What is Facebook Ads and how to advertise on Facebook?

Do you know how advertising works on Facebook Ads? Do you want to learn how to improve the scope of your Social Media strategy or plan?

Thanks to this complete updated guide, which I have prepared for you, you will be able to start from scratch and step by step your first campaigns and advertisements.

In addition, this mega tutorial includes all the most important changes that Facebook offers us in this year 2020, since as you well know, it is a very variable social network, both in its algorithm and in the platform’s own interface. In short, you will be able to advertise your own project or business from today.

And, knowing how to use Facebook Ads has become one of the best ways to achieve our business objectives, whether you are looking for more Web traffic, give more visibility to products and services or even increase the number of downloads of a mobile App . Let’s first know the definition of this powerful platform!

What is Facebook Ads and what is it for?

Facebook Ads is the platform or tool with which you can carry out and manage all kinds of advertising campaigns within this social network and, in addition, in your company account on Instagram.
The ads of these two super social platforms can be beneficial for any brand, company, business, professional, etc. who wants to become much more visible on the Internet, both to themselves and to their products and / or services, facing the millions of users (or potential customers) existing on them.

This advertising tool on social networks, among many other features, allows us to create different types of publications, segment them according to the particularities of the target or target audience you intend to target.
Although there are still professionals who do not want to recognize it, without a good financial investment, on this platform there is almost no organic visibility.

Therefore, if you have already decided to “create a Facebook page” for your business (or corporate Fan Page), it is almost an “imperative” to invest a small part of your Marketing budget in paid campaigns on it.

We can create segmented ads through parameters such as:

1. Country or city of residence.
2. Language.
3. Marital status.
4. Professional activity.

Interests, customs, tastes of the user, etc.

On the other hand, those same strategies that mostly seek to monetize their platform by pushing companies to use promoted publications or Facebook Ads campaigns, have conditioned that this social network is continually improving the tools we have to advertise ourselves.
Meanwhile, the success of the purchase of Instagram in its day, is now also an excellent opportunity to make advertisements for companies on this visual network, and all directly from the Facebook Ads Manager platform itself.
The integration of advertising on Instagram with Ads, allows us to obtain greater options to reach more target audiences and increase the profitability of any ad campaign.
Another of the trends that is consolidated in this social network is video, and of course, it is a great format for your Facebook Ads ads.

Keep in mind that videos represent an increase in visibility, thanks to an increase in reproductions of more than 50% (according to the network itself).

Company pages, therefore, can increase your visibility and sales by using the video format in your ads.
Perhaps, for all the aforementioned, although they want to advertise on Facebook, a large part of small and medium-sized companies tend to have many doubts when planning their advertising strategy and investment.
In short, there are many businesses that are still not quite clear about how this online advertising tool is used (not even from the most basic point of view).

Facebook Ads Mega Guide Everything you need to know about advertising on Facebook!

On this occasion I would like to help you better understand this platform and plan and develop your own advertising campaigns, offering you here the updated information with all the changes that have occurred up to 2020.

Facebook advertising tools

Keep in mind that we have many tools for this social platform. But, to advertise it itself, it provides us with 2.
So, these are the tools that, today, you can use within your corporate account:
Keep in mind that we have many tools for this social platform, but, to make Advertising itself provides us with 3:

► Business Manager

It is a platform specially designed for brands to offer access and management of their pages to those professionals or agencies that manage multiple accounts and to which they can only be assigned the advertising role, without the need for a greater link, such as being administrators Of the same.

The main differences of Business Manager are that there is no direct link between profiles and pages, that is:
With this tool you will keep your business well separated from your personal Facebook profile.
It is also very useful to use by professionals who manage multiple brands, thus avoiding possible errors or mixing multiple brands in the same advertising account.

► Ads Manager

It is used to manage and create campaigns and advertisements in an easy and intuitive way.
Throughout this post I am going to focus on showing you how to use and optimize your ads through the Ads Manager, although some of the tips that I am going to give you are also applicable if you use Power Editor or Business Manager.
This is what the Ads Manager looks like today.
I make this comment to you because, as you know, the platform is continually changing its interface.

Thanks to the Ads Manager you can carry out the management, evaluation and control of your campaigns.
So, if we remember that this is the social network with the largest number of users so far, and we bear in mind that this advertising is one of the cheapest, carrying out a Facebook Ads campaign would make our advertising investment on the Internet an even better business. more profitable.
Especially if we design and segment it correctly.

Campaign structure in Facebook Ads advertising with settings for ad set

In the infographic that I show you below and that was made by the «FB For Business» team itself, we see the structure of Facebook Ads advertising campaigns.
Thanks to this campaign structure, it is easier to organize, optimize and measure all our advertising actions.

► Campaign

Each campaign must have a single advertising objective out of the 11 available (we will show you later) for all their ad sets in common.

► Ad set

A campaign can have multiple groups or ad sets.
But each ad set must define a budget, schedule, bid, placement, and audience targeting for all of their common ads.

► Announcements

Within each ad set, we may have multiple ads.
And each of them have different combinations of images, text, links, videos or call-to-action buttons (but they share the segmentation and budget of the whole set).

What advertising goals and types of ads are there on Facebook Ads?

Facebook has modified some characteristics and now we have 11 different types of objectives for our campaigns.
But also, as I was saying, among the new features is now the grouping of objectives based on three categories of objectives:

»Recognition

These are objectives with which you can generate interest in products or services that you offer:
1. Brand recognition
You will gain greater visibility of your brand and will reach those people most likely to be interested in it.
2. Reach
Increase the number of people you can reach with your ads thanks to this type of objective.

»Consideration

With these objectives, you will awaken other people’s interest in your company and, therefore, also seek to obtain more information about it.
We can distinguish between these six types:
3. Traffic
Attract people to a destination on or off Facebook.
Bring more qualified traffic (or quality visitors) to different places on your Facebook page or to your own website, depending on your goals or their importance.
4. Interaction
Increase the interactions with your publications, the likes you receive or the responses to events and offers you have launched.
6. Application downloads
If you have already created an app, this is a goal with which you can boost the success of said application.
Get more people to use your mobile application or within Facebook.
7. Video views
Get more people to watch a video.
If you practice Video Marketing, you can promote your creations with unpublished images, product launches or customer stories to boost recognition of your brand.
8. Generation of potential clients
With this objective you will be able to create a Facebook Lead Ads advertisement and, in this way, manage to attract potential clients.
In other words, your business will have a form with which to obtain and collect information from people, including newsletter registrations, price estimates and follow-up calls.

»Conversion

By using these objectives, you will be promoting that those people who have shown interest in your products or services end up buying them:
9. Conversions
Increase conversions on your website.
Attract more users to your website, so that they carry out specific actions on it.
Some of the conversions to pursue with this objective may be:

• Sales
• EBook Downloads.
• Newsletters subscriptions.

Here you should always use a conversion tracking pixel, in order to properly evaluate those results.
10. Sales of the product catalog
With this objective you will be able to make announcements that include products from your catalog and that are also aimed at people who may be interested in them.
11. Visits in the business
Get people to visit your business.
Selecting this objective you will be able to promote the different locations of your business (in the case of having several) to achieve an increase in customer views in it.
It is an objective that is focused on attracting customers who are geographically close to your physical business.
Next, I will show you the options that exist today, so you can decide which of them you should use according to the objective of your campaign.

How to segment the audience of our ad in Facebook Ads?

Once we have chosen and selected a target, we will be shown a new page in which to choose which audience we want to target our ads.
It is very important to always carefully analyze who or who we are trying to capture with the campaign that we are going to design because if that ad is shown to some user who does not see it as attractive content, we will be spending our money in vain.
That is why Facebook Ads allows us to segment the audience or audience to which our ads will be directed according to different parameters. The options we have to segment are very wide and varied:

Who do we want to see our advertisements?

Next we are going to see how to create an audience segmentation to show our ads (if we have already created an audience configuration previously we can select it instead of creating a new one)

► Custom audiences

Segment the ads to be shown to those people that you decide under your own criteria.
If we click on the text “Create a personalized audience” a pop-up window will appear like the following one in which we can select what type of audience we want to create among the different options that Facebook offers us.

»You can set and create a personalized audience by:

A customer file: use a file you have with data from your own customers to analyze which ones already have a Facebook account and thus be able to set a personalized audience with your own customers to show your ads to. You can import them from a text document or even Mailchimp. The import process is guided and quite simple.

Website Traffic: Target your ads to those who routinely visit your website or other web pages. You will be able to select the exact URLs by which you want to select your visitors as well as the period of time to take into account for said selection.

Activity in the application: if you have an application you will be able to create a list with all those people who interact with it.

Offline activity: If you already have a list with the data of people who have already interacted in your business, you can use it to direct your ads to those people you have captured outside of the social network.

Interaction on Facebook: select those people who most interact with your content and create a list with them. You can select people who have seen a video, have registered in a form or have used one of your canvas spaces.

► Places

We can define the geographic segmentation of our ads by the following criteria:

• 1st Everyone in this place.
• 2º People who live in this place.
• 3º People who have recently been in this place.
• 4º People who travel through this place.

After choosing one of these criteria, we continue to decide the countries, provinces, states or cities of the public in this set of ads.
In this option we will also have the possibility of using the exclusion segmentation.
That is, exclude places (a country, a province or a particular city).

► Age

You must choose between a minimum age (13 years) and a maximum age (+65 years).

► Language

Choose the language or languages ​​of the people who will be able to see your publication.

► Detailed segmentation

In this field you can segment your audience by:

Demographic data: these are data mainly obtained from the biographical information that each user has completed in their profile, such as education, work, romantic relationship, political ideology, etc.

Interests: these segmentation parameters are designed according to the customs or interests that users demonstrate to have habitually in their behavior within Facebook.

That is, the categories of the pages of which they are fans, the style of publications they share the most, the posts with which they interact the most, being able to deal with hobbies, sports, entertainment, shopping, food and drink, etc.

Behaviors: these are segmentation parameters that are focused on the actions or behaviors that the public usually has in their life, for example events or trips that they have made or attended.

Also in this case you can use the option to exclude by any of the previous criteria.

► Connections

To finish you can also choose to segment according to the connection or relationship that the user / fan has with our company page, being able to choose between:

1st Connections with your Facebook company page.

2º Connections with your application.

3rd Connections to your event.

Similarly, you can also exclude under those criteria and combine several at the same time.
As we are selecting and setting the criteria for our audience, we can see in the right column the Facebook Ads real-time estimate of the potential reach of our defined audience, as well as some indications that will serve as feedback.

If you already know what social networks are and how they work, you should understand that having our target well identified, in addition to studying the customs and interests of our community, is also very useful for obtaining data that further improves our criteria when carrying out correct segmentation.

RECOMMENDATION: Do not try to reach everyone, because in the end we will not end up reaching almost anyone and you will lose part of the money invested in attracting people who are not interested in what we offer.
If we do not have a good budget for our campaign, the most reasonable thing would be to try to maintain, through segmentation, a maximum potential reach not very high (more or less 200,000 people).

Of course, this always depends on the campaign and the investment, because then that first scope will decrease even more when the total budget is set in the next point.

In short, if we become obsessed with reaching a large number of people, sacrificing part of the segmentation (due to not having an abundant budget), we could lose effectiveness in our campaign.
And, as we said earlier, end up showing that ad to people who may not be interested in it.

Ad placement on Facebook Ads

Now that we have defined our audience, the next step in the configuration of our ad set is to define where our ads will be shown.
Your advertisements will be shown in different locations, but you also have the possibility to choose exactly which ones will be shown.

There are two ways to select locations.

1. Automatic locations

With this option we leave it to Facebook to choose the best locations for our ads at all times.
Our ads can be shown in:

Facebook (news sections, instant articles, streaming videos, right column).

Audience Network.

Messenger (start and sponsored messages).

2. Edit locations

By selecting this option we will have full control over the locations where our advertisements will be displayed.
You can segment and choose according to the following criteria the locations where your ads will be displayed:

By device types: all, only mobile (1) and only computer.

According to asset customization: this option allows us to choose different images or videos for the same ad depending on its location.

By platform types: on Facebook (News sections (2), instant articles and the right column (3)), Instagram (4) (news and stories), Audience Network (native, banner and interstitial, in-stream videos, videos with prize) and Messenger (start and sponsored messages).

Advanced options: it is possible to segment by mobile devices or wifi connections among others.

Below I show you 4 of the different locations that I indicate, with a campaign that I started a while ago:

This image shows the locations that I have previously explained to you that, despite being part of 2017 ads, in 2020, these same formats are still in force.

How does Facebook calculate the price of our ad?

The next step to perform in the configuration of our set of Facebook ads will be to define Budget and Calendar.
The calculation of the price of each of our ads will depend on the configuration that we make of all this series of parameters that I will detail below.

»Specify the campaign budget

Budgets can be set for an entire period of time (campaign) or for an average of daily spending.
Please note that the budget is set for a whole set of ads, not per ad.

»Define the circulation period

You can decide if you want it to have a certain duration (start and end day and time) or continuously.

»Optimization for ad delivery

This is where Facebook now offers us 3 main types or structures of optimization, in relation to the calculation of the share price in our future announcement.

Interaction with a post: They will show our ad to the people most likely to interact with that post.

Impressions: They will show the ad to people as many times as possible.

Daily Single Reach – Our ad will show up to one or X times a day.

»Amount of the bid (choose your bid)

There are two clear options, in the first (Automatic) our bid will be automatically optimized for more interaction or impressions.
In the second (Manual) we ourselves will set the maximum price that these shares will reach in the bids.
Important: depending on the chosen ad delivery option, the price will be set by cost per impressions or per click.
► CPM or PPM: cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or bid per thousand impressions (PPM). An impression is the same as a visualization.
That is to say, here we will pay for every 1,000 times that someone sees that ad, in the different places that Facebook has for it (computer/computer news section – cell / mobile news section or right column), although that publication does not get any action or click.
► CPC or PPC: Cost per Click (CPC) or bid per Click (PPC).
In this option, we will pay for each click that is made in our publication.

»When is it billed?

Depending on the objective chosen here, the moment when you can be billed can be shown, and it can be for each time an impression is made or someone performs an action on an advertisement (one click).

»Ad scheduling

You can select at what specific hours or days of the week you want your ads to be displayed.

»Type of delivery

With this option, you can choose between standard and accelerated delivery.
You will find it helpful to use Accelerated for launching ad campaigns where you need them to immediately reach your target audience quickly.

How does bidding work on Facebook Ads?

Each of our publications competes to be shown to the audience that we have chosen through our segmentation, in a kind of virtual auction, against other ads that also have parameters and / or criteria more or less similar to ours.
If at the end of the campaign creation process we decide to define the maximum amount we will pay in the bids ourselves, then what was explained in the previous paragraph is a good reason to choose a relatively competitive maximum bid price.

Do not worry, the entire amount of the proposed is not always consumed, because if our audience is not being very competitive by other ads, the amount that we will have to pay for those bids (of the shares, visibility, CPC or CPM) would be less.

To help you here, Facebook Ads usually automatically assigns (for guidance) a recommended bid amount (in addition to proposing a minimum and maximum).
My suggestion is to use the one they give you or an average bid amount closer to the maximum than the minimum.
For example, if he suggests an amount between € 0.06 and € 0.17, you try to maintain a balanced average offer  taking into account your budget.

How can I analyze and monitor the performance of my ads?

Analytics is very important in advertising. For this reason, before starting to “spend for spending”, we must be very clear about our objectives and the measurement parameters that we will use.
And to control and monitor the performance of our campaigns, I use the Metricool tool, with which you can have full control over all of them.
And for samples, a button, therefore, take a look at this video, where the boys explain how to use this part of the tool to follow up through their dashboard or control panel.

In the same way, before increasing the budget, we should evaluate that campaign and see the results it brings.
It is in the Ads Manager where you manage to control both the evolution of your promotions and Ads campaigns, through the display of statistics and graphics, as well as edit and / or correct some possible errors that we might have made in them.
Obviously from the same Ads Manager you can also pause, end or eliminate the period of diffusion of said publications (or from the same company page you can also go to the statistics tab and see the numbers of those publications).
»You may also be interested in: What is a KPI and how to choose them in Marketing?

Step-by-step tutorial for creating a Facebook Ads campaign (Updated with 2020 interface)

Now, and knowing the theory, let’s see how to create a campaign.
All the parameters indicated in this article are useful for almost any campaign objective or type of advertisement, of course, always depending on our needs and strategies we could decide to manage one or the other option.
In the case of proposing to provide greater visibility to the contents of a corporate blog or boost sales / reservations on a certain web page, perhaps the most appropriate could be to select: “Traffic” or “Conversions” (respectively).
Also, if I want to get more downloads from my App, I go to the objective: «Application downloads».
However, I would venture to say that the “Interaction” option (mainly thanks to the changes that restrict the natural visibility of our Facebook pages), today may be the most demanded.
Now, yes, we are going to create our first Facebook Ads campaign.
Below I show you step by step how to create it.
I will not stop at every step, having explained each of them previously and in more detail.

1. We begin to design our campaign

We go to our profile or company page and in the drop-down menu on the top right, we choose the “create ads” section.

2. Campaign objective

Once inside the Facebook Ads page, we now select the first option (or type of ad): “Brand recognition”.

3. Name of the campaign

Under the two previous options, before clicking continue, we will have a place to put a name to the campaign that we are creating, as you can see in the previous image.
Click continue.

4. Who do you want your Facebook ads to reach?

► Segmentation: it is the most important moment of the whole tutorial and one of the stages that can most influence the success or not of any Facebook Ads campaign (that’s why it is one of my favorite parts).
Here we select and define as much as possible our target audience.
As we have previously seen in this post, we will proceed to define the different fields of our segmentation in search of that ideal audience, that is, the Facebook user with whom we want to interact.

5. Choose where you want your ads to show

► Locations: select the most appropriate locations for your campaign

6. How much do you want to spend on advertising on Facebook?

► Budget: we can define the total or daily budget and the calendar or circulation period of the campaign (according to the guidelines explained above).

► Optimize bid: select a budget and mark a calendar with the duration of our campaign.
Now, to better control our investment, we only need to optimize it by choosing one of the available options and deciding what would be the most suitable maximum bid amount for our interests (remember the tips I gave you above).

7. Give your ad set a name

Choose a name for your ad set that is clear and descriptive.
If we use an existing ad set, we might keep the same name that it already has.
Click continue.

8. Commercial and preview

Now we must select and configure the advertisement to show.
The first of all will be to give a very descriptive name to our ad to be able to differentiate it from others that we can create.

► Create a new ad or use an existing publication
We have two options when creating an ad:

Create a new ad with a new post

Make our announcement with an existing publication

► Identity
In this section you can indicate which page to link your ad to (if you manage multiple pages here you can choose).

You can also link an account you have on Instagram to also show your ad on it.
► New ad format

We can make a new publication for our ad by selecting “Create a new ad” at the top.
Next, we must choose what type of format we want to use for our ad:

1. Ad by sequence
2. Single image
3. Single video
4. Presentation

Depending on the format you have chosen below, you must choose the content and text to include.
Below, in advanced options, you have the possibility to generate a Facebook pixel to follow your conversions.
Finally, on the right, you have a preview with the formats in which our ad will be presented according to the locations we have previously chosen.
► Format of an existing publication

To use an existing post we are asked to choose a post from our page to use in this campaign.
If you access the advanced options you will have the possibility to select the option to track using a pixel.
Finally, in this section we can also preview our ad in the formats in which it will be presented by Facebook Ads to the locations that we have previously defined in this case.

9. Order

After all this process, we can preview the general parameters in “Review order” or finish by clicking on the green button called “Place Order”.
This will send our announcement for review so that it can later be published according to the parameters we have chosen.

How to create a remarketing campaign on Facebook Ads?

And finally, I wanted to leave you a step-by-step video tutorial where we will show you how to make your social advertising more profitable with a remarketing campaign.

Conclusions

It is the SMEs that could get very good benefits from planning an adequate investment in Facebook Ads because with the very little budget they would be able to obtain a fairly wide audience.
And, if they segment correctly, also very attractive results.
Well, if you have read the entire guide, you will have noticed that the whole process of designing and creating an advertising campaign on Facebook Ads does not have to be a big secret.

But if your desire is to invest your money well, I would recommend hiring a professional to advise you and train you in the subject or, at least, to be patient and to test little by little (mainly giving great importance to segmentation, because the other options They will be +/- important, depending on your objectives and / or the results you seek to obtain).

As for the choice of CPM or CPC, in my experience, CPM is a good choice for the visibility of an ad and / or brand (if you are looking for branding, you can reach many people), but sometimes it gets little interaction short term.
Instead, the CPC option is less massive and may need more investment, but it will undoubtedly leave you more accurate statistics (because with it you make sure that a user not only saw your ad but also interacted in some way with the).

A key! In this whole matter of advertising on social networks, perhaps the key is to use the classic and traditional method of trial and error, for a simple reason: what sometimes works for some, sometimes it is not so useful for others. (mainly if we talk about businesses or brands from different commercial sectors).

Before reading this article, did you know what Facebook Ads is and how it works?

And you, do you have any advice to improve our advertising campaigns on Facebook?
If you liked this guide, share it with your friends!