How to Run Facebook and Instagram Ads

Running ads on Facebook and Instagram can feel intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. Strip away the jargon, and you have one of the most powerful tools available for growing your business, finding new customers, and driving sales. This guide will walk you through setting up your first ad campaign step by step, from prepping your materials to figuring out what’s working after you go live.

Before You Open Ads Manager: The Groundwork

A great ad campaign doesn’t start in Ads Manager. It starts with a clear plan. Before you spend a single dollar, take a few minutes to nail down these three fundamentals. Getting this right will save you a ton of time and money later.

1. Define Your Goal (What do you actually want to happen?)

What is the single most important action you want someone to take after seeing your ad? Rushing this step is like starting a road trip without a destination. Meta’s advertising platform is built entirely around objectives, so knowing your goal makes everything else much easier.

Your goal might be to:

• Sell a specific product: Driving traffic directly to a product page.
• Generate leads: Collecting email addresses for a newsletter or a free guide.
• Increase brand awareness: Introducing your brand to a totally new audience.
• Drive foot traffic: Encouraging people in your local area to visit your physical store.

Be as specific as possible. “Get more sales” isn’t a goal, “Sell 25 units of our new ceramic mug to women aged 25-45” is a goal you can build a campaign around.

2. Know Your Audience (Who are you talking to?)

You can’t speak to everyone, so don't try. The best ads feel like they’re talking to one specific person. To do this, you need to understand who that person is. You don’t need a perfectly detailed, 10-page market research document. Just start with the basics:

• Demographics: Where do they live? What’s their typical age and gender?
• Interests: What hobbies do they have? What other brands do they follow? What influencers catch their attention? Think about adjacent interests. Someone buying running shoes is probably also interested in nutrition, fitness apps, and local 5K races.
• Pain Points: What problem does your product or service solve for them? What are they struggling with that you can fix?

This information will be your guide when you start building your audience targeting in the Ad Set level. You’re moving from guesswork to a data-informed strategy.

3. Get Your Creative Ready (What will they see?)

Your ad creative - the image, video, and text - does the heavy lifting. All the targeting in the world won’t save an uninspired, boring ad. In today's social landscape, video is king, especially content formatted for Reels and Stories (9:16 vertical video).

• Video First: If possible, lean into video. It doesn’t need to be a Hollywood production. A simple, well-lit video shot on your phone showing your product in action often outperforms slick, overproduced commercials. The first three seconds are everything, so make them count.
• High-Quality Images: If you're using static images, make sure they are clear, bright, and grab attention. Show your product being used by a person to make it more relatable.
• Write Compelling Copy: Your text should be direct and benefit-focused. Don't just list features, explain how those features solve your customer's problem or make their life better. Hook them with a great opening line, provide value, and end with a clear call to action.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Meta Ads Manager

Meta structures its campaigns with three levels: Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad. Think of it like this:

• Campaign: The overall objective (the “why”).
• Ad Set: The audience, budget, schedule, and placement (the “who, where, and how much”).
• Ad: The actual creative people see (the “what”).

Let's walk through creating one your first time.

Step 1: Set Up Your Campaign (The "Why")

Inside Meta Ads Manager, click the green "Create" button. The very first thing you’ll be asked to do is choose a campaign objective. Based on the goal you defined earlier, this should be an easy choice.

Choosing an Objective:

• Awareness: Use this to show your ad to the maximum number of people in your audience to build brand awareness. Good for top-of-funnel campaigns.
• Traffic: Best for sending people to a specific destination, like a blog post or landing page.
• Engagement: Ideal for getting more comments, likes, shares, or event responses on your posts.
• Leads: Helps you collect information from people interested in your business, using on-platform forms or sending them to your site.
• App Promotion: Designed to get more people to install and use your app.
• Sales: The go-to objective for e-commerce. It uses Meta’s algorithm to find people most likely to make a purchase.

Once you select your objective, give your campaign a clear name (e.g., "Q4-Holiday-Sale-Leads") to stay organized. For beginners, you can leave settings like A/B Test and Advantage Campaign Budget off for now.

Step 2: Define Your Ad Set (The "Who, Where &, How Much")

This is where you build the engine of your ad campaign. You’ll tell Meta who you want to see your ad, where you want to show it, and how much you're willing to spend.

Budget and Schedule

Decide whether you want to set a Daily Budget (spend up to this amount per day) or a Lifetime Budget (spend up to this amount over the entire campaign period). A daily budget is great for ongoing campaigns, while a lifetime budget is better for campaigns with a fixed end date, like a promotion or event.

Audience Targeting

This is where your audience groundwork pays off. You have three main ways to build an audience:

• Core Audiences: This is where you build an audience from scratch using Meta’s data. You can target based on:
  • Location: Countries, states, cities, or even a radius around a specific address.
  • Demographics: Age, gender, language, and more.
  • Detailed Targeting: This is the most powerful part. You can add interests (e.g., "long-distance running"), behaviors (e.g., "frequent travelers"), and demographic details (e.g., "college grads").
• Custom Audiences: These are "warm" audiences composed of people who have already interacted with your business. You can create custom audiences from sources like your customer email list, people who have visited your website (requires the Meta Pixel), or people who have engaged with your Instagram profile. These audiences are highly effective for retargeting.
• Lookalike Audiences: Once you have a high-quality Custom Audience (like a list of your best customers), you can ask Meta to create a Lookalike Audience. The algorithm will analyze the common traits of people in your source audience and find millions of new people who share those same characteristics. It’s an incredibly powerful way to find new customers at scale.

Start with a core audience based on your research. As you gather data, you can expand into custom and lookalike audiences.

Placements

Placements are where your ads will appear across Meta’s family of apps (Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, Messenger, etc.). You have two choices:

• Advantage+ placements (Recommended for Beginners): This is the default setting where you let Meta’s algorithm automatically show your ads where they're most likely to perform well. It’s smart, efficient, and usually the best choice.
• Manual Placements: This gives you full control to pick and choose exactly where your ads appear. You might use this if your creative is specifically designed only for Instagram Stories, for example.

Step 3: Create Your Ad (The "What")

Finally, it's time to build the ad itself. Here you'll connect your creative with your targeting.

Format

You can choose from several formats. The most common are:

• Single Image or Video: The classic, reliable ad format.
• Carousel: Lets you showcase multiple images or videos that people can swipe through, each with its own link. Great for telling a story or showing off a variety of products.
• Collection: A mobile-only format that creates an instant, full-screen shopping experience. Best for e-commerce brands with a larger catalog.

Ad Creative &, Copywriting

Upload the image or video you prepared earlier. Then, fill in the text fields:

• Primary Text: This is the main body of text that appears above your image/video on Facebook and as the caption on Instagram. Grab their attention early.
• Headline: The bold text that appears right next to your call-to-action button. Keep it short, punchy, and benefit-driven (e.g., "Free Shipping On All Orders").
• Call to Action (CTA): Choose the button that best matches your goal (e.g., Learn More, Shop Now, Sign Up, Download).

Tracking

Before publishing, make sure your ad is set up to track conversions. If you're sending people to your website, this means you need the Meta Pixel installed on your site. The Pixel is a small piece of code that tracks actions visitors take, like adding an item to their cart or making a purchase. This data is essential for understanding your ad performance and for building powerful custom audiences for retargeting.

After You Hit "Publish": What Happens Next?

The job isn’t over once your ad is running. Now it’s time to monitor, analyze, and optimize.

Monitoring Key Metrics

A flood of data is available in Ads Manager, but you only need to focus on a few key metrics to start:

• Reach: The number of unique people who saw your ad.
• Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your ad. If this gets too high (e.g., above 5-6), your audience might be getting tired of it.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked on it. A good indicator that your creative and messaging is compelling.
• Cost Per Result: How much it costs you to get one desired outcome (e.g., a lead, a click, or a sale). This is arguably the most important metric.
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): For e-commerce, this tells you how much revenue you generated for every dollar spent on ads. A ROAS of 3x means you made $3 for every $1 you spent.

Optimizing for Better Results

Give your ads a few days to run before making major changes. The algorithm needs time to learn and find the right people - this is called the "learning phase."

After a few days, you can start optimizing. Cautiously test one variable at a time. For instance, you could duplicate an ad set and test a new audience interest, or duplicate an ad and test a new video. Turn off the ads that are performing poorly (high cost per result, low CTR) and allocate that budget to the ones that are working. Advertising is all about testing, learning, and doubling down on what your audience responds to.

Final Thoughts

Getting comfortable with Facebook and Instagram ads is a process of testing and learning. Start with a clear goal, a well-defined audience, and engaging creative. Build your campaign patiently through the Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad structure, and don't forget to review your performance to see what's actually connecting with people.

A smart ad campaign is one piece of the puzzle, and it performs best when it drives traffic to a well-maintained, active social presence. Since ads can bring new eyes to your profile every day, keeping your organic content calendar full is critical. At Postbase, we built our tool to solve precisely this challenge. We give you a single visual calendar to plan and schedule your content across all platforms - especially video formats like Reels and Shorts - and a unified inbox to manage all the new comments and DMs your ads will generate. This organized approach helps make sure the audience you pay to attract is supported by a strong, consistent organic brand.