Facebook Ads Manager feels intimidating to beginners. There are just so many sections. What if you select the wrong setting and end up messing your Facebook ad? This helpful walkthrough aims to educate you about everything you need to know about this fantastic marketing tool.
Facebook has approximately 2.7 billion users. Most of them spend over two hours every day on social media platforms. It’s no wonder then there are over 10 million active advertisers on Facebook.
No matter the audience – age, gender, region, occupation, or anything else – they know Facebook ads are able to reach them. But the question is, how do digital marketers create, manage and analyze their Facebook ad campaigns?
And… the short answer is Facebook Ads Manager
Part 1: The Introduction to Facebook Ads Manager
What is Facebook Ads Manager?
Well, it’s exactly what the name says – a tool that helps you manage Facebook ad campaigns. You can create new ads, view old ads, change existing Facebook ads, and analyze all of your marketing campaigns. It helps you design your ads in a very simple to follow step-by-step process.
At first glance, Facebook ads manager looks pretty intimidating to a beginner. The dashboard has so many tools. You feel lost and overwhelmed. However, once you get to know the basics, you will find it a fantastic tool, offering everything you need to deliver a successful campaign.
Where is my Ads Manager?
There are two ways to find your Facebook ads manager. First is by signing into your business account by following https://business.facebook.com. The second is by following the direct link to AdsManager. Note: Every Facebook account has a unique ad account associated with it.
The first method takes you directly to the business page. You can head over to the left-hand sidebar, click on your Facebook page’s dropdown arrow and then select the ads. You can also find the “Ads Manager” option if you head over to the bottom of the page.
The second method brings you directly to the Facebook Ads Manager of your personal account. You can also use more than one ad account simultaneously, as shown in the screenshot below. As per my knowledge, there’s no limit on the number of ad accounts you can add. Correct me if I am wrong!
Lastly, you can access the Facebook Ads Manager on your mobile. The Ads Manager mobile app is available on both Android and iOS. Facebook recently changed its name from Facebook Ads Manager to Meta Ads Manager.
How to make an ID on Facebook Ads Manager?
It’s very simple. Every Facebook account has an ad account. That’s right! By default, you are given a personal ad ID when you sign up and create your profile. You can go to Ads Manager and check out this ID on the upper left-hand side of the screen.
To set up your account and use Facebook ads, you need the following THREE things.
- A verified payment method
- A Facebook Page
- Admin, Editor, or Advertiser role on someone else’s Facebook page.
In case you don’t have a page for your business, don’t worry. You can easily create a Facebook page by following the steps here. Once you create a page, an ads account will be automatically given.
You can also make a new ad account for your page, but you cannot do so in the Ad Manager. Instead, you have to sign up for your Business Manager by following the business manager URL above and creating a new ad account.
Add your teammates to your Facebook Ads account
You can add your teammates to your Ads account to create and manage Facebook ads on your behalf. Just grant them access to your Facebook Ads account and assign them a suitable advertising role. Currently, there are three advertising roles:
An Analyst can only analyze your ad’s performance. They can only view the ads and not change anything. This role has very limited access. It is ideal for those who just need your ad data to compile reports.
An Advertiser can advertise on your page. They can create, edit and view ads with the help of the linked payment method. However, they cannot access the payment details or change them. This role is perfect for freelance marketers, campaign handlers, or other partners.
An Admin is a top-level administrator. They can modify payment details and manage the roles in addition to everything else an Analyst and an Advertiser can do. Of course, this role is only for the administrators who need full rights to handle the entire marketing campaign.
In order to add someone to your ad account, follow the steps below:
Step 1: Go to Ad Manager Settings
Step 2: Select Add People right under the Ad Account Roles option
Step 3: Add the person you want by typing in their email address or Facebook profile name. You cannot add someone who’s not on Facebook.
Step 4: Assign them a role by using the dropdown menu
Step 5: Click Confirm to finish adding them to your ad account.
Remember, Facebook Page Role, Business Manager Role, and Ad Account role are different things. You cannot use one to manage the other. That means, if you are an admin of a business’s Facebook page, you cannot automatically access their ad account or Business Manager – unless you are assigned each of these particular roles.
Explaining the Facebook Ads Manager Dashboard
A cursory look at the Ad Manager Dashboard makes it feel overwhelming. There’s just too much going on and a lot to take in. But, don’t worry, we are here to walk you through all the important parts.
For now, let’s focus on three major sections: the main campaign and the menu bars on the left and right-hand sides of the page.
Campaigns
All the campaigns are available in the middle of the dashboard. Each campaign has three elements. You can find them across the top in tab format. These include ad campaigns, ad sets, and ads. Every campaign can have multiple ad sets, and every ad set can have multiple ad creatives.
Feeling confused by these terms? Here’s a bit more for clarification:
A campaign is where you choose your primary objective. Depending on what results you want, you can go for customer acquisition campaigns, conversion campaigns, or customer retention campaigns. Once you choose a particular type of campaign you want to run, start making your ad sets along with a target audience, ad placement data, and budget. Each campaign has multiple Ad sets.
An ad set is a group of ads. It contains all the settings for when, where, and how to run the campaign. When you create an ad set, any choice you make at this level automatically applies to all the ads in the set. At this level, you can choose audience characteristics for your ads. These include location, gender, and age. Moreover, you can create a budget, set a schedule, and select your placements.
An Ad is an area where you decide the message and accompanying image. As each set has many ads, you can split test which creative elements are working best for your campaign and then scale from there.
Section 2: Create and Edit Facebook Ads
How to create Facebook Ads using the Ads Manager?
Sure, the dashboard feels a little overwhelming, but the actual ad creation and management is a very straightforward process. To start, simply click on the green “create” button (as you can see in the image above). When creating a new ad, you can select your campaign objective: brand awareness, consideration, and conversion. After that, you have to define other ad elements such as audience targeting, budget, ad placement, format, etc. Don’t worry! Facebook walks you through the entire setup in a very simple-to-follow process. So, creating your first Facebook ad shouldn’t be a problem.
Important: Facebook takes at least 24 hours to review and publish your ad. Once your ad has been approved, you will get a notification on your Facebook account that your ad has gone live. Go on and hit that publish button. You can easily go back and edit it as many times as you want, even if it’s live.
How to edit Facebook Ads using the Ads Manager?
Ads are not perfect. Sometimes you notice a small typo once it has already gone live, or perhaps you want to increase the budget when you see it’s performing so well. In such a situation, don’t worry. Editing a Facebook Ad is easier than you think.
Hover your mouse over the campaign title that you want to edit. Options like View Charts Edit and Duplicate will appear. Click on the Edit button. A new pop-up window will show up, revealing all the options to edit the campaign. You can edit the campaign itself, ad set, or even the ad.
An excellent feature of Facebook Ads Manager is that it lets you edit multiple ads, ad sets, and campaigns – at once. Simply select a group of campaigns, ad sets, or ads (by checking their respective boxes in the first column) and then click on “edit in the navigation pan.
Here’s what you can edit on each level:
For ads
- Change the ad title
- Change the ad destination (your ad source)
- Change the ad creative (image, CTA, link, text, etc.)
- Specify URL parameters
For ad sets
- Change the ad set’s title
- Change the start and end date
- Change the spend amount
- Change your audience
- Change your ad placement
- Change the delivery and optimization settings
For campaigns:
- Change the campaign title
- Change the budget
- Change the spending limit
- Turn the campaign On or OFF
Section 3: Facebook Ad Reports
Facebook Ads Manager provides detailed ad reports. Therefore, you can find how an ad aligns with your business goals for social media. You can use ad analytics to check how your ad performs in all key areas.
For instance, if you use Facebook ads to create brand awareness, perhaps you want to know which ad is getting the highest engagements. Likewise, if it’s a sign-up campaign, you may be interested in knowing about the Click-through Rate (CTR) and what’s the cost per click.
Search and Filter: How to find the relevant ad, ad set, or campaign?
Facebook Ads Manager has a very handy search & filter bar on the top of the screen. You can enter in any search term and choose a particular filter from the dropdown menu. For example, among the list of filters, you have:
- Campaign name or Campaign ID
- Ad set name or Ad set ID
- Ad name
- Saved Searches
- Recently Changed
- A/B test
- Name
- ID
- Delivery
- Objectives
- Placement
- Metrics
- Audience
- Test name
- Special ad category
You can also choose the arrow next to any of these filter categories for a more in-depth list of searches. Then, select your filter and “Apply.”
Furthermore, you can specify a date range. Simply click on the dates right next to the search bar. After that, you can use the “compare” feature to get a bit more understanding about how your ads are performing against a different period.
You can see your ads in the following date ranges (periods).
- Maximum
- Custom
- Today
- Yesterday
- Last 7 days
- Last 14 days
- Last 30 days
- This week
- Last week
- This month
- Last month
Column Breakdown: How to get data for your ad reports?
Facebook Ads Manager provides you with a wealth of data for each ad. And the best thing? you can customize your reports by selecting which characteristics you want in your reports. You can also break down the ad’s performance on the basis of factors like reach, engagement, offline conversions, targeting, audience, etc.
As you can see in the image below, there are several column presets for you to sink your teeth in. These columns help you find all the relevant data for reporting in a jiffy.
- Performance: It includes characteristics like reach, results, the amount spent, etc.
- Setup: This column contains bid strategy, objective, budget, etc.
- Delivery: It includes characteristics like reach, frequency, CPM, impressions, etc.
- Engagement: These include people taking action, likes, reactions, comments, shares, etc.
- Video Engagement: In this column, you get thru plays, two-second continuous video plays, cost per two-second continuous video plays, etc.
- App Engagement: It includes characteristics like mobile app installs, mobile app actions, cost per mobile app install, etc.
- Carousel Engagement: In this column, you get information like carousal reach, clicks, frequency, impressions, etc.
- Performance and Clicks: It includes characteristics like attribution setting, results, reach, cost, etc.
- Cross-Device: In this column, you get characteristics like Website actions, mobile apps installed, conversion value, etc.
- Offline Conversions: In offline conversions, you get metrics like purchase, cost per purchase, etc.
- Targeting and Creative: It includes attribution setting, reach, frequency, etc.
- Bidding and Optimization: In this column, you get budget, results, cost per result, bid strategy, etc.
- Messenger Engagement: It contains link clicks, messaging replies, blocked messaging connections, etc.
- Digital Circular: Finally, we have the digital circular column that includes metrics such as instant experience impressions, etc.
No, that’s not everything there’s to the reports.
If neither of these presets suits your reporting requirements, you can go on to customize them. In addition, you can create your own presets by selecting the “Customize Columns” option in the dropdown menu.
When you click this option, a pop-up screen will appear. It will have even more metrics like CPC, CTR, Results, Results Rate, Reach, Frequency, etc. You can also select or deselect any of them according to your requirements.
You can also sort each column by just clicking on the heading.
If that sounds confusing, don’t worry. The ads manager has every help you need. Simply hover over a particular name, and a tiny pop-up will provide you with all the information about each matric and what it does.
How to get more details with the breakdown feature?
If you thought that’s all about the report, you couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, you can go even more granular with insights – thanks to the breakdown feature. You can break down all the presentable data by:
- Time (day, week, or month)
- Action (destination, video view type, device)
- Delivery (age, platform, location)
You can choose one criterion from every section. For example, you can select one from time, one from action, and one from delivery sections. Below is what your reporting table may look like after you have selected all the columns.
How to export, share and save Facebook Ad Reports?
Once you have all the data you need for your business, you can do the following:
Export: Export saves and downloads all of the data in the form of an excel or CSV file.
Create Custom report: You can further customize your reports before saving them for an offline record.
Share: You can even share these reports with others who have access to your ad account. This option provides you a link to the viewable data.
In case you are not sure which option to use, Facebook comes for help AGAIN. It offers some standard report templates that you can use for your reports. Simply go to reports and from the dropdown menu, click on “Standard reports.”
Understanding how your ads are performing on Facebook
If you want to create effective Facebook ads, you have to analyze the performance on a regular basis. With Facebook Ads Manager, you can take a deep dive into your campaigns, ad sets, or ads to get a much better understanding of how your ads are performing. Information like demographics breakdown, performance, or results over a specific period are always in the palm of your hands.
To examine the performance of your Facebook ads, head over to the left-hand side menu of the Ads Manager and click on that Charts icon on the top of other icons. It will open an expanded view of your selection along with a visual representation of the performance.
Available metrics for your Ad campaign
Performance: The performance chart shows you all the link clicks, people your ad reached, and the total amount spent on your ads. Scroll over the line chart to get individual results for a particular day. You can click on the “Custom” option to isolate certain metrics and check their performance.
Demographics: The demographics chart shows how your ad performed across different demographics – age and gender. Scroll over a particular section to find individual results for each gender or age group. There’s also a filter option on the top to help you find the information you need.
Platform: The platform tab showcases data of how your ad performed across various platforms and placements. It contains ad results, ad reach, ad impressions, and budget spent. There’s also an option to compare mobile and desktop data.
Delivery: In the delivery tab, you can get information about the predicted and delivered value for impressions, reach and money spent.
Section 4: A Quick Overview of Facebook Ads Manager Useful Features for Marketers
Besides managing ads, the Ads Manager has some cool features and tools you can use to up your marketing game. These tools are easy to access via the menu button on the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
Insights
The Insights tool helps you understand more about your audience. It lists aggregated information about their demographics, behavior, location, results, content, and more. To target a particular demographic, click on that blue “Create Ad” button to create an ad targeting your specific demographic.
Facebook Pixel
Perhaps the most useful tool for any eCommerce store is the Facebook Pixel. It’s a simple code that enables you to know more about the actions being taken on your website. You can then use this info to create better-performing Facebook ads. When you place the Facebook pixel on your website, it allows you to track add to carts, dropouts, etc. Hence, you can optimize your ad accordingly and then remarket to people interested in your services or who took specific actions on your website. To set up and track your Facebook Pixel, visit the Events Manager.
Ads Manager Mobile App
Facebook Ads Manager has a convenient mobile app that lets you manage ads on the go. You can download the app for IOS as well as Android from the respective app stores. With the Facebook ad manager mobile app, you can create a new ad, manage your campaigns, check and analyze ad matrics and get instant notifications of how your ad is performing.
Facebook Creative Hub
Facebook’s Creative Hub is another excellent tool for marketers and advertisers. It allows you to create mockup ads and then preview them as though they are live on a platform (Facebook or Instagram news feed). This way, you can collaborate and bounce ideas with your team without spending money on an actual ad. If you want to know more about this latest tool, click here.
Final Thoughts: Change is the only Constant
With Facebook ads, things constantly change. Meta continuously adds new features, tools, and characteristics. Likewise, some features get removed when a better feature rolls out. We will keep updating this post when and if that happens. But still, if you spot anything that we need to update, do let us know in the comment section below. Thank you for staying with us throughout this guide. All the best!
