How to prepare your website for advertising on Facebook?

Attract new customers and increase your sales with Meta's advertising tools

We've talked a lot about the different opportunities that effective Facebook advertising offers.

In recent years, Mark Zuckerberg's platform has established itself as one of the marketing channels no business can do without.

An easy-to-use interface, the ability to target in detail and cost control are among the main reasons for this.

Like any self-respecting company, Meta is constantly evolving and changing its products to offer more to its consumers.

So today we're going to talk about how to prepare your website for Facebook advertising.

👉 What accounts do you need to have? What is the difference between Meta Ads Manager and Meta Business Manager? What is a product catalog? What is a pixel? How are they configured?

And any other questions you might be asking yourself if you're just starting to advertise on Facebook.

⭐️ Basic accounts needed for advertising on Facebook

Personal Facebook account

Let's start with A and B - in order to run ads on Meta's network, you must have a personal Facebook account. Let's assume you do. If you don't, find out how to sign up for Facebook here.

Facebook page

The Facebook page is your business's profile on the social network. It presents your company to your audience and can be used for various purposes such as:

• communication with your target users;
• publishing useful content related to your field;
• launching and managing advertising campaigns.

To create a page, follow these steps

• Log in to Facebook.
• Find Pages in the menu on the left.
• At the top left you will see a blue button "+Create a new page".
• Write the name and category that matches your business.
• Click "Create Page".
• Customize your page. Add a profile picture, cover photo and information about your business.
• Publish and communicate with your audience 🙂

Instagram account

Perhaps you're wondering if Facebook or Instagram is the better social network for your business?

It's important to mention that Meta's advertising platform allows you to advertise on Facebook and Instagram at the same time. So it's useful to have an account on Meta's "younger" social network as well.

Once you have a Facebook account, creating one on Instagram is quick and easy.

Your login details will be the same. You'll be able to sync information like your profile picture, name, and username so they're the same across both social networks.

• Download the Instagram app on your mobile device.
• Open it and it will automatically detect your Facebook account (if you are logged in on the same device).
• Follow the steps the app will walk you through.

It's a good idea to configure your account from personal to professional.

• This is made easy by the three bars in the top right corner of your profile.
• Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Account type -> Switch to professional account.
• Select a category that describes your business, then select Business.

⭐️ Advertising on Facebook with Meta Ads Manager

Meta Ads Manager gives you full control over goals, budget, audience selection, creative creation and other important settings for successful Facebook and Instagram advertising.

Through it, you can create reports and track a host of important metrics that show how successful your campaign has been such as CTR, Cost per result, ROAS and more.

Among the additional options offered by the tool is the A/B test of advertising campaigns with different creative elements or the creation of rules for the automatic management of advertising campaigns.

To run your first ad, you'll need to enter your payment information. This is done from the Billing section of Meta Ads Manager. Required:

• bank card details or Paypal account if you will be using one - the card will need to be verified with an automatic transaction;
• company details, if you want to be invoiced - enter your company's registration number and address and the system will automatically create an invoice after each payment;
• payment limit - here you choose how much you want to be charged for your payment method.

Meta Ads Manager ads follow this structure:

• Campaign - this is the first step where the purpose of the advertisement is determined. The advertising platform offers different objectives such as Sales, Driving traffic to your website or Brand Awareness and more.
• Ad set - there can be several ad sets in one campaign, each of them oriented to a different audience.
• Advertising - each ad group can contain multiple ads to test different creative, for example.

⭐️ Meta Business Suite

In addition to ads, you can create posts, track the messages and comments you receive, and find out more about your audience in the form of demographic data.

If you want to manage all these activities from one place, create a business manager account on business.facebook.com.

Once you have a business account you can add different business assets to it to build your business portfolio. Examples are Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, advertising accounts.

The structure in the usual case is as follows - a business account contains:

• a Facebook page;
• an Instagram account;
• one advertising account.

In another case where your company has several different sites that share a common payment method and advertising budget, the structure might be as follows:

• X number of Facebook pages;
• X number of Instagram accounts;
• one advertising account.

In addition to adding your Meta Business Suite accounts, you can also add your team members and define who has what permissions. Depending on the roles in your team, you may decide certain users can create posts and communicate with users.

Give others more freedom by giving them access to your advertising account and payment method. We encourage you to reserve admin rights for you and the most trusted people on your team.

Access to Meta Business Suite

You have three options for the level of access to give:

• Full control (or business admin): in this role the user can control all the settings of the business account, business accounts, intruments and people. Since there is also the option to delete the account in this role, it is best suited for business owners.

• Partial Access: In this option, users have access and can work only on tasks and business assets that are assigned to them. Such as members of your marketing team or external specialists such as a digital agency (link).

• Advanced options: This choice allows you to give advanced access to work on certain tasks. Typically used for users who need access to your company's financial information but don't have full control.

⭐️ Datasets

When a dataset is created, a unique ID is generated which is used to set up integrations such as Meta Pixel or Conversion API. With this ID, you can also view the action data you are interested in in the Events Manager.

When you create a new dataset, the ID will be the same for it and for the new pixel you are going to generate and so they will be linked in the Events Manager.

⭐️ Meta Pixel & Conversions API for Facebook Advertising

What is Meta Pixel?

In this way, you can track the actions that users perform on your website (events) and also measure the effectiveness of your advertising activities.

You can use the Meta pixel to:

• Show your ads to the right audience. By using the pixel and the actions you set it to measure, you can create audiences of people who have had certain activity on your website. For example, they visited a specific page, read a blog post, added a product to their cart or completed an order, and more.

• Get more orders. With the Meta auto-bid option, the algorithm takes information from the pixel and finds users who are more likely to perform the action you want.

• Measure the results of your advertising campaigns.

What is Conversions API?

This is an additional Meta tool that can work alongside the pixel to improve the performance of your campaigns.

This makes it easier to personalize and optimize ads, as well as analyze their results .

CAPI is also a good choice if you want to continue reaping the benefits of targeted remarketing advertising after third-party cookies disappear.

💡 Main similarities between Conversions API and Meta Pixel

Both tools are used to track user behavior. With CAPI and Meta Pixel you can get information about the number of conversions and their value.

This information in both tools is visible in both Meta Events Manager and Meta Ads Manager and can be used to target ads, measure results, and move users forward in the marketing funnel.

💡 Main differences between Conversions API and Meta Pixel

• The main difference is in the way user actions are tracked. While Pixel relies on cookies, CAPI sends signals directly from your servers to Meta's.

This makes it a more reliable choice because it doesn't depend on cookie bans or ad-blockers.

• CAPI can also be used to measure a wider range of actions as well as those with a delay. This means you can use it to monitor what happens later in the customer journey. This way you get a more complete picture of the results of your Facebook advertising.

• Because CAPI does not work with cookies, this tool respects user privacy , which has become a hot topic in recent times.

⚙️ How to configure Meta Pixel?

You need to create the pixel and paste the code on your website.

Then set the desired actions (events) that the pixel should measure - such as viewing a product, adding to cart, completing an order.

Once you've set up the actions that Pixel will measure, Meta advises that you enable the Conversions API. This will make your Facebook advertising even more effective.

Follow the steps:

• Open Meta Events Manager from Meta Business Suite -> All tools.
• Select Connect data sources and then Web.
• Press the Connect button.
• Select a name and click the Create button. This creates a new ID that will be used to label both your pixel and the new dataset that will group the events you will be tracking.
• In the following steps you must select

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Depending on your choice, follow the steps outlined in the Events Manager.

⭐️ Events and their role in your Facebook advertising

These actions can be of two types:

• Standard: they are the same for everyone and indicate a common activity by users.
• Personalized: these create rules that designate specific customer actions that are important to your business. For example, you can filter out all orders of certain products that are above a certain value.

Some examples of standard actions you can measure with the pixel are:

• viewing product page;
• add product to cart;
• performing a search within your site;
• sign up for a newsletter or sign up for a free trial;
• order completion, etc.

By tracking user activity on your page/app you can:

• target audiences who have performed certain actions, for example, added products to their cart but not completed their order;
• create Lookalike Audiences;
• help the algorithm find new users who are more likely to take a desired action.

You can set which actions your pixel will track by adding the appropriate code on certain pages or via the configuration tool in Meta Events Manager.

There you can also add parameters such as currency and order value to keep track of your revenue and expenses with accuracy.

⚙️ How to configure action measurement?

• Log in to Meta Events Manager.
• Select Data sources on the left side of the page.
• Select the data source (dataset) for which you want to set measurement actions.
• Go to settings.
• Select the Open event setup tool in Event setup.
• Type in your website address and click Open.
• Confirm or reject each proposed action.
• To add actions that do not appear in the list, select the Track new button or Track a URL and follow the instructions.
• Choose an action.
• Set parameters for it.

⭐️ Product catalogue

Here, each user sees the products they are interested in. They can be ones he has browsed, added to his cart or are similar to ones he has already bought.

You can take advantage of these options by creating a catalog through Commerce Manager or Meta Business Manager.

⚙️ How to create a product catalog with Commerce Manager?

• Give your catalogue a name.
• Choose a product category - whether you sell online or offer local services, real estate or something else.
• Connect the Meta Pixel to the catalog via the Events Manager.
• Choose which users or partners will have access to your catalogue.
• Upload your prodcts - via spread sheet or manually.

These are the initial steps you need to take to prepare your business for advertising on Facebook. It's nothing complicated, but there's quite a bit of work you need to do to make sure everything is configured correctly.

And when that happens, you can launch your campaigns and report the good results that will grow your business.

We are here to help. If you don't want to do everything we've described above yourself, feel free to contact us. The ADvantage digital agency team is made up of wizards who master the ins and outs of Facebook advertising with ease and will happily apply them to your marketing strategy.