How do I create Facebook ads?

Although Facebook provides instruction on how to create ads in their support documentation, the following guidelines and recommendations have been compiled by Tapcast’s Audience Intelligence Team to streamline your decision making so that you can create ads that yield a high return on ad spend.

If you have multiple audiences that you want to run against each other, Tapcast strongly recommends that you consider doing so in a split test to better determine the best performer. 

The basics

If you are new to Facebook ads and want step-by-step instruction, use Guided Creation. 

If you are more comfortable with Facebook ad creation and would like the freedom to set up the campaign, ad set, and ad elements in any order, use Quick Creation.

Depending on the choice you make, keep this in mind:

• Guided Creation: when using Guided Creation, your campaign will go live (pending review from Facebook) immediately upon clicking Confirm. In other words, you do not need to review and publish; it will be published immediately.
• Quick Creation: when using Quick Creation, you will save your campaign, ad set, and ad elements as a draft. You then have two options:

• Edit these elements in any order, and publish them immediately in the editing pane by clicking the “Publish” button.
• Or make edits and save them as a draft by clicking the “Close” button so that you can come back and edit and publish them at a later point in time by clicking the “Review and Publish” button.

Creating a new Campaign

• Name of Campaign: Campaigns can be organized to distinguish advertising objectives, products, or anything meaningful to your business. Assign your Campaign a meaningful name. You may wish to preface the name with the date for sorting purposes.
• Buying Type--You are offered two choices:

• Auction = Bid to reach your audience for the lowest possible price (recommended)
• Reach and Frequency = Pay a fixed price to predictably reach your brand’s audience

• Campaign Objective: Several options are offered. Select the one that best fits your advertising goals for this Campaign.

• Traffic = Send more people to to a destination
• Lead generation = Drive more sales leads
• Page likes = Get more Page likes
• Conversions = Drive more people to an action on your website or app (recommended)
• A lot more, but these are the most common ones.

Creating a new Ad Set

• Ad Set Name: Ad Sets under the same Campaign are distinguished by their audiences, so it’s suggested that the assigned name reflects the target audience in some meaningful way. Again, you may wish to preface the name with the date.
• Conversion: If your Campaign objective is Conversions, then you will need to select where the conversion event takes place. If it is on a website, then you will further need to select the event from the dropdown list.

• Purchases
• Leads
• Registrations
• Custom Conversions: if you select this, you’ll be prompted to also choose or create a custom conversion

• Dynamic Creative: Automatically delivers the best combinations of your creative assets. It finds the best ad creative combinations by taking the components of the ad (images, videos, titles, descriptions, CTAs, etc.) and running different combinations of them. If you wish to take advantage of this feature, please see the Facebook instructions.
• Budget & Schedule: Set your daily or lifetime budget for this Ad Set here. You can also schedule when it should start and stop running, if you need to. Otherwise, leave it at the default setting.
• Audience: Ideally, you will have saved the audience you wish to use in your Asset Library prior to creating the Ad Set, in which case you will simply select it from the dropdown.  If you have not yet, you can create an optimized or brand new audience with Audience Builder and then move it to the Asset Library.
• Placement--You are presented with two choices:

• Automatic: Facebook will place your ads where they are likely to perform the best (recommended)
• Edit Placements: Choosing this option allows you to fine tune where your ads will be placed--by device, platform, operating system, and more. There is generally no need to do this, unless you want to restrict your ad placements in some way.

Creating a new Ad

• Ad Name: Give your Ad a name that is descriptive and allows you to easily distinguish it from your other Ads. If you ever use that same combination of image/video and ad copy in a different Ad, use that same name for it consistently. Conversely, if you ever create a similar Ad in which there is even a small difference (i.e. slightly different wording, different CTA, etc.), make sure to give each variant a unique name. Doing so will yield benefits when you analyze Ad data, allowing you to attribute observed performance to the appropriate creative variables.
• Identity: You will be asked to identify the Facebook Page and Instagram Account to associate your ads to. A Facebook Page is required, and although an Instagram Account is not, it’s recommend that you associate one as well to get better results from your ad.
• Image/Video:

• Images and videos should have been uploaded to the Asset Library beforehand to make it easy to include them in your ads.
• Visual content should meet Facebook standards.
• See Tapcast’s recommendations on how to select and create visual content for your ads.

• Ad copy:

• Adhere to Facebook’s Community Standards.
• See Tapcast's guidelines for preparing your ad copy.
• Make sure Ad Preview is on so you can see how your ad will look as you compose it. Pay attention to how it will appear on mobile platforms. You may need to shorten the text to ensure that your message isn’t misconstrued due to where it gets cut off on mobile, for example.