How to create a campaign on Facebook and Instagram Ads

In digital marketing there are plenty of tools that can help us improve our online campaigns. Of all of them, Facebook Ads is probably one of those with the greatest reach and effectiveness: it lets us advertise on more than one social network, Facebook and Instagram, and generate a lot of engagement with the chosen target audience. So this type of advertising can be the final push your brand needs.

Do you want to make the most of everything Facebook Ads has to offer? Do you want to know how to create a conversion campaign on Facebook and Instagram? Below we explain the main advantages of this tool and how to create your own social media advertising campaign step by step, on both Facebook and Instagram.

What is Facebook Ads?

Facebook is currently the social network with the most active users in the world, so advertising on the platform is a great opportunity for our business. The secret of its success is that, for most companies, their desired audience is on the platform, and Facebook gives them a quick and direct way to reach it. On top of that, ads can be customised extensively and their cost is fairly low, which makes them an affordable way to get traffic and conversions.

Main advantages of using Facebook Ads

Beyond what we have already mentioned, there are many other technical aspects that make Facebook Ads your greatest ally in digital marketing:

• Audience segmentation: Facebook holds a lot of data on its users, so it is very easy to segment your target audience precisely. You will find every kind of target on the social network.
• Going viral: although as advertisers we pay for each click on an ad, the reach of Facebook Ads advertising is not currently limited by pay per click, so it has a greater impact depending on how your users behave and can even go viral.
• Interactivity: as well as conventional ads or promotions, Facebook Ads lets you launch interactive posts that help us obtain even more data about our customers (a giveaway, for example).
• Affordable price: since you only pay for each click or conversion achieved, the cost of advertising is lower than on other platforms.
• Measurement capability: as well as a low cost, Facebook gives us the ability to measure how effective our ads are and check all the built-in statistics.

How to create a Facebook Ads campaign

The fact is that Facebook’s ad manager lets us create advertising campaigns for its own platform, but also for Instagram. So here we show you how to create your own ads for these two social networks.

You might also be interested in: How to create pages with Google My Business

Advertising on Facebook

Step 1

The first step in creating advertising campaigns on Facebook is to select your objectives. These can be:

• Awareness: this objective covers options such as brand awareness, local reach or post engagement.
• Consideration: in this section we can choose, for example, lead generation, getting video views or clicks to the website.
• Conversion: here we are after actions such as product catalogue sales or conversions on our own website.

Step 2

Once the objectives are set, we need to create the content for the ads. It is essential that we create a set of materials to launch our campaign: a library of images for the ads, copy tailored to the campaign objectives (watch out for the character limit) and even promotional videos for your brand.

Step 3

To measure the effectiveness of our advertising on Facebook and Instagram, the first essential step is to install the conversion pixels. These are snippets of code added to your website that link the visits you get to your Facebook ads. This pixel will also help us measure return on investment (ROI), which is very important in digital marketing.

Step 4

Once everything is installed, we can create our account and first campaign with Facebook’s Ads Manager. Within Facebook’s advertising tool, we click on Create new campaign and select the marketing objective we chose earlier.

Step 5

Next, we need to create the ad set. Depending on the campaign structure, we can create several ad sets. First we have to name the ad set and, where relevant, choose where we want the traffic generated to go: our website, our app or Facebook Messenger. We can also create an offer, for example to promote a discount coupon.

The next step is to choose the audience we are going to target. This is one of the most important parts, as good segmentation can be the key to success. We can reuse an audience we have used before or create one from scratch.

Thirdly, we also need to select the placement of our ads, since automatic placements will appear by default, but it is better to customise them and turn off ads on Audience Network.

Finally, we need to decide the budget and schedule for the ad set. The most important options to configure are the criterion by which the ads will be optimised (we recommend landing page views) and whether we are going to pay per impression or per click.

Step 6

To finish, it is essential to create the individual ads we are going to run. To do so, we need to set the format (carousel, image, video…), the ad text, the URL and the CTA we want to add.

After all this, our campaign will be ready to launch.

Advertising on Instagram

Now that we have seen how ad campaigns are created on Facebook, let’s look at how this process is replicated on Instagram. The fact is that both platforms share the same interface for managing advertising, so we can repeat the process with a few variations to create our ads on Instagram.

The main variations to bear in mind are:

• Not all of Facebook’s original advertising objectives are available on Instagram, so you may need to adapt them for the new platform.
• The target audience for your campaign can be new from scratch, the same one you created earlier on Facebook, or you can ask Instagram to find a similar audience.
• If you only want to launch your campaign on Instagram, you will need to deselect Facebook and Audience Network in the placements.

Finally, Instagram also lets you create advertising from its own platform. To do this, we can select a post we want to promote and choose the campaign objective, audience, budget and duration within the app.

Now that you know the guidelines for creating your own Facebook Ads campaign, I encourage you to put them into practice in your business. Remember that the most important thing is to analyse and optimise your campaign as much as possible so that it is effective and you get good results.

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