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# The Ultimate Facebook Newbie Tutorial 2018 - Part 1 - The Almighty Ad Manager (18)

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Almighty? Yes al...........wait for it........ MIGHTY! Let start off with some reasons why the ad manager is so good;

- it's on point, with not too much bells and whistles

- it's understandable, even for someone with little internet knowledge

- it's fast, and by this I mean within a few steps you have a campaign live with great potential

- it has so many features, but they don't distract you from the core (setting up a campaign fast)

- amazing targeting, this feature you will find no where else and has to be pointed out specially

- comprehensive analytics, for a "free" tool you get so many insights regarding the campaigns you run


Now it's time to take you on journey, a journey where we go step by step through the ad manager and experience the possibilities a little bit.

Step One - Setup the ad account



Above you see the first page when you enter the ad manager of Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager/). Choose the options which are applicable for you personally. If you want to change the time zone later on, this will de-activate the current account, so you lose all ads and history and you have to start from scratch.

Step Two - Choose objective



Based on the objective you choose, Facebook will adjust the ad manager with features, for example bidding options and different ad formats. In general you choose the goal you have in mind, probably "conversions". This means you have to install a pixel later on and this is recommended for most campaigns. If you want to skip this part you can choose "traffic", especially if you are a newbie. Later on the pixel part will be explained so don't panic :-).

It's recommend to use a pixel, especially when doing high CPA offers for example.

Step Three - Set up audience targeting



This part is very interesting and important. Your targeting needs to be on point, especially when you are testing campaigns for the first time. As a newbie I assume you don't have a look-a-like audience yet. If you have it and want to get most out of it, wait for part 4 where I explain targeting and the look a like audiences more in-depth.

For now it's just plain simple selecting country, age, gender, languages (for example if you advertise in Canada, people are speaking French and English, so select the relevant language which matches your ad text, lander and offer). The possibilities to mix and match "interest" and "behaviour" are enormous. Try to laserpoint as much as possible, but make sure your potential audience (see the part on the right) is at least 100k (kinda personal tho' too). More about this will be revealed in part 4. At last, you are able to save your audience settings for future usage.

If you are going to test first campaigns, make sure your targeting is as laserpointed as possible.

Step Four - Choosing placements

Which placements you are going to select depends on several things. For example booking a holiday will not be done often via a mobile phone, but advertising a mobile app or game ofcourse makes sense to solely select mobile devices. Within that you still have lots of options to choose from, am I going to rule out Instagram or will I include it. In general, IF lander and offer are optimized for mobile devices, I suggest to do your first tests only on the mobile newsfeed. This gives you the best idea if your targeting and ads are on point.



From their you can later on duplicate the best ads and only change placements to measure differences clearly when it comes to CTR, CPC and CR eventually.

Step 5ive - Budget & Planning

As a newbie you probably have a limited budget, luckily you can get decent results for just a couple of bucks a day. Some prefer to create 1 ad set - several images - 20 dollar per day. Others prefer 4 ad sets, each 3 images, setting 5 dollars per ad set (total 20 dollar too). Since Facebook advertising is mainly about creating appealing ads and precize targeting I advice to test as many images as you can do without exceeding your budget.



As you can see you can keep a campaign going until you pause it, or set a certain time to end (if you set a certain time to end, you can't proceed with the campaign after expiring). If you know a certain campaign runs until mm/dd/yyyy ofcourse this option is ideal. Also you need to select this when you want to use day-parting.

You can select to get charged per click or per view. I have never worked with CPM's so I prefer CPC, in fact it shouldnt have any effect on the performance of your ads. Ofcourse you can set a rule - to not exceed X amount per click/view.

At last, you have an option to get faster results. Honestly I have never tried it and I doubt it will give high quality traffic. If you launch new ads in the morning/around afternoon you will see results coming in quite fast already. At the end it's not a sprint, but a marathon to understand Facebook, it's algo and how to become profitable with it.

Make sure you spread your budget wisely on multiple ads, with same targeting/settings etc to get a feeling what images/text work best.

Step Six - Page Identity

Besides having good ads and precize targeting the Facebook page you are using for advertising is quite important too. Compare it with sender name of an e-mail. Would you open an e-mail from "Cheap Insurance Quotations" or rather something like "The Financial Magazine". One thing is for sure, if you are using a Facebook page which doesn't sound/look trustworthy enough, your CTR will be clearly lower than using an authority or trusted Facebook page.



You can create unlimited Facebook pages and even split-test. Same ads, same targeting, different Facbook pages to see how it effects CTR. If you want to advertise on Instagram too, you have to connect an existing Instagram page.

The Facebook page you are going to use has quite an impact on CTR, make sure its relevant and somehow trustworthy.

Step Seven - Selecting The Right Format

Most people (including me) are still using the single image. Especially if you are a newbie it's kinda hard to pick good ones from start. Before I already mentioned to test as much as images as possible (even images you "think" won't work), this way you create a certain affection to "naturally" pick the good ones. It's important to realize you have to stand out on the timeline of a consumer, they get so many impulses you have to make sure they see your ad. Bright colors, contrast, "movement" in the image and human faces are known to work well in general.



Other formats to choose from are; - carousel (mostly used by webshops to show multiple products), - single video (video is probably becoming the new standard, video's appeal in general more than images), - slideshow (kinda dull in my honest opinion) and canvas (in general not really suitable for affiliate marketing, more likely to work for branding or at least telling a bit more about the product than usual).

Step Eight - Select Images

One of the most important parts of setting up your ads!



Facebook makes it possible to upload 6 images in an ad set. From my experience (and others) it's best to upload max 4 images in an ad set. If you upload 6 images you will see very quickly 1-3 images don't get much attention/traffic/views as the other 3. But it doesn't mean these images are bad performers. Spread 9-12 images over multiple ad sets so all images get the right attention from the FB algo.

Which images sizes are best for which formats you can easily find via Google or such.

Avoid using stockphoto's as much as possible, it's probably the first place competitors search for, besides that in general these images are too slick and not really convincing. Matuloo (big up!) wrote an interesting post were to find the best images; https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...s-2017-Edition

Test as much as creatives as you can to get a feeling what works. This will help you a lot to get into green eventually.

Step Nine - Setting up the ad copy

The fun and creative part starts here. Now you are going to come up with text, headlines and call to actions to interest consumers to click on your ad.



I still don't know why Facebook calls the part below the image "headline". I think a headline in general means the title above the image/story, but oke. Above the image, the "text" part, you explain the product benefits often, in whatever form you come up with. Play a bit with things like fear, scarcity, eagerness, shocking to creating some kind of interest/desire.

Use the "headline" for a clear call to action. "Sign Up Now - It's Simple!" - "Download While It's Hottt!" - "Get Yours Now Before Your Friends Do" etc etc.

Adjust the button to the most relevant option; Webshop -> Shop Now button, Tickets -> Book Now button etc etc. I hope one day Facebook gives an opportunity to vary a bit with colors/shapes/text, at the moment it looks like a button from the 90's.

The "advanced options" (sometimes hidden, but don't skip this part!) are very interesting to put the cherry on top. The link description part is very underrated but gives you the opportunity to create trustworthyness towards the consumer. Text like "already downloaded 1.233.000 times" or made-up reviews like "This product is awesome, thanks!" make the ad copy complete.

Especially if you are running an affiliate offer you must come up with a good display link, otherwise it will show some tracker link or such which makes the consumer doubt to click on the ad copy. Use stuff like secure.offer.com/special-sign-up-here or such to make the link look attractive. It doesn't have to be an existing link/domain (lol).


Step Ten - Conversion Tracking

Facebook here gives you the opportunity to add a Facebook pixel, app events or offline events. Honestly I have never used this part when pushing affiliate campaigns. Call me lazy, call me ignorant, call me stubborn, everybody has it's way of making money ofcourse.



Thanks for reading! I hope the setup is clear and the small tips I gave already triggered your creativity how to setup a good ad. Next parts will be more in-depth and cover most topics from the ad manager and a lot more!


NOTE: It might be possible your lay-out/setup of the ad manager is different, this could vary based on geo for example.

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This dude is on fire !!! Great job stickupkid (Y)

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Thanks! Excited to reveal some proper and useful insights at the next parts!

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Great tutorial! Already found few ideas to test tomorrow. Thank you a lot, bro and keep going

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BOOM! First bomb dropped! Looking forward to the next one!



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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would you use your personal facebook account or would you open a new facebook account and then create ad manager?

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Age and natural activity are very important, so I would suggest to start with your personal account yes. Making new accounts and start advertising right away will not work since FB is a social network and not an advertising platform.

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Amazing!
Thanks for the contribution!

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Thanks for the post. Following up the guide! Pretty well detailed!

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Thanks for this great initiative. I will follow your thread closely as I am preparing to set up my first FB campaign in years. I'm still checking on some basic things as advertisng on FB has changed a bit since 2014 (when I was active there)

As I understand the fanpage is meant for building trust towards FB and your audience mainly? I ask this because when I promoted games back in 2014, people would arrive at my fanpage first before they were redirected to a lander. Argument was that FB didn't like ppl leaving their platform. I even iframed the lander in fanpages a few times.

So do I understand correctly that clicking my ad should redirect my audience to my lander directly and not to my fanpage?

I know it's a really basic funnel question but I haven't found a clear answer on STM anywhere

Thx!
Sjoerd

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That's correct Sjoerd, it's now mainly to gain trust to let people click on the ad, which is a clickout to a page you put in the ad manager. You can do it to your fanpage too ofcourse, whatever you like!

Apologies to all that the next chapters are taking a bit long, last weeks were crazy in very different ways.

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Just wanted to let you know that since a few weeks, I can now also run ads on IG with only a Facebook Page.

Even though on the screenshot you posted in the OP, it was already possible I am noticing. Might want to update the text.

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Thanks for the addition! I am afraid when I am at the last chapter, I need to rewrite most chapters again ;-)

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Very helpful stuff stickupkid.
I want to run first few campaigns following stm closely. I have had my FB ad account banned, currently figuring out on how to get started again - was looking on stm as well for the answer but yet to find any concrete answer.
Thanks for such elaborated tutorial It means a lot to newbie like me.

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Thanks man! On this forum you won't find much about alternatives for getting new accounts. Try the search function on the forum, otherwise you will find answers on Blackhatworld.com. Good luck, hopefully you will start a follow along soon!

*apologies for not writing any new stuff lately, hope to pick it up in 2019 again!

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I wanted to expand on this point going into 2019, because what stickupkid said is more important than it looks.

In the past, you could get by by choosing a page name that was relevant to the offer/niche you were driving traffic to and maybe creating a few posts to not have the page be completely empty. After that the main focus would be on driving traffic to ads.

That has changed and will continue to change. The main driving factors here are the scandals FB has been dealing with over the late part of the year, and also their general need to ensure a high value engaging platform that users trust which ultimately drives their main form of revenue.

The two main take aways are that your costs are going to be higher, and your reach lower if you ignore your fan page instead of giving FB what it wants/needs.

Secondly and more importantly, the reason FB works so well for marketers is that they work hard to make it "safe" for users to click ads. Don't do stuff that abuses and erodes user trust. If you have been paying attention to the news and changes on FB. You can see how easily features and functionality can be taken away.

That said, what exactly does FB Value?

Total Page Likes: The more likes the better. Also, due to the fact that there's now an authorization process after a page reaches a certain size, FB is able to "trust" the bigger authorized pages more than the smaller unauthorized pages. (https://www.facebook.com/business/ne...tion-for-pages)

Page Growth: Is your page growing or shrinking? These are signals of relevancy, and value creation. I haven't read the following anywhere, but it would make sense that organic growth is valued more than paid growth. FB already tracks paid and non-paid growth, so it's easy to assign different weights to both in their algorithm.

Activity: Are you posting any content to your page? A page with no posts provides little to know value to FB.

Engagement: Posts are important, but even more important are Engaging Posts/pages. How do fans and non-fans engage with the content you post? Are you getting the responses Facebook uses as signals for quality interactions? Comments, Shares and Reactions (likes, loves, wows etc). I have reason to believe having a high engagement group linked to the page is another quality signal to help boost ad reach and lower costs.

Page Age: All things equal, an older fan page has more trust than a newer page. However, I believe this factor is not as important as some of the above. So it's likely that this maxes out after a certain length of time and no longer provide benefits over a newer page.

Feedback Score: This is not applicable to all pages, but if you are selling anything (Purchase pixel fired). How are people rating their experience with purchases associated with ads linked to your page? FB uses surveys to determine user experience and will disable your ad accounts once with enough bad rankings. If you are selling shady stuff they will eventually catch on, because the pixel lets them know the level of interaction people had with your page/offer.

It's a lot of stuff to think about. If there was one thing I'd say to focus on, it would be in the curation of engaging posts. Most of the rest will take care of itself when you do that.

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Really good info, thanks for this!

When are the next parts coming out (4,5,6,7,8,9,10)?

Cannot wait!

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FIRE!!! Thanks for the insights.

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