Intro to Facebook Ads 2025

Today we’re going to cover the most popular marketing channel available to businesses all over the world, Facebook ads. Well technically they’re called Meta Ads and encompass all of Meta’s properties including Facebook.com, Instagram.com, Messenger.com, and the Meta Audience Network. They’re all served from the same platform called Meta Ads Manager.

I’ve spent $20M+ over the last 15 years working in performance marketing and noticed a lot of gatekeeping within the industry by people (agencies) making it more technical than it has to be so they can keep a job. Meta also understands this and I think makes the Meta admin dashboard (business manager) overly complicated. I’m here to decode it for you. Anyone can launch their own Facebook ads with no prior experience if you follow the right steps.

First, How Does it Work?

Before we go into how to set up an ad it’s important to know generally how the ads actually work. When you give Facebook your money what happens? Well lets break it down.

Meta Ads are run in a CPM-based ad model which means cost per mille or cost per thousand impressions your ad gets. The CPM prices are usually around $1 to $10 on average, but why such a big range? Because the campaign you will most likely run will be auction-based. You’re competing against every other advertiser for the same eyeballs and if it’s a competitive audience you’re going after you can bet a lot of other people are trying to get their attention too. It can vary wildly depending on the industry you’re in. This means for 10,000 people to see your ad you could be spending up anywhere from $10-$100.

Now you do have the option to choose a second buying type which is fixed, not variable auction. It’s called “Reservation” and is a relatively new feature where you can pay a fixed CPM (usually in the $0.50 range) and have to show to a minimum of 200,000 people. To be honest I’ve never used this buying type since it’s only goal is maximizing reach of your ads but you’re trying bring in paying customers the auction buying type is what you want to go with.

Steps Overview to Launching Your First Campaign

There are 4 main steps to creating your first FB ad campaign so we’re going to run through each (with real-life examples) so you can launch your own campaign today.

1. Account & Pixel Setup - this is where a lot of people get tripped up. There are 5 basic steps in this technical stage 1.) creating a business FB page 2.) setting up your business portfolio 3.) setting up your ad account 4.) installing the event tracking code on your site 5.) testing events are firing correctly.

    

2. Making your Ad Creative and Landing Pages - the most overlooked section. Great ads going to a high-converting page will make your life a lot easier. Running ads comes down to a simple formula, are people clicking on your ads at a high rate and are those people turning into customers?

   • ad views X click-through rate = site visits

   • site visits X conversion rate = # of transactions/leads

3. Setting Up Your First Campaign - this is the meatiest section. I laid out step-by-step instructions to walk you through creating a campaign from scratch. This includes what the goal of the campaign should be, what audiences to select, and where your ads will be placed.

    

4. Is it Working? - Always the trickiest part. Feels good to get something live and see some clicks coming in but you’re spending money to hopefully get more money in return. The challenge is FB tells you one number that can look very different to what is actually happening. We’ll go through how to measure the right things.

    

1.) Account & Pixel Setup

Disclaimer Meta makes this way harder than it has to be (it’s 28 steps 😮). We’re going to make this as painless as possible walking you through each step. Remember, this first part is for someone who does not have a Facebook page set up for their business, if you’re good on that skip to step 4.

• First step is creating a Facebook Business Page. You gotta have one of these if you want to run ads. It also has to be connected to a real FB profile so you have to create one of those too, it can be your personal one. Go here and select “Create new page” https://www.facebook.com/pages/. You get to the below page (I’m in dark mode). Fill out the page name, category, and bio.

• You’ll then be prompted to fill out all the info for your page but you don’t actually have to enter any of it besides the page name, category, and bio above. Facebook will give you a worse Page Health score but I haven’t seen anything to tell me it affects anything with ads. Click Next through all 5 of the bio questions and you’ll be done.

• That’s it! Your new page is now live and you can login, you’ll use the same email as your personal account and can toggle between your accounts in the top right of the screen.

Ok here’s where Meta makes it complicated. What FB tells you to do is to click on the big blue “Advertise” button that you see on your new page, when you do you the below page where it prompts you to “Create ad”. This is where we go next right? Nope. Meta has TWO different places you can serve ads from, the first is this one commonly known as “boosted post ads” which let you spend money to get more exposure on organic posts you put on your new Facebook page. But the targeting and reporting is very limited with these, plus you can’t customize creative or copy well. So where do we go?

Click back in the upper right, then click on the FB logo to reach your home page. Click on “Ads Manager”

You’ll then see the below screen. If you do not already have a “business portfolio” you will need to create one. As it says in the prompt at the bottom it will allow you to connect your Facebook and Instagram profiles (more reach), as well as add other businesses or use advanced features. Click on “Create business portfolio”.

It will come up with some prompts to create a Meta Business Suite. What the hell is that, I thought it was called business portfolio?? Again Meta likes adding all kinds of complication when setting up an account. Exit out of the pop up and scroll down to the business portfolio section, highlighted below. You’ll be prompted to give your portfolio a name and put in contact info. The portfolio name will be used to manage all your future businesses and ad campaign so call it something general but also you know it’s yours.

Select the business page you just created (or if you already had one) along with any other existing pages (like IG) that pop up. This business portfolio will connect all of these pages together so you can show ads to all Meta properties from one account. Click “Next”, add anyone else you want to manage your ads (or skip), then click “Confirm”.

It will then take you back to the Meta Business Suite home page, click “Ads” on the left then click “Ads Manager”. You’ll see this screen next, click “Go to business settings” then “Add” then “Create a new ad account” in the dropdown.

You should now see the below screen, give your account a name then select time zone and currency. Click “Next”.

Make sure to click “My business” for who this ad account will be used for then click “Create”.

Assign yourself to have full control over the ad accounts then click “Assign”.

Boom! Ad account created, next step is adding your payment info. Follow the prompts and add the CC that will be charged for your ads. It should take you back to the Business settings home page, from here we’ll need to create the pixel and install it on your site. This is the thing that fires when someone converts on your site then tells FB a conversion happened so you can you’ll want to click on Data sources on the left, then click “Datasets” and finally “Add”.

Next you’ll be prompted to choose how to connect your site, the simplest option at the start is using the Meta Pixel only. This can get you good enough tracking when your budgets are low (under $10K/month). The recommended option uses something called Conversions API along with the pixel to more accurately send back your marketing events (ie conversions, sales, website events) to Meta using a direct connection between your app platform or CRM instead of relying on an onsite file to load (pixel). The pixel relies on cookies to send back information which now get blocked or manipulated often. For now select “Meta Pixel only”.

From here select “Check for partner”

You’ll need to to know where your website or landing page was built. Most common options would be WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, or Shopify.

Turn on “advanced matching” here. This will help you send better marketing event data back to Meta so your ads can perform better.

Ok now you’ll need to go through the steps to setup the event tracking on your site. I’m selecting Webflow below because that’s where I built my site.

Once you login to the place where you built your website, they should have a section like below where you can put in the pixel ID Meta gives you and connect it to your ads easily.

If that doesn’t work or your site is not listed in partner selection pop up, you can go back to the Data Sources home screen, select “Set up Meta Pixel” again and choose the option “Manually add Pixel code to website”

Grab the base code and insert it into the “Head code” of your sites custom code area.

After you’ve successfully installed the base code we’ll need to set up your marketing events like sale or form registration. Navigate back to the pixel setup screen on Meta. Enter the homepage of your site then select “Open Website”.

It will automatically open your site and from there you can see the pop-up in the top left of the screen with two options 1.) “Track a new button” and 2.) “Track a URL”…. Now this is really important to nail so going to break it out into a few steps. First I would recommend selecting the second option, “Track a URL” but don’t click it yet! Basically this means your conversion event will fire when a new page is loaded, the page that is normally used here is the /complete or /success/ after someone successfully checks out and completes purchase or your lead form. This is the page you’ll want to now navigate to on your site.

To get to that thank you page (could be called /complete or /success), you’ll need to actually make a purchase on your site or fill out the lead form when you have the Meta Pixel Helper open. The pop-up should still be open when you get to this page. When you are there, now you can click on “Track a URL” then from the dropdown select either “Purchase” or “Lead” (most common things you want to track) but feel free to browse the others. Leave the “URL equals” dropdown as is and if you selected purchase I would recommend choosing “Don’t include value” for the final step unless you only have 1 product with 1 price. Finally click “Confirm”. You’ll see a “Setup complete” pop-up if done correctly.

Next step is testing the events you set up, go back to “Data Sources” then “Test events”, click around your website to the buttons or pages you selected in the event set up tool and you should see them popping up like below. If you’re getting a green “Processed” message by each then you’re good to go!

Finally we’ll need to assign it and then connect the dataset to the ad account you set up earlier. Navigate back to the Business Settings and click Datasets. Once on this screen click Assign people.

Click yourself, the Conversions API, then Full control and click Assign. This is basically giving yourself the ability to add this pixel to the new ad campaigns you create.

Next you’ll click on Done then Connect assets when you’re back on the dataset screen. Click on the ad account name you set up earlier then Add.

That’s it! 28 steps later and we’ve set up your business page, business portfolio, ad account and event tracking. Now on to the fun part, the creative.

2.) Making your Ad Creative and Landing Pages

One of the most important steps that many people overlook. What is the messaging and images/videos you’re going to use in your ads and where will you send people?

Let’s review the types of ad formats and examples of current ads that perform really well, then in the next section we’ll go into setting up your first campaign.

A great place to start is straight from the source in the Meta Creative Center. A pretty new resource that can be helpful when you’re just starting out. Would recommend making 3 different ads for your first campaign, so whatever image or video you’re making you’ll need to make 3 versions to ensure your dollars are being spent most effectively. Meta will auto rotate them so the best performing variation gets the most spend.

Here’s a quick overview…

• General best practices

  • Combine videos and images for better results

  • Ads with lower production-value videos drove a significantly higher lift in ad recall

  • Keep your text focused and clear - Limit primary text to 125 characters or less, headline text to 40 characters or less and description text to 25 characters or less

  • Look at your organic posts to see what kind of content your audience is already engaging with most and use those for ads

  • Test, test, test - there’s 2 in-platform testing tools for this, the first for A/B tests or testing two ad creative/copy against each other and Meta will promote the winner for you. The second is the experiments tool where you can test elements on existing campaigns. Just remember to only test one variable at a time so you can isolate what drove the good or bad performance.

• Video

  • Film vertical

  • Include sound

  • Place key information within the safe zones (borders)

  • Make your videos entertaining, relatable and digestible

  • Put a face to your business

  • Highlight your message in the first 3 seconds

• Photo

  • Focus on the product or service

  • Pay attention to aspect ratios

  • Use high-resolution images

  • Show your brand or logo

  • Avoid including too much text on your image

  • Ensure your images are properly lit and feature simple backgrounds

The site Klientboost also as a great article on a bunch different ad types and what drove results for them.

Now on to the landing pages.

If you don’t have a website or maybe your site isn’t really optimized for what you want to do I would check out Unbounce or Clickfunnels, both no-code landing page builder tools that make it easy for non-techies to get a landing page up pretty quickly. They have prebuilt templates you can select from by business type or by conversion goal (capture email, selling something, etc) so don’t worry if you have no coding skillz.

Here are Nick’s rules for a high-converting landing page

1. Clear value prop - don’t mince words here, speak directly to your main value or problem you are solving. ONE message and ONE call to action, trying to do any more than that will lower your conversion rate.

2. Concise, easily digestible copy.

3. Simple is best - no links to other pages on your site, no big words. This is why using a landing page builder is great because often times your regular site is too busy.

4. Match the messaging and images/videos from ads on your landing page. You’re telling a story to this person so make it consistent from the first touch point (ad) to the middle (landing page) to the last (email or phone call follow up).

5. Use social proof - if you have testimonials from happy customers, have 1,000 5 star reviews on Google, or maybe you can feature recognizable companies you work with. Very effective at building trust with someone that doesn’t know you.

3.) Setting up Your First Campaign

Alright now we’re cookin with gas! You have the FB pixel installed and all your creative and landing pages are ready to-go. It’s time to get your ads out into the wild and see what they can do.

We’ll go through each step and I will actually launch a real campaign in this post.

Ok here we go, once you’re signed in navigate to your Ads Manager (https://adsmanager.facebook.com/adsmanager/manage/campaigns). From there you’ll see no campaigns live so you click the green “Create” button in the top left and the below screen will pop up. 9 times out of 10 you’re going to select Sales since that covers both transaction $ based campaigns and lead form campaigns. Leave it as “Auction” as we discussed above.

Next you’ll see this pop up with Advantage+ already selected, you should not use this for your first campaign. It’s best for ecomm stores with lots of products and higher spends. You’ll want to select “Manual sales campaign” at the bottom then click “Continue".

Next, you’ll want to assign a name to your campaign, make it descriptive to the audience you’d like to go after or the promotion you’re running at the time. I also like to include a month and year of launch for easy reference. You can always change this later. You shouldn’t have any special ad categories so you can skip. Now scroll down and choose your “Campaign spending limit”, this is a cap on how much you’re going to spend so would recommend an initial investment of $600-$1,000 into your ads. This may seem like a lot but that’s the minimum daily spend ($20-$30/day for 1 month) that can produce any meaningful results. If you’re not ready to spend (and potentially lose) that money then paid advertising isn’t right for you right now.

Next we’ll go into creating your ad set, which is just the group that houses your ads (Campaign → Ad set → Ad). You’ll first want to name your Ad set then select “Website” as the “Conversion location” unless you have a mobile app that’s also registering conversions. Leave “Performance goal” on “Maximize number of conversions” and make sure the dataset is selected under the Pixel section that we created earlier. Under “Conversion event” select the event we set up in Steps 23 & 24.

Now jump to “Budget & schedule” which is defaulted to $20/day. As we covered earlier, I would recommend a total budget of $600-$1,000 which would cover a 1 month initial test (more on this later). So setting your “Daily budget” at $20/day works out to $600/month which may get you about 200-300 people to your site. Of that you can anticipate 1%-3% to convert depending on what you’re trying to get them to do. Now when you run the math on that it isn’t very many, but it’s enough to get started. Once you’ve seen some ROI come then would recommend scaling. Would leave start date as now, no end date (we set a campaign spending limit), and jump to “Audience controls”.

Now go to the “Advantage+ audience” section and select “Switch to original audience options”.

This allows you to create your own custom audience which is the best targeting for your first campaign. Leave “Custom audiences” as is and then select where you want your ads to show up. It can be a whole country but would recommend getting very specific to where your ideal customer resides, which could be a selection of states and regions. You can also exclude locations if necessary and also set an age range and “Language” of your target customer. Finally under “Advantage detailed targeting+” try searching for a category or keyword that is mostly aligned to who you’re going after. For example could select multiple like people interested in real estate and first time home buyers if you’re trying to get leads from prospective buyers. It will show you your total expected reach on the right.

Now on to the final stage before your ads can go live, the ad set up. We already detailed how and what kinds of ads to create for best performance so hopefully so you have an image or video created by now. When you get to this screen you’ll need to name your ad, make it something specific to the campaign promotion and ad type (Spring Collection Video Ad 1), which will make it easier to know the difference between your ads in reporting. Next select the Facebook page we set up earlier (and IG if you have one but not necessary).

Under “Ad setup” leave it as “Create ad” and under “Creative source” leave it as “Manually upload”. In the next section “Format” should be left as “Single image or video” and leave “Multi-advertiser ads” checked. Now for selecting the creative for your ad, under the “Set up creative” dropdown select either “Image” or “Video” depending on which one you have, if you have both that's great but just need one for now. You can always add another ad for this campaign later. Once you select either “Image” or “Video” it will prompt you with a “Creative setup” pop-up that first let’s you put in site link extensions. These are basically mini callouts to other parts of your site, but not necessary. If you enter your site in the “Source URL” it will automatically pull them in for you. If it’s not relevant to you (you don’t have multiple products) then just click “Next”

Next is the ad text, reference the “Making your Ad Creative and Landing Pages” section above to see best practices. Remember don’t overdo it here, keep your message and call to action simple.

Now onto the actual image or video, you’ll need to upload from your computer, select it from the uploads on screen then click “Next”.

You then should see a screen like this which shows all the variations of what your image or video could look like. Keep the “flexible media” checkbox enabled and play around with the ratios to see what your ad will look like. You can crop each of them or replace a single placement so it’s better formatted. If it doesn’t look perfect I wouldn’t worry too much, just make sure nothing is cut off then click “Next”.

Because we have the “Advantage+ creative enhancements” turned on you’ll then see all the different other variations of your ad that Meta creates for us, including ones with music, displaying top comments, and touch ups the visuals. These can be great for extending reach so take a look and turn on/off any one’s you’d like. Click “Done” when that’s finished.

We’re almost there! Once your back on the ad builder screen double check the ad text and image variations you added to see if all looks good. Then scroll down to the “Destination” section. Here all you need to do is put in your website into “Website URL” and then if you want put in a shortened version into the “Display link” field. This isn’t necessary but can help your ads look cleaner. For the “Browser add-ons” this may not be relevant to you but if you did want to add a number for your business that would show up directly on the add this is where you can do it.

Finally under “Tracking” make sure “Website events” is selected.

That’s it! The rest of fields are optional so you can go ahead and click “Publish”. You should see a screen like this, no ads will be live yet because it usually takes Meta a few hours to review new ads before you start spending. This would be a great chance to add in more ad variations (if you have them) by repeating the steps we just did. Just click into the campaign you created and click the green “Create” button in the top left. Woo woo you’re an ads pro now!

4.) Is It Working?

Ok now that your first campaign is live, what happens now? Meta will continue spending your full daily budget every day until the end of the campaign (if you set an end date) but it’s up to you to make sure you’re spending in a smart way. Remember when we talked about creating 3 different ad variations? The ongoing management is where that will come into play.

Even though Meta will try to spend on only the best-performing variation, you will still spend money on other ads you have live that don’t perform all that well. It’s your job pause out bad performing ads and focus your spend on the best.

But how do I know which one is good or bad? Well this goes back to Step 22 when we set up the conversion events, which could be a form that was filled out on a page (lead) or someone bought an item on your site (purchase), among many other conversion events available. You want your spend to be going to the ad that is getting you the most amount of conversions for the cheapest Cost per Result.

This is what it would look like in your Ads Manager dashboard when you have some conversions coming in. You can see the “Amount spent” column is the total cost of the campaign in the date range you set and for that money you can see I got a $26.04 cost per result on 280 conversions, in this case it was “Per Website Contact” which is just a lead form. If you’re using the website contact event and getting leads for $25, how many out of 10 leads could you close into paying customers? If it’s 1 (10%) then you would need to spend $250 to get one paying customer (closed 1 out 10). Can your business sustain those numbers?

But is spending $26 to get someone’s contact info a good price? It depends on two things, how much you’re willing to spend and how good you are at converting those leads.

If the purchase event is what you’re going with then proving the return on your investment is a little easier, with one big caveat. The default Attribution Setting is 7-day click and 1-day view which means your results will be reported if they happened within either of these two windows. So lets say someone clicks on your ad and don’t purchase anything you that day but come back to your site directly 3 days later, Meta will attribute that as a conversion back to your campaign. And lets say someone doesn’t even click, just SEE your ad on Facebook and they convert within 24 hrs, Meta will attribute that as a conversion back to your campaign. Seems a little crazy to me so I always switch to just 7-day click when setting up the campaign. This lets Meta have enough data to go get you conversions and still having a hand in conversion.

So on one had you can see how much you spent and you can see the total purchase conversion value in your dashboard easily, but take it with a grain of salt. Meta wants to take as much credit for conversions as they can so the purchases you see on your backend (Shopify, Stripe, Kajabi, etc.) will often not match what Ads Manager is telling you especially if you have other marketing channels in the mix.

Whichever conversion event you choose, I would recommend committing to this test for at least a month. I often see business owners write off a marketing channel too early without giving it a full effort. This is what the first month might look like.

Week 1 - launch campaigns, ads getting warmed up. Don’t expect many conversions.

Week 2 - conversions are coming in but campaigns are still in learning phase, don’t have enough data to really get going.

Week 3 - if spending enough (>$50/day) your campaigns should be out of learning mode and starting to really bring in conversions. This is when you’ll need to optimize the spend on only the best performing ads.

Week 4 - might be coming close to the end of your initial budget and you’ve done optimizations with one ad winning out and spending the most. Hopefully you’ve been able to see money come either direct through purchase or you following up with leads.

After your first month you should have enough data to make a decision if this channel is right for you. It isn’t for everyone but if done right can be a great source of customers and growth for your business.

And that’s it. Hopefully you were able to make it through all 44 Steps and your first campaign is live. Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.