Facebook and Instagram Ad Campaigns

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Ads Manager

Ads Manager is your starting point for running ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Here you can select different ad formats to target your Core, Custom, or Lookalike Audiences. These formats include Video Ads, Image Ads, Carousel Ads, Shopping Ads, and Instant Experience Ads.

Ad Manager also allows you to control ad placements for your campaign. These placements can be used to encourage users to engage with an objective and ad format. They include Story Ads, Mobile Feed, Desktop Feed, Right Hand Side Ads, Instagram, Messenger, Marketplace, Reels Ads, and Audience Network.

When editing ad placements, you can also choose what devices and networks to target with your ads. In this context, ‘networks’ refers to Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network or Partner Sites.

It’s worth noting that your audience will respond differently to your ads across different channels and devices. Creating placement-specific target groups, called Ad Sets, allows you to focus your spend more effectively on your best performing segments.

Facebook Ads campaign structure

When building a campaign on Facebook, it should be noted that there is a three-tier structure to preparing ads on the Facebook ads platform. 

• The Campaigns tier is where overall campaign objectives are set. These determine what you want to accomplish with a paid campaign.
• The Ad Sets tier describes your targeting groups and determines your audiences, social networks, devices, and budgets.
• The Ads tier is where you generate your ad creative. For example, this is where you work with your photos, videos, ad text, and links.

Note: A campaign might have an overall objective that targets different audience segments. It is best practice, therefore, to have multiple audience segments in your campaign. This allows you to decide how much to spend on each, based on their performance.

Campaign objectives

Before you build an ad campaign, you need to decide what marketing objective you wish to address. There is a range of campaign objectives available to advertisers, including Brand Awareness, Reach, Traffic, Engagement, App installs, Video views, Lead generation, Messages, Conversions, Catalog sales, and Store visits.

It is important that marketers choose the most appropriate campaign objective to help them achieve their overall campaign goals. These objectives can be aligned with each stage of the marketing funnel.

For the Awareness stage, you can run ads that optimize for brand awareness or reach.

For the Consideration stage, you can use ads to drive traffic to a destination on or off Facebook. You can select to increase engagement of posts and ads. You can also get app installs, increase video views, get video views, and collect leads. Selecting ‘Messages’ will drive people to open conversations with the business in Messenger.

For the bottom of the marketing funnel, the Conversion stage, you can increase conversions on your website, promote products in your catalog, and get people to visit your store.

It is essential that you understand what you want to get out of your campaign, as that will dictate which objective you select.