How to create an effective Facebook Ads campaign (2024)

Facebook Ads is a powerful acquisition and retention channel. But you still have to master it well. In this article, I explain, step by step, how to create an effective Facebook Ads campaign (acquisition/retargeting). Which objective to choose, which audience (s) to define, etc. Follow the guide.

Facebook Ads is THE advertising network. It makes it possible to increase your reputation, to generate qualified leads, sales, to retain your customers, etc. And this, whether you are in B2C or B2B.

At Growth Room, we use Facebook Ads for both. See our results for our customers:

👉 Example with Teach Up, a SaaS e-learning platform

👉 Example with The Peluchery, an e-commerce for high-end stuffed animals

In this guide I'm going to show you step by step How to create an effective Facebook Ads campaign Our expert Julian Boulinguez will also give you some tips.

On the program:

• Understanding Facebook Ads
• Which campaign objective should you choose
• What are the audiences
• How to create an effective account structure (acquisition/retargeting).

To note: This article is for novices. However, if you are a beginner, you will find valuable tips and advice. 😉

Creating an effective Facebook Ads campaign: some essential settings

Let's start with the basics.

If you have never launched a campaign on Facebook Ads, you must first create your account Business manager.

The process is very simple. I invite you to watch This video.

Second step: install the Facebook Ads Pixel

This is a line of code (a small cookie) that you will install on the source code of your site, and which will allow you to track the actions of visitors. The objective of the Pixel is to be able to use the information collected to launch ultra-targeted campaigns.

It allows you to track specific actions and conversions on your site, but also to build specific audiences that will allow you to launch retargeting campaigns (we will discuss them in this article).

To find out more, I invite you to read our article: Installing the Facebook Pixel on your site: why and how? You'll see, it's not very complicated.

Facebook Ads: lThe structure of the Business Manager

Before getting to the heart of the matter - creating your Facebook campaign, a quick reminder of the organization (or structure) of the Business Manager.

Marketing is structured “in a funnel”; from the broadest level the campaign, to the finest level the advertisements.

Here is a diagram:

Note that the advertising set is also called Adset.

Each element has a specificity:

One campaign = one objective

A set of ads = one audience

An advertisement = a message, a visual, a landing page

Facebook Ads campaign: define your objective

The first step is to define the objective of your campaign, is the action you want Internet users to take when they see your ad.

In your Business Manager, when you click on the green “Create” button, this window appears:

To make an effective Facebook Ads campaign, it is important not to set the wrong objective.

Why? Because the algorithm of Facebook will optimize your campaign according to the chosen objective. It will show your ad to your target audience, but especially to people who are likely to perform the desired action.

That is to say? For example, I never download applications through an ad. Facebook knows this, and therefore does not offer me ads inviting me to download an application. On the other hand, I often click on ads inviting me to discover/buy #beautyaddict beauty products. For Facebook, I am a quality target for these ads.

The different goals of a Facebook Ads campaign

As you can see from the visual above, Facebook classifies goals into 3 categories: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion. That is the classic structure of a sales funnel.

Let's break down some of these goals.

Brand awareness

It allows you to reach the people who are most likely to remember your ads. This objective is mostly used by big brands like Coca-Cola, or those who already have a certain community. Their aim is not to convert, just to show that they are present.

Cover

It allows you to broadcast your ad to the largest number of people in your target audience. It is often used by big brands to announce news. Example Nike on its new sneakers.

Traffic

This goal only brings traffic to your website. It does not encourage conversion.

Interactions

It allows you to reach people who are likely to interact with your publication (Like, comment, share).

Lead generation

To acquire its prospects. It allows you to collect information on people interested in your product via forms.

Conversions

To encourage your audience to perform a specific action on their site, such as adding to the cart, making a purchase, registering.

Catalog sales

It allows you to present your products and increase your sales.

Facebook certainly categorizes its goals as a funnel, but as you can see, the reality is quite different. Don't fall into the trap of following him to the letter.

Facebook Ads campaign: what objective to choose?

Whatever your stage of maturity, Focus on the “Conversions” objective (unless you are an application or a physical store). With others, you may be disappointed.

When you have little notoriety, many marketers will however tell you to do a traffic campaign.

Yes and no.

“When you want to promote your brand and your products, it is tempting to launch a campaign with a traffic objective. It's useful in B2B when you have a long sales cycle. In B2C, it is of no interest. Unless you want to blow up your stats on your Google Analytics or Shopify,” explains Julian Boulinguez, B2C expert at Growth Room.

For our client Teach Up (B2B), we actually started with a traffic campaign, then with a conversion campaign. The first generated over 3,700 unique visitors to the site. The CPC was 0.15 cts.

It may seem illogical to choose a conversion goal when our target audience does not know us. But the idea is not to sell “from scratch.”

The goal is to do a conversion campaign with a prospecting objective (with a lead capture page for example). On Facebook, your conversion goal can have different goals.

Ad set: some settings

Once the campaign objective is defined, a new page appears:

First thing to do: name your campaign.

At the bottom of the page, Facebook will then offer you the option “Optimizing the campaign budget”, also called CBO for “Campaign Budget Optimization”.

This allows to optimize your overall budget and distribute it across your best-performing ad sets. In other words, you let Facebook manage your budget by itself. It will automatically look for performance.

The opposite of ABO (Adset Budget Optimization). Here, you distribute your budget as you want, by hand, and by set of advertisements.

CBO or ABO?

The CBO is very interesting. It's a bit of an option for lazy people.

However, if you do CBO, Facebook will favor a particular audience (if you do several). It will not allow you to identify, yourself, the most efficient audience. Note that the more hearings you do, the more budget you will have to spend.

“If you want to test multiple audiences, I don't encourage you to take that option. On the other hand, if you want to test several creations, the CBO is ideal,” explains Julian Boulinguez

What is the budget for your Facebook Ads campaign?

“Depending on your spending potential, I recommend a budget between €20 and €40/day to start getting results. If the results become interesting, it is possible to adjust upward later.”

When should you broadcast your campaign?

No rules. On the other hand, choosing the broadcast time can be interesting if you are targeting specific people.

Example with Dreem, a company producing a technological headband that measures, analyzes and improves sleep. The team launched a Facebook Ads campaign on a sleep test, targeting people affected by sleep problems.

She activated this campaign around midnight, at which time sleepers connect to the social network to pass the time.

Result: more than 200,000 leads collected and qualified!

Set of ads: defining your audience

By clicking on Next, you will be taken to the “New Ad Set” page.

Here too, you have to rename your set of ads to better find your way around. Example: e.g. “Lookalike_Buyers” if you are targeting a similar audience of your buyers.

Then comes the hearing part. Targeting is THE key to an effective Facebook Ads campaign.

What audience (s) to use?

It all depends on the maturity stage of your target audience.

On Facebook, you have several types of targeting.

In cold

Audience of interest

By interest, we mean “fashion”, “shopping”, “beauty”, or even “Organic food”. It is quite broad and affects people who are likely to be interested in your business. These people correspond to your target audience, one of your personas. One set of ads = one persona.

If you have not yet defined your personas, I invite you to read this article on The persona: what is it and how to define it.

Similar or “Lookalike” audience

The Facebook algorithm finds new people who share the same characteristics as your source audience. To use it, you must therefore have one (customer database, customers detected by the Facebook Pixel, Fans Page).

A “Broad Targeting” audience

The idea is to not apply any filters (except the geographical area) and to give free rein to the Facebook algorithm. Not segmenting can be dangerous, but this audience can have some nice surprises in store. Note: this option is only interesting if your Pixel has recorded numerous events, and if it knows how to recognize a potential buyer.

In lukewarm

A so-called “engagement” audience.

These are people who interact with you on Facebook and Instagram. They show interest in your business, but have not yet taken the step of buying your products. In this case, you need to exclude people who are already customers from your audience.

An audience: broad types of visitors on your site or visitors on a product/service page.

In hot

It's retargeting with audiences for your Pixel events namely visitors, cart additions, etc. I'll come back to that later in this article.

In custody (the forgotten big one)

A retargeting audience on your existing customers (retention campaign).

How do you create your audiences?

Let's start with an audience of interest.

To create this audience, it is possible to do it directly on the page of the set of ads as here (see visual below).

The interests are to be filled in the “Advanced Targeting” box. Examples: “Shopping”, “fashion”, “beauty”, “beauty products”, etc.

Or to do it beforehand in the “Audiences” tab of your Business Manager, here:

Click “Create Audience” and then click “Create Saved Audience.”

A new window opens.

Then simply indicate the interests in “Advanced Targeting”.

On the “Ad Set” page, all you have to do is indicate your recorded audience.

Manual or automatic placement?

Facebook will ask you to choose.

Placement is where your ads will appear (right column, Messenger, etc.).

Keep this setting (automatic placement) by default. However, only keep Messenger and Instagram if you have a mobile application.

Similar audiences

For the “Broad Targeting” audience, you do not touch the “Advanced Targeting” section to target specific interests.

If you decide to make a similar audience, click on “Create a similar audience”, either directly on the page of your ad set or in the “Audiences” tab of your Business Manager.

You will arrive here:

You will need to create a so-called personalized audience. It's up to you to choose your source (see visual below).

Advice: Leave the audience size at 1%. Increasing this percentage leads to the creation of a larger and more varied audience, and therefore less qualitative.

You can create a similar audience through your customer list. You will of course have to create it by clicking on “Create a custom audience”. Facebook explains how to do it:

If you are making a similar audience based on your customers, be sure to exclude them afterwards. The aim is to find new customers. For retargeting (retention), I'll come back to this later in this article.

If you don't have a lot of customers yet, choose “Facebook Page” and/or “Instagram Account” as the source. You can definitely do two audiences (a set of ads for each audience remember)

You then need to define the duration of your audience, ideally 180 days.

For warm/hot targets, create a custom audience as well.

For people who have interacted with you on your pages, choose “Facebook Page” or “Instagram Account” or “Website” as the source if you want to reach users who have visited your site. The process is quite identical to that of a retargeting campaign. I'll explain everything below 😉

Create effective advertising

Now it's time to create ads. These are the ones you need to focus on, regardless of your defined audience.

No need to create a dozen ads per ad set. Opt for simplicity: 3 or 5 max.

Facebook offers several formats: “single image/video”, “Carousel”, “Collection”. The first is the easiest to create.

Select your image, write the description, title, and select your CTA. Don't forget to put the link to your site or landing page.

On the right, click on the “Overview” tab to see all of your ads.

Be careful with the terms used. Facebook has a very strict advertising policy. I strongly encourage you to read This document to prevent your ads from being rejected.

As for your messages, be vigilant as well. These should be different depending on your chosen audience. For people who already know you, there is no need to let them “discover” your product.

The visual, the most important element now

For an effective Facebook Ads campaign, your visuals must be attractive and, above all, meaningful.

On the platform, you only have 2 seconds to captivate and attract Internet users (yes, it's very short)

The visuals, with or without text?

At Growth Room, we've tested both for our customers.

And our results all proved the visuals with text right.

CTR increased from 0.87 to 2.26%.

For an effective Facebook Ads campaign, therefore, rely on visuals with text!

“Spy” and be inspired by the competition for your ads

If you don't have any inspirations, feel free to “spy” on your competitors on Facebook Ads Library.

Available free of charge, this library allows you to consult all the ads broadcast on Facebook applications and services.

You can find inspiration (copywriting, creation) and especially look at the activity of your competitor (s).

A gold mine!

The only downside is that Facebook Ads Library doesn't say which ads work best.

To find out, there is A very simple tip :

• Visit your competitor's site
• Go to your Facebook and Instagram account
• And let the magic of retargeting work

“The most engaging retargeting ads are probably the ones with the highest ad spend, maximized. This means that they are the most efficient,” explains Julian Boulinguez.

In addition to Facebook Ads Library, you can use Ad Creative Bank

Depending on the theme chosen, this site offers you a selection of the most creative ads of the moment.

Nice as everything 👍

Besides the visual, don't forget to take care of your description, your title.

To find out more, do not hesitate to read our article The 2023 guide to creating a Facebook ad that converts (visuals + copywriting). You will find all our best practices for distributing effective advertising!

Test different visuals and texts

For an effective Facebook Ads campaign, consider doing some tests!

At the “advertising” level of your Facebook Ads campaign, it is possible to test several combinations of titles, descriptions and images.

To do this, click on the “Add options” button.

At this point, you can now publish your campaign!

Campaign launched: what next?

“For 3 days, the campaign will enter a so-called learning phase. Facebook will test your ads and optimize the ones that work.”

3 metrics to look at:

• Cost per click (CPC): aim for €0.40 ideally.
• The CTR: it is the ratio of impressions to clicks. How many times is Facebook going to have to show your ad to get a click? You will have understood it, it is THE traction metric par excellence. Aim for more than 2%.
• Cost per conversion (CAC): If you manage to lower your CPC, and increase your CTR, you have a good chance of lowering your CAC. It is the most important metric. Set an acquisition cost in your head that should not be exceeded, and stick to it.

Let it run at least 1 week to 10 days for it to be meaningful, and make optimizations if necessary.

What if it doesn't work?

“You should never turn off the floodgates, unless you are really not profitable. In this case, it is possible to lower your budget and adjust what is wrong. It can be a creative, copywriting, or targeting problem.”

Note that Facebook may also have some responsibility at the CBO level (if you have taken this option). The distribution of the budget among the adsets may have been poor. Yes, Facebook is not infallible.

The solution: Make a mix of the 2 (ABO + CBO). That's what we call the half-CBO.

You're kind of taking control of the CBO.

How to do it?

• For all ads, click on 'edit' the ad set that gives you the best performance.
• In the budget and calendar section, click “show more options.”
• Finally, click on “Ad Set Spending Limits” and enter the minimum daily amount you would like to see spent on this ad set (typically 1/4 of your daily budget).

Julian, our B2C expert, shows you all this In pictures.

To be noted. A future article will be dedicated to optimization. If you need help, you can also contact us at welcome@growthroom.co. For our customer The Peluchery, in particular, we had done some optimization.

If it works well?

“You can increase your budget. But be careful, it is 20% maximum every 3 days. If you increase your budget too much, you'll put your campaign back into a learning phase.”

However, do not forget to renew your ads every 3 weeks, at the risk of tiring your audience.

Create a retargeting campaign

Here we go, the famous retargeting!

It is undoubtedly the most interesting of Facebook Ads. And that's where your little Facebook Pixel comes in.

Retargeting campaigns allow you to:

• Target people who have already interacted with your site (visit, cart addition, payment initiated, content view, etc.), but did not take action (purchase).
• Retargeting your existing customers. The most common mistake: thinking that they will always remain customers, that they will come back alone to buy their product (s). That is of course wrong. We must continue to target and nurture them.

In addition to your acquisition campaign, don't forget to create a retargeting campaign. Yes, you are not going to stop there. Acquire and... convert a max!

Budget level, Focus 80% on acquisition and 20% on retargeting.

How do I do a retargeting campaign?

Example for a classic retargeting campaign.

First step: create a new campaign and define your objective (Conversions).

For the audience, you can create it beforehand in the “Audiences” tab of your Business Manager” or directly on the “Ad Set” page. Then click on “Create a custom audience.”

Again, Facebook will ask you to choose your source.

If you want to retarget people who have interacted with your site, click “Website.”

In the new window, indicate your Pixel and then your event: “All website visitors”, “People who viewed specific web pages”, “Visitors by time spent”.

Here we are going to go to the simplest: “All website visitors” at 30 days.

Remember to exclude your current customers. To do this, you need to create a new custom audience “Purchase 30 days”

You know the rest of it. All you have to do is create your ads. Yes, it's as easy as that!

And to retarget people who abandoned their shopping cart?

Click on “Website”, enter your Pixel and select the “Add To Cart” event over the last 10 or 30 days.

Another possibility in retargeting: run a DPA (Dynamic Product Ads) campaign.

Here, the objective is to automatically generate personalized ads that will target people who were interested in one or more of your products. Facebook will advertise the product visited in question. To do this, everything will happen in the “Catalog Sales” objective.

Retargeting: be careful!

Since the iOS 14.5 update, tracking has become more difficult. Being limited, Pixel events provide less and less information and audiences are increasingly reduced. By events, for example, cart additions and purchases.

“Targeting events such as “adding cart” and “buying” is no longer really interesting (reduced efficiency). Prefer to make audiences with people who have interacted on your social networks (Instagram/Facebook fans) or rather on large audiences such as site visitors or product/service page visitors”, indicates Julian Boulinguez

Quant to retargeting to nurture its customers, It's very simple:

All you have to do is create a retargeting audience on your database of existing customers or on buyers from the last 6 months for example.

Beware of the rehearsal!

A retargeting campaign that has been broadcast for too long is “tiring”.

So don't broadcast your campaign for too long.

Know that theUsers are more likely to click on an ad if it is seen within 7 days of visiting a site.

• Increase the frequency of your ads within 4 to 7 days after they are visited.
• Then reduce the frequency so that visitors only see your ads once every 2 or 3 weeks.

For your retargeting campaign, also remember to renew your ads every 3 weeks, at the risk of tiring your audience.

Now you know the basics of creating and launching Facebook Ads campaigns.

I am talking about the basics because Facebook Ads is a network offering a thousand and one possibilities, and the strategies are numerous. I will come back to this in other articles 😉

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You can also sign up for our free Facebook Ads training !

5 rules to remember for an effective Facebook Ads campaign

If you feel lost at first, don't worry. Facebook seems complex, but the more you use it, the more comfortable you'll be.

For an effective Facebook Ads campaign, follow these 5 rules:

• Choosing the right lens
• Define your audience well
• Create attractive and engaging ads (the right message to the right audience + the visual with text)
• Optimize
• Test, test, and iterate

It's up to you to play now!

At Growth Room, Facebook Ads is our business. Our Ads experts are there to help you send effective and effective Facebook Ads campaigns. Do not hesitate to contact us at welcome@growthroom.co