Did you know Facebook has almost 2.5 billion users? That’s a lot of people for your e-commerce needs. Imagine how many people you could get to visit your store with Facebook ads!
But do you know how to create Facebook ads? It would be best if you had an easy, reliable way to promote your dropshipping store. Learning how to use Facebook ads, you can bring in more traffic and see your ROI grow.
Use this comprehensive guide to navigate Facebook’s Business Manager. Before you know it, you’ll learn how to create eye-catching Facebook ads for your online business.
Exploring the Facebook Ads Manager
You can use different tools for ad management on Facebook and other platforms. For learning how to create Facebook ads your first time, you’ll benefit from its built-in Ads Manager.
Using this business tool, you can create various ad types in a multitude of ad sets. Ad sets are merely a compilation of created ads you can schedule and budget ad spends for. Through Ad Manager, you can also create ad campaigns.
You’ll benefit from its real-time ad reporting and the ability to track campaign performance. You can run A/B test campaigns for different target audiences. This data allows you to set up optimized campaigns.
If you’re uncomfortable with Facebook ads or how to create them, you’ll find the guided, quick creation helpful. For easy duplication of ads, ad sets, and campaigns, use Ads Manager. Make informed changes to your ads with custom reporting options.
You also get the flexibility of Facebook’s mobile Ads Manager. You can create and monitor from anywhere, making optimized ad campaigns more accessible. Now that you’re familiar with Ads Manager, you need to learn how to create an account.
How to Create Facebook Business Ad Account
Your first step to creating a business ad account means creating a business page on Facebook. If your business doesn’t already have one, it’s vital to connect and redirect customers to your dropshipping efforts.
After creating your business page, confirm your ad account information. Do this in the settings menu through your Ads Manager. In settings, you can change your time zone or currency as needed.
Save these changes and set up your payment method(s). You can set up multiple ways of payment. On the payment settings page, you can set account spending limits.
Use this button to change, remove, or reset your account spending limit. After you make the needed changes, save by selecting the set limit button. With these basic features covered, it’s time you learn how to create an ad campaign.
How to Create a Facebook Ad Campaign
Within the Ads Manager, select the campaign tab. Click on the create button to begin. Begin by selecting basic settings for any new campaign, ads, and ad sets.
You can also duplicate existing campaigns in the future. When you create top-performing ads and campaigns, this is a valuable time saver. After creating a campaign, you must refine it with editing.
Continue to the editing screen, and you’ll see an expanded view. In this panel, you can select your campaign objective, audience, ad placement, and format. With these simple steps, you’re ready for a deep dive into each set of the editing panel.
Choosing a Campaign Objective
You want to know how to create Facebook ads without overspending. If you didn’t know, overspending on ads is one of the most common risks for dropshipping. Choosing the right campaign object saves you time and money.
Your selected objective must align with your sales goals. If you’re announcing a new product or site, this is the cornerstone of your campaign objective. Naming your campaign means assigning the right conversion event.
Conversion events result from desired actions by users. The users can be your current or prospective customers. Conversions occur when customers act the way you want them to. Below are the types of conversion events available through Facebook Ads.
- Brand awareness: recognizable images or qualities associated with your business on behalf of consumers
- Local awareness: how much people recognize your business in its physical address
- Reach: based on how many people see your ad across the various placement options
- Site traffic: how much your ads redirect to actual site visits for your dropshipping store
- Engagement: extends beyond reach, based on click-throughs, reactions, likes, shares, and comments
- App installs: if your ad directs customers to download an app, the number of downloads
- Video views: the number of times users view your video ads across placements
- Lead generation: the number of quality leads which convert to sales prospects
- Conversions: the number of successful conversion events from any created ad set
- Product catalog sales: revenue generated from ads directly linked to goods
- Store traffic: number of visits to your physical store or virtual dropshipping store
- Messages: the number of conversations started by ad placements
Identify which of these conversion events is the most valuable for your business. These determine your campaign objective for the ads and ad sets you will create. After identifying your goal, you must name your ad campaign.
Naming your ad campaign depends upon the conversion events you chose. You may need to create multiple ad campaigns for your business. You can use the following elements to help you determine the best name for a campaign:
- Client name or website: if your ad campaign reflects a specific client or website, use this name for your campaign
- Target location: if your ad campaign is directed at specific locations, use this to distinguish from similar campaigns for different areas
- Custom audiences: if your campaign objective is directed at specific audiences for A/B testing of new demographics
- Creative type: if you test different types of ad formats (e.g., carousel, video), use this to identify a campaign
- Facebook page: You may have more than one Facebook page. Connect the related page to your campaign
These are just a few examples of what to name a Facebook ad. However, you need to know more about how to create Facebook ads than a campaign name or objective. It’s time for you to learn about custom audiences on Facebook for better targeting.
Naming Your Ad Campaign
Naming your ad campaign depends upon the conversion events you chose. You may need to create multiple ad campaigns for your business. You can use the following elements to help you determine the best name for a campaign:
- Client name or website: if your ad campaign reflects a specific client or website, use this name for your campaign
- Target location: if your ad campaign is directed at specific locations, use this to distinguish from similar campaigns for different areas
- Custom audiences: if your campaign objective is directed at specific audiences for A/B testing of new demographics
- Creative type: if you test different types of ad formats (e.g., carousel, video), use this to identify a campaign
- Facebook page: You may have more than one Facebook page. Connect the related page to your campaign
These are just a few examples of what to name a Facebook ad. However, you need to know more about how to create Facebook ads than a campaign name or objective. It’s time for you to learn about custom audiences on Facebook for better targeting.
Targeting the Audience You Want
You have several options for custom audiences through Ads Manager. Facebook allows different targeting filters for your custom audience. You need to understand these marketing segments before learning any targeting techniques.
- Location: varies from city to state, region, and country, including travel and recent moves
- Age: significant for targeting critical demographics based on purchase behavior, income, and other related factors.
- Gender: Facebook no longer defines genders; this allows for greater flexibility in niche markets
- Languages: if your brand is multilingual, you can interact with various countries this way (beyond location alone)
- Relationship: relationship statuses impact purchase patterns, such as trips for two, engagement rings, and adult devices
- Education: from high school to university, this helps narrow down audiences beyond age.
- Work: work may also determine what consumers buy (e.g., educators, lawyers, doctors, nurses)
- Financial: income is not overtly in user profiles. However, Facebook’s algorithms estimate users’ income levels automatically. The estimates are based on the users’ previous purchase behavior and their present content. Facebook uses factors such as hotel stays, travels, and the type of car for the determination of one’s financial status.
- Home: different from location, which can vary for trips and temporary events
- Ethnic affinity: certain cultures and ethnicities offer unique marketing opportunities (heritage trips, cultural attire, etc.)
- Generation: connected to age, but important to distinguish larger custom audiences
- Parents: users with or without parents on Facebook generate specialized chances for custom audiences
- Politics (the U.S. only): allows for important connections to media subscriptions, political gear, and more
- Life events: new employment, engagement or marriage, birthday, and a few other events allow for highly targeted ads in different industries.
- Interests: users choose these based on every type of page (celebrity, entertainment, other businesses, meme groups, and more)
- Behaviors: when users get online, when they’re most active, and what they do online
- Connections: whom the user connects with personally and professionally
These custom audience filters work well when combined. You can target broader demographics, then narrow markets with technical information. Consider these when you approach the following targeting techniques for your future ad creation.
Targeting Techniques
If you’re stuck on creating a Facebook ad campaign with custom audiences, use these techniques for reference. They serve as possible solutions to help you select custom audiences for your business or industry. E-Commerce ads can benefit from tactics like those suggested below.
- Audience exclusions: for the custom audience you need; don’t let other market niches overlap with a potentially more interactive one
- Behaviors: Consider your target persona and their behaviors. Using your knowledge about them to set the proper behaviors here. Setting the correct behaviors could generate more leads and increase your ROI
- Income: show ads to people with disposable income if you sell high-end/expensive goods. Location: consider users who recently moved; offer discounts if your business connects with their new needs or target travelers
- Life events: allow industry-specific niches, such as wedding dresses, honeymoon packages, and engagement rings
- Test international markets: use languages and expand your region to discover previously untapped markets
These are just a few samples of targeting techniques. Your business and industry will help you narrow down which custom audiences you need to filter for. After determining whom to advertise to, you need to set your budget.
Budgeting for Account Spending Limits
Learning how to create Facebook ads also means learning how to budget for ad spend. As mentioned above, you can set account spending limits through your Ads Manager settings. It would help if you had a deeper understanding of these limits and how they shape your ad campaigns’ success.
Your options for timing, bidding, placement, and relevance metrics impact your budget. How much money you spend depends on your choice for daily and lifetime budgets.
A daily budget is an average spent on ads every day. Your lifetime budget is the maximum spend during the period of an ad set. Setting these budgets is determined by your needed ROI, ad scheduling, and delivery type.
When setting your budget, you can’t alter a budget type after creating the ad set. For your first ad campaign, be careful to choose the right option for your ads. Consider a daily budget and unlimited campaign duration for the most flexibility in your first campaign.
Ad Delivery
To determine how much you want to spend (before bidding), consider the cost of your product(s) or service(s). Make sure to factor in production and profit. Also, consider how much aim to sell and your current conversion rates.
These considerations impact how much you choose to spend when you set your daily and lifetime budgets. Your daily budget can flex depending on its selected delivery schedule. You can choose for continuous display or set an end date for ads.
A delivery schedule caps how much you spend per week with its selected end time. Continuous ads run through your lifetime budget more quickly. A daily budget for continuous ad set display slows spending but decreases how often your ad displays.
Whatever delivery type you select, standard, or accelerated depends on the considerations discussed above. If you want a punchier, shorted campaign, choose the accelerated delivery type. For slower, longer campaigns, consider the standard (and Facebook recommended) delivery type.
Choosing a delivery type depends on your KPIs. For site traffic, prioritize as for click-throughs and page views. For site conversion, select the conversions objective.
You can also choose how often Facebook charges you for ad conversions. You can choose between an ad impression or page like. Ad impressions are engagements like click-throughs. On the other hand, page likes are simple thumbs-ups from each new like your business or product page receives.
Bidding Strategy
A valuable factor to consider when considering your Facebook ad budget is setting bid control. The bid control allows you to set the maximum amount you’d like to pay for an ad. The bidding cap applies to standard delivery and scheduled ads display.
You can explore other bidding strategies to stretch the impact of purchased ads on Facebook. With Facebook’s lowest-cost target cost bidding, you have options.
Lowest cost bidding has you pay the least for ads purchased. This cost depends on your campaign objective(s) and conversion event(s). Using the lowest bid option tells Facebook only to increase your bid when needed and only within your budget.
A bid cap helps you avoid overspending. Don’t bid too low, or you run the risk of low exposure for purchased ads. High bids aren’t something to stress over; you still pay the lowest amount possible in the auction.
Target cost bidding communicates a target cost to Facebook. Targets are set using your conversion event. When you place a target cost, Facebook tries to meet this target as your ad’s average cost.
Target cost aims to help keep a consistent cost per conversion. It may require raising your ad budget and rescaling your ad campaign. If this is your first campaign, you may want to use the lowest cost bidding instead.
1- How to Create Perfect Facebook Ads
Creating the perfect Facebook is more than budgeting or campaign objectives. These help you begin campaigns but don’t inform the creative type you choose. You have different options for the ad types you can create.
- Carousel: make an ad with two or more scrollable images or videos
- Image: Create up to six different varieties of an advertisement with one image
- Video: use one video for a video ad
- Slideshow: loop a video ad with up to 10 variations of a product (Ex: different colors, sizes, and angels)
- Canvas: combine image and video ads for more impact
These ad types come with limitations on pixel size. Your ad copy also has limitations. See these highlighted for your reference below.
- Text: 125 characters
- Headline: 25 characters
- Link text: 30 characters
- Display URL: 30 characters
- Images: 1200×628 pixels
- Video: 600×315 or 600×600 minimum pixels (dependent on display)
- Carousel: 1080×1080
Now you know your limits and specifications for image, video, and text. After creating an ad or ad set, you need to learn about ad placement.
2- Select Ad Placement
Ad placement depends on your budget and campaign objective. You can know how to create the perfect Facebook ad, but it’s useless without the proper placement. You can purchase ad space on various places on Facebook, Instagram, the Audience Networks, or Messenger.
On Instagram, you can place ads in the feed and stories. On Messenger, you can set as in the inbox or as sponsored messages. Facebook and the Audience Network offer even more options. For Facebook:
- Feed
- Instant Articles
- In-stream videos
- Right column
- Marketplace
- Stories
And for the Audience Network:
- Native, banner, and interstitial
- In-stream videos
- Rewarded videos
Placing ads on any or multiple of these spaces depends on the campaign objectives you chose above. Use the following list as a reference when choosing your ad placement.
- Brand awareness: Facebook and Instagram
- Engagement: Facebook and Instagram
- Video views: Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network
- App installs: Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network
- Traffic (for website clicks and app engagement): Facebook and Audience Network
- Product catalog sales: Facebook and Audience Network
- Conversions: Facebook and Audience Network
After budgeting, scheduling, creating, and placing ads, you have more to do. The final, ongoing step for creating a Facebook ad campaign that works is monitoring and analytics.
3- Monitor and Analyze
You can monitor your ads, ad sets, and ad campaigns on Facebook’s Ads Manager. Google Analytics can help with analytics for site traffic and interactions with Facebook ads from other platforms. Use this to monitor your ad’s success and the competition.
Be sure to monitor your (and your competitors’):
- Images and visuals: on-brand, attractive, and informative content that stands out from the crowd
- Headlines: eye-catching titles that attract customer engagement
- Ad copy: keywords and search queries that generate more visibility and leads
- Offers and promos: your ads should increase the odds of your campaign goals with offers or promos
Studying these factors gives you valuable information about the potential opportunities to drive more traffic to your business. Using data from successful campaigns helps you build up towards an even better ad.
With your analytics from Ads Manager, you can mark peak-performing ads. Make sure to export this data for future use. Remember that you can duplicate previous campaigns.
Duplicating your top-performing campaigns saves you time and effort in the future. After this review, be sure to pause ads that need updating. Edit your underperforming ads as needed. Run A/B testing to make sure your ad sets meet the campaign objectives you set.
After monitoring your ad campaign results for some time, you should calculate some critical factors for your business. These include:
- Budget spent: both daily and lifetime, their stability and bids placed
- KPI achievement: how much of your desired conversion events were reached
- Customer lifetime value (LTV): what customers get from your ad campaigns
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): how much revenue your placed, scheduled, and purchased ads generate
Once you have calculated these factors, it’s time to eliminate the fluff. Turn off ads that simply are not working. These drain your account budget and offer little ROAS.
Define the optimal design for your future ads based on top-performing analytics. Duplicate this for future campaign promotion for your e-commerce store
Discover Other Ways to Advertise Your New Online Business
Promoting your new online business doesn’t have to be complicated. Using this guide, you should know how to create Facebook ads (and more.) If you’re still wary of advertising your business, take it slow.
Your drop shipping experience doesn’t have to be daunting, either. Shop1 wants you to feel prepared and capable. It’s part of the reason we provide guides like this for you.
It’s also why we simplify setting up your dropshipping website. For other helpful insights on your dropshipping needs, contact us. We’ll talk you through your options and offer valuable insight on promoting your new online business.
