Facebook Advertising for Sales: A Practical Guide for Beginners

Social networks are currently among the most effective means of developing a business with online commerce or any other subject of activity. Whether by creating organic content or by advertising on Facebook and Instagram, companies large and small struggle to capture the attention of potential customers on a daily basis.

If you've always wanted to try boosting your revenue, but creating a Facebook ad for sales seems complicated, learn how to do it in our beginner's guide.

In it, we'll show and tell you step-by-step how to create an effective social advertising campaign on Meta. Let's get started!

For your convenience, you can view our guide in video format. Follow us on YouTube for more useful content to enrich your knowledge in the field of digital marketing.

👉 Step 0: Meta Business Suite -> Ads Manager

Before we get started with setting up our Facebook ads for sales, it's important to keep in mind that in order to complete the next steps, you'll need access to Meta Ads Manager, which is part of Meta Business Suite - Meta's platform that brings together all aspects of managing your social media presence.

👉 Step 1: Choose a target for your Facebook sales ad

Moving on. Creating each campaign starts by clicking the green Create button and selecting a campaign goal. Today we're going to choose Sales because our goal is to drive sales for your business.

Depending on how you've built your marketing funnel, in other campaigns you can experiment with the other goals for the different audiences you plan to target. These include:

• Awareness (creating brand recognition);
• Traffic (driving traffic to your site);
• Engagement (increasing engagement on publications or events);
• Leads (lead generation);
• App promotions (mobile app advertising).

Here the platform will ask you if you want to create an Advantage+ Shopping campaign.

If your business is just starting out, our advice is to choose a Manual Sales campaign that could bring you more stable results at the moment.

👉 Step 2: Campaign level settings

Name

First we name the campaign with a name of your choice. Choose something that will help you find your way around easily when your campaigns become more numerous.

In the name, you can include the theme and purpose of the campaign, as well as the period during which it will be active. For example, if you are running a campaign for different promotions each month, the name could be something like:

Sales Promo February 2024

Special Group

The next step is to note whether your ad belongs to so-called special groups. These include real estate ads, credit ads, job ads, political ads and more. If your topic is not one of them, skip this step.

Campaign details - product catalogue

In the next step, you can choose whether to use a product catalogue for your Facebook ad. If you have one, feel free to include it in your ads.

👉 Step 3: Ad group level settings (ad set)

Name

Choose a name for your ad group - it 's good practice to name it after the audience you'll be using, so it's easier to navigate through campaigns later.

Realizations

• Conversion location

Here you choose whether your ad will lead to your website, app, direct phone calls or even Meta Messenger.

• Conversion event

Depending on your campaign goals, you can choose different types of conversion events or conversions - these include viewing a product, adding a product to cart, purchasing. For the purpose of our campaign we will choose the latter.

Audience

From Audience controls we choose who will see your ad. Generally speaking, you have three choices here. We'll go over each of them in detail.

Broad audience

Broad audience is one where we do not set criteria such as demographics, interests, interactions with our site or page, in other words we do not limit in any way who will see our ad. This audience will include people who have never been to your site or heard of it, as well as people who know you, may have even shopped with you.

The audience is important because it and their experience with your brand determines what your advertising messages will be. With a broad audience, the ad algorithm decides who to show your ad to.

Retargeting audience

With this option, you can reach users who have already had some interaction with your business in some period of time (1, 7, 30, 60, 90 days, etc.).

There are many options, here are some examples:

• users who have been to your site;
• users who have added products to their cart but have not completed their order;
• users who have bought something from you;
• users who follow your page but have not viewed your products;
• users who have engaged with your page content and ads, and many more.

If you don't see the audience selection options, it's likely that Meta is again trying to prompt you to use Advantage+ and let the algorithm choose an audience for your ad.

Switch to original audience options -> Use original audience will give you more control over your audience.

You can both include and exclude audiences. This will give you the desired selection of people to see your ad (you'll need to create custom audiences for this). You can choose location, age, gender, etc.

New audience - by interests and behaviour

If you choose this audience option, our advice is to change the campaign goal as well. New audiences rarely yield good results in terms of orders, but they are a great choice for increasing your brand awareness.

Again, you can turn audiences on and off here, but you also have options to choose the demographics and interests or behaviors that distinguish your searchers.

You can choose people who are interested in "home decor" or those who work in the position of "project manager" or those who have a birthday soon - the targeting options here are many and the only limitation is your imagination.

Once you select an option, you can see recommendations for more similar interests from the Suggestions button. However, we advise you not to go overboard with the interests, because the more you add, the harder it will be for the algorithm to find the right people.

Once you set the audience selection, you will see approximately how large it is on the right. The numbers there are a good guide, but don't trust them 100%.

Budget for your Facebook advertising for sales

There are two options here: to allocate it on a daily basis or for the entire duration of the campaign (lifetime). We recommend the first option to make sure that you will have funds until the end of the campaign.

Here you can also choose when your campaign runs until, and choosing the end date is optional, meaning you can set the campaign to run until you decide to stop it.

If you see the message "The start date is in the past", just change the start time of the campaign and it will disappear.

Who pays for your Facebook ad for sales

One of the innovations from 2023 is that Meta now insists on knowing who is paying for the advertising and who is benefiting from it (Beneficiary & payer) , so just tick what your case is there and confirm the company details.

Placements

Where will your ad appear? By default, the option for Advantage+ placements is checked again, but we prefer to select them manually, so we click on Manual placements.

Here it is very simple - where there is a tick, the ad will be displayed, where there is a dash, it will not be displayed.

👉 Step 4: Ad level settings

We move on to the more creative part of creating the campaign, which is building the ad itself.

Here, at the very beginning, you need to choose a Facebook page and the corresponding Instagram account from which your ad will be displayed.

If you don't see the preview of your ad, click the Ad preview slider and it will load different options according to the positions you selected in the previous step.

Here you can see what your ad will look like on your Facebook feed, Instagram feed, Stories, etc.

Format

• Single with photo or video
• Carrousel with 10 cards
• Collection - it opens full screen, grab attention, but only display on mobile devices.

Visual elements

You upload a photo or video, then we recommend you size them for each item selected.

In the next step, you can see how it will look in different placements and select the All optimizations option, which automatically adjusts some details in your visuals like color, lighting, and more.

Text (ad copy)

Your Facebook ad has several text elements. These are:

• Primary text - it comes on top of the banner/video (in the Facebook feed). Go for something short without a lot of emojis.
• Title - even shorter.
• Description - additional information in a concise version.

Be sure to use the call-to-action button that matches the goal you want to achieve.

Links

You should put a link to the page you want your ad to lead to.

You can add a long link with UTM parameters to track in Google Analytics how the campaign is performing and what results have been achieved with it.

The Display link field allows you to hide the long link to avoid confusing your subscribers.

Pixel check

Check that your pixel is working well and that everything is set up correctly so there are no nasty surprises later.

Finalizing

Hallelujah. Once you post your ad, the Facebook bot is tasked with checking that your ad complies with all the rules, and once it's found to be okay it will run. Congratulations!

This was our practical beginner's guide on how to create a Facebook ad to sell more and grow your business.

If it seems complicated, you don't have the time or the patience to try it yourself, ADvantage digital agency is always on call.

Our PPC wizards are ready to transform into your guides through the challenges of the 21st century digital wonder called Facebook advertising.