How to Create a Facebook Ad on Business Page
Thinking about running ads on Facebook but not sure where to start? You're in the right place. Creating an ad directly from your business page is a powerful way to reach new customers, drive website traffic, and grow your sales. This guide will walk you through the entire process, step-by-step, using Meta's Ads Manager for maximum control and results.
Before You Create Your Ad: A Quick Checklist
Before jumping into settings and budgets, make sure you have the basics covered. A little preparation now will save you a lot of headaches later. You’ll need three things to get started:
A Facebook Business Page: You can’t run ads from a personal profile. Your ad needs to be connected to a legitimate business page that represents your brand, product, or service.
A Payment Method: Have a valid credit card, debit card, or PayPal account ready to add to your ad account.
Access to Meta Ads Manager: While you can click the "Boost Post" button on your page, the real power of Facebook advertising is inside Ads Manager. This is the central hub where you'll build, manage, and analyze your campaigns. You can access it directly by going to ads.facebook.com.
"Boost Post" vs. Ads Manager: What's the Difference?
You’ve probably seen the prominent blue "Boost Post" button on your Facebook page. It's tempting, offering a quick way to get your content in front of more people. While boosting is simple, it's also incredibly limited. Think of it as the automatic mode on a camera - easy to use, but you sacrifice control over the most important settings.
Meta Ads Manager, on the other hand, is the professional control panel. It gives you complete command over every aspect of your campaign, including:
Specific marketing objectives (like generating leads or driving online sales).
Advanced audience targeting to pinpoint your ideal customers with incredible precision.
Control over ad placements (where your ads appear on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and more).
Detailed performance analytics to understand exactly what’s working and what isn't.
For any serious advertising effort, Ads Manager is the only way to go. This guide will focus exclusively on creating your ad through this powerful tool.
How to Create a Facebook Ad: a Step-by-Step Guide
Let's walk through building your campaign from scratch inside Ads Manager. Once you navigate to https://ads.facebook.com/, you'll see a green "+ Create" button. Click that to begin.
Step 1: Choose Your Campaign Objective
The very first thing Facebook will ask you is, "What's your marketing objective?" In other words, what do you want to achieve with this ad? Your choice here will influence the other options you see as Facebook will optimize your campaign to achieve this specific goal.
The options are grouped into categories, but here are the most common ones for businesses:
Awareness: Show your ad to the maximum number of people in your audience to build brand recognition. This is great for getting your name out there but not for driving immediate action.
Traffic: Send people to a destination, like your website, blog post, or a specific landing page. If your goal is to get more eyeballs on your site, this is the objective for you.
Engagement: Encourage people to interact with your post. Perfect for getting more likes, comments, shares, video views, or event responses.
Leads: Collect information from potential customers. You can use an instant form right on Facebook to gather names, emails, and phone numbers without them ever leaving the platform.
Sales: Find people likely to purchase your product or service. This objective is best if you have an e-commerce store and have the Meta Pixel (a small piece of code) installed on your website to track purchases.
Practical Tip: For your first campaign, choose an objective that is simple and directly tied to your business goal. If you want more website visitors, choose "Traffic." If you want to grow sales on your Shopify store, choose "Sales." Alignment is everything.
Step 2: Define Your Target Audience
This is where the magic happens. Facebook’s greatest strength is its ability to help you find your exact customer. In the "Ad Set" level of your campaign, you’ll define who sees your ad. You can get incredibly specific.
Core Audience Building Blocks
You can create a "Core Audience" by specifying the following details:
Location: Target by country, state, city, zip code, or even drop a pin and target a radius around your business. This is essential for local businesses.
Age & Gender: Select an age range and gender that best matches your typical customer.
Detailed Targeting: This is the most powerful feature. You can include (or exclude) people based on:
Demographics: Job titles, education level, relationship status, life events (like newly engaged or new parents).
Interests: Pages they’ve liked and topics they are interested in, like "organic food," "real estate investing," or "Taylor Swift."
Behaviors: What they do on and off Facebook, like their purchase behavior ("Engaged Shoppers"), travel habits, or the type of phone they use.
Example: A yoga studio in Brooklyn, NY could target women aged 25-45 who live within a 5-mile radius of the studio and have expressed an interest in "Yoga," "Lululemon," and "Mindfulness."
Custom and Lookalike Audiences
For more advanced campaigns, you can also use Custom Audiences to retarget people who have already interacted with your business (like website visitors or email list subscribers) and Lookalike Audiences to find new people who are statistically similar to your best existing customers.
Step 3: Choose Your Ad Placements
Placements are simply where your ads will appear across Meta’s family of apps. This includes the Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, Messenger Inbox, Marketplace, and more.
You have two choices:
Advantage+ Placements (Recommended for Beginners): This is the default setting, which lets Facebook automatically show your ads across all eligible placements. Its algorithm is incredibly good at finding the cheapest and most effective places to show your ad to achieve your objective.
Manual Placements: This allows you to hand-pick where your ads are displayed. You might use this if you've designed an ad specifically for Instagram Stories and don't want it to show up anywhere else.
When you're starting out, it's best to trust the system and stick with Advantage+ placements.
Step 4: Set Your Budget and Schedule
Next, you’ll tell Facebook how much you want to spend and for how long. You have two options for budgeting:
Daily Budget: You set an average amount to spend each day. This is flexible and great for ongoing ("evergreen") campaigns that don't have a fixed end date.
Lifetime Budget: You set a total amount to be spent over the entire duration of the campaign. This is perfect for promotions with a clear start and finish, like a Black Friday sale.
Practical Tip: You don’t need a massive budget to see results. Start small with $10-$20 per day. This is enough to gather data and learn what resonates with your audience before you decide to increase your spend.
Step 5: Design Your Ad Creative
Finally, the fun part! This is where you'll upload your visuals and write the copy for the ad itself. This is what your audience will actually see in their feed.
Choose a Format
Single Image or Video: The most common ad format. Use a high-quality, eye-catching image or a short, engaging video to stop the scroll.
Carousel: This format lets you showcase multiple images or videos in a single ad that users can swipe through. It's great for featuring different products, telling a story, or highlighting various features of a service.
Write Your Ad Copy
Primary Text: This is the main text that appears above your image or video. The first one or two sentences are crucial, so lead with a strong hook that grabs your audience's attention.
Headline: Use a short, powerful headline (around 5-7 words) to convey your main message. Think benefits, not just features.
Description: The optional text below the headline. Use it to add extra context or urgency, like "Limited Time Offer."
Call-to-Action (CTA) Button: This is the button that tells people what to do next. Choose a CTA that aligns with your objective, such as "Shop Now," "Learn More," "Sign Up," or "Download."
Step 6: Review and Publish
On the final screen, take a moment to review all your campaign settings. Check your audience, budget, copy, and images. Make sure the website link works correctly! Once you're happy with everything, hit the green "Publish" button.
Your ad will now go into a review process, where Meta's team checks to ensure it complies with their advertising policies. This usually takes anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. Once approved, your ad will go live and start reaching your target audience.
Final Thoughts
Creating your first Facebook ad in Ads Manager opens up a world of new possibilities for growing your business. By setting a clear objective, carefully crafting your audience, and designing an engaging ad, you can effectively reach new customers and drive measurable results.
As you start running campaigns on Facebook and other platforms like Google Ads or Shopify, you'll quickly find that your performance data is scattered everywhere. At https://www.graphed.com/register, we created a solution that lets you connect all your marketing data in one place and build real-time monitoring dashboards with simple, natural language. Instead of spending hours pulling reports, you can just ask questions like, "Show me my Facebook ad spend vs. Shopify revenue for last month," and get an answer in seconds.