When it comes to your Meta (Facebook) ad campaign, there are a lot of things that you need to do to make sure that the campaign is a winning one.

Facebook ads have great potential to deliver amazing results, results that can transform your business, but you need to make sure that you follow these “must dos” during the initial set up phase in order for your campaign to be successful. So, let’s take a quick look.

Steps 1 – 4: Setting Up Your Account

These first four steps are all about setting up your account.

Set Up a Meta Business Suite

The first thing that you’re going to want to do is to set up a Facebook Business Suite. This is a single platform from which you can manage both Facebook and Instagram simultaneously, as well as your paid social media campaigns.

Install the Meta Pixel on Your Site

The pixel is absolutely crucial to your campaign. It is a must do before you set anything up. The pixel is a piece of code that allows Facebook & your website to communicate. You’ll need to add this code to your website, and then check that it’s working in Events Manager. Having the pixel on site means you’ll be able to track what your Facebook campaign does on your website, like generate leads or purchases. It also allows you to create audiences from certain actions on your site, for example you can build an audience of everyone who has visited your website within a certain timeframe.

Verify Your Domain With Facebook

Verifying your domain is important if you want to optimise your campaign to conversions (tip, yes you probably do!). This is again a piece of code that you’ll need to put on your website. It basically binds your Meta Business account with your website.

Set Up and Configure Web Events

Web events are actions that are taken on your website. You can set these up in events manager using the ‘events set up tool’. Once they’re set up, you’ll need to configure them, eg prioritise your events.

Steps 5 – 8: Building Your Campaign

These are the steps that you want to take when you’re actually building the campaign.

Optimise for Conversions

If you optimise to the traffic objective (a mistake a lot of businesses make), then all you get is website traffic. That’s not a relevant business outcome. You want to optimise to conversions for the majority of your campaigns, as this will give your campaign much more chance of delivering the objectives you’re looking for eg leads or sales.

Create Lookalike Audiences

With a lookalike audience, you can reach an audience of new, yet relevant prospects, as it’ll be built from your existing datasets. You basically ask Facebook to go out and find users who look similar to one of your existing audiences eg your website audience. Using them is a good way of ensuring your activity is broad but still relevant to your brand, as the audience has been built from your own data.

Examples of good datasets to build lookalike audiences from are newsletter databases, Facebook & Instagram engagement audiences, and previous purchasers, or audiences that have performed high intent actions on your website.

Use Multiple Creatives

If you want to build the ultimate ad campaign, you’ve got to have some diversity in your creative. It’s no good using the same tricks over and over – customers grow tired of those quite quickly. Instead, use multiple types of creative like photos, videos and carousels. Ideally, you want to have at least 2 or 3 different creatives within 1 campaign.

Optimise Ads For Feeds and Story Placements

Creative for the feed is very different from creative for stories. One piece of creative is unlikely to fit both. That’s why you need to create two sets of creative; one for the feed (square 1080 x 1080), and one for the stories placement (vertical 1080 x 1920).

Having your creative optimised for both placements will mean your campaign has a better chance of performing optimally, as users will see creative built for the placement they’re seeing it on.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to Facebook ad campaigns, you have to do a certain set of things to make sure that they’re affective. A paid advertising campaign is a great way to reach your audience, and deliver objectives like leads, sales, event sign ups etc, but you have to do it properly. If you don’t take the time to set up the campaign in the right way, you won’t get the results that you want.