New to Meta advertising and feeling like you’ve landed in Oz? Don’t be intimidated! Facebook and Instagram ads offer a wealth of features, settings, and options to elevate your business. But without a clear roadmap, it can be overwhelming. In this post we’ll walk you through setting up winning campaigns, crafting ad creatives that pop, and using powerful tracking tools like the Meta Pixel and Conversion API to supercharge your results.
Why Advertise on Facebook & Instagram?
Whether you’re a small business targeting locals or a global ecommerce brand, Facebook and Instagram ads offer flexible targeting to reach your audience. Gain a competitive edge by uploading your customer lists to leverage the system’s targeting capabilities to reach users with similar behavioral patterns, maximizing your ad campaigns ROI. This precision leads to more efficient ad spend and higher potential returns compared to traditional advertising.
Best Practices For Setting Up Facebook & Instagram Ads
1. Pixel Tracking and Conversion API
It’s crucial to first set up Meta’s pixel and conversion API before running ads on Facebook and Instagram. They’re essential for smooth tracking and data-driven decisions.
The pixel is a website code that tracks visitor actions, measuring ad impact and offering optimization insights. The conversion API complements the pixel, capturing all conversion data and sending it to the ads manager for accuracy, even with browser restrictions.
Get started by heading over the Events Manager located under tools in your Meta Business account and follow these steps:
Create a new data source by clicking “Connect Data Sources” to choose where the pixel will be placed. On the next screen, you will be asked to give your pixel a name.
Now choose how to connect the pixel to your website – it is highly recommended to use the Meta Pixel and Conversions API option over the Meta Pixel only option.
Conversion API
After creating a pixel, you will be prompted to select whether you would like instructions on setting up the conversion API. The easiest way to do this is through a partner integration such as Google Tag Manager. If you prefer to set up the conversion API directly on your website, you can follow these simple steps:
Select Events to measure actions that are most important to your business goals
Next you will select the parameters you want to collect to match potential customers back to their Facebook account ID to properly attribute the conversion to your campaign.
Once this has been completed, you will bet taken to a review screen to confirm your parameter selections. Lastly, either send instructions to your developer to implement the code or manually implement it yourself.
2. Define Your Objective
Once you’re ready to create a new campaign, you will be asked to choose from one of the following objectives: awareness, traffic, engagement, app installs, leads, or sales. Picking the right one is important—the ads algorithm will significantly vary based on your selection. For instance, if you pick “leads” with the goal to drive sales, you will most likely not see the results you were anticipating:
Pro Tip: Align your objective with your business goals. Are you new to the marketing scene and trying to get more eyes on your website? Then a traffic campaign might be the best approach. If you’re an established brand and looking for new customers, a leads or sales campaign might be better suited for your needs.
3. Creating Your Campaign
Meta offers two distinct campaign setup options to cater to different marketing needs on Facebook and Instagram:
- Advantage+ Setup: An automated, user-friendly solution ideal for those seeking ease of use and optimized performance.
- Manual Setup: More controlled format for experienced marketers aiming to fine-tune every aspect of their ad strategy.
We will focus on manual setup best practices in this guide. As you proceed with the setup process, it’s important to use a clear, concise naming convention to label your campaigns to easily compare performance metrics.
Declaring Special Category
Depending on your industry and the content of your campaigns, Meta will ask you to declare if your ads fall into one of these categories to promote fairness and equity:
- Financial products and services
- Employment
- Housing
- Social issues, elections or politics
Note: Using a special ad category may limit your targeting options.
Budget Optimization
To get the most longevity out of your budget, it is recommended that you set up a daily budget using Meta’s Advantage Campaign Budget tool to effectively distribute and optimize the budget in real time across your ad sets.
Next, choose your preferred bid strategy:
- Bid cap – choose the highest cost per click you are willing to pay
- Highest volume – get the most results for your budget
- Cost per result goal – aim for a certain cost per result while maximizing the volume of results
4. Ad Set & Conversion Creation
Before going further, you will need to decide what a qualified conversion looks like for your business. Meta offers a number of conversion locations across the social platform and its properties (Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger).
These are the most common forms of conversion:
- Website: Generated by directing users to your website to take an action.
- Website & calls: Generated through both your website and calls.
- Instant forms: Asks users to fill out an in-platform form to convert.
- App: Drive leads through your app (depending on whether you are running an app campaign)Pro Tip: When picking your performance goal, it is always best to choose “maximize number of conversion leads” rather than “maximize number of leads”. The latter option communicates to Meta’s algorithm to put your ads in front people more likely to share their contact information. However, that doesn’t mean they are also more likely to convert after doing so. For this reason, it is a best practice to always choose “maximize number of conversion leads”.
5. Audience Targeting For Success
Arguably the most important part of the Facebook and Instagram ad campaign setup process is audience targeting. When defining your audience by demographic, location, and language, consider excluding specific custom groups. This is particularly useful in new customer acquisition campaigns, where you’ll want to avoid targeting existing customers.
Advantage+ Audience Targeting
The default Advantage + targeting setting leverages Meta’s algorithm to optimize for your goal. In this mode, the core audience configurations are “suggestions” that inform the bidding model’s targeting.
I’ve found “Advantage + targeting” to be highly effective when paired with broad audience targeting suggestions or custom audiences. For example, advertising a local shoe store works well with general “tennis shoes” or “running sneaker” suggestions. More specific suggestions tend to be less effective.
Layering custom audiences (such as lookalikes) into Advantage+ targeting also performs well. Select your custom audience by clicking into it. If you haven’t created one, click “Create New” next to the custom audiences section and configure it. We’ll discuss custom audiences more in a moment.
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are people who have already interacted with your brand through website visits, ad engagement, video views, social media follows, or purchases. These audiences are highly effective for refining targeting and creating lookalike audiences, which we’ll discuss next. You can create a custom audience in your audience manager or while setting up a campaign.
Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike audiences help you target people similar to your best customers, maximizing your ad impact. Create them by selecting “create new” in custom audiences and choosing your base audience (often purchasers or engaged visitors). Start with a 1% similarity and expand as needed for optimal results.
Placement Options
After building your ideal audience, it’s time to identify where you want your ads to appear across Facebook and Instagram. Meta provides two options:
- Advantage+ placements: the algorithm will determine the best placements from across all available default placements (Instagram, Facebook, Audience Network, and Messenger). Touted as the most optimal choice to maximize your budget and show ads to more people, this option tends to cast a wider net compared to manually choosing placements.
- Manual placements: you choose where you want your ads to show. While it’s still recommended to select as many viable options as possible to reach your business goals, this method give you more control to decide where you want your ads to show most.
Pro Tip: It is highly recommended to create separate campaigns for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Each platform caters to a different audience and demographic. Not only will it help you spend your mine more wisely, it will provide valuable data as to where you are getting most conversions and if you should reallocate more budget to that platform.
6. Ad Developement
Your ad’s creative is crucial for grabbing attention. Start with easily accessible assets and experiment with different formats later. Follow Meta’s ad specs to ensure proper display.
- Image Ads: Use high-quality images to avoid pixelation.
- Video Ads: Keep them short, engaging, and impactful from the start.
- Carousel Ads: Showcase multiple images or videos in one ad for varied content.
Craft Winning Copy
Craft concise, compelling ad copy that aligns with your visuals. Include a clear call-to-action (CTA) to guide the user’s next step. After your initial version, Meta’s AI will suggest variations based on your example, which you can select or expand upon.
Experiment with different ad versions (headlines, images, copy, CTAs) to help you understand what resonates best with your audience. One caveat, make sure your implementing staggered, incremental changes rather than multiple updates to uncover which change made the most impact.
Conclusion
Continuously use ad performance data to inform decisions. Refine targeting, creative, and budget for optimal results. Set objectives, create engaging ads, target the right audience, and use performance data to optimize. These steps, combined with adaptability and continuous learning, lead to Facebook and Instagram ad success.
