Are you a small business owner who is just starting out? Well, it can be challenging to start promoting ads or even just understand the basics of advertising.

There’s no need to worry because we’ve got it covered. This article will explain all the basics you need to know when it comes to Facebook ads. Even if you know nothing about how Facebook’s algorithm works, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to run ads and how they reach people.

Now, let’s dive into some Facebook advertising tips and strategies.

Basic Facebook Ads Lingo to Know

Before we get into talking about Facebook Ads Manager, it’s important to understand some of the basic vocabulary related to it. Here are the three must-known terms when it comes to how to create Facebook Ads Manager:

desktop computer with facebook icon

1. Business Manager

Facebook’s Business Manager is a tool that helps you manage everything related to your marketing and advertising activities on Facebook. This tool has been developed for businesses, both small and large. With it, you can create ads, manage both Facebook and Instagram profiles, and share access to them with your entire team, as well as with outside partners.

2. Ads Manager

Facebook’s Ads Manager is the tool that lets you manage all your ads. With it, you can create, edit, and analyze all your Facebook ad campaigns. This tool makes it easy to create and monitor your ad campaigns, whether they are on Facebook or Instagram.

3. Ad Account

With an Ad Account, you can advertise on Facebook in a highly-targeted way that is not possible anywhere else. Unlike your personal Facebook account, your ad account allows more than one person to manage it. It’s important to note that each individual using the ad account can be granted a different level of accessibility.

Running ads on Facebook is a bit different from running ads on Google and other providers. When you run Google ads for eCommerce and the like you create one main Google account to run all of your ads, but when running Facebook ads you need to create a business ad account to manage your Facebook and Instagram ads.

Main Components of a Facebook Ad

Now that you understand the basic terms related to Facebook Ads Manager, it’s time to look at the main components of a Facebook ad. These are all integral parts to understanding what you want to learn and how to create Facebook ads.

1. Campaign

An ad campaign is a strategy that is designed to be carried out on Facebook to increase brand awareness, communication, leads, and sales. An ad campaign involves more than just making an ad. You will need to be well-organized from start to finish, to achieve the best results.

For example, a well-crafted campaign will keep all of these objectives in mind:

  • Reach
  • Traffic
  • Engagement
  • Lead Generation
  • Conversions
  • Sales
  • Website Visits

A stellar Facebook ad campaign will have taken all of these objectives into account and designed the most effective ad as a result.

2. Choosing a Special Ad Category

When you have an ad campaign, you want to make sure you select the best-fitting category for it. Sometimes, you will find that the best one is considered a special ad category.

This means that ads will have specific requirements in some countries, which can mean including a disclaimer in the ad. This is especially prevalent in political ads, but there are other areas that this applies to as well.

The most common special ad categories are:

  • Social Issues
  • Politics
  • Credit Opportunities
  • Employment Opportunities

3. Deciding on an Ad Objective

Before you create your first Facebook ad, you need to decide on what your ad objective will be. After all, you have to know what you want to achieve to pick the right objective.

This is something that you want people to do once they are exposed to your ad. Is it to get leads? Is it to get sales? Is it to increase brand awareness? As your business grows, your objectives will change.

If you’re first starting off, it’s best to place your focus on increasing brand awareness and generating leads.

4. Ad Set

The Facebook ad set is where you decide on who your audience is and what budget you have for your ad campaign. An ad set could consist of just one ad, or it can be several.

This is the moment where you will be defining your target audience, how much you are willing to spend on the ads, whether you want the bidding to be automatic or manual, and where the placement of the ads will be.

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5. Choosing Your Target Audience

Who do you want your ads shown to? Since you will be working on a budget, you want to make sure that your ads are highly targeted. Otherwise, you will be wasting your money by showing them to people who are uninterested.

Your target audience can be curated based on the location, interests, demographics, and other differentiating features of your audience. Consider creating an avatar of the ideal customer.

You can make your target audience as broad or narrow as you please. The more highly targeted your audience is, the higher your likelihood of getting conversions. However, if you niche down too much, you may not have a big enough audience to make the ad worth the money you spent on it, so keep that in mind.

How to optimize your Facebook ads

When it comes to getting traffic to your ad, there are 7 things you should consider. Let’s go over them below.

1. Dynamic Creative

Dynamic creative is a fancy term that just means that your ad is optimized to achieve the best results. Whether your ad has an image, video, title, description, and/or call to action, it will be optimized to get the most efficient results for every impression delivered on Facebook.

Thanks to a dynamic creative, you can personalize different variations of an ad depending on who the ad will be shown to. That can further increase the effectiveness of your ads.

2. Offer

An offer is a discount that you can share with customers so that they are incentivized to buy something from you. An offer ad can be created from any one of your Facebook pages.

This ad can be displayed in people’s news feeds, where your audience can like it, comment on it, or save it. All Offer ads saved will appear within their Offers bookmarks for use later on. Also, they will get a reminder three times about that offer.

3. Audience

Choosing your audience for a Facebook ad should avoid going in either extreme. You shouldn’t have a very small or large one but instead, stick towards the middle.

When you cast too wide of a net, nobody will see your ad. When it’s too small, you’ll get practically nobody as well.

4. Custom Audience

When you develop a custom audience, you are only advertising to people who are already engaging with your Facebook page.

You can also customize your audience to include people who have already bought a product or service from you. This involves uploading an email list.

5. Lookalike Audience

On Facebook, you can match your ads and promote them to those who fit in a similar category to those people who already purchased something from you.

That is why they are called lookalikes. This is a continuation of custom audiences and something more advanced you can use once you are more seasoned with the Facebook Ads Manager.

6. Pixels

A Pixel is a code that you embed within your website so that Facebook can curate a custom audience for you. When you have a Pixel on your site, you can track who has purchased your products and services.

This allows you to know exactly how much money you have spent on each one of your ads. As with lookalikes, you can save using this once you have gotten comfortable using Facebook Ads Manager.

7. Placement

Depending on where an ad shows up on Facebook involves its placement. Also, depending on what you want to achieve with an ad.

Your ads will appear either on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger. Additionally, there are multiple locations within these social networks where these ads can appear, such as the News Feed and the sidebar.

Budget & Schedule

You will have to select the budget you want to have for your ad, as well as schedule it. You have the option of either creating a daily or lifetime budget.

1. A daily budget is easier to set up. When choosing this type of ad budget, Facebook will only spend a certain dollar amount every day the ad runs.

2. A lifetime budget will vary in how much money is spent on an ad per day. Instead, you decide on how much money you want to spend for the entire campaign, setting the day on which the ad should stop running.

Anatomy of a Facebook Ad: 5 building blocks

The last lesson in how to create Facebook ads involves the ad itself. There are 5 features and functions you should become familiar with.

1. Format

Formats your ad can appear in:

  • Image
  • Video
  • Carousel
  • Instance Experience
  • Collection

2. Media

As you can see, some of the format types for Facebook ads involve the use of media. Using media types in your ads will increase engagement rates, which will lead to more leads and sales.

3. Text & Links

The text you use in the ad needs to capture the attention of whoever sees the ad. People are inundated with content, so you want to make it punchy and to the point. Add a link to your product or service landing page to make it as easy as possible for someone to get a lead or sale.

4. Languages

Depending on who you want to target, you will have to decide what language to make your ad in. The primary language of your target audience should be the language your ad is in.

5. Tracking

You can go into your Facebook Ads Manager’s Account Overview to look at the summary of your ad campaigns. You will see how well they perform, view demographic information, and receive a holistic view of your ad’s performance.

Final thoughts

Now that you have a basic understanding of how to create Facebook ads, thanks to these Facebook advertising tips and strategies, you can get started using this powerful marketing tool at your disposal.

Facebook allows for highly-targeted ad campaigns that will help stretch your advertising dollars farther than through any other advertising platform. Once you have success with your first ad, you can venture into more advanced features, such as Pixel and lookalikes.

Why you need an email signature

Once you get leads, make sure you get them signed up for your mailing list. You will get to further promote your business through your email signature.

Wisestamp has revolutionized the advertising real estate known as the email signature and lets you promote your social media accounts using icon add-ons.

These icons can be hyperlinked to directly take people to the social media accounts for your business. Enjoy more attention to your business’s social media accounts and potentially create new business relationships and customers.

Join the email signature revolution by taking advantage of Wisestamp’s professional email signature icon add-ons.