Ads
- Video Ads
- Carousel Ads
- Instant Experience Ads
- Collection Ads
- Slideshow Ads
- Messenger Ads
- Dynamic Ads
- Stories Ads
Image Ads
Headline | 40 Characters |
Link Description | 30 Characters |
Body Text | 125 Characters |
Campaign Objectives | All Except Video Views |
An image ad is the most common type of Facebook ad that you can set up within a few clicks. While these ads may be easy to set up and may seem simple, we’d advise you to have a brilliant copy, image, and CTA to achieve the best possible results.
Here’s an example:
Video Ads
Headline | 40 Characters |
Link Description | 30 Characters |
Body Text | 125 Characters |
Campaign Objectives | All Except Catalog Sales |
47% of people watch video advertisements mainly on Facebook. On top of this, there’re more than four billion video watches on Facebook each day. A video ad is one of the best ways to catch your audience’s attention. You can produce different kinds of videos ads like where you have your product in action or where you showcase your testimonials.
Similar to image ads, you can skyrocket your click-through and conversion rates by enriching your Facebook video ads with creativity. Also, it’s not mandatory to invest thousands of dollars in video production to get a Facebook ad up and running. Instead, you can simply capture a video via your phone (but make sure that it’s engaging) or create GIF-like graphics for the purpose.
Here’s an example:
Another one:
Carousel Ads
Headline | 40 Characters |
Link Description | 20 Characters |
Body Text | 125 Characters |
Campaign Objectives | All Except Video Views & Engagement |
With Carousel ads, you can incorporate and display multiple images or videos into a single ad. This ad type allows businesses to showcase up to ten images or videos – which they can use to showcase their product(s) or service(s).
You can use this ad type for highlighting different products, displaying one of your products from different angles – it simply depends on your creativity. Realtors use these types of ads to display different properties or different images of a single property. Some brands use these types of ads to showcase their clients’ testimonials.
Examples:
Instant Experience Ads
Text | Text Blocks up to 500 Words Each |
Button Text | 30 Characters |
Campaign Objectives | All Except Lead Generation |
Previously called Canvas, the instant experience ad type is a full-screen ad format that loads 15x faster than a mobile website that’s outside of Facebook. It’s a full-screen experience that will open after your prospects or customers tap on the ad on their mobile devices – and since these ads load literally instantly, you can instantly catch your audience’s attention – if you do it right. With this ad type, you can showcase your products as well as convey your brand story in an engaging and visually appealing manner.
Here’s an example:
Collection Ads
Headline | 40 Characters |
Link Description | – |
Body Text | 125 Characters |
Campaign Objectives | Conversion, Traffic, Store Traffic, Catalog Sales |
Facebook Collection Ads allow businesses to showcase a few of their products when their target audience taps on the ad. From there, they can directly purchase your products without ever having to head over to your website or leave Facebook at all. When your audience taps on your ad, the products will appear in front of them as an instant experience – and from there, your audience can browse, explore, and purchase your products from their phones with ease.
Here’s an example:
Slideshow Ads
Headline | 25 Characters |
Link Description | 30 Characters |
Body Text | 125 Characters |
Campaign Objectives | All |
With slideshow ads, you can put video ads in front of your audience created from a collection of still photos or text or already-existing video clips. One of the reasons why these ads work is that they use about 5x lesser data. This means – it doesn’t matter where your target audience resides and what kind of internet connection they have, slideshow ads will load perfectly for them.
You can build your ad from within the Facebook Ads manager itself.
Here’s an example:
Messenger Ads
Headline | 40 Characters |
Link Description | N/A |
Body Text | 125 Characters |
Campaign Objectives | App Installs, Traffic, Catalog Sales, Messages, Conversions |
Over 146 million people based in the United States used Facebook Messenger in 2020. According to messenger audience data, 24.6% of the users were millennials in the age range 25-34.
That being said, running Messenger ads will give you access to more than 146 million people – if your target audience is people based in the United States. Over 1.3 billion people from all across the globe use Facebook Messenger. And in my opinion, not many businesses run Facebook Messenger ads – as they are extremely comfortable with other options or aren’t fully familiar with the full force of Messenger ads.
You can break through the noise and leg up on your competition by crafting and running Facebook Messenger ads.
Here’s what one looks like:
Dynamic Ads
With Dynamic Ads, you can target the ones who are most likely to purchase your products. For example, if one of your website visitors added one of your products to their cart yet didn’t checkout, you can display that product’s ad on Facebook in front of them using Facebook Dynamic Ads. It’s a great advertising option focused on conversions.
Example of Dynamic Ads:
Stories Ads
According to MediaBrix, vertical videos are subject to 90% higher completion rate when compared with horizontal videos. At the same time, less than 30% of your audience will flip their smartphones sideways for watching your horizontal video ads.
That’s the reason vertical videos work as well as they do. Smartphones are meant to be held vertically. And with a huge chunk of people preferring vertical videos over horizontal ones, it makes sense to launch vertical video ad campaigns to help you achieve your goals. With Stories Ads, you can tap into the Facebook Stories feature and display vertical ads in front of your audience in an efficient manner.
For example:
Now that we are familiar with the basics, let us help you get your first profitable Facebook ad up and running.
Follow These Steps to Launch Your First Facebook Ad Campaign
Rather than sharing theoretical knowledge, we like to keep it highly actionable for our readers – which is why we have outlined and clearly explained the steps you need to follow to launch your first Facebook Ad campaign.
Step I: Head over to Facebook Ads Manager.
Step II: At the top, under Campaigns, select the preferred Ad Account. For example, if you want to run ads for “Business I – Ecommerce store,” select the ad account associated with the same.
Step III: Now, you will see the three core elements we talked about earlier: Campaigns, Ad Sets & Ads.
Facebook Campaigns:
Facebook Ad Sets:
Facebook Ads:
Step IV: To create our first ad campaign, head over to “Campaigns.”
And now,
In this section, select “Create Ad.”
Step V: Now, you will be asked to choose your campaign objective. You need to choose from:
- Awareness
- Brand Awareness – Introducing your brand and its products and services to a new audience.
- Reach – Reaching out to as many of your target audience as you can.
- Consideration
- Traffic – Driving traffic to one of your web pages, Facebook page, or app.
- Engagement – Reach out to a wider audience for increasing engagement
- App Installs – Campaign designed for the purpose of having people install your mobile application
- Video Views – Campaign designed for the purpose of having people watch your videos.
- Lead Generation – Fuel the upper part of your sales funnel with new prospects.
- Messages – Get more people to message you via Facebook Messenger
- Conversion
- Conversions – Ad campaigns focused on making more and more people taking the desired action.
- Catalog Sales – Make your Facebook ads act as product catalogs where you can display the products your target audience is most likely to purchase.
- Store Traffic – Drive traffic towards your local store.
Based on what you are trying to achieve, select the preferred Campaign Objective. Here, let’s just select “Brand Awareness.”
Step VI: Upon selecting “Brand Awareness,” we were taken to:
Here, you can:
- Name your ad campaign
- Choose whether your ads are related to special categories
- Add Campaign Details
- Buying Type
- Campaign Objective – we selected Brand Awareness
- Under Show More Options, you’ll see – “Campaign Spending Limit.” You can set the campaign spending limit here if you want to.
- Enable or Disable A/B Test Feature
- Add Daily or Lifetime Campaign Budget, if you want to
Step VII: Once you have set your Facebook Ad campaign, it’s time to create a new Ad Set.
- Name your ad set
- Set a start date and end date
- Create New Audience or Use Saved Audience
- You can also use a lookalike audience to reach out to your people similar to your existing audience
- Or you can just build a custom audience using Facebook’s advanced targeting options.
- While creating your audience, you can add the location, age, gender, and other demographics for accurate targeting
- For example, we set:
- Location: California, United States
- Age – 18-65+
- Genders – All
- Detailed Targeting: Reading, Books (we are trying to target people who are interested in reading books)
- For example, we set:
- Choose between Automatic & Manual Placements (if you are new to Facebook go with Automatic Placements)
- Automatic Placements: Facebook will automatically choose where to display your ads.
- Manual Placements: Here, you can choose platforms and placements. Also, you can choose whether you want to display your ads across specific mobile devices or operating systems.
Step VIII: Set Brand Safety – With the Brand Safety feature, you can exclude types of content that’d be inappropriate to be displayed along with your ad.
Step IX: Time to Create the Ad – Once you have created the ad set, it’s time to create your audience.
Here you can:
- Name Your Ad
- Choose Facebook Page
- Choose Instagram Account
- Set Up Your Ad (Dig in more to set different types of ads we mentioned above)
- Single Image
- Single Video
- Slideshow
- Carousel
- Collection
- Instant Experience
- Ad Creative
- Add in Headlines
- Description
- Website URL
- Edit Placement
- Add CTA
- And much more!
And you can preview your ad once you have successfully crafted it.
Step X: Hit “Publish.” When you are done with the complete process, you can hit the green publish button to get your ad up and running.
Congratulations! You’ve Launched Your First Facebook Ad
In my opinion, Facebook is one of the most brilliant advertising platforms with advanced targeting options. With a fool-proof strategy and perfect implementation, you can make a great first impression in front of your target audience and leave them with no other choice but to click through your ads and take the desired action.
We’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of marketers claim Facebook ads to not be a profitable investment. But – the reason why they fail at generating results is that they don’t do it right.
I’ll admit – Facebook Ads platform is a bit complicated. But only when you play around a little – you will start getting the hang of it. And in no time, you’ll be skyrocketing your sales or generating an ever-increasing number of leads.
So, what are you waiting for?
Put your business in hyper-growth mode with Facebook ads today!
