How to Make Money with Facebook Ads

Turning Facebook Ads from a money pit into a money-making machine is completely achievable with the right strategy. This guide breaks down exactly how to run profitable campaigns, covering everything from nailing down a winning offer to targeting the perfect audience and crafting ads that actually convert.

Before You Spend a Dime: The Foundation for Profitable Ads

Success with Facebook Ads starts long before you open the Ads Manager. It starts with having something valuable to offer. No amount of ad spend can fix a product or service that nobody wants. Your foundation needs to be solid.

1. Nail Your Offer: The Three Paths to Profit

First, get crystal clear on your business model. Most profitable Facebook Ads strategies fall into one of three buckets:

• Selling Your Own Products (E-commerce): This is the most direct path. You sell physical or digital goods, from apparel to online courses. You control the pricing and the branding, and you keep the largest share of the profit. For example, a small business selling handmade leather wallets can run ads directly linking to their product pages on Shopify. The goal is simple: drive sales.
• Selling a Service (Lead Generation): If you’re a coach, consultant, real estate agent, plumber, or digital marketing agency, you're not selling a product - you're selling your expertise. Your goal with Facebook Ads is lead generation: getting someone's contact information (email, phone number) so you can follow up with them. An ad for a free home valuation from a realtor or a "Request a Quote" form for a landscaping company are classic examples.
• Affiliate Marketing: With this model, you're a professional matchmaker. You promote other companies' products or services and earn a commission on every sale you generate through your unique link. It’s lower risk since you don't handle inventory or customer support, but your margins are smaller. A fitness influencer might run ads for a protein powder they use, sending traffic through their affiliate link to earn a cut of the sale.

Before moving forward, you must know which path you're on. Your entire ad strategy - from your objective to your ad copy - will change depending on your answer.

Setting Up Your Facebook Campaign for Success

Once your offer is dialed in, it's time to build the campaign. The settings you choose here are incredibly important, as they tell Facebook's algorithm what you're trying to accomplish.

2. Choose the Right Campaign Objective

When you create a new campaign, Facebook asks for your objective. This is where many people go wrong. Choosing "Traffic" when you want sales is like telling a taxi driver you just want to drive around the city instead of giving them a destination. You'll burn a lot of fuel and never get where you want to go.

For making money, you should almost always focus on two objectives:

• Sales (formerly Conversions): Your new best friend if you're in e-commerce or selling anything directly. This tells Facebook's algorithm, "Go find people who aren't just likely to click, but likely to pull out their wallets and buy something." This requires a Facebook Pixel installed on your website to track purchases.
• Leads: Perfect for service-based businesses. This objective is optimized to gather contact information, either through Facebook's native Lead Forms (which pre-fill user information, making it super easy to submit) or by sending people to a lead capture page on your website.

An honorable mention goes to Engagement. While you won't make direct sales from an Engagement campaign, some marketers use it strategically. They run an ad with this objective for a few days to gather social proof (likes, comments, shares), making the ad look more popular and trustworthy. Then, they take that same post (using its Post ID) and run it in a new Sales campaign. The social proof carries over, often leading to better conversion rates.

3. Master the Art of Targeting: Finding Your People

Facebook's superpower is its targeting capabilities. You can get your offer in front of the exact people who need it. Your audience can be broken down into three main categories.

Core Audiences (Detailed Targeting)

This is where you target people based on their manually entered data and on-platform behavior. Think about:

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, language.
• Interests: Pages they’ve liked, content they engage with. Selling gear for coffee lovers? You can target people interested in brands like Fellow or James Hoffmann.
• Behaviors: Purchase behaviors, life events, device usage. The "Engaged Shoppers" behavior is a powerful option, as it targets people who have clicked the "Shop Now" button on Facebook ads in the past week.

Custom Audiences

These are warm audiences - people who already know you exist. Custom Audiences are where the highest returns often come from because you're messaging people who have already shown interest. You can create audiences of:

• Website Visitors: Using the Facebook Pixel, you can retarget anyone who has visited your website. Even better, you can target people who visited a specific product page or added an item to their cart but didn't check out.
• Customer Lists: Upload a list of your customer emails or phone numbers. Facebook will match them to user profiles, allowing you to run ads to your existing customers or exclude them from campaigns aimed at new ones.
• Engagement Audiences: Target people who have watched your videos, liked a post, or sent you a message on Facebook or Instagram. These people are warmed up and more likely to take the next step.

Lookalike Audiences

This is how you scale. Once you have a solid custom audience (like a list of 100+ customers), you can ask Facebook to create a "Lookalike" audience. Its powerful algorithm will analyze the traits of your best customers and find millions of new people who share those characteristics. Creating a 1% Lookalike of your purchasers is one of the most reliable ways to find new, high-intent customers at scale.

Creating Ads That Convert: The Creative is Everything

You can have the best product and the most precise targeting in the world, but if your ad is boring, cheap-looking, or confusing, an apathetic thumb scroll is all you'll ever get. The creative - the image or video paired with the copy - does the hard work of stopping the scroll and persuading someone to act.

4. The Ad Itself: The Image or Video

Today, short-form video reigns supreme, especially content that looks and feels native to platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok. Slick, highly-produced corporate ads often get skipped. Authentic, user-generated content (UGC) style creative tends to perform better because it feels more like a recommendation from a friend than an advertisement.

Whether you use image or video, follow these principles:

• Stop the scroll within 3 seconds. Use bright colors, quick cuts, big text captions, or a surprising opening shot. Your only job in the first few moments is to earn a few more.
• Show, don't just tell. If you sell a stain remover, show it removing a nasty wine stain in real time. If it's a productivity app, show a screen recording of how it makes a chaotic calendar look organized.
• Focus on people. Ads with human faces consistently outperform those without. Show someone genuinely enjoying or benefiting from your product.

5. Write Compelling Ad Copy

Your visuals get the attention, your copy closes the deal. Keep it simple and benefit-focused.

• The Hook (First Line): Address a pain point directly or ask a question. For wrinkle cream, "Tired of lines that tell a story you didn't write?" is better than "Introducing our new face cream."
• The Body: Explain what's in it for them. Instead of listing features ("our backpack has five compartments"), state the benefits ("organize your entire day, from laptop to lipstick, in one bag"). Use short sentences and bullet points or emojis for readability.
• The Call-to-Action (CTA): Be direct. Tell people exactly what you want them to do next. Use strong action words like "Shop Now," "Get Your Free Guide," or "Book A Strategy Call." Don't leave them guessing.

6. A/B Testing: Never Stop Optimizing

Your first brilliant ad idea is just a hypothesis. The real "secret" to making money is to relentlessly test. However, only test one variable at a time so you know what caused the change in performance.

• Test Creatives: Run the same copy and audience, but test two different images or videos.
• Test Copy: Use the same image, but test a long-form description against a short one, or a humorous hook against a serious one.
• Test Audiences: Run the exact same ad to an interest-based audience versus a Lookalike audience to see which performs better.

Keep the winner, turn off the loser. Rinse and repeat. This simple process is how you turn a moderately successful campaign into a full-blown profit engine.

Analyzing and Scaling: Reading the Data

To know if you're making money, you have to speak the language of the Ads Manager. Luckily, you only need to focus on a few key metrics.

7. Understand What Numbers Matter

Don’t get lost in vanity metrics like reach or impressions. Focus on the numbers that directly connect to your wallet:

• ROAS (Return On Ad Spend): The king of all metrics. It answers the question: "For every dollar I spend, how many dollars do I get back?" It’s calculated as Revenue / Ad Spend. A ROAS of 4 means you're making $4 for every $1 you spend.
• Cost per Purchase / Cost per Lead: How much are you paying to acquire one customer or one lead? You need to know your average profit margin to understand if this number is good or bad. If your product profit is $50, a cost per purchase of $20 is fantastic. If it’s $60, you're losing money.
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): This measures the percentage of people who see your ad and actually click it. While it doesn't directly measure profit, a very low CTR (under 1%) is often an early indicator that your ad creative isn't resonating with your audience.

8. Knowing When to Scale and When to Kill

Follow these simple rules:

• When to Kill an Ad: If an ad has spent 1-2 times your target cost per purchase and has zero sales, turn it off. Don't get emotionally attached. The data says it’s a dud. Move on.
• When to Scale an Ad: If an ad is producing a healthy ROAS, congratulations! Now, don’t mess with it. Aggressively increasing the budget on a winning ad set can reset the learning phase and ruin its performance. Instead, duplicate the winning ad set and slowly increase the budget (by about 20% every few days). You can also duplicate it to target new Lookalike audiences, scaling horizontally to find more pockets of winning customers.

Final Thoughts

Making money with Facebook Ads isn't about some secret hack, it's about a systematic process of testing. It comes down to pairing a great offer with the right audience and relentlessly optimizing your ad creative until you find a combination that connects with people and drives action.

Running profitable ads is a huge win, but it's only one piece of your social media strategy. After you've captured that initial interest, managing the incoming comments and messages while building a consistent organic presence is where a real brand is built. We built Postbase because that part of the job shouldn't feel chaotic. Using a simple visual calendar for all your organic social content and a unified inbox helps you stay on top of the community your ads are bringing in, keeping them connected long after the first click.