How to Post a Facebook Ad

Thinking about running Facebook Ads but not sure where to start? You're in the right place. Many guides make it seem more complicated than it needs to be, but launching your first ad is a straightforward process once you understand the basic steps. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to post a Facebook ad, from setting up your campaign to designing the creative and hitting publish.

Before You Start: Your Pre-Flight Checklist

Before jumping into the Facebook Ads Manager, you need a few things in place. Taking care of these first will make the actual ad creation process much smoother.

• A Facebook Business Page: You can't run ads from a personal profile. If you don't have one for your business yet, it only takes a few minutes to set one up. This is the public face of your business on Facebook and the identity your ads will run from.
• A Meta Business Suite (or Business Manager) Account: This is the central hub for all your business activities on Facebook and Instagram. It contains your Ad Account, which is where your billing information lives and all your campaigns are managed.
• An Idea for Your Goal: What do you want people to do when they see your ad? Do you want them to visit your website? Buy a product? Fill out a lead form? Having a clear goal is the most important part of the process, as it dictates all other campaign settings.
• Your Ad Creative and Copy: Have your image(s), video, and ad text ready to go. While you can finalize them during the creation process, it's a lot faster if you have the core components prepared beforehand.

Understanding the Ads Manager Structure

Facebook Ads Manager is organized into a simple hierarchy. Understanding this structure helps you keep your campaigns organized and makes the entire platform much less intimidating. Think of it like a set of nesting dolls.

• Campaign: This is the highest level. You set one main advertising objective for the entire campaign, like driving traffic to your website or generating sales.
• Ad Set: This level lives inside a campaign. Here, you define your targeting (who you want to see your ads), your budget, your schedule (when the ads will run), and placements (where your ads will appear, e.g., Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories).
• Ad: This is the innermost level, living inside an ad set. The ad is the actual creative your audience sees - the image or video, the headline, the primary text, and the call-to-action button.

You can have multiple ad sets within a single campaign (to test different audiences or placements) and multiple ads within a single ad set (to test different images or headlines).

Step 1: Create a New Campaign

Once you're in the Facebook Ads Manager, click the green "+ Create" button to get started. The very first choice you have to make is your campaign objective.

This is where your pre-defined goal comes in. Meta will ask you to choose from a list of objectives that are aligned with different stages of a customer's journey. Don't overthink it, just pick the one that best matches your desired outcome.

Choosing Your Campaign Objective

• Awareness: Use this if your goal is to reach as many people as possible and make them aware of your brand. It's optimized for reach, not clicks or conversions. Good for new brands in a new market.
• Traffic: Choose this when you simply want to send people to a specific destination, like a blog post or landing page. Facebook will show your ad to people most likely to click the link.
• Engagement: This objective is for getting more post reactions, comments, shares, video views, or Page likes. It's great for building social proof and community around your brand.
• Leads: Use this to collect contact information (like email addresses) directly on Facebook using an Instant Form, or by sending them to a form on your website.
• App Promotion: As the name suggests, this is for driving installs and engagement for your mobile app.
• Sales: If your priority is to drive actions like purchases or adding items to a cart on your website, this is the objective to choose. Meta's algorithm will specifically find users who are most likely to convert.

For most businesses, particularly in e-commerce or service industries, Traffic, Leads, and Sales are the most common starting points. After selecting your objective, give your campaign a descriptive name (e.g., "July 2024 - Traffic to Blog Post") and click "Next."

Step 2: Set Up Your Ad Set

The ad set level is where you control who sees your ad and how much you spend. This is the most crucial part for determining your ad’s performance.

Budget and Schedule

First, decide on your budget. You can choose a Daily Budget (the average amount you'll spend per day) or a Lifetime Budget (a total amount for the entire duration of the campaign). A daily budget is great for ongoing campaigns, while a lifetime budget works well for campaigns with a fixed end date, like a promotion.

Next, set your start and end dates. You can let it run continuously or schedule it to end on a specific date. It's always a good practice to set an end date when you're starting out so you don't accidentally overspend.

Audience Targeting

This is where you tell Facebook exactly who you want to see your ad. You have three main ways to build an audience:

• Custom Audiences: These are "warm" audiences built from your own data sources, such as an email list you upload, website visitors tracked by your Meta Pixel, or people who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page. These are incredibly valuable because they already know your brand.
• Lookalike Audiences: This is a powerful feature where you can take a Custom Audience (like your best customers) and ask Facebook to create a new audience of people who share similar characteristics but haven't interacted with you yet. It's one of the best ways to find new potential customers.
• Detailed Targeting: This is "cold" targeting, where you build an audience from scratch based on their demographics, interests, and behaviors. You can target people based on their job title, pages they like (e.g., competitors or industry magazines), purchase behaviors, and thousands of other data points.

Pro Tip: When starting out with detailed targeting, focus on the interests that are most closely related to your product or service. If you sell hiking boots, targeting interests like "Hiking," "REI," and "National Parks" is a great starting point.

Placements

Placements are the different places where your ad can appear across Meta's network (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network). You have two options:

• Advantage+ (Automatic) Placements: This is the recommended option. You let Facebook's algorithm decide where to show your ad to get the best results for your budget. It's generally the best choice for beginners.
• Manual Placements: Here, you can manually select or deselect specific placements. For example, you might only want your ad to run on Instagram Stories and Reels. This offers more control but requires a bit more knowledge about which placements work best for your goals.

Step 3: Create Your Ad Creative

Finally, we have the ad itself - what the user will actually see in their feed.

Identity and Format

First, select the Facebook Page and, if applicable, the Instagram account you want the ad to run from.

Next, choose your ad format:

• Single Image or Video: The most common format. A clean, eye-catching visual supported by compelling text.
• Carousel: Lets you showcase up to 10 images or videos in a single ad, each with its own link. Amazing for showing off multiple products, features, or steps in a process.
• Collection: An immersive, mobile-only format that opens into a full-screen experience when someone taps on it, making it easier for people to browse and buy products.

Ad Creative and Copy

This is where you upload your visuals and write the text.

• Media: Upload your photo or video. Pay attention to the recommended aspect ratios for different placements (e.g., 1:1 square for feeds, 9:16 vertical for Stories/Reels). Visual quality is paramount here - use high-resolution, clear, and engaging images or videos.
• Primary Text: This is the main text that appears above your image or video. It's your chance to grab attention, explain your offer, and create interest. Keep it clear and focused on the benefit to the user.
• Headline: A short, punchy line of text that appears just below your visual. Think of a mini-headline like "Free Shipping On All Orders" or "Book Your Demo Today."
• Description: An optional, shorter line of text that appears below the headline. It's often used to add urgency or extra context, such as "Limited Time Offer."

Destination and Call to Action

You’re almost there! Now, tell people what to do and where to go.

• Call to Action (CTA): This is the button at the bottom of your ad. Choose the one that best fits your goal, like "Shop Now," "Learn More," "Sign Up," or "Download." A clear CTA removes any confusion about what you want the user to do next.
• Website URL: Enter the website link you want to send people to when they click your ad. Double-check that it's the correct link!
• Tracking: Make sure the "Website Events" option is toggled on so your Meta Pixel can track the actions people take on your site after clicking the ad. This is critical for measuring your results and optimizing future campaigns.

You can preview your ad on the right-hand side of the screen to see how it will look across different placements. Once you are happy with everything, hit the green "Publish" button. And that’s it! Your ad is posted and will be sent to Meta for a short review process before it goes live.

Final Thoughts

Creating and posting a Facebook ad is a matter of following a logical three-step framework: setting the campaign's objective, defining your audience and budget in the ad set, and then building the ad creative. By methodically working through these steps, you can launch effective campaigns that reach the right people with the right message.

Once your ads are running, monitoring their performance is what matters most. That's where we wanted to remove the common frustration of manually exporting data from Ads Manager and trying to match it up with Shopify or Google Analytics. We built Graphed to connect all your data sources and allow you to ask simple questions in plain English - like "Which Facebook campaign has the best ROI?" - to get instant, real-time dashboards and answers without ever touching a spreadsheet again.