Facebook Ad Campaign – What is it?

Introduction to Facebook Ad Campaign

Is setting up a Facebook Ad Campaign a necessity necessary for your business? Let’s break it down.

There are 1.39 Billion active users on Facebook currently. With almost 2 billion people here, you have the potential to serve an immense amount of people.

Apart from this, Facebook accounts for more than 9% of the total digital ad spending and 18.4% of the global mobile digital advertising.

Enough about Facebook’s fame now, let’s get to what you came here for.

Creating Ads

Facebook Ads Manager is the tool to create, manage, and measure results for Facebook campaigns. This is probably your first step. There are two ways to create an ad – Guided Creation and Quick Creation.

Quick creation –This option allows us to set up the campaign first and later create ad sets and ads.

Let’s focus on the Guided Creation Process.

To create a new ad, click Create an ad in Ads Manager.

The Facebook Ad Campaign has three parts: Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad.

Campaign

The first step in creating an ad is choosing the objective. It has three main objectives namely, Awareness, Consideration, Conversions.

Awareness

The Awareness campaign can be further classified as Brand awareness and Reach.

• In Brand awareness, the goal is to increase people’s awareness of our business, brand.
• The next one is Reach, which shows our ad to as many people as possible in our target audience.

However, Reach and Engagement on Facebook are entirely different from each other.

Consideration

It is the objective that gets people to think about our business and seek more information when we use Facebook campaigns. Under Consideration, we have several objectives like Traffic, Engagement, App installs, Video views, Lead generation, and Messages.

• Under consideration objective, the first one is Traffic, it drives people from Facebook to any URL, such as website, blog post, etc.
• Engagement is the next objective and it reaches people more likely to engage with our post. It can be likes, comments, shares, offers claimed.
• App installs are fairly direct; it sends people to the app store to download an app.
• Video views are targeted at people who are most likely to watch our videos.
• Lead Generation collects leads for any business. It gathers information from people interested in the form of sign-ups, newsletters, etc.
• Messages are the objectives to connect and communicate with potential or existing customers interested in our brand.

Conversion

The Conversions Campaign is the final objective while creating your Facebook ad campaign and under it, there are three objectives namely, Conversions, Catalogue sales, Store traffic.

• Conversions encourage people to take a specific action, such as download app, register for our site, or make a purchase.
• Catalog Sales shows products from our e-commerce store’s catalog to generate sales.
• Store Traffic promotes any brick-and-mortar business locations to people that are nearby.

The next step in the process will be to Name the campaign, it helps in easily identifying and making changes to the campaign.

Ad set

After setting up the name for the ad set, the next step is to choose an audience.

Audience

For the audience, we can create a new audience or we can use a saved one in setting up the Facebook Ad Campaign. There are different parameters to choose an audience. 

• Location targeting can be used to target people based on state, country, city, zip code, etc. 
• Age helps us to target ads to people within an age range.
• Gender target ads specific to men, women, or people of all genders.
• Languages target people of certain languages
• Detailed targeting allows us to further distinguish based on criteria such as demographics, interests, or behaviors.
• Connections can aid us in including or excluding people from our audience based on connections to our pages, apps, and events.
• The custom audience are target audiences we have information about and we can also define custom audience from a list.

The subset of custom audiences is the Lookalike audience. We can create it from a source. It finds other people on Facebook who are the most similar to people from the selected source.

Understanding the Facebook Audience can supremely boost your Facebook Ad Campaign.

Placement

The placements section has two options. It has an automatic placement, which is pre-selected and recommended. The other option is Edit placements, here we can edit parameters like which device we need to place ads on. We can choose mobile or desktop.

Placement also includes options for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or Audience network, which we can select or deselect based on our objective. We can also choose where the ad appears in feeds and stories.

Budget, bid, and schedule

In the Budget & Schedule section, we can choose a budget and set our ad set’s schedule.

• We can determine the budget for the ad first.
• The schedule option is next and here we have the option of choosing to run the ad set continuously or we can opt for a start and end date.
• Next comes Optimization for Ad delivery, this is different for different objectives. It can be for brand awareness, conversions, link clicks, impressions, daily unique reach, etc.
• The bid amount is automatic by default, if eligible we can also set a manual bid.
• The other options are Ad scheduling and Delivery type

Ad scheduling gives the option to run ads all the time, which also gives the option to edit them. Delivery type is also standard by default. It shows ads throughout our selected schedule, we can also edit options.

Ad

This is the final option in the ad creation process. It allows us to create an ad format. Depending on our objective, we can choose a different format.

• Carousel – This is a format where the ad can be displayed with two or more scrollable images or videos.
• Single image – An ad with a single image, we can create up to six ads with one image each.
• Single video – An ad with a single video.
• Slideshow –A looping video that can contain up to 10 images.
• Canvas – An immersive format, it combines both images and videos.

Choosing images or videos

• Choosing images and videos that fit the ad format is necessary. 
• Also, in addition to that, we should keep in mind the image-to-text ratio.
• Usage of recommended aspect ratio for each placement will maximize the potential of the ad
• Using high-resolution images 
• Previewing ads using Creative hub will be very useful to get an idea of how people will see the ad on different devices.

Connecting the page and placing an order

After connecting our page, we can add additional details to the ad such as website URL, call-to-action-buttons, etc., By doing this we can see a preview of how the ad will look across all the eligible placements.

The final step is to place an order at bottom of ad creation to order Facebook ads. The first time we place the order, it will ask for payment information.

Analytics

Analytics is the most important thing to learn and track the progress of our campaigns. We can view specific data and learn if our campaigns, ad sets, and ads are helping us meet our business goals by customizing the columns in the Ads Manager table.

We can choose from different reporting templates such as Delivery, Engagement, performance and clicks, app engagement, or customize the columns of the table with different metrics.

The three tabs available here are Columns, Breakdown, and export.

Columns: We can choose from preset columns that target specific metrics, or customize our columns to create our own selections.

Breakdown: We can choose how our performance data looks by using breakdowns such as Age, Gender, or Placement.

Export: We can export our performance data as an Excel or CSV file. We can also choose to share to send a link to the data with people on our ad account.

On the right-hand side of Ads Manager, we can open the side pane to edit our ads, view the results of the ads in rich, visual charts, and see a timeline of all updates made to our ads.

On the side pane, named the insights pane, we have another three options such as Charts for the ad, Editing ad, activity history for the ad. The main option that is necessary to view the performance is the Charts for the ad.

Charts for ad

• The performance chart shows the number of people who click on our ad, the number of people we reach, and the overall cost of our ad. The custom option allows us to choose the metrics we want to view.
• The demographics chart shows how our ad performs across different ages and genders. We can scroll over each section of the chart to see individual results for each age group.
• The placement chart shows our ad’s performance across different placements, such as Facebook or Instagram. Depending on where our ad is eligible to appear, we’ll see where our ad is receiving the most delivery.

Conclusion

With this, you will have the basics of Facebook Ad Campaign sorted. But obviously, learning doesn’t end.

There’s much more in the bad, understanding Facebook Audience and the difference between Facebook Reach and Engagement.

Here’s a tip for your Facebook Ad Campaign – You will not get it right the first time. Keep trying different combinations to find out what works best for you and your business.