6.1 Setting up an Ad Campaign

Welcome back to this series on Facebook and Instagram advertising. We’re knee deep into the Facebook platform and now, we’re going to get into actually creating the campaigns.

So let's get right into it. 

First, click on this green create button. You should be taken to this screen that asks you what your campaign objective is. Like we discussed in the previous chapter, there are several different purposes for which you can create ads.

Today we are going to create a conversion campaign. Why? Well, if you recall, in the last episode we talked about how creating a conversion campaign tells Facebook exactly what you want to achieve. Facebook then optimises your ads in real time to get you more conversions. That's exactly why. So go ahead and check that conversions box and hit continue.

Next you come to this campaign creation screen that lets you add your campaign name and has a bunch of different options that you will learn about as you get into doing this yourself. For now, let's just give the campaign a name and move on.

Now you come to the ad set section. Remember we talked about how ad sets are where you can set the targeting of the campaign? Now here is an important practice to follow. We have already created different audiences that we want to target to.

Now, it is possible to set this ad set to target all of those audiences but, what would be really effective is creating different ad sets to test out different audience combinations. That way you can tell whether high schoolers are clicking more on your ads than undergrads or whether interest based targeting works better than demographic based targeting.

So to get started, let's give our ad set a name. Let's call it High Schoolers Basic.

Now as you scroll down, it asks you to name a conversion. In the last episode, we created a custom conversion for anyone who fills out the form. If you click on the conversion event, you will see your conversion show up here. Go ahead and click it.

Here is an interesting function that Facebook gives you. It's called dynamic creative. What that means is, if you give Facebook a bunch of images and different kinds of copy, it will auto generate multiple combinations of ads.

So if you have 5 ad images and 5 different kinds of ad copy, that would make up 25 ads. That way you can test out what images and copy are working for you. So go ahead and check the dynamic creative toggle button.

Next you want to set up a campaign run date and time as well as a budget.

Now, when it comes to budgets, we always recommend starting with a smaller budget and working your way up. So if your client has a budget of 10,000 rupees per day, let’s start with just 1000 rupees for this ad set. Moving on, we come to the audience. Well, we’ve already done the work so we don't need to create a fresh audience. If you click on saved audiences over here, you'll see the audiences created. I'm going to go ahead and select the first one.

Next you'll see placement. As you grow as a marketer you will probably want to create ads specifically for each placement. Say for Instagram stories versus a Facebook newsfeed. But since you’re just getting started, let’s keep this on automatic. And that's it for the ad set. Go ahead and click next.

Now you are in the ad set. Now, you’re in the ads section. This is where you build the actual ad! To start, give your ad a name and select your associated Facebook or Instagram page. Next, you want to keep a single image or video checked, right here.

Unless you are running ads for an e-commerce site and need a bunch of different images shown at the same time, use the single image option. Now here is where you want to select your image. You will need to have your images ready before you can set up the campaign. 

Let's go ahead and add our images. There you go! Our images are in. Now we have to insert the ad copy.

In the last chapter, we talked about how to write winning ad copy. The best thing to do is to have a bunch of ad copies ready before you begin building your campaign. A lot of people go straight into building ads and when they get here, they just type in some copy off the top of their heads, which is a terribly poor practice. That's like turning up to a high stakes football tournament, super unfit, in your grandma's bathroom slippers. 

Have a bunch of headlines, primary text and descriptions ready for you to use in your ads before you begin your campaign. To add different variants of copy, just click Add Another Option and put your additional copy in. We are going to go ahead and do that now. We wrote up this ad copy that we're going to paste into its respective section.

And finally, another small detail – put in the website url, where you want to send them. Please don't miss this. Now if you want to see what your ads look like, just tap on this preview option on the right and switch between the different placements.

Once you’re all done here, go ahead and Publish your ads. And just like that you have published your very first round of ads. Now if you remember, we had created only one ad set with one targeting - high schoolers basic. But we also have other audiences we want to target including those for the undergrads.

Now, when you are on this page, click on your campaign and you'll see here that you're at the ad set level. You can see the ad set we just created - high schooler basic. Now, we know we want to test multiple audiences so why don’t we do that. You can go and create another ad set and follow the same process, use another audience, change the images and the ad copy.

Now, it's also possible that you want to keep the same ads as another ad set, but just change the targeting. In that case, just tick the ad set you want to duplicate, and hit duplicate. But, we don’t really want them to be completely the same. I mean we want the ads, the images, the budgets to be the same, so you go down to the audience part of this ad set and change the saved audience - oh and rename the ad set.

Now if you hit publish, you have a new ad set with the same ads. We are going to quickly go and do this for all the audiences we created so we have multiple ad sets. There you go. It should look something like this.

It’s important to know, Facebook typically takes 15-20 minutes to review your ads and then they're up and running. And just like that, we have a proper ad campaign. With multiple audiences, multiple ad images and ad copies.

Pretty good stuff.