Facebook advertising holds immense significance, with 1.4 billion active daily users spending over 50 minutes daily across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. Unsurprisingly, 93% of marketers leverage Facebook for advertising. To harness the potential of this vast user base and ensure meaningful results from your Facebook Ads spend, the key lies in Facebook Ads Manager.
A powerful tool, Facebook Ads Manager empowers you to effortlessly set up, manage, and analyze your Facebook Ads campaigns. While it may seem daunting initially, it proves to be one of the most user-friendly online advertising tools once you grasp its functionalities.
In this comprehensive article, we delve into the intricacies of Facebook Ads Manager, providing insights on how you can effectively utilize it to establish and run lucrative Facebook Ads campaigns. Unlock the full potential of your advertising efforts with the guidance and tools offered by Facebook Ads Manager.
Using Facebook Ads Manager
To utilize Facebook Ads Manager, you must first have a Facebook Ads account (for guidance on setting one up, refer to this article). Once your Facebook Ads account is established, accessing Facebook Ads Manager is straightforward. Simply click on the small downward arrow located in the upper left-hand side of your Facebook page and select “Manage Ads.”
Upon clicking, Facebook will direct you to the Ad Accounts page, where you can quickly overview all the ad accounts you have access to. If you’re managing multiple accounts, you can select the appropriate one from this page.
For direct access to your personal account’s Facebook Ads Manager, you can use the URL https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager in your browser’s URL bar. Streamline your navigation to Facebook Ads Manager with these simple steps.
Creating Your First Campaign in Facebook Ads Manager
After setting up your account and entering Facebook Ads Manager, simply click the green “+ Create” button to initiate your inaugural campaign.
Subsequently, you’ll be guided to select a campaign objective. Opt for your objective, assign a name to your campaign, and click “Continue” to proceed with selecting your targeting options. Here, you’ll encounter various settings to consider:
Location
For businesses with local operations, limited shipping areas, or a specific target location, this setting proves invaluable. Essentially, it enables various levels of location targeting—city, state, zip code, country, etc.—to reach individuals within a designated radius of that location.
To illustrate, if you aim to target a shopping center, input the name or address and set a radius around it. Additionally, you can focus on individuals residing specifically in that location, beneficial for professions like dentists, or cast a wider net by targeting “everyone in this location,” encompassing both residents and transient individuals.
Demographics
Tailoring your ad targeting based on factors such as educational level, political affiliation, and relationship status can be a strategic approach, depending on your business’s target audience. The effectiveness of demographic targeting relies on your understanding of the specific demographics you aim to reach.
For instance, adjusting your ads based on relationship status changes is beneficial for a wedding venue but may not be as relevant for a restaurant. Customize your demographic targeting to align with the characteristics most pertinent to your business’s target audience.
Interests
Facebook discerns a user’s “interests” by examining the interests listed in their profile and the pages they have liked. The relevance and efficacy of utilizing “Interests” as a targeting parameter will differ based on the nature of the products or services your business is promoting.
Behaviors
Behaviors enable you to direct your ads towards individuals based on factors like job roles, purchasing behavior, or specific actions taken on Facebook. Although these targeting options present intriguing possibilities, their value may vary among different companies. Thankfully, audience targeting is not the sole option available for Facebook Ads.
Beyond the aforementioned general targeting options, there are a couple of additional approaches to tailor your ad targeting that warrant your attention.
Retargeting
A potent strategy for audience expansion on Facebook involves retargeting. Facebook retargeting follows a similar principle to other forms of retargeting, but with a distinct advantage – the ability to generate lookalike audiences.
While the details of setting up and utilizing Facebook retargeting won’t be covered in this article, it’s a valuable option worth noting. For a more in-depth guide on how to implement and leverage Facebook retargeting, refer to this comprehensive article.
Lookalike Audiences
In the course of marketing your business, it’s likely that you’ve amassed a substantial email list. The great news is, you can upload this email list to Facebook, and the platform will identify any profiles linked to the emails on your list. These profiles then form a new custom audience that you can target on Facebook.
This feature proves particularly useful if someone has visited your website, completed a form, but hasn’t responded to your outreach efforts – it allows you to re-engage with them on Facebook.
But the capabilities extend further.
Facebook introduces “lookalike audiences,” a feature that identifies users on the platform who closely resemble those on your email list. This creates an audience you can market to effectively. The algorithm behind this feature is highly efficient, enabling you to target thousands or even millions of individuals who share striking similarities with those already interested in your business.
As an added advantage, you can combine lookalike audiences with your retargeting audiences. This allows you to concentrate your marketing efforts on individuals most likely to respond to your ads. For a deeper understanding of utilizing lookalike audiences, refer to this informative article.
After
As you fine-tune your targeting parameters, observe the display gauge in the upper right-hand corner, which dynamically updates with estimates of your audience size and anticipated daily results. These figures factor in your chosen objective, targeting specifics, and budget, providing an estimate of your anticipated advertising outcomes.
While the effectiveness of your ads is undoubtedly influenced by what you’re promoting and the ad creatives, it’s advisable to closely monitor these estimates. They offer valuable insights into the reasonableness of your targeting and budget decisions.
Next, you’ll decide on your budget and the metric for optimizing your ad placements on Facebook. Although we’ll cover this briefly here, you can find more detailed guidance on budget selection in this article.
The pivotal decision lies in choosing between a lifetime budget or a daily budget. A daily budget ensures continuous ad display throughout the day, every day, allowing you to run the campaign for the desired duration until you hit your budget. On the other hand, a lifetime budget restricts ad running to a set period, preventing expenditure beyond your specified budget. However, note that Facebook may allocate more spending on certain days and less on others with this option. The lifetime budget choice also grants access to dayparting, enabling you to regulate the days and times your ads appear.
While additional settings cater to specific campaign and business goals, we’ll bypass them for now and proceed to ad creation!
Creating an Ad
By this stage, whether you were aware or not, you’ve successfully established a campaign and an ad set. Now, the exciting phase begins—creating your ads! Begin by selecting an ad format:
These ad formats, including carousel, single image, or single video ad types, are quite straightforward. Many individuals opt for these, but canvas ads can be intriguing for certain businesses (for more information on that, click here).
Now, proceed to upload a 1,200 pixel by 628 pixel featured image (assuming you’re creating a single image ad; for specifications on other ad types, refer to this article). Write your headlines and body copy, select a suitable call-to-action, and include any links you want users to click.
In previous years, Facebook adhered strictly to the 20% text rule for ad images. While they have relaxed this rule, prioritizing images with less text, they still provide a tool to gauge adherence to their guidelines,which you can explore here.
Congratulations! You’ve just crafted your inaugural Facebook Ads campaign. Shortly, we’ll delve into using Facebook Ads Manager to optimize not only this campaign but also the numerous others you’ll soon be creating. Before that, let’s address one more fundamental aspect of your Facebook Ads Manager account: adding additional users.
Adding Other Users to Your Facebook Ads Manager Account
As you might have deduced, your Facebook Ads Manager account need not be confined to your personal Facebook profile. It offers the flexibility to be shared with others or reciprocally shared by you with others.
To facilitate this, navigate to the relevant Facebook Ads Manager account. Click on the menu icon situated in the upper left-hand corner and select “Settings.”
Proceed by clicking the blue “Add People” button on the right side of the screen. This action enables you to search for specific individuals and incorporate them as users within your ad account.
Once you’ve identified the appropriate person, you can assign them one of three role options:
- Ad account admin: An individual with “Admin” access possesses full control over the account, from editing payment details to overseeing the roles of other users.
- Ad account advertiser: With “Advertiser” access, a person can view, edit, and create ads without influencing payment or user settings, though they can set bids for your ads.
- Ad account analyst: This role entails read-only access. An “Analyst” can observe ad performance, generate reports, but lacks the authority to make any changes.
It’s worth noting that these ad account roles are distinct from Facebook Page roles and Facebook Business Manager roles. Each set of roles provides access to different aspects, meaning that being an admin on your Facebook Page does not automatically grant access to your Facebook Ads Manager account.
Navigating Facebook Ads Manager
The primary Facebook Ads Manager page presents an abundance of information and various options. Recently, Facebook enhanced the “Account Overview” tab, providing even more data and options for a comprehensive view:
Feeling a tad overwhelmed? Fear not, navigating through these features is simpler than it may appear. Let’s break down each tab individually and explore how to effectively utilize them.
Account Overview Tab
The “Account Overview” tab offers a comprehensive view of your overall Facebook advertising performance. For instance, you can swiftly access data such as the number of clicks your ads have garnered or the amount spent within a specific time frame by utilizing the dropdown menus within the graph sections.
While the specific information within each dropdown menu may require some exploration, a bit of tinkering allows you to efficiently access your key marketing metrics, presenting a quick overview on this tab.
Moreover, this tab serves as an excellent hub for monitoring the demographics of your Facebook ads. For instance, in the “Age and Gender” section, you can observe that approximately 65% of link clicks originate from men, constituting around 75% of the ad spend. This distribution aligns well with Disruptive’s target market, demonstrating a normal pattern. However, anomalies, such as a surge in clicks from 55+ year old women in a past campaign, can indicate issues with messaging and targeting. Check out here
Analyzing data in the “Hour” or “Location” sections allows you to assess how effectively your ads are targeted. If, for instance, you’re operating a local restaurant in San Francisco but observe a majority of ad impressions or clicks in New York at midnight, it suggests a need for adjustments in your campaign settings.
Lastly, by clicking on “Creative Reporting” on the left-hand side, you gain access to a useful report amalgamating results from ads with the same imagery and ad copy but different campaigns or ad sets. This facilitates easy comparison of ad creative and identification of trends. However, it’s important to note that if you’re running the same creative for vastly different audiences, this aggregate report may lose its utility. Keep this in mind as you navigate through the data.
Campaigns Tab
While the “Campaigns” tab may not offer as extensive demographic data as the “Account Overview” tab, its information is considerably more detailed and generally practical.
Within the “Campaigns” tab, you gain visibility into the current status of running campaigns and their results over your selected timeframe. This proves invaluable for assessing the overall performance of your account, considering the diverse target audiences and objectives across various campaigns.
Given the diverse Facebook ad types, audiences, and objectives, the aggregated data in the “Account Overview” tab may not always provide a nuanced evaluation of advertising performance. For instance, a cost-per-click (CPC) of $5.00 might be subpar in one campaign but exceptional in another, a distinction not discernible on the “Account Overview” tab.
Creating distinct campaigns for each audience and objective is a recommended practice, and the “Campaigns” tab becomes instrumental in swiftly gauging whether your campaigns are delivering the desired results. This makes it my preferred go-to tab for monitoring the performance of a Facebook Ads account.
Individual campaign settings, such as the campaign name or spending limit, can be edited by selecting the specific campaign and clicking the “Edit” button. Additionally, you can add a new campaign by clicking the green “+ Create” button.
Ad Sets
While the “Campaigns” tab is excellent for obtaining broad data, it may fall short in providing insights when a campaign is underperforming. To delve deeper into the reasons behind the performance, click on the relevant campaign within the “Campaigns” tab. This action directs you to the campaign’s “Ad Sets” tab, offering a more effective approach compared to directly clicking on the “Ad Sets” tab, which leads to an unfiltered view and could be overwhelming.
Within the “Ad Sets” tab, you can analyze and compare the performance of various ad sets, providing a comprehensive overview using the same campaign settings, akin to the “Campaigns” tab. Keep in mind that objectives and audiences are selected at the ad set level, not the campaign level. This means you may have ad sets with distinct results performing well within the same campaign.
It’s crucial to note that Facebook’s algorithm undergoes a learning phase with each new ad set’s targeting. If Facebook is still optimizing a specific ad set, you may notice a “(Learning)” note in the “Delivery” column of the “Ad Sets” tab. In such cases, even if the ad set isn’t currently performing well, it might be advisable to allow more time for the algorithms to learn and optimize.
Similar to the “Campaigns” tab, you can add a new ad set by clicking the green “+ Create” button. Additionally, you have the option to edit the name, start and end date, and/or targeting settings for a specific ad set by selecting the box next to the ad set and clicking the “Edit” button.
Ads Tab
Lastly, we come to the “Ads” tab, which enables you to view and compare the performance of each individual ad within an ad set. When you click on an ad set in the “Ad Sets” tab, the “Ads” tab displays only the ads within that specific ad set.
Your preference for this tab may vary based on how you structure your Facebook campaigns and ad sets. If you frequently use the same ads across different audiences, with only one ad in each ad set, this tab may not be particularly useful. Conversely, if you target a single audience but experiment with various ads, the “Ads” tab can become a favorite tool for direct ad performance comparison (although the “Creative Reporting” option in the “Account Overview” tab may also suit this situation).
To craft a new ad for your selected ad set, click the “+ Create” button. For direct edits to an existing ad, click on the “Edit” option directly beneath the ad name. This action opens the editing options pane on the right side of your screen, allowing modifications to ad copy, destination URL, images, and more.
However, unless you’re making pre-launch adjustments or minor tweaks, it’s generally advisable to duplicate an ad and then make changes to the new ad. This method ensures easy tracking of which ad content yields specific results.
Using Facebook Ads Manager
Facebook offers an abundance of data concerning your ad performance, yet navigating through this wealth of information to pinpoint the relevant data can pose a challenge. To assist you, let’s delve into how Facebook Ads Manager presents and reports on data.
Preset Columns
Facebook Ads Manager offers the flexibility to craft personalized data filters, although, in many instances, their standard presets, available in the “Columns” dropdown menu, suffice for assessing the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. Here are the fundamental presets and key metrics they encompass:
- Performance: Results, Reach, Costs, Amount Spent
- Delivery: Reach, Frequency, CPM, Impressions
- Engagement: People Taking Action, Reactions, Comments, Shares
- Video Engagement: Impressions, 3-Second Video Views, Cost per 3-Second Video Views
- App Engagement: Mobile App Installs, Mobile App Actions, Cost per Mobile App Install, etc.
- Carousel Engagement: Reach, Frequency, Impressions, Clicks
- Performance and Clicks: Results, Reach, Cost
- Cross-Device: Website Actions, Mobile Apps Install, Website Action, Conversion Value
- Offline Conversions: Purchase, Purchase Conversion Value, Cost per Purchase
- Targeting and Creative: Clicks (All), Clickthrough Rate (All), Cost per Click (All)—equivalent to Creative Reporting data
- Messenger Engagement: Link Clicks, Messaging Replies, Blocked Messaging Conversations
While these column presets cater to the majority of advertiser reporting needs, you have the option to create custom column sets if you require something different.
Custom Columns
To craft your personalized column sets, access the “Columns” dropdown menu and select “Customize Columns.”
Within this interface, you have the flexibility to add, remove, or rearrange columns according to your requirements:
- If incorporating a few additional columns is a one-time adjustment, simply click “Apply” to implement your new column set.
- Alternatively, if you wish to preserve your customized column arrangement for future use, tick the box in the lower left-hand corner, and assign a name to your bespoke column set.
Interpreting Your Data
While having the correct columns in your report is essential, there are times when additional information is needed to interpret your data accurately.
If you’re unsure about the meaning of a specific metric name (given the multitude of metric names, confusion can arise), simply hover your mouse over the column heading. Facebook will provide comprehensive details about the metric.
Another way to extract more insights from your Facebook Ads Manager data is to utilize the “Breakdown” menu, located to the right of the “Columns” dropdown menu. This menu enables you to incorporate subcategories into each row of your report using options such as:
- Time: Break down results by specific day, week, two weeks, or month.
- Delivery: Break down results by age, gender, business locations, country, geographical area, device, platform, time of day, and more.
- Action: Break down results by conversion device, post reaction type, destination, link click destination, video view type, video sound, and carousel card.
You can choose one criterion from each category, with a total of three. For instance, if you want to break down a year’s worth of data by week, device, and destination, you can do so, even if the usefulness of such detailed data might be limited.
While breaking down data works best with a single criterion, there are situations where having the option to use a second or third criterion is beneficial. You can export your data by clicking the double arrow button near the “Create Rule” button.
Additionally, Facebook offers a limited rule generator that can automate certain actions in your account. While not as robust as rules or scripts in platforms like Google AdWords, it can still be useful for specific tasks, especially when concerned about unexpected CPC fluctuations.
Conclusion
And there you have the fundamentals! The Facebook Ads Manager isn’t an overly intricate platform, and once you grasp its workings, it becomes quite user-friendly.
For more extensive campaign, ad set, or ad duplication and manipulation features, especially in bulk, the Power Editor might be your go-to. However, for day-to-day tasks, the Facebook Ads Manager proves to be an excellent choice.
If you need assistance navigating any aspect of the Facebook Ads Manager or seek general recommendations for a successful Facebook campaign, feel free to reach out here or in the comments. I’m eager to provide assistance!
What’s your take on the Facebook Ads Manager? Any favorite features? Perhaps you have a trick or two to share? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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