Facebook Ads Management Tutorial You Need
Facebook ads are a powerful tool for any business. With it, you can reach more potential customers and give your service a huge boost. Many businesses are already crushing it with Facebook ads and its targeting options that allow them to reach their target audience effectively.
Facebook ads are run using a tool called Ads Manager, and that’s what this article is about. If you’ve been thinking about how to perform Facebook ads management, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll also be covering some useful tips for managing ad campaigns.
Facebook ads management tool
You may be asking yourself, “How do I manage Facebook ads?” Well, Facebook has an easy-to-use platform for this, called Ads Manager. This ads management tool has powerful features that allow you to:
- Create new ads. Ads Manager lets you create new ads in an easy and simple process. You will be guided to set your marketing objective, define the people you’d like to reach, manage the budget you want to spend, choose the places to show your ad, choose the ad format, and more.
- Manage multiple ads at once. You’ll be able to view, edit, and duplicate your existing campaigns at any time. It’s also easy to edit settings like audiences, budget, placement options, and creatives. You can even edit multiple ads at once.
- See how your ads are performing. With the Ads Manager reporting tools, you can see how your ads are performing in real-time. You’ll get insights on what to adjust – such as your ad creative, budget, or audience – so that they perform better over time.
How to use Facebook Ads Manager
This section covers the basic overview of how to use Ads Manager for Facebook ads management, which is your starting point for running ads on Facebook.
Do I need a Business Manager Account?
Before we jump any further, you might be asking: “Can I run ads directly in Ads Manager without having a Facebook Business Manager Account?“
The answer to this question is, “Yes”!
To get access to Ads Manager, all you need is at least a Facebook account.
You don’t have to create a Business Manager Account, but it’s recommended to advertise under a business account and not under your personal account. Especially if you hire an agency to manage your ads or you are a contractor managing campaigns for multiple clients. Advertising under a Business Manager account allows for better tracking and management.
Ad campaigns without a Facebook (business) page are also possible, but you should consider the type of ad you’ll use. That’s because certain ad formats can’t be used without a Facebook page.
Where is Ads Manager on Facebook
To access Ads Manager, go to https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager. You’ll see the Ads Manager dashboard, which has two pages in its navigation.
The first one is the Account Overview page, where you can see everything that’s happening in your advertising account. If you’re running ads, you will see the results based on the objective and settings you selected. You will also see the amount you’re spending.
The second one is the Campaigns page, where you can see all the campaigns that you’ve created in a table. When you manage Facebook ads, you most likely spend most of your time on this page. You can track each campaign and see how well it is performing by looking at the columns in the table.
Notice that there are three tabs on this page: Campaigns, Ad sets, and Ads. In each tab, you will see a similar interface, such as a Create button on the left and a Reports dropdown on the right to access the ads reporting functionality.
The structure of Facebook ads
Facebook organizes ads into three distinct levels:
- Campaigns. At this level, you select your ad objective, which is the overall goal of your campaign.
- Ad sets. At this level, you choose your target audiences, which could be based on keywords, demographics, age, buyer persona, etc. You also choose your ad placements, determine a budget, and set a schedule.
- Ads. At this level, you design the ad creatives, which are the ads themselves. You choose your ad format, upload images or video, add headlines, and more.
You can have multiple ad sets under one campaign. Diversifying your target audience is key to finding successful ads. This way, you can see which of the many ad sets work best.
Within an ad set, you can also have multiple ads. This is really helpful to see which ad is better – videos or images, for example.
The Ads Manager Reporting functionality
One way to access Ads Reporting is by using the Reports dropdown in the Ads Manager’s Campaigns page. If you click the Reports dropdown, you will see several options for exporting your ads data, as shown below:
Then, to access the Ads Reporting page, you can either:
- Select Export Table Data > Export to Ads Reporting.
- Or, select Create Custom Report.
- Or, select one of the reports listed under Standard reports.
Ads Reporting allows you to use breakdowns, metrics, and filtering to create custom reports of your ad performance:
After creating your report, you can save it or export the data to one of these formats: Formatted Data Table (.xlsx), Raw Data Table (.xlsx), CSV (.csv), and image (.png).
Make sure to take advantage of Ads Reporting to analyze and improve your ads’ performance. If you want to do a more detailed analysis within Facebook ads management, you can export your data into .xlsx or .csv to be analyzed elsewhere – such as in Excel, Google Sheets, or Data Studio. By doing this, you can extract and manipulate your ad data from Facebook in the way you want.
To keep your extracted data always up-to-date, you can use an integration tool such as Coupler.io to automate data export on the schedule you want. It provides a Facebook Ads integration to export different ad stats and allows you to schedule exports. For example, you can set the data to be refreshed every Monday at 7 am.
Where can you export your data? There are three supported destinations:
Data export provides you with the flexibility to do more with your data. You can process it, visualize its patterns and trends, even combine it with other sources.
To add more power to your Facebook ads analytics, you can also use third-party Facebook insights tools. It allows you to evaluate ad metrics better and improve visualization.
Facebook ads management cost
So, how much do Facebook ads cost? Well, it’s hard to tell the exact amount. That’s because the cost will vary depending on several factors, such as your industry, target audiences, ad placements, and multiple other factors.
It’s hard to generalize, but you may well end up paying between $0.5 – $2 for every click a Facebook user makes on your ad.
Suppose, in your case; it costs $2 per click. So, to get ten clicks — enough in many cases for one sale as a result — you need to commit $20 a day, or about $600 a month. In this scenario, each sale costs you $20.
If a campaign seems effective, you may want to double your budget. It’s easy to adjust your budget as you want, and we’ll cover it in the later section.
How to set up an ad in Facebook Ads Manager
The green Create button is your starting point to create all of your ad campaigns. If you click on it, Facebook will guide you through the necessary steps to create your Facebook ad.
Now, let’s take a look at the basic steps to creating an ad. We’ll cover the steps on how to select your ad objective, how to manage budget, audiences, placement, and how to create your ad creatives.
#1: How to select your ad objective
Start by clicking the Create button. You will see a popup allowing you to choose your ad objective.
Choosing an objective is the first step in creating your ad campaign, and it’s what you are striving to achieve.
There are three main types of objectives for running an ad:
- Awareness — Your ads will show to people that have never heard about your brand, product, or services. It’s to generate knowledge and interest in your product or service.
- Consideration — Your ads will show to the people that might be a little bit familiar but have never made a purchase. This objective is to allow people to engage with your business, click on specific links for more info, and keep your product or service top of mind.
- Conversion — Your ads will show to the people who are ready to convert. Those are the people that you’re ready to make a customer. Your ads prompt audiences towards a call-to-action (i.e., click to purchase, sign up for a promotion).
Once you’ve made your selection, optionally scroll down and enter your campaign, ad set, and ad names.
When done, click Continue. After that, you will be redirected to the campaign edit page.
#2: How to manage Facebook ads budget and schedule
To manage the budget of an ad set, go to a campaign edit page. Then, click on an ad set and scroll down until you find the Budget & schedule section.
You can allocate your budget in two ways: Daily or Lifetime Budget.
Daily Budget
By default, Facebook suggests a $20 daily budget. However, you can essentially run an ad campaign for as little as $5 a day. Facebook then runs the Ads up to that limit, day after day, and charges you the agreed-on amount each day.
A daily budget of $20 means that you’ll need to pay $20 every day, on average. The actual amount spent daily may vary — it can be more or less than your daily budget.
You will need to set a start date for your ads to run. Optionally, you can set the end date.
Lifetime Budget
Instead of committing $20 per day, you may want to spend $300 per month. In this case, you’ll need to select the Lifetime Budget and specify the start and end dates of your ads.
#3: How to manage Facebook ads audiences
It’s very important to target a highly relevant audience with your ads. You don’t want someone clicking on your ad only for them not to be interested in what you’re selling because they are too young or too old, for example.
Managing audiences is done at the ad set level, as the following screenshot shows:
You have three audience selection tools to target your ad delivery:
- Core Audiences — You define an audience based on criteria such as age, gender, location, interests, language, and more.
- Custom Audiences — To get back in touch with people who have engaged with your business, online or off.
- Lookalike Audiences — To reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers.
The ability to create Lookalike Audiences is one of the best features offered in Facebook Ads Manager. Essentially, this feature allows you to expand your advertising reach.
#4: How to manage Facebook ads placements
Just like managing budget and audience, you can manage Facebook ads placements at the ad set level. And in the following screenshot, you can see that there are two options to manage ad placements: automatic or manual.
Automatic Placements is the recommended option to get your ad placed. Facebook’s powerful machine learning can test out different scenarios and placements a lot quicker than the manual option.
You may want to choose Manual Placements if you already know which placements work best for your audience. When selecting this option, you will need to manually configure where to place your ads based on things like:
- Device: Mobile, Desktop.
- Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger.
- Feeds placements: Facebook News Feed, Instagram Feed, etc.
- Stories and Reels placements: Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels, etc.
#5: How to choose your Facebook ads creative
To manage an ad creative, select an ad on a Campaign edit page. You’ll be able to customize the media, text, and call-to-action for your ad based on the ad format you selected.
There are 3 different ad formats:
- Single image or video: One image or video, or a slideshow with multiple images.
- Carousel: Two or more scrollable images or videos.
- Collection: Group of items that display into a fullscreen mobile experience.
After uploading media such as an image or video, the next step is to insert a copy for your ad by providing the following things:
- A headline.
- Text to tell people what your ad is about.
- Call to action (subscribe, contact us, etc.).
- Destination (can be a website’s URL).
There’s also an Ad preview option on the right pane to preview your ad. If you find it takes a lot of time to load your ad, you can always turn it off.
Facebook ads campaign management tips
Take a look at the following tips to help you build successful Facebook ad campaigns:
- Write a great copy for your ad. You can’t just send any old text – you need great copywriting to make your ads more powerful and better connect with your target audience. Keep your copy short and simple, and have a clear call to action (CTA).
- Choose compelling images. Pick images that will grab your audience’s attention. Don’t just use any cute cat or baby images you find on the Internet 😉
- Have someone else review your ad to ensure your ad is easy to understand.
- Test everything, from your ad copy, images/videos, ad placements, target audience, even your budget. You won’t know which ad will give you better results until you test them.
- Keep improving the performance of your ads. For example, if you find that your ads are bringing in many clicks but no sales, try refining your target audience. This will help you avoid losing more money on your ads.
It’s also important to know that Facebook reviews every single ad you publish on the platform. So, be sure to check their advertising policies to help prevent your ads from being rejected. Understanding what you can and cannot advertise on Facebook may save you a lot of time and money in the future.
Bonus: How to manage Facebook Ads for clients
So, a client asks you to manage their Facebook ads? This quick guide may help you.
The first step of running Facebook ads for clients is setting up a Business Manager Account. It’s not required but recommended, as explained previously in this article.
To set up a Business Manager Account:
- Go to business.facebook.com.
- Click Create Account.
- Enter your business name, your name, and your business email address.
- After your account has been created, confirm your business email address.
The next thing to do is request access from your client. They will need to have a Business Manager Account set up so that they can invite you to access their ad account.
It’s considered a best practice to use the client’s ad account instead of your personal ad account — and here’s why:
- The client should be the one who has full control of their ad accounts.
- You don’t want to pay for their ad spend upfront.
- It’s much better to manage your clients’ ads in different ad accounts, so problems with one client don’t affect the other clients.
And then, how much should you charge to run Facebook ads?
In most cases, based on your experience level, you could aim for somewhere between 10%-20% of your client’s monthly ad budget, for a client with a big budget. However, you can also use other pricing models, such as flat fees or hourly rates.
It’s also important to know as much as you can about the job before you start working. Make sure that any expectations are set appropriately by understanding what kind of work will be needed and how long everything may take.
