Vinny the Marketer

HOW TO SET UP ABUSINESS MANAGER ACCOUNT ON FACEBOOK 
and run a successful campaign.

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How to Create Facebook Audiences

To create and manage your Facebook target audiences, you’ll have to use the Audience Manager tool.
You can find this tool in the Business Manager, by clicking on the top-right menu and selecting “Audiences.”

On the Audiences page, you can see all your saved Facebook audiences as well as create new ones. To understand the wide range of targeting options that come with Facebook ads, let’s start from the basics.

Facebook has three primary audience types:

• Saved Audiences
• Custom Audiences
• Lookalike Audiences

Each of these audience types gives you plenty of additional options for creating the perfect target audience for your Facebook campaigns.  

Facebook Saved Audiences

Saved Audiences are the audiences that you can define by choosing people’s interests location, age, gender, used devices, income level, etc. You can create Saved Audiences both in the campaign setup phase or in the Audience Manager.

Location-based targeting

Facebook allows you to target people in specific locations, including:

• Country
• State/Region
• Counties
• DMA (Designated Market Area)
• City
• Postal Code
• Specific Address Radius

Simply type in the regions you wish to target.

You also have another layer of location targeting, allowing to be even more specific:

Everyone in this location (the default targeting option) – The last updated location of an actual Facebook user

People who live in this location – Location is set by the location on a user’s Facebook profile and confirmed by their IP address.

People recently in this location – Tracked by mobile device usage in the geographic area you intend to target.

People traveling to this location – Users who had this geographic area as a recent location that’s at least 100 miles away from their home location.

Demographics-based targeting

As you click on the Demographics tab, you’ll get plenty of targeting topics to refine your audience based on many options. The basic 3 are:

Age – If you’re targeting an audience with a specified age range, you can easily reach them by telling Facebook who your ideal customers are.

Gender – You can also select to target a particular gender.

Language – If you’re advertising in a particular language, you might want to only target the people who can understand your ads.

But you can get way more detailed. As an example, you’ll be able to target people by their political views, life events, job titles, ethnicity, and so on.

Interest-based targeting

Interests are one of the best (and easiest) Facebook ads targeting options as they allow you to target people specifically interested in a subject related to your product. For example, you could target people interested in your competitors or your broader market segment, or magazines and blogs covering your market.

To target based on interests, you can either browse the menu with hundreds of interests or simply type in one interest, so that Facebook will suggest to you other related topics.

The interests are based on Facebook users’ likes and interests, apps they use, Pages they’ve Liked, and more. Adding more than one interest will target people with at least one of them so you’ll make your reach broader.

Behaviour-based targeting

Unlike precise Interests, Behaviors allow you to target people by purchase history, events they like, personal anniversaries, etc. This data is gathered by Facebook analyzing many factors and also using external data sets.

They are not always useful, but when they are they work great! As an example, you can target people currently traveling or planning their next trip … priceless if you’re in the hotel or event booking market. Check them out and see if they can work for your business.

To master the behavioral targeting and learn about all its possibilities, check this guide: Reach Your 100% Perfect Audience With Facebook Behavioral Targeting.

Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook Custom Audiences are probably your most high-value target audiences as they allow to re-target past website visitors and people who have engaged with your content or app. There are multiple ways to create a Custom Audience, and we’re going to cover each of them briefly.

Creating Custom Audiences from Customer Files

This first type of Facebook Custom Audience is based on your existing customer files – the lists of email accounts, phone numbers or app IDs. The Customer File audience is a great way to target your newsletter subscribers or app users.

To create a Facebook Custom Audience, follow these steps:

1. Create a Facebook Custom Audience
2. Select the “Customer File” option
3. Select whether you wish to add a customer file or import contacts from MailChimp.
4. Import your customer data to create a new Custom Audience
5. Select the identifiers
6. Upload a customer file
7. Give your Custom Audience a name

Your customer files can include 15 different identifiers, the most popular ones being:

• Email
• Phone number
• Mobile advertiser ID

If you need to clean up the data inside your customer files before the import, this Facebook’s guide can help you out.

Creating Custom Audiences Based on Website Traffic

Website traffic-based Facebook audiences allow you to create remarketing campaigns for people who have engaged with your website. These are high-value audiences as the users seeing your ads have already shown some interest in it. Important! To create audiences based on your website traffic, you first need to install Facebook Pixel. See the Pixel setup instructions by Facebook.

If you’ve built your website on WordPress, you can also create this type of Custom Audiences with the Pixel Caffeine plugin.

Once you’ve installed the Facebook Pixel, you can simply go to the Audience Manager and create a Custom Audience based on past website traffic.

You can choose between multiple options:

• Target everyone who visited your website
• Target people who visited specific web pages
• Target people who visited specific web pages but not others
• Target people who haven’t visited your website for a certain amount of time
• Other custom combinations

Creating Custom Audiences Based on App Activity

If you want to reach the people who have engaged with your iOS or Android app, you can set up a Facebook target audience to do that. To target people based on the app activity, you first need to register your app and set up app events.

To create a Facebook Custom Audience based on app activity, target people who have taken specific actions (events) in your app. You can also select the timeframe for targeted events.

For example, you could select a purchase event and specify “In The Last 90 days” to reach people who have completed an in-app purchase event in the past 90 days. Here’s the official guide by Facebook to help you create Custom Audiences based on app activity.

Creating Custom Audiences Based on Engagement

Did you know that you can also target the users that have engaged with your content on Facebook, e.g. viewed your videos or liked a Page post. The latest addition to Custom Audiences is the possibility to target people who have done one of the following:

• Visited your Facebook Page
• Engaged with your Facebook Page posts or ads
• Clicked on any call-to-action buttons
• Sent a message to your Page
• Saved your Page or posts

This gives you the perfect opportunity to reach high-potential audiences that are interested in learning more about your brand or product. If you want to know more about Custom Audiences, how to create them, and how to get the most out of them, check out this guide: Facebook Ad Custom Audiences: Everything You Need To Know

Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Facebook Lookalike Audiences let you reach the people who are similar to your existing customer database – making them highly likely to convert as well.

To create a Lookalike Audience, you first need to create a Custom Audience to tell Facebook what type of users you want to reach. Next, select the “Lookalike Audience” from the audience creation menu and select a target country and a percentage (1%-10%) of the targeted country’s Facebook users. The percentage signifies the people most similar to your selected Custom Audience.

Lookalike Audiences help you to extend your ad campaign’s reach so that you only target people who are likely to be interested in your offer.

How To Narrow Down Your Audiences

Sometimes, a Facebook audience can include millions of users. Unless you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising budgets waiting around the corner, you should keep your target audiences smaller and more precise.

When creating Saved Audiences, you can narrow your audience with the AND/OR targeting options. The OR targeting means that when you add new targeting options under the same category of targeting, your audience will grow larger. The AND targeting means that a person who’s in your target audience must fall into multiple categories. This will help to decrease your audience size and create niche audiences.

As you may have noticed from the image above, you can also EXCLUDE people who match specific interests or demographics. You can also EXCLUDE specific Custom Audiences from the general target audience. For example, you could exclude past converters to avoid your ads reaching people who are already customers.

Bonus Tip

If some Lookalike Audience or Custom Audiences are too large (hundreds of thousands of people), narrow them down with interest-based targeting by creating a Saved Audience.

Here’s how it works:

• Create a Facebook Saved Audience
• Select a Custom Audience or Lookalike Audience
• Add interest- or demographics-based targeting options

Facebook Ads Reporting in the Ads Manager

The easiest way to review your campaign performance is to use the Facebook Ads Manager. Here, you can filter your campaigns by dates, objectives, etc. and “zoom in” any campaign to measure the performance of every single ad set or ad.

Don’t forget to set the correct date range when checking your ad reports! You can also compare two different date ranges to see how your campaign performance has changed over time.

If you want to understand how a campaign is performing right now, select only the last 7 days. A longer period could change all your metrics and make it difficult to understand your recent campaign performance.

As you look at the Campaigns tab in the Ads Manager, you’ll notice the reporting table with different metrics such as:

• Cost-per-click
• Cost-per-conversion
• Impressions
• Unique Link Clicks

That’s where you can get a complete overview of all your Facebook campaigns’ performance.

You can select a campaign by clicking on the checkbox in front of the campaign name. Next, you’re able to navigate to the Ad Sets and Ads tabs to see the performance of every individual campaign unit.

The great thing about this page is that Facebook automatically displays the most useful data for each campaign.

Managing Your Ad Report’s Columns

While Facebook’s doing a pretty good job by displaying the most relevant ad metrics, you can actually change the metrics you see in your ad reports. Click on the Columns menu to select between different ad reports to change the metrics in your ad reports.

Different Column sets show various metrics

You can either select pre-set reports or create new custom ad reports by clicking on “Customize Columns.”

There are truly many metrics available in Facebook Ads Manager. To help you get started, we’ve highlighted in bold the most important and insightful report metrics. Of course, the choice of your ad report metrics depends on the campaign’s goal and campaign objective (in red).

Performance: Results, Result Rate, Reach, Frequency, Impressions, Delivery, Social Reach, Social Impressions, People Taking Action, Positive & Negative Feedback, Amount Spent, etc.Engagement: Post Engagement, Post Comments, Post Shares, Page Engagement, Page Likes, Page Mentions, Event Responses, Check-Ins, Offer Claims, etc.Clicks: Link clicks, Unique Link Clicks, CTR, Social Clicks, etc.Messaging: New Messaging Conversations, Messaging Replies, Cost per New Messaging Conversation, etc.Media: Video Average Watch Time, Canvas View Time, 3-Second Video Views, 10-Second Video Views, 30-Second Video Views, Video Watches at 25%, Video Watches at 100%, etc.Website Conversions: Website Leads, Website Searches, Website Adds to Cart, Website Registrations Completed, Cost per Website Conversion, Cost per Website Purchase, Website Conversion Value, Website Custom Conversions, etc.Apps: Desktop App Installs, Mobile App Actions, Mobile App Adds to Cart, Mobile App Purchases, Cost per App Install, etc.On-Facebook: On-Facebook Purchases, Leads (Form), Cost per On-Facebook Purchase, etc.Offline: Offline Leads, Store Visits, Offline Purchases, Offline Adds to Cart, Cost per Offline Purchases, etc.
Once you’ve created the ad reports you need, don’t forget to save them! You can also set any new report as the default option.

Advanced reporting With Campaign Breakdown

In addition to the campaign metrics you see in your Ads Manager reports, you can take your Facebook ads reporting routine one step by using the Breakdown menu. By using the Breakdown menu, you can break down your campaign reports by:

• Delivery: age, gender, location, browsing platform, platform, device, time of day, etc.
• Action: conversion device, destination, video view type, video sound, carousel card, etc.
• Time: day, week, two weeks, month

You can select up to one criterion from each section (i.e. one from Delivery, one from Action, and one from Time).

Using the campaign breakdown, you can find answers to many questions, including:

• Which ad placements are performing the best?
• What times of day or weekdays deliver the most conversions at the lowest cost?
• What are the best-performing target countries?

To break down your ad campaigns by different criteria, first select one or more Facebook campaigns. Then, select a criterion from the Breakdown menu.
For example, in the example below, we’ve broken down our ad campaigns by Placements, allowing us to find all the poorly performing placements and turn them off.

Take your time when getting used to all the Facebook Ads reporting options in the Ads Manager. After a while, you’ll get a better understanding of the most important ad metrics and campaign optimization best practices.

Additional reading:

• A Simple Guide to Help You Track Facebook Ads Analytics
• Review These 8 Facebook Ad Metrics and Improve Your Ad Performance

Save & Automate Campaign Reports

Did you know that you can schedule weekly (or daily) Facebook campaign reports to be delivered to your inbox for free? Once you’ve created a report in the Facebook Ads Manager, you can save the report and have it delivered to you periodically. To do that, click on the Report icon next to your Account name. (It’s quite hidden, but take a look at the screenshot below):

As you click on “Save new report…” a small window pops up. You can name the saved report and set up a monthly, weekly or daily email.

If you’re using AdEspresso to manage your Facebook ad campaigns, you can see additional campaign reporting as well as your A/B test results.

Whenever you’re running a Facebook ads experiment, AdEspresso’s automated Facebook ads reporting will let you know which variation is performing better. This feature could potentially end up saving you a great amount of time.

Generate your reports in Pdf with AdEspresso

With AdEspresso, you can create beautiful PDF reports to be shared with your team, your clients, or whoever needs it. AdEspresso has 3 different Report Templates you can use choose from:

• Audience Analysis: A report completely designed around your audience! Quickly understand who your best customers are and how much every audience is performing.
• Revenue Performances: A great conversion-focused report to analyze your spend and revenue generated across campaigns!
• In-Depth Report: A huge report with everything you need to analyze every aspect of your Facebook Ads!

You can build reports out of specific Facebook Ad campaigns or quickly select all campaigns with a specific tag or within a given advertising account!
You can specify to report on campaigns, tags, or ad accounts of data as per usual. Just a click and your modules will be pre-selected and filled with data.  You can review that they are what you are looking for, or edit the modules to reflect a change you’d like to make to your template.

Once you check the preview of your report, you can configure your delivery to be sent to specific email addresses or to be generated from AdEspresso and emailed to you and voila!

And there’s more! Once you’ve set up your report you can always download it again with the most updated numbers! We’ll take care of generating the report every day, week, or month with your latest results and timely deliver it via email ready for download.
Your report templates just saved you some time on reporting, way to go! 

Moving Forward With Facebook Advertising

Alright, we did our best not to overwhelm you with too much new information. However, everything we discussed in this Facebook Advertising Guide for Beginners is really important for your first campaign’s success.
You now know all the opportunities that Facebook Ads have to offer such as how to create a new campaign, set up the right creative, target the right audiences, and how to analyze your campaign’s performance.

But, remember, in online marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all guide or tips.
You need to apply what you learn and keep testing everything, never assuming that something will work just because you’ve read it online.
Every business is different: While there are many tips and best practices we can teach you, only youknow how your business works, who your customers are, and how to effectively apply what you’ve learned here!