How to Run Facebook Ads

Putting your first dollar into Facebook Ads can feel like a leap of faith, but it doesn't have to be a guessing game. It's one of the most effective and affordable ways to find new customers, generate leads, and grow your business today. This guide will walk you through setting up a successful Facebook ad campaign from start to finish, breaking down the process into clear, actionable steps.

Before You Open Ads Manager: Your Pre-Flight Checklist

Success with Facebook Ads starts before you even create an ad. Rushing this stage is where most beginners go wrong. A little preparation makes all the difference and prevents you from wasting money on ads that don't hit the mark.

1. Define Your Goal: What Do You Actually Want to Achieve?

"I want more sales" is a fine starting point, but we need to get more specific. What action do you want someone to take after seeing your ad? Facebook's ad platform is built around objectives, and choosing the right one is your first major decision. Think about your advertising goal in one of these three categories:

• Awareness: You want to introduce your brand to a new audience. The goal isn't an immediate sale but to put your name on the map. This is great for new businesses or launching a new product.
• Consideration: You want people to actively think about your business and seek more information. This includes goals like sending traffic to your website, getting video views, collecting leads, or messaging your Page.
• Conversion: You want someone to take a specific, valuable action. This is usually about making a purchase, signing up for a service, or downloading an app.

Get clear on this before you move forward. Your objective will dictate how Facebook optimizes your campaign and who it shows your ads to.

2. Know Your Audience: Who Are You Talking To?

You can't talk to everyone. The magic of Facebook Ads is its powerful targeting, allowing you to speak directly to people who are most likely to be interested in what you offer. Take a moment to sketch out your ideal customer persona.

• What are their demographics? (Age, gender, location, job title, etc.)
• What are their interests? (What pages do they follow? What hobbies do they have? What other brands do they like?)
• What are their pain points? (What problem does your product or service solve for them?)

The more specific you can be, the better your targeting will be. You're not trying to reach millions of people, you're trying to reach the right people.

3. Prepare Your Creative: Think Like a User, Not an Advertiser

People don't go on Facebook or Instagram to look at ads. Your ad is an interruption, so it needs to be an engaging one. It has to feel native to the feed while still grabbing attention. Your creative is your single biggest lever for performance.

Images vs. Video

Both can work, but video often performs better, especially for demonstrating a product or telling a quick story. For images, use high-quality, eye-catching visuals. Lifestyle shots of your product in use often outperform sterile product-on-white-background images. User-generated content (UGC) is also incredibly powerful because it looks authentic and builds trust.

Creative Tips to Stand By

• Make it mobile-first: Most people will see your ad on their phone, so use a vertical (9:16) aspect ratio for Stories and Reels.
• Capture attention fast: You have about 3 seconds to stop someone from scrolling. Your opening frame or hook needs to be compelling.
• Keep it simple: Don't cram too much text into your image or video. Let the visual do the heavy lifting.
• Use captions on video: The majority of users watch videos with the sound off. Use on-screen text or captions to get your message across.

A Quick Guide to Meta Ads Manager

Meta Ads Manager is your command center for creating, managing, and analyzing all of your campaigns. To find it, you can navigate there from your Facebook Page or go directly to business.facebook.com/adsmanager. It's structured in a simple three-level hierarchy:

1. Campaigns: The top level. Here, you set your overall advertising objective (e.g., Sales, Leads).
2. Ad Sets: The middle level. Inside each campaign, you have one or more ad sets. Here, you define your audience (targeting), placements (where the ads show), budget, and schedule.
3. Ads: The final level. Inside each ad set, you have the actual ads - the visuals and copy people will see.

Think of it like a folder system: A Campaign is the main folder, Ad Sets are the sub-folders inside it, and Ads are the individual files within those sub-folders. This structure allows you to test different audiences and creatives against each other to see what performs best.

Launching Your First Campaign: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough

With your goals, audience, and creative ready, it’s time to build the campaign. Let's walk through it step-by-step.

Step 1: Create a New Campaign and Choose Your Objective

In Ads Manager, click the green "+ Create" button. The first thing you'll be asked to do is choose your campaign objective. Meta simplifies this into six choices:

• Awareness: Maximize reach and ad recall.
• Traffic: Send people to a web link.
• Engagement: Get more video views, post engagement, or Page likes.
• Leads: Collect information from potential customers through a form.
• App Promotion: Get more app installs or engagement.
• Sales: Find people likely to purchase your product or service.

Choose the objective that best matches the goal you defined earlier. For this example, let's say we're a small e-commerce store and want to drive sales, so we'll pick Sales.

Step 2: Set Your Budget at the Campaign Level

After naming your campaign, you'll see a toggle for Advantage Campaign Budget (formerly Campaign Budget Optimization or CBO). If you turn this on, you set one central budget at the campaign level, and Facebook automatically distributes the spend to the best-performing ad sets. If you leave it off, you'll set individual budgets for each ad set.

For beginners running a simple campaign with one or two ad sets, turning this on and setting a daily or lifetime budget is often the easiest approach. This lets Facebook's algorithm do the work for you.

Step 3: Define Your Audience at the Ad Set Level

Welcome to the Ad Set. This is where you tell Facebook who you want to see your ads. The targeting here can be broken down into a few sections:

Location, Age, Gender, & Language

This is your basic demographic targeting. You can target people in specific countries, regions, cities, or even within a one-mile radius of your store. Then, select the age range and gender that aligns with your ideal customer.

Detailed Targeting

This is where things get interesting. Detailed Targeting lets you include or exclude people based on what they've shown an interest in or what their past behavior on the platform suggests. You can target based on:

• Demographics: Education level, job industry, life events (recently moved, newly engaged), parental status, and more.
• Interests: Pages people have liked, related topics they've engaged with (e.g., people interested in hiking, organic food, or thriller novels).
• Behaviors: Purchase behaviors, device usage, or how they interact with Facebook (e.g., people who administer a Facebook Page).

You can layer these on top of each other to get really specific. For example, you could target people aged 25-45 who live in Chicago, are interested in "yoga" AND "sustainable fashion." On the right side of your screen, Facebook will give you an estimated audience size to show if your targeting is too broad or too narrow.

Step 4: Choose Your Placements

Placements are all the different places where your ad can appear across Meta's apps and services (like the Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, Messenger Inbox, and more). You have two choices:

• Advantage+ Placements (Automatic): You let Meta's system automatically show your ads where they're most likely to get results. This is the recommended option for nearly everyone, especially beginners.
• Manual Placements: You can hand-pick exactly where your ads show up. You might use this if you've designed a creative specifically for Instagram Stories and don't want it to appear anywhere else.

For your first campaign, stick with Advantage+ Placements. The algorithm is incredibly good at finding the most cost-effective placements for your goal.

Step 5: Design a Compelling Ad

Finally, we're at the Ad level where we build what the user sees. This part is surprisingly straightforward.

Select Format & Creative

First, choose your format (Single Image or Video, Carousel, or Collection Ad). Then, click "Add Media" to upload the image or video you prepared earlier.

Write Your Copy

Next, you'll write the text for your ad. There are a few key fields:

• Primary Text: This is the main body of text that appears above your image/video. Lead with a strong hook that speaks to your audience's pain point or desire.
• Headline: A short, punchy sentence that appears in bold next to your call-to-action button. Think benefits, offers, or clear statements (like "Free Shipping on All Orders").
• Description: A smaller piece of text that sometimes appears below the headline. Use this for extra details or social proof, like "Join 10,000+ Happy Customers."

Choose a Call-to-Action (CTA) and Destination

Select a CTA button that matches the action you want someone to take. Options include "Shop Now," "Learn More," "Sign Up," "Book Now," etc. Choose the most relevant one for your campaign goal. Finally, enter the website URL where you want to send people who click your ad. Make sure this link goes to a relevant landing page, not just your homepage.

After that, you're ready to hit the "Publish" button. Your ad will go into a short review process, and once approved, it will be live!

Launching Is Just the Beginning: Monitor Your Results

Don't just set it and forget it. After letting your campaign run for at least 3-5 days to gather data, head back to Ads Manager to check your performance. What you should monitor depends on your objective, but a few key metrics are always important:

• Reach: How many unique people saw your ad.
• Cost Per Click (CPC): How much you're paying every time someone clicks your ad.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who saw your ad and then clicked it. A high CTR (generally above 1%) is a good sign that your creative and messaging are resonating with your audience.
• Cost Per Result: Based on your objective, this shows how much you're paying for each sale, lead, etc. This is often the most important metric of all.

If your campaign is performing well, let it run or gradually increase the budget. If it's not, don't be afraid to turn it off and try again. Use the data to learn. Was your CPC too high? Maybe your audience was too broad. Was your CTR low? Try testing a different image or headline.

Final Thoughts

Creating your first Facebook ad campaign involves defining your goals, targeting the right audience with the right messaging, and designing a visual that stops the scroll. By following these steps methodically, you can confidently launch an ad that gets real results for your business and turn what feels like a gamble into a predictable growth engine.

An amazing ad campaign drives clicks and new traffic, but a strong organic presence across your social profiles is what often convinces those visitors to follow and stick around. That's where we come into play. A great ad paired with a consistent, energetic feed is an unstoppable combination. With Postbase, we make managing that organic side feel effortless with our simple visual calendar and rock-solid scheduling for all platforms, including modern formats like Reels and Shorts. When you make your ad spend work harder by having a great brand to back it up, you're building a community, not just collecting clicks.