How do you advertise on Facebook? How do you create a Facebook Ads campaign? How do you create an ad account and why? How does everything work?

Advertisers have a ton of questions about Facebook advertising, even before getting to the stage of optimizing their campaigns.

That’s why we’ve created a series of articles that will help you master the world of Facebook advertising. If you want to dive even deeper and stay on top of Facebook advertising trends, listen to our podcast 100% dedicated to Facebook Ads: Social Selling.

Enjoy!

What’s the difference between Facebook Advertising and Google Advertising?

The answer is simple: your audience’s intentions.

On Google Search, your audience is looking for information, a solution, or even attempting to achieve a specific goal. They may even be looking to call a company.

On Facebook and Instagram, it’s the opposite. Your audience is simply passing the time or looking for entertainment.

At no given moment is your audience searching for a plumber’s number, a restaurant’s opening hours, or how to get to the dentist.

That's why it’s important to adapt your ads accordingly and adopt the platform's codes, conventions, rules, design elements, etc. You can’t just take an ad made for TV and stick it on Facebook.

This is a truth we’ve covered a myriad of times, especially on our podcast, Social Selling. You need to catch your audience’s eye among the thousands of Feed Posts or Stories they see a day and ensure your message gets across.

Catching your prospects’ eyes is potentially the hardest part! Users are now increasingly used to seeing ads on various platforms, and their ability to detect, filter through, and ignore ads is getting stronger.

Let’s take this UGC ad as an example.

As you can see, this ad looks like anything but a classic ad: no ad slogan, no logos, it’s filmed with a smartphone, and there’s no sound other than the rustling of the items in the box.

Yet this video allowed us to generate our client thousands of dollars using an audience that wasn’t at all familiar with the brand!

Remember that Facebook Advertising is now evolving in an environment where organic content is becoming increasingly popular, and it’s supposed to generate engagement and interaction!

Now that we have a better overall understanding of the platform, let's get into the Facebook Ads Manager and your Facebook Ads Account.

In this image, the External Business Manager gets access to the Facebook Ad Account #2 because the Business Manager shares it and all of its resources (Facebook Page, Pixel, DPA Catalog, etc.) with the External Business Manager.

To create a Business Manager, and in tandem, an advertising account (or inherit one), all you have to do is follow Facebook's instructions. We strongly advise you to create a Business Manager account before your ad account.

You will spend very little time in this tab, but it is necessary to master it for future collaborations or account creations.

The Facebook Ads Manager is where you’ll spend most of your time.

The Ads Manager includes 3 main tabs: Campaign, Audience, and Ads.

The Campaign Tab allows you to set a budget for your campaigns and a campaign objective.

When you create a campaign, and therefore a Facebook ad, you will always be asked to choose an objective related to what you wish to achieve as a business, or what you wish to accomplish with that particular campaign.

The Audience Tab is where you can define your target audience(s), a start and end date, a spending limit, where to broadcast your ads, and your attribution window/type.

The Ads Tab is where you can see you see, edit, and control your creatives. Let’s now take a look at what a standard ad looks like.

A standard ad is composed of 6 or 7 elements:

• A Facebook or Instagram Page
• Ad/Post Copy
• A Visual/Creative (We’ll touch on this later in the article)
• A Redirection Link (if necessary) and thus a call to action button
• A Headline
• A Description (which does not appear on mobile ads, like above)

There are many ways to integrate the Facebook Pixel, and that’s because it’s one of the most important aspects of Facebook advertising. Without it, you won’t be able to generate or track campaign conversions. To understand why, consider this diagram.

At the top, from left to right, this is the path a person takes when clicking on your ad, and then performing an action on your site (ex: purchase). At the bottom, from right to left, this is the information the Pixel sends back to your ad account.

You can find all the resources and information related to the Pixel on the Events Manager page in the Business Manager. Here, you can configure all of your events. That is to say, all of the ‘conversions’ or ‘events’ that take place on your website that are important to your campaign or business objective (ex: purchase, add to cart, lead, etc.)

However, the Facebook Pixel is experiencing many difficulties and may disappear eventually. That’s why we strongly advise you to take a closer look at Facebook's Conversion API.

The Conversion API is a fairly new development whose purpose is to address a more challenging digital marketing environment. “The Conversions API is designed to create a direct connection between your marketing data and the systems which help optimize ad targeting, decrease cost per action and measure results across Meta technologies,” Meta explains.

Attribution is a KEY element in advertising and understanding how well your ads perform. We advise you always choose the widest attribution window, namely 7-day click and 1-day view.

This means that after a prospect clicks on your ad’s link, your ad can convert for up to 7 days and 1 day if the user only sees it.

The wider your attribution window, the more conversions Facebook can attribute to your campaign, and in turn, the less it will charge you for those conversions.