In an oversaturated market, social media can be a great showcase for your company to reach your audience more easily and without major investments. In this context, Meta Ads, formerly known as Facebook Ads, has become a fundamental tool for many companies looking to reach new clients, increase sales, and boost their growth. In this post, we want to give you a brief guide to help you get started with creating your first campaigns.
What is Meta Ads?
Meta Ads is Meta’s platform that allows the creation and management of advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, based on the use of metadata. With this additional information, which provides the platform with greater context about the user, Meta Ads is able to display personalized and relevant advertisements.
This tool collects information from users’ metadata and their online behavior to identify patterns and trends, allowing the creation of personalized ads. For example, if someone has been searching for flights to a particular city, Meta Ads can use that data to show ads related to accommodations or travel to that destination.
But why choose Meta Ads over other tools? There are plenty of reasons:
- High visibility. Every company wants to reach as many people as possible. It we look at the total number on Meta’s platforms where advertising is commonly done, the reason for choosing this tool becomes clear. Facebook has over 3 billion users, making it the most used platform, while Instagram ranks third with 2 billion users.
- The potential it offers with its powerful targeting capabilities thanks to the data Facebook gathers daily about its users to know their interests
- Low costs that can allow a high profitability with a good return on investment.
- Variety of ad formats that it offers to adapt to your specific needs
How to create a campaign
Before anything else, it's important to clarify that in order to create a campaign on Meta Ads, you must have a business page or a Facebook Fan Page, which you can also link to your company’s Instagram account. Once that’s set up, you’ll need to create an ad account, just choose the currency you’ll use and your time zone, and you’ll be ready to start building your first campaign.
- Set your objective. Once you’ve logged into your Ads Manager account (for which you need to have a Facebook account), you can begin creating your campaign. The first step is to select your main objective, as Meta Ads allows you to run different types of campaigns according to what you want to achieve.
- Awareness. Increase your brand’s visibility.
- Traffic. Drive users to a specific destination, such as your website.
- Engagement. Designed to boost interaction with your posts.
- Potential customers. Focused on collecting information from potential customers interested in your products or services.
- App promotion. Focused on achieving that more people use your app.
- Sales. Focused on generating conversions, such as purchases or sign ups for a service.
- Name it. Once the objective is chosen, give the campaign a name so you can identify it easily.
- Budget and calendar. Now is time to define how you are going to distribute the budget you have, you can choose between one daily or total. In addition, you have to establish the dates in which your campaign will be active.
- Ubicación de los anuncios. Selecciona las plataformas de Meta en las que quieres que aparezca tu anuncio.
- Ad placement. Select the Meta platforms where you want your ad to appear.
- Create the ad. You have already configured the whole ad, but the ad itself still needs to be created. On the final screen of the process, you’ll be asked to choose the ad format that best fits your needs. Then, you’ll need to write the copy and add the visual elements. Among the different types of ads you can choose from, Meta Ads offers the following options:
- Image ads. Perfect for quickly grabbing attention
- Video ads. A great option to engage the audience with dynamic content, ideal for telling stories or explaining how your product or service works.
- Story ads. These allow for a closer connection with your audience and quickly capture their interest.
- Carousel ads. Perfect for showcasing multiple products or telling a story step by step, as they allow you to include several images or videos within a single ad.
- Collection ads. An excellent choice when promoting products, as they let users browse your offerings directly from the ad, making the process smoother.
- Playable ads. This option is ideal for promoting an app or game, since it allows users to interact with it before downloading.
Finally, don’t forget that it’s essential to track the performance of your ads in order to optimize them. Be sure to monitor metrics such as conversions, impressions, CTR and cost per result.