Get started with advertising on Facebook and Instagram

By Meta Blueprint
Published: Jul 14, 2022
Duration 5m
Difficulty Beginner
Rating 1 star 2 stars 3 stars 4 stars 5 stars

Average rating: 4.8 610 reviews

Share Activity

This lesson teaches you how to set up and advertise with a Meta Ads Manager account.

This lesson will prepare you to:

Set up an Meta Ads Manager account.
Structure an ad campaign.
Work with the Meta Ads Manager campaign structure.

Create ads in Meta Ads Manager

Meta Ads Manager is the starting point for running more sophisticated ads across Meta technologies. It’s an all-in-one tool for creating ads, managing when and where they’ll run and tracking how well campaigns are performing. Ads Manager is designed for advertisers of every experience level to use.

Your business can use Ads Manager to manage ads and see an overview of your efforts across multiple technologies. When you see which elements of your campaigns perform best, you can adjust your ads to maximize your budget and time to achieve your business goals.

For example, Tahrrisha from Little Lemon wants to use the advanced tools available in Ads Manager to scale advertising for the restaurant. Tahrrisha will learn how a business can go from setting up Ads Manager to creating an ad.

_{Little Lemon is a fictitious business designed by Meta. Any similarities to content produced by real-life businesses aren't intentional.}

Prepare to start advertising in Ads Manager

Once you see which posts lead to the most interactions, you can use Ads Manager to help achieve your desired campaign outcomes.

Every personal Facebook account has an associated Ads Manager account, but advertisers will need permission from a Facebook business Page or Instagram business account to create ads.

To start running ads, complete these steps.

Use the arrows to learn more.

Step 1

Make sure you have a Facebook business Page. Once you create a Page, you’ll automatically have an Ads Manager account.

An account ID number, currency and time zone will automatically be assigned to you based on your location. You may change your currency and time zone, but doing so will set up a new Ads Manager account. Follow the popups to deactivate your old account. You’ll still be able to view old accounts in Ads Manager, but ads under the old account will stop running
Step 2

View your ad account settings to confirm your account information.
Step 3

Click the credit card icon on the left side to access payment settings. You must enter payment settings in order to run ads. Here, you can:
See your balance.
Enter your payment method. You may add more than one, and you can return to payment settings to remove or change your methods at any point.
Payment activity. You can view your payment activity per ad account.
Business info. This section will have your business name, address and currency.

Now that you’ve set up your account, let’s learn more about creating an ad to launch your first campaign.

Ads Manager campaign structure

Now that you’ve set up your account, let’s learn about some fundamentals of advertising in Ads Manager. Ads you create in Ads Manager have three parts: campaigns, ad sets and ads. Collectively, these parts are called the campaign structure. Knowing how they work together will help your ads run the way you want and reach the right people.

Tahrrisha has set up an Ads Manager account for Little Lemon and is ready to begin advertising. She has several unique goals and knows she will have to organize her ads to measure their success and ensure she is spending her money wisely.

Campaign

The first level of a campaign structure is the campaign, where you’ll choose an objective for your ad. An objective is your business goal, or what you want people to do when they see your ad. For example, you may want to increase traffic to your website or find the audience that will be most likely to purchase your product or service.

There are six objectives: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion and sales. Depending on your objective, you may be required to set a destination for your ad. The destination is where people will be directed when they click your ad. You can set your destination to an external website, a mobile app registered on the Meta for Developers site, Messenger or WhatsApp.

Ad sets

Once you set your objective, you can start designing ad sets. An ad set is nested under a campaign, and the settings you choose on this level will influence what choices are available to you at the ad level, the last level.

One of the most important things you’ll determine on the ad set level is your targeting strategy. You can have multiple ad sets within a single campaign, which will enable you to segment the audiences you are targeting your ads to later on.

A/B testing

You will also have the option to turn on A/B testing at the campaign, ad set or ad level. A/B testing enables you to change variables, such as your ad creative, audience or placement, to determine which strategy performs best and improve future campaigns. A/B testing will split your audiences evenly and measure the results in each group, so you can use it when you're trying to compare different advertising strategies or measure the difference a new strategy makes against your existing campaigns.

Placements, budget and scheduling

You’ll also choose your placements, set your budget and choose your scheduling options at the ad set level.

Use the arrows to learn more.

Placements, budget and scheduling

You’ll also choose your placements, set your budget and choose your scheduling options at the ad set level.

Use the arrows to learn more.

Placement
A placement determines where your ads will be displayed. You can decide which technology to run your ads on and whether the ads will appear in the feed, stories, in-stream (before, during or after video content) or in-article. You can choose these manually or turn on Advantage+ placements to run ads on all available placements.
Budget and scheduling
A budget is the amount you want to spend on your whole campaign. You can also set a schedule. You can run the ad set continuously from the day you set it or pick start and end dates for your campaign.

This final level is where you’ll customize the creative elements of your ad. You can have multiple ads within a single ad set to test various formats. At this level you’ll determine your ad creative, including visual elements such as copy, photo or video, and set an action button.

Use the hotspots to learn more.

Little Lemon sets up a campaign

Tahrrisha is ready to begin advertising for Little Lemon and wants to make use of the more advanced capabilities available in Ads Manager. She set up an Ads Manager account and understands the campaign structure. Now she’s ready to start building campaigns.

Now that Tahrrisha knows how to start using Ads Manager, she can start running ad campaigns for Little Lemon. In the next course, we’ll take a closer look at how a business can select an ad objective to align with its business goals.

Knowledge check

Which of the following settings do you decide at the ad set level?

Choose the correct answer

Key takeaways

Use Ads Manager to create and manage coordinated ad campaigns.

Define your campaigns structure by campaign, ad set and ad levels.

Keep learning

About ad creation in Meta Ads Manager

How to create a campaign in Meta Ads Manager

Get started with advertising on Facebook and Instagram

This lesson will prepare you to:

Create ads in Meta Ads Manager

Prepare to start advertising in Ads Manager

To start running ads, complete these steps.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Ads Manager campaign structure

Campaign

Ad sets

Placement

Budget and scheduling

Ad

Ad media

Copy

Action button

Little Lemon sets up a campaign

Knowledge check

Key takeaways

Keep learning