The BEST Facebook Ads Tutorial for Beginners 2025 (Full Guide)

I've spent more than $100 million on Facebook ads over the past 11 years, working with more than 2,000 clients in just about every industry you can think of. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the entire process of creating a Facebook ad campaign and an Instagram ad campaign from scratch. If you've never run a Facebook ad before, or if you have but you're not 100% sure that you set up everything correctly, this is the exact video that you need. It's going to walk you through every single step and setting you need to get right.

So before we get into the really interesting part and start putting the ads together, we first need to put the correct structure in place. It is really important—not the most interesting part, but it is really important. It doesn't take very long, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do it.

The right structure is to first create a Meta Business Manager account, which is sort of like the umbrella that holds all the other Meta assets. Don't worry, this will make more sense as we go through. Within your Meta Business Manager account, you have things like your ad account, your Facebook page, your Instagram profile, all that sort of stuff.

Now, you create a Meta Business Manager account by coming through to this page here: business.facebook.com/overview. You do need to be logged into your Facebook profile to go through and do this, by the way, so make sure that you are obviously on the browser that you're using and following along. Then you want to go ahead and click on "Create an Account."

Now, unfortunately, I can't go ahead and do this and show you the steps because we already have a lot of Meta Business Manager accounts. We work with hundreds of clients at any one time, and we certainly don't need another Meta Business Manager account. So I don't want to go through and create another one, but you just click on "Create an Account," and it's very straightforward and easy to go through. You just need to provide Meta with a little bit of information about your business. Just go through and provide that, and then you'll very quickly come through. That just takes a few seconds, one or two minutes at the most, and then you will be taken to your Meta Business Suite, which looks something like this.

Now, yours is going to look a little bit different because obviously it's dependent on your Facebook page and Instagram profile and things like that, but don't worry about that. Within Meta Business Suite, there are all sorts of really interesting things you can do. You can see we've got Inbox over here; you can manage comments on your ads on both Facebook and Instagram from just one central location instead of having to find the various ads and reply or delete comments that you don't want on there.

You've got Lead Center, so if you're generating leads via instant forms—again, we'll talk more about that later on—you can come in and grab that information. You can see insights, all sorts of great stuff within Meta Business Suite, but that's not the focus of this video because we're not going to actually create the ad campaigns from within Meta Business Suite. You can; you have some functionality to be able to do that. You can literally see a "Create Ad" button there, but it's not the best place to do it. I'll get to that in a second.

First, we need to finish setting up the structure. So what I want you to do is go ahead and click on "Settings" down here on the left-hand side. Now, it's from within this settings section that we can add in those things that I mentioned—things like your Facebook page, Instagram profile, all that sort of stuff. I'm going to quickly show you how to do the most important things. We're not going to cover absolutely everything in here; I'm going to cover the things that you need to do right now to get the structure in place.

So let's start with Pages. Underneath Accounts, we can go ahead and click on "Pages." Again, your settings section is going to look different because, like I said, we've got hundreds of accounts, hundreds of pages in here. Don't worry about that. The important thing is just to follow along with this left-hand side stuff and for now come into Pages.

Now, what you want to do—you can see this blue button on the top right here—is we want to go ahead and click "Add." This is how you add a Facebook page into your Business Manager account. You can either add an existing Facebook page, so if you've already got a Facebook page that's yours, you want to go ahead and click on this and then simply grab the URL, or you can even just enter in the Facebook page name, pop that in there, click "Next," and then what will happen is admins of that Facebook page—hopefully that's you—will be notified. You then just approve the request via that notification, and boom, the ownership of that Facebook page is transferred from you into this Meta Business Manager account.

Well worth doing. It might not seem necessary at this point, but trust me, the more you advertise, the more you realize that it's really helpful. That way, you can give other people access, you can get issues resolved if you ever get a page restricted or any sort of issues like that within a Meta Business Manager account. So just go ahead and pop that in there and then transfer over.

There are a few other options I'll quickly touch on. Instead of moving over or transferring ownership of an existing page, you can just request access to a page. This is where you don't want to change ownership; it's owned by another Business Manager account usually, but you do want to get access to it. For example, as an agency, where we're running ads for our clients, we do this all the time because we need access to their pages in order to be able to run ads from their Facebook pages.

So again, you can just click on this, enter the same thing, and then an admin of that page will be able to approve that request. You can also just create a new Facebook page if you don't have one already.

Okay, so that's Pages. Ad Accounts is next. If you've run any sort of Facebook or Instagram ad before, even just boosted a post from within the app, for example, you will already have an ad account. If you do, then you want to go ahead and move your ad account over to your Business Manager account, much in the same way. So you click on this ad button, and you go ahead and say "Claim an Existing Ad Account," this second option here. Or again, you can request access to an ad account if you're doing this for a client, for example, or you can just go ahead and create a new ad account. If you have not run any ads before, you probably don't have an ad account, in which case you want to go ahead and click on "Create a New Ad Account."

Again, the process of going through that is fairly straightforward. Meta is going to ask for some information, ask you to add in things like billing information, and then your ad account will be set up in your Business Manager, which is what we really want.

So that's Pages, that's Ad Accounts, and then we've also got Instagram Accounts. Like you can see, there are other things here, but they're less important. Instagram accounts are a little bit different. You can go ahead and click on the plus "Add" to move an Instagram account into a Business Manager account. You've got to agree, and then you've got to claim the Instagram account, where Instagram will get you to log in, and then you're able to go ahead and add it in.

Again, I'm not going to go through the process because we've already got Pages, Ad Accounts, and all that, but you can see exactly how this works. So those are the most important things—the assets to add in here: your page, your ad account, your Instagram account.

But one thing I want to touch on here that you can do that's really valuable as well is People. You can go ahead into this section, People, up here under Users, and click "Invite People." In this section here, if you get the email address from someone that's associated with their Facebook profile, their Facebook account, you enter that in there, you invite them into your Business Manager, they receive a notification, they can accept the request, and then they're in.

By the way, people can be in multiple Business Manager accounts; it's not like an exclusive thing, so don't worry about that. But this is really useful if you've got multiple people on your team or you want external people to work on your Instagram, your Facebook, whatever. As an agency, we use that all the time because we need to get our clients' assets—the pages, ad accounts, Instagram accounts, and other stuff—added into our Business Manager.

We then need to be able to assign various people from within our team to certain accounts and things along those lines. Once you've added someone in here, the way you give them access to specific assets is, let's say you come into Pages, for example. You can see here we've got "Assign People," so you can go ahead and click "Assign People," and then from the list, you select whoever it is that you want to have access.

So I can, for example, select myself, Ben Heath, and I can choose what access to this page that the Ben Heath person within this Business Manager should have. I can give full control, or you can go through the various options and decide, "I want to have ads access or content but not other stuff," and go through.

You also want to do this with yourself, by the way. So once you've got your page, ad account, Instagram profile added into your Business Manager, you want to make sure you add yourself in and then give yourself access to the various assets. Even if it's just you managing things, you still want to go through and do this process.

Like I said, if you want to be able to add in other people, we do this as an agency all the time because we have 40-plus staff members. We have something like 400 ad accounts at any one time within our Business Manager, so we've got lots of different ad accounts being added to different people to do different work on client accounts, things like that. Then you can go in and do it this way.

Okay, that's all we need to get set up within our Business site, within the settings section. Within there, now we can go ahead and create the ad campaign—the exciting part, right? So the best place to do that is within Ads Manager. You get there by clicking on "All Tools," and I've got Ads Manager up here in recently used. Otherwise, it's going to be down beneath "Advertise."

If you click on Ads Manager, you'll come through to your ad account overview. We've just gone straight into an example ad account that I have created for demonstration purposes. It's much better to create your Facebook and Instagram ads from within Ads Manager, where you get the most functionality. It's the most user-friendly.

Even though there are other options, like boosting posts or you can do stuff directly within Meta Business Suite, Ads Manager is the place to be. If you're going to go on after this video and watch other videos of mine and see examples of me doing specific things, you'll often see that I'm doing that from within Ads Manager. Well, actually, I'm nearly always doing it from within Ads Manager.

By the way, when I talked earlier about grabbing your ad account ID in order to move an ad account into your Business Manager or request access to an ad account within your Business Manager, the account ID is right up here. You can see we've got "Example Ad Account," and then there's the number. You just grab that, and that's what you use.

Okay, so this is the account overview. Ads Manager—the view that people are most familiar with and where you're going to operate out of most—is in Campaigns. If you go ahead and click on "Campaigns," you see something like this. If you've run Facebook and Instagram ads before or you've watched other content on Facebook and Instagram advertising, you've probably seen something that looks quite a lot like this.

We don't have any campaigns in here because this is an example ad account I use for demonstration purposes, but yours is probably going to look something like this. Maybe you've got some stuff in here if you've already run campaigns. So let's go ahead and get started with the campaign creation process.

The first thing to understand is that within a campaign, there are sort of three layers, and you can see these up here. You've got campaigns, you've got ad sets, and then you've got ads. The three layers work as in the following: one is within the previous one, if that makes sense. So within a campaign, you can have one or multiple ad sets, and within each ad set, you can have one or multiple ads.

We're going to go through each one of these three in order, starting with the campaign. If I go ahead and click on this plus green "Create" button, we've got this campaign creation window.

Okay, not going to there. There's a bunch of things, by the way, that I'm not going to talk about, not going to cover because as a Facebook and Instagram advertising beginner, you don't want to get bogged down with all the details. There's lots of advanced stuff that you can absolutely get to later on. I'm all about let's get a campaign set up that is good, that has a realistic chance of delivering fantastic results for business, of getting leads, of getting sales, but let's try and keep it simple at this stage. We can always add complexity later on, so not going to worry about collaborative ads as an example.

So the first thing I want to talk about in here is buying type. If I click on this little arrow, we've got auction or we've got reservation. Now, the default is auction, and that's what I'd recommend the majority of advertisers go with—certainly beginners.

So auction is exactly what it sounds like; it's how the majority of the price of Facebook and Instagram advertising is set. You are competing against all the other advertisers for people's attention, for those ad slots, for those impressions, right? The price is set by an auction.

So how much you pay per thousand impressions—one of the common metrics used when it comes to Facebook ads—is going to be determined by how many other advertisers are also trying to reach the people that you're trying to advertise to. What's the demand there? That's how things typically work.

Reservation, on the other hand, is where you can book a certain price over a period of time, and you're not subject to the natural fluctuations of what I just described and the market conditions and how many advertisers are looking to advertise and things like that.

Now, that might sound great because you think, "Okay, well surely that way I could guarantee a lower price for an extended time period," and that's true. But in order to facilitate that, Meta may need to put your ads in front of people that aren't as likely to buy your products and services. They're not as good prospects in order for you to guarantee that lower price that you're looking for.

So whilst reservation might seem great, it's rarely the right way to go and certainly not something I'd recommend a lot of beginner advertisers to use because it can be quite complicated. Yes, you may pay more to put your ads in front of people in the auction, but your ads are almost certainly going to be put in front of people that are much more likely to take the action you want them to take, whether that's purchase or become a lead, whatever it is.

Okay, so just go with auction. Then we've got the campaign objective section. Now, this is one of the single most important settings in any Facebook ad campaign. You really need to make sure that you get this right because it determines how Meta optimizes your ad campaign.

That might sound like something fairly trivial; it is not at all. If you tell Meta that you want a certain outcome, Meta is going to optimize your campaign for that outcome, and that optimization process is very, very powerful.

So let's say, for example, you tell Meta that you want to sell products via your website. Okay, Meta can see as you generate sales, and they have the data being generated. They can see, "Okay, people are more likely to purchase in the morning as opposed to the afternoon. They're more likely to purchase on a Saturday instead of a Thursday. People who are 43 are more likely to purchase than people who are 36. People who are interested in these two things are more likely to purchase. People who live in this postcode are more likely to purchase."

There are all these various elements, the data points that Meta can use, and they go, "Okay, based on our data, we can see the people like this are taking this action. Therefore, we'll put this advertiser's ads in front of people that are very similar to the people that are already taking this action."

If you optimize for something that you don't really want—I'll explain more about that in a second—then Meta will optimize for that. But does that mean you're going to get the outcome? Does that mean you're going to get leads? Does that mean you're going to get sales? No.

So let's go through the options. Awareness: Meta is going to put your ads in front of people who are most likely to remember them. Businesses that typically use this are going to be very large companies that aren't necessarily looking to directly generate a sale from that advertising. They're after brand awareness; they're after being top of mind. They often have large budgets—not something I'd recommend beginners mess with.

I do have something called an omnipresent content strategy; it's a bit more of an advanced strategy you might want to experiment with later on. I'll include a link in the video description to that, but as a beginner, no, it's not what we're going to touch.

Next, we've got traffic. Now, a lot of advertisers, particularly beginners, use traffic because they think, "Okay, I'll send a lot of people to my website." With traffic, that's what Meta will do. They will put your ads in front of people who are most likely to click on your ads, and you think, "Great! I'll get lots of people to my website; I'll therefore get lots of leads; loads of people are going to buy."

But Meta is very good, if you select traffic, at finding people that click—not necessarily at finding people that are going to take those next steps. I know that sounds strange, but trust me, it absolutely happens.

Then we've got engagement. So this is things like shares, comments, reactions. If you choose this campaign objective, Meta is going to put your ads in front of people that are most likely to engage. That's going to be a combination of some people engaging with ads way more than others; they are just far more likely to leave a comment, far more likely to share it, to leave a reaction of some sort.

And then there's obviously also a subsection of that, which are people who are likely to engage with ads within your space, like within your niche; they're interested in your industry. Engagement can also refer to things like video views, by the way, and other engagement on the ad as well. Not something I typically recommend beginners use; it can be used, and there are various strategies that use it, but not something I'd recommend you start with.

Then next, we've got leads. Now, leads is one of the two campaign objectives that I would actually recommend beginner Facebook and Instagram advertisers use. The other one is sales. I'm going to talk about these two together because basically, you want to decide as a beginner, "Do I want to use leads or do I want to use sales?"

Now, the reason why you want to go with either one of these is because this is what really matters to your business, right? This is what makes your campaigns either successful or not, either profitable or not. It's did we generate leads that we converted into customers, or did we just go ahead and sell stuff?

It's nice to have views on your videos; it's nice to have comments; it's nice to send a load of people to your website, but really, this is the stuff that matters. I know I'm sort of going on and on about this, but it's really important. I really want to emphasize this point here.

So how do you choose between leads or sales if those are the only two you should be going for at this stage? Basically, can people come through and check out and purchase directly? So can they click through your website and make a purchase? If you've got like a Shopify store, for example, absolutely they can. In which case, go with sales.

If not, if there's like an intermediary step before someone actually buys, then you want to go with leads. So for example, for my Facebook and Instagram advertising agency, someone's not going to come through and directly purchase our services. We don't have the functionality for that, and not many people would do that anyway. They're going to want a phone call first, so they come through to our website, they book in a free call; therefore, we're generating leads.

You can generate leads via your website; you can keep people on Facebook and Instagram and generate leads via instant forms. You could send people to WhatsApp or Messenger and generate leads. There are all sorts of different options. Even with sales, it's not just strictly coming through to your website making a purchase; you can also do that through Messenger and things along those lines.

But those are the two campaign objectives you want to use. Now, you might be thinking, "Okay, for Meta to be able to optimize for these leads or for these sales, how does Meta know who purchases via my website? How do they know who goes through to my website and inquires and becomes a lead?"

Well, in order for Meta to have that information, you need to set up the Meta Pixel. Okay, very, very important. This is relatively straightforward to do, and it basically allows Meta to track the actions that people take once they come through to your website.

That's how they can work out people aged 43 are more likely to buy than people aged 36 because we sent 10 43-year-olds and 10 36-year-olds, and more of the 43-year-olds bought. All those tiny little data points that Meta can use to optimize your campaigns and get you the best results possible, which is why the campaign objective is so important.

So you need to get the Meta Pixel installed. I've actually created a video that shows exactly how to do that. I'll include a link in the video description below. You can go through and get that set up, and it goes through all the details depending on what you're looking to use.

Then just finally, app promotion is fairly obvious. If you're advertising an app, either to get in stores or to get people to make sort of in-app purchases, then you can go ahead and use app promotion instead.

There are scenarios I want to quickly mention where you have to use traffic; you can't use leads, you can't use sales. That's typically when you are running ads to a destination where you can't actually track whether or not someone purchased.

So there are some event-based websites where you're selling tickets to things where you can't, for example, install the Meta Pixel, or you're sending people to third-party websites where they might purchase your products but not your website. Then you might go ahead and need to use traffic instead of leads or sales.

But I would strongly recommend you use leads or sales. I'm going to go ahead and use leads because the example as I go through this process is going to be an ad campaign advertising our Facebook ad services. I'm going to use that as an example, walking through the process, and we would use leads for that.

But what I'm about to show you from this point on could absolutely apply to sales as well, right? So then we go ahead and click "Continue."

Now, this next point is also really, really important. So Meta, interestingly here, has defaulted to manual. They won't always, and there's a good chance within your ad account you will see a default of tailored leads campaign instead.

So there are tailored campaigns and there are manual campaigns. Most people are going to go with the tailored campaign, and Meta has worded it that way on purpose to encourage people to do so. It sounds good, right? Tailored sounds better than manual.

The issue with tailored campaigns is that basically what it is is reduced functionality. You don't have as many targeting options; you don't have as many options to do various things. You have less control as an advertiser.

Now, that is good if you don't know what you're doing because a lot of advertisers will actually mess things up because they'll use the wrong settings. They will enter in information, targeting options that make their audience too small, like they'll mess things up, and they'd be better off just going with tailored campaigns and just letting Meta work it out for them.

But because you're going through this video and you are taking the time to educate yourself and you know what you're doing, I would recommend going with manual campaigns. We typically use manual campaigns for our clients.

There are times where we will use tailored campaigns, and we will be very clear. It's not something I wouldn't recommend. On the sales side of things, you're advertising an e-commerce business; they refer to it as Advantage Plus shopping campaigns currently. It's another type of tailored campaign, and we do use them all the time, and they can be very, very effective.

It's relying on Meta's AI and Meta's optimization process to automate a lot of things and work a lot of things out for us advertisers. But I do think that for beginners, you're going to get a better understanding of Facebook advertising if you create manual campaigns to start with and then look to incorporate ASC Advantage Plus shopping campaigns or tailored lead campaigns later on.

I'm going to walk you through the steps and show you exactly how you can set up a manual campaign the right way, so you don't need to worry about messing things up. Just wanted to quickly talk about that, so I'm definitely going to use a manual leads campaign to go through this process.

So I'm going to go ahead and click "Continue."

Okay, so right at the top, we've got campaign name. I would just call this something that allows you to understand what the campaign is for. Once you've got a lot of campaigns, it's useful when you're reviewing the data to be able to say, "Oh yeah, that's my campaign for that thing, and that's my campaign for that thing I'm advertising."

So for example, we could call this "Done for You Facebook Ads" because this is what the campaign is done for—for you Facebook ads services. We'll just leave it at that for now.

Okay, right, don't worry about the rules; that's not something you need to worry about at this point. Special ad categories do need to be very quickly mentioned. If your ads are running within an industry that falls within a special ad category, you need to declare it.

You can see the categories down here. If I just click in, we can see that the options here are financial products and services, employment, housing, social issues, or politics. If your ads fall within one of those or are related to one of those, then go ahead and tick it. You can tick multiple categories.

If you're unsure, you're like, "Well, our ads are kind of financial-related. We're not selling loans or credit cards, but we are selling something with a finance offer," go ahead and select it. It's better to be safe here rather than sorry because if you don't select a special ad category and your ads are deemed to be within a special ad category, that can get your whole ad account disabled or at least temporarily restricted.

So better to go ahead and select. Once you do select a special ad category—let's say, for example, you're advertising something related to housing—that will reduce some of the functionality, some of the targeting options and things like that later on, which is not ideal. But those are the rules; Meta is our platform; they make the rules; we just sort of have to go along with it, I'm afraid.

Most advertisers, though, you won't fall within a special ad category; therefore, you can just leave that section blank.

Okay, so we've already talked about the campaign details in terms of buying type and the campaign objective, and we're not going to worry about the extra options. We've got this thing down here called Advantage Campaign Budget.

What that basically allows you to do is that, you know how I said within a campaign you can have multiple ad sets? Well, typically, you would set the budget at the ad set level. You'd be like, "I want to spend $100 a day on this ad set, $10 a day on this ad set, $1,000 a day on this ad set," whatever you can have, whatever budget you want.

We'll talk about that later on. But Advantage Campaign Budget sizes that budget at the campaign level and then distributes the budget to the various ad sets according to performance.

That used to be much more important when we used to have campaigns with lots of different ad sets running. We rarely do that now; we have simpler structures, so you can leave that off—not a problem at all.

When it comes to A/B testing, not something I'd recommend you worry about as a beginner. Just before we click on to the next section, I just want to quickly show this option here.

So you see more options underneath the campaign details, and you can set a campaign spending limit if you would like. You can click "Edit," you can click "Add a Campaign Spending Limit." I think this is sometimes good for beginners who are a little bit afraid of, "Oh, what if something goes wrong and I accidentally spend thousands of dollars that I just don't have? Is there anything I can do to avoid that?"

Yes, you can just set a campaign spending limit and pop in whatever you're comfortable with. Just remember that you've done that, and your ads will switch off when you hit that campaign spending limit. I've seen some people not realize why their ads aren't running, and it's because they've hit their campaign spending limit.

Not something I'm going to do when we are running campaigns for our own stuff or for our clients. We're around ad accounts all the time, so I don't need to worry about that, but I just wanted to quickly mention it in case that might put a few people's minds at ease as we go through.

Then we jump to the ad set level. Likewise, we can give our ad set a name. This would typically be, for example, if we're advertising our done-for-you services, we might have different ad sets based on different locations.

So for example, we work with clients all over the world, but we might have an ad set that is US and Canada-based, right? We might have a different one for advertising in the UK. We might have different ones for other places. So we might start with that sort of name, and I'll adjust the name as we go through and add in various information.

Basically, you want to call the ad set a name based on how you've set up the ad set, so we'll do it at the end.

Right, then we get to this conversion location section. So this is a leads campaign. Where do we want people to become leads? The default here is instant forms. So that's where you click on an ad, and instead of being taken to a website or anything external, you are just presented with a form.

You can create this form, and you can let Meta know what questions you want to ask. I want to ask for their name, their phone number, their email address, their physical address. I want to pre-qualify these leads, so I want to ask other questions like, "What's their budget?" or "What's their time frame?" These are going to vary depending on your business, right?

Most businesses at this point are still sending people to their website instead, so I'm going to go ahead and select that option. But you can use instant forms. I have videos on how to set up instant form-based campaigns and the forms themselves. I'll include links in the video description below, so you can go ahead and check that out.

But yeah, I'm going to go ahead and use the website because that's where we would typically generate leads, and it's fairly self-explanatory. There are other options—things like Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp. For most people, I would recommend beginners stick with either website if your website's great and can convert well or just go with instant forms—the really easy option.

Yes, you absolutely can generate leads via Messenger, Instagram. I know that we don't do that as much typically in countries like the UK and US, but there are other parts of the world where that's far more common to do a lot more business via WhatsApp, for example.

So you can select these options, but it can just be a little bit more difficult in terms of tracking and setting up the campaigns and the tracking capabilities to be able to get that really important data to know who's becoming an actual client, who's actually becoming a lead. Whereas via instant forms, it's super easy; it's all on-platform. Via your website, you just install the pixel, and you're good to go.

So I'm going to go with website. Then we get down to this performance goal section. This is the other part that's incredibly important in relation to the campaign objective.

So once we select our campaign objective as leads, we can still mess things up if we go ahead and use the wrong performance goal. You can see the default here is "Maximize Number of Conversions." Absolutely what we want; we want as many leads as possible. Go out and get us that, Meta. Use your really powerful AI to go ahead and get us as many leads as possible.

We can't select here "Maximize Value of Conversions," but if you are using a sales campaign in particular, it's often quite important to maximize value of conversions as opposed to number of conversions. It might be PR a little bit differently with a sales campaign. You might see "Maximize ROAS" (Return on Ad Spend) instead.

What that basically means is that when people come through to say your e-commerce store and they purchase, you know, some people are going to purchase $20 worth of stuff; some people are going to purchase $200 worth of stuff. If you go with "Maximize Value of Conversions" or "Maximize Return on Ad Spend," what Meta is going to do is they're going to value that $200 customer more than the $20 customer.

So they're going to spend more of your budget trying to get higher-value customers. Now, when we're generating leads for our done-for-you services, of course, we have differing values of customers, but we're only tracking up to the point where they become a lead—not where they then go on to become an eventual customer.

You can track when someone becomes a customer, but that's quite advanced and not something I want you to worry about. I want you to worry about as a beginner. At the point at which someone becomes a lead, all leads are worth the same because we just don't know what they're worth.

Whereas obviously at the point someone purchases, you know exactly what they're worth. That data can be fed back to Meta, and Meta can go, "Oh, okay, yeah, when we advertise to people in their 20s, they only spend $30, but when we advertise to people in their 50s, they spend more like $80. Let's put more ads to people in their 50s; we'll get better results."

Okay, so if you can go with "Maximize Value of Conversions," "Maximize Return on Ad Spend." If not, "Maximize Number of Conversions" is fine. But what you absolutely can't do—please do not do—is go with any of these other goals. If you go ahead and select "Maximize Number of Link Clicks," for example, that's going to function just like a traffic campaign, and then you miss out on the optimization that we've talked about that's really important.

If you go with "Maximize Daily Unique Reach" or "Maximize Number of Impressions," those are going to function similarly to awareness campaigns. So yeah, don't select those; don't mess it up. "Maximize Number of Conversions" for this one is absolutely fine.

Okay, then we've got our data sets. Remember I talked about getting the pixel set up? So we've got "Example Ad Account's Pixel." There's a pixel for this specific ad account, and then we go ahead and select the conversion event that we want people that we want Meta to optimize for.

You can see this isn't set up properly; we haven't got any active events because this is just an example ad account. But we would go ahead and select "Lead." It's going to say this is inactive; this example ad account is not actually set up on a website.

But once you've got this set up and you've been through that pixel setup video, this will all be set up, and you'll be absolutely fine. Now, what this is saying to Meta now is, "Look, I want you to get as many conversions as possible. I want you to use this pixel; it's on my website, and I want you to optimize for the lead conversion event."

You could obviously have different conversion events because you might have some ad campaigns that are optimizing for leads, other ad campaigns that are optimizing for webinar registrations if you run a webinar, other ad campaigns that are optimizing for email newsletter signups if you've got an email newsletter, other campaigns that are optimizing for direct purchases, that they're optimizing for sales.

So lots of different options; that's fine. You can go ahead and select the right conversion event for this campaign. Then we've got the cost per result goal—not something to worry about for now. I've got videos on that if you want more information. Basically, don't worry about that.

Don't worry about showing more options; do not worry about dynamic creative. These are more advanced things I don't want to—this video is already going to be long, already going to feel complicated to beginners, even though I'm trying to make it as simple as possible. So just not something that we need to worry about for now.

Then we get to budget and schedule. There are two different types of budget options: we've got daily budget and we've got lifetime budget. The default is daily budget, and that's what I recommend that most advertisers use.

The problem with lifetime budgets is you'll see once I select a lifetime budget, you get an automatic start date and an end date. Campaigns typically run for a fixed time period, and that means that you need to create new campaigns if you want to continue advertising.

So if you go with daily budget, you can run a campaign for as long as it continues to produce results. We've had campaigns that have literally run for clients for years—like four, five years at this point. Yes, we're going to change the ads within the campaigns; otherwise, we'd run into ad fatigue and all things like that.

But the campaign itself is going to run and run and run, and that's really important because remember what we talked about in terms of Meta's AI optimization systems improving your results? Well, having all that data within one campaign is really beneficial. If you use daily budget, you can keep running for as long as you like; you can adjust budgets; you can scale; you have the maximum amount of flexibility.

Okay, so I'm going to switch back to daily budget now. How much should you spend? This is one of the most common questions that I get asked from Facebook ads beginners, and I think they often want an answer.

So Meta's just defaulted to $20 per day here. The answer that I give that I think is the right one is when you're getting started, you want to spend an amount that you can afford to lose. You don't want to put yourself or your business in any sort of financial difficulty if the campaign doesn't work out because you're brand new to this.

There's a reasonable chance that the ad campaign won't work. Hopefully, it will. When you go through this, you've got a much better chance, but it might be that your offer is not quite right; something about the ad creative didn't quite land, and you just need to try again.

If you keep trying again and again, eventually, you definitely get there. But in the beginning, it might not work out straight away. But you don't want to spend so little that you don't care about it. If your business turns over $10 million a year and you start an ad campaign with $10 a day, it's like, are you even going to bother to check it?

There needs to be that emotional investment, so there's usually a sweet spot where it's like, "We could afford to lose this, but it might sting a little." So that's what I recommend you go in. That's going to massively vary depending on your business, right?

If your business turns over $100 million a year, that number is going to be way, way bigger than if you're a solopreneur and you're turning over $30 grand a year. You know what I mean? So that's going to vary massively. I'm just going to leave it as the default for now, but just be aware of that.

I wouldn't typically recommend setting an end date. I would like to think that once you've got this campaign live, you're going to be in your Ads Manager, you're going to be checking on it, you're going to be adding in ads, you're going to be pausing. I'll talk about optimization later on. You're going to be pausing underperformers; you're not just going to sort of set it and forget it.

If you think you might set an end date just in case, but we very rarely do. Okay, budget scheduling—again, more of an advanced thing, not something that I want you to worry about now.

Then we get into this targeting section down here, which is really, really interesting. Targeting is now split by default in a manual campaign into audience controls and Advantage Plus audience.

Now, if you've run Facebook ads before but haven't in a while, this is going to look quite different to what you're used to. What you're probably used to is this option here: "Switch to Original Audience Options." Now, I wouldn't recommend you do that, but you can do it.

Now, the way this works—the reason why targeting is now split into these two sections—is that any targeting criteria that we give Meta in this audience control section, those are hard boundaries. As in, don't go beyond what we've told you to target here.

Meta Advantage Plus audience, on the other hand, that section is suggestions. So you're saying to Meta, "Look, the people that like my stuff, that I think are my potential customers, they are interested in this. But you know what, Meta? If you've found with all your data that there are other people who aren't technically interested in that that might also buy, might also become a lead, go ahead, have at it, advertise."

I really like this combo—this use of Advantage Plus audience in a manual campaign—because I think it gives you the best of both worlds. It gives you the flexibility of Meta's really smart machine learning processes to get you the best results, and they can optimize the campaigns, and they have the flexibility to target lots of different people as many as is within your target location in most cases.

But you also are able to give Meta inputs to help speed up that optimization process because if they're going to advertise to the whole country, particularly with a new ad account, sometimes that's going to be difficult for them to work it out because there's just so many different options for them to test.

So you can give some direction with the suggestions and be like, "Look, this is what we're advertising here; these are the types of people to go after." But you have all this flexibility, so I think it works really well. It's the best of both worlds.

Okay, so let's go ahead and click into "See More Options." So actually, no, before that, let's tackle locations. So we've got audience control here; we've got locations. It's just defaulted to the United Kingdom because that's obviously where I'm based.

But we can go ahead and change that. Like I said, this ad set might be for example an ad set that we run in the US and in Canada, and we might have a different ad set for that versus different locations.

So maybe we want to take the UK out; you know, different time zones, different language. Maybe we'll operate in a different ad set. Okay, so we could go ahead and add that in. You can, of course, advertise locally if that's what your business does instead.

So let's say, for example, you were based in a town in England called Oxford. I can go ahead and select Oxford, delete those out, and you can see here with the map, the default here is Oxford plus 25 miles. Maybe that's too far; maybe you want to reduce that down to, you know, "Oh, we're just going to go with 16 miles," or you can go ahead and select, "No, actually just the current city only."

So these things, what you select here is going to be very dependent on your business because if you are a national or international business, you can obviously advertise to the whole country, multiple countries; that's absolutely fine. If you are a local business, you have to make an assessment of, "Okay, we're a gym; we're a restaurant. How far are people willing to travel to visit us?"

Okay, we think about this far. Or we're a plumber, an electrician—how far am I willing to travel to a customer's property to work on them? You can adjust these things and go about it like that, either with the radius, current city only, all that sort of thing.

Now, one thing I would recommend is that you don't want to artificially constrain your location. So let's say, for example, you are a UK-based business. I don't like the idea that someone goes, "Well, you know, London's the wealthiest part of the UK. We think most of our customers are going to come from London; therefore, we're only going to target London."

If that's the case, target the whole of the UK. Now, this does assume you can serve the whole of the UK, right? Like you sell a product or a service that you can serve throughout the country. Don't make your target location broader than the people you can actually serve.

But if you can serve the whole UK, don't do this. Don't just go ahead and target London or any other specific location. Better off letting Meta work it out. In that case, I would rather you go ahead and select the United Kingdom, and then you let Meta work it out.

They might put 80% of your ads in London because you might be right about most of your customers going to come from London, but they might put the other 20% in front of people that are really good prospects; they just happen to be in other locations.

That's one of the benefits that you have with going with a leads or a sales objective is that Meta can find those people that you would otherwise miss if you were just specifically targeting your best possible prospects. They have that flexibility.

Okay, so that's location. You can go with the option that best suits your business. I obviously talked through that quite a bit there. Right, I'm going to go ahead and select the United States and Canada because that's what we're going to do within this ad set.

Then we've got minimum age. This only goes up to a certain amount—only goes up to 25 from 18. This is really designed so that you don't advertise to anyone that's too young, like legally to be able to buy a certain product or something within that country. Obviously, different countries have different age requirements and different restrictions around different products and services.

But you can go ahead and put in a minimum age. Then we've got this exclude custom audience section—not going to worry about that until I get into custom audiences in the Advantage Plus audience section. I will quickly come back up and mention that because that will make more sense then.

And then we've got languages. The default here is all languages. For most businesses, that's going to be fine, but there are certain times where you want to be more specific. Let's say, for example, you are advertising in Canada, but you only work—maybe you only speak French, right? And you only work with French-speaking Canadians. Therefore, you can specify French.

There are obviously lots of countries that have multiple languages, and maybe you can only serve certain customers that speak certain languages. Therefore, you can go ahead and enter those in. I'm just going to leave it as all languages because that's what we would typically do.

Okay, then we get down into the Advantage Plus audience section. So remember, these up here are hard boundaries. Like we selected the US and Canada, minimum age 18. Meta will not advertise to people younger than that or outside of those countries.

In Advantage Plus audience, we also have things like—I'll get to custom audience in a second—we also have things like age and gender, but these are suggestions. So we could say, "Look, I think my customers are most likely going to be—oh, this is for our done-for-you services, right? So I think they're most likely going to be age 30."

I didn't quite select that properly; let me try that again. Age 30 to, well, honestly, 65 plus. But we might say the core is age 30 to 55 for people, for business owners or marketing managers that are going to use our Facebook and Instagram advertising services.

Okay, so we can enter that in, but remember, these are suggestions. So Meta can choose to go with people younger or older as well, but that gives Meta some direction. So that's what I recommend you do. You want to keep this relatively broad; don't be too specific here.

Anything less than like a 10-year age range, 15-year on bit—that's a bit too specific. But entering some suggestions here, and then like I was saying, unless you are very heavily skewed one way or the other, I just go with all. That's certainly what we do.

But if you were like, "Look, you know, our products are sold 80% male or 80% female," you can go ahead and be more specific. Then we've got this detailed targeting section.

So here, I don't want you to overthink it. You basically want to add in things that are related to your products and services that you think describe the people that would be interested in purchasing your products and services.

So we're advertising our done-for-you Facebook advertising services, right? So we might add in things like social media marketing—people who are interested in social media marketing.

Now, this I'm glad this came up, actually. So we've got social media marketing here, but look, we've got over to the right, we've got job type. Now, do we want to advertise to people that have a job title related to social media marketing?

Well, we might if we're looking to work with larger companies where it might be a social media marketing manager looking to hire an agency. But I imagine most people that have a job title of social media marketing, they're actually the ones doing the work, and therefore they're not going to hire our agency, right?

But we could find people, and here we've got employers. But what we really want here is people interested. So look, social media marketing—interest. That's going to include lots of business owners, entrepreneurs, people that are interested in this that may well become customers of ours.

So we're going to go ahead and select social media marketing as an interest. You can add in a bunch here. For example, we could add in, like, I know some of these options, right? We could add in like Facebook page admins, or more specifically for us, business page admins.

So these are admins of Facebook pages that are for businesses. That would be a good option for us for obvious reasons. You can go through, so what I recommend you do is don't overthink this. Add in a handful of options that just seem relevant—just sort of common sense test.

You can type in things. So, you know, let's say you were selling football boots, right? You'd add in things like football, and you add in maybe more specifically football boots. That's not going to come up, but you might add in some of the various brands related to football boots, and you can go through and type things in, or you can literally browse through the categories.

So you can browse through demographics, interests, and they've got all the subcategories. It's worth taking a little bit of time to work these out, but remember, these are suggestions, not hard boundaries. So Meta has the ability to go and be more flexible.

Okay, so once you've added those in, the next thing I want to talk about here is custom audiences. So custom audiences are a few different types of custom audiences. The way the easiest way to understand custom audiences broadly is they are warm audiences.

So they're people that have interacted with your business before. This could be people that are on your email list; this could be people that have previously bought from you—existing customers. This could be people that have watched videos of yours on Instagram or follow you on Facebook or have submitted a lead form or any one of these number of things.

For beginners, I'd recommend that you don't worry about custom audiences yet. That is absolutely something that you want to add in later on, but not something you need to do right now. Honestly, most beginners won't have much in the way of warm audiences anyway. They won't have much custom audiences because, you know, you're getting started.

So you're not going to have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of Instagram video viewers, right? Because you know you're just getting started with your advertising most likely. So you're not missing out on much by not including them yet.

But as your warm audiences grow, this becomes more and more significant and more and more important. The people that have interacted with your business before, visited your website, on your email list, interacted, engaged on Meta, on Facebook or Instagram, they're some of your best prospects. They're some of the people that are most likely to purchase or become a lead because they've already demonstrated a very clear interest in whatever it is that you do and whatever it is that you have to offer.

So definitely something to do at some point, but not right now. I'll include a link in the video description below to another video that shows you exactly how to set up all the custom audiences, which ones you should use and when, and all that sort of thing.

Also, it's worth pointing out that because we're using Advantage Plus audience here and these targeting suggestions are suggestions, not hard constraints, Meta is pretty good at finding people within your warm audience anyway.

That's how, as part of a tailored campaign or as part of an Advantage Plus shopping campaign, where you have much more limited targeting criteria, Meta is still able to find people in your warm audience to retarget because they put ads in front of people, and the ones that engage the most, they put ads in front of those more again and again.

They basically find your warm audiences to some extent anyway. Definitely something to add in, not right now. Just quickly to round it off, this exclude these custom audiences from up in the audience control section—why would you want to use that?

That's for a scenario where, let's say you're going to run a big new sale or a discount on an offer, but you don't want your previous customers, who perhaps didn't get to take advantage of that discount, that price, to see that ad because they might be annoyed about it.

So that's where you would exclude, create a customer audience of those people and exclude those people. Part of customer audiences are also lookalike audiences. So that's where you take an existing group of people—let's say people who have visited your website or previous customers—and you say to Meta, "Create an audience of people that are very similar to this group of people."

Same age, demographic, same interests, same behaviors online, all that sort of stuff. Again, can be a very powerful option—not something I want you to worry about at this point. I have other videos on lookalike audiences that you can go ahead and check out.

Okay, so that is targeting. Now we scroll down to placements. Now you can see the default here is Advantage Plus placements, which means all placements. Just to quickly explain what placements are, placements are the various locations on Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger where your ads can be shown.

So if I just click in, it'll make a bit more sense. If I click "Edit" on this, Advantage placements—which is what's recommended—is just go with the lot. If we click into manual placements, we can then see that there are various options.

So you've got these four platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger. Within that, we have subcategories, right? So perhaps you want to advertise, you know, in the Facebook and Instagram feeds, like in the various feed options, but you don't want to advertise on Stories and Reels.

So you can deselect Stories and Reels as an example. Or you get more specific and say, "You know, I want to advertise Instagram Stories but not Facebook Stories," or "I only want to—I want to get rid of the Audience Network; I only want to advertise on Instagram and not Facebook."

You can do all sorts of various things. Because we have selected the leads campaign objective or the sales campaign objective, depending on your business, I would recommend that you go with Advantage Plus placements.

The reason why is that because Meta knows what we want. They know we want a lead; they know we want a sale, and they know what that looks like in terms of we've set it up. So they have the tracking capabilities to know when that outcome has been achieved.

Meta is going to put your ads on the placements that are most likely to get you what it is that you want—that thing, that lead or that sale. That might mean that most of your ads are put on the feed, Stories, and Reels. In fact, that's what it will mean.

But perhaps someone clicked through an ad, went through to your website. Now they're in Marketplace or they're on the Audience Network, and Meta is like, "Oh, we can get this person over the line because they've already engaged; they just didn't quite purchase last time. Let's put an ad in front of them."

So giving Meta that flexibility is really good. If you have to use one of the other campaign objectives—so you have to use traffic, for example, because you can't track the end lead, say they're going to a third-party platform of some sort—then you do want to select manual placements.

My recommendation would normally be to get rid of Audience Network and sort of limit yourself to feed, Stories, and Reels for the most part and get rid of the various other options if you're in that scenario.

But most advertisers, that's not going to be the case, and you can go with Advantage Plus audience without a problem.

Okay, that's the ad set level done. Let's jump over to the ad level. Oh no, one thing we didn't do at the ad set level—we didn't label it, right? So I said that we were going to name it what we're targeting here.

So we're targeting US and Canada in the sessions 30 to 55, and we've gone with business page admin, social media marketing. So what we might do is come up here and say, "30 to 55, we could do business page admins and then social media marketing," something like that.

You can come up with your own naming conventions. I just think it's useful for me to demonstrate this because when we're then glancing through potentially lots of different ad sets, if we wanted to test different setups or lots of different campaigns, we can just really quickly and easily see what it is that we're advertising.

So just something worth doing, and we might shorten these. Now let's jump over to the ad section name. I'm going to do at the end like I did with the ad set partnership ad. Don't worry about that; great feature, something you may want to use later on. I have videos on them—not something you need to worry about right now.

Then we go to identity to just make sure basically that you've got the right Facebook page and the right Instagram account selected. If you haven't already, you might want to follow me on both Facebook and Instagram. Those are how you find me, just in case you've added in multiple. Just make sure you've got the right ones selected.

Obviously, we've got tons and tons, but worth doing. I've seen people accidentally run ads for one business from a page for a different business—not good.

Right, then we've got ad setup. You can either create an ad, you can use an existing post. Creative Hub mockup is not something to worry about right now. Use existing post would be like if you've got an Instagram post that's performed really well, maybe it's got lots of social proof, and you're like, "Let's just run that as an ad."

It's not something I usually recommend because the format of that post isn't necessarily going to be well-designed for an ad, and Meta will allow you to make some customizations to try and improve it. But you want, for example, your ad to have the core elements of an ad, like a very obvious call to action button and a headline, and be able to click through and take action.

So I don't usually recommend that, but something you can do. I'm going to go ahead and click "Create Ad." Then we're going to go with manual upload. You can see we've got stuff here talking about Advantage Plus catalog ads—again, a great feature, not something to worry about as a beginner; that's more of an advanced thing, so don't worry about that for now.

Then we choose our ad format. So I'm going to go ahead and use single image or video here—usually what I'd recommend. Carousel, in particular, I do like; you can use that as an ad format to experiment with. That's where you'll have multiple cards, so you'll have multiple images, each with its own headline, and people can click through, for example, like different products.

A great ad format, something we use a lot, but just a little bit more complicated. I think let's keep things simple; let's get your first campaign out there, and you can always look to add things more complicated in later on as you get more familiar and you're dealing with one advanced element as opposed to trying to take on 17 advanced elements all at once.

So okay, so we've got format: single image or video, multi-advertiser ad. You can leave that on or turn it off; I don't think it's going to make a huge amount of difference either way, to be perfectly honest.

Then we get to setup creative. So I'm going to go ahead and click on "Setup Creative" here, and I'm going to create an image ad for demonstration purposes. Typically, I would recommend advertisers start with images. Yes, videos can produce better results—not always, by the way—but they're a lot more difficult to create.

So in terms of reducing that barrier to entry and getting started at the beginning, I'm going to go ahead and select image ad. Then you'll see this creative setup window.

Now, the first part of this actually I think is quite confusing, and it's not something I think you need to mess with as a beginner advertiser. So you can enter in here like a source URL where Meta can grab information from.

So for example, you can put your website here, and Meta is going to find a bunch of site links. Site links would be someone could click on an ad but go specifically to a destination, like they could go through to your testimonials page or through to your reviews page, or they could go straight to your contact page or straight through to your how it works page, whatever your site link setup is.

Not something I'd recommend you set up as a beginner. The improvement in results is there from using this, but it's not worth the added complication at this point. You can see here Meta's got, based on our experience, you can reduce your cost per result by up to 4.5%. So it's not a big needle mover yet; add that in later on, and I have other videos about that.

So we're just going to skip that and go ahead with next. This section, we obviously need to add things in. So this is text; this is the ad copy that we're going to add in. So we've got primary text, and where text appears is going to look different depending on the placement option.

We'll talk about—we'll show you that in the preview in a second. But typically, if you think about like a Facebook feed ad, you've got your primary text above the image or the video, then you've got the image or the video, you've got the headline beneath it.

We've got some various options here, so I'm just going to go ahead and grab some primary text and headlines to pop in because remember, this we're going to be advertising as an example my done-for-you Facebook advertising services.

So we've got ad copy; we've got ads that are running for this right now, so I'll quickly grab those. So I've just added in some ad copy and quickly talk through it. I don't want you to spend too long on this and overcomplicate it.

Yes, ad copy does make a difference to your result; it is something that you want to optimize over time. But again, these are things that can be added to, and you can test new options and get more familiar with it. I think getting that first campaign up and live is really important.

But here, for example, we've got here as the ad copy, short and sweet, which is how I'd like you to start. Would you like my specialist agency to create, manage, and optimize your ad campaigns for you? You can find out about our services and book a free 30-minute strategy session with us here.

Now, this ad is typically being put in front of people that already know who I am. They've followed me on other social platforms, or they've seen lots of ads on Facebook and Instagram, so we don't need to include as much information as we might do with other types of ads in terms of the primary text.

But short and sweet is often the way to go. We've got a call to action; we've got a question at the beginning. It's obvious what it is that we're advertising, taking a few boxes. I have other videos on more detailed ad copy, by the way, if you want to check that out.

Just want to give an example. One thing that is interesting: we've entered in this primary text option; Meta has generated a number of different other options for primary text that's AI-generated based on what we've input.

We can add up to five different text options. You see primary text one of five. So I could, for example, look at one of these, you know, "Tired of struggling with your ad campaigns? Let us help! Book a free strategy session with our specialist agency and get the results you deserve."

I could be like, "Boom! Okay, let's go ahead and add that in," and that would be another one of our primary text. You do need to read through these quite carefully; some will be good, some won't.

So go through these and just select the ones that you think will work well. Maybe you take one, you sort of tweak it slightly, and then you go ahead and use a variation of it yourself. But yeah, using the text variations is typically a good idea.

If you just want to go with the one primary text, not a problem at all, but you can add up to five. Adding in a few, particularly the AI-generated ones, is absolutely fine.

Then we scroll down to headlines. So I have entered this headline: "Free Strategy Session." Pretty straightforward; we're advertising our done-for-you services. Let's start with a free call, with a free strategy session to work out what it is that you want and how we might be able to help. That's the offer here.

Meta AI has come up with a couple of options. I can click "Generate More," and it'll come up with some more. "Elevate your ad campaigns. Elevate your advertising game." I don't think that's great.

So for example, this is an example that I don't think is very good: "Elevate your advertising game," because I'm offering a done-for-you service here. Like, we'll run your ads; someone doesn't need their ad game to get better; we're going to do it for them.

"Elevate your advertising game" sounds like it's like an education; it's like a course or a coaching program, and that's not what I'm advertising here. We do have those—both of those; we have a coaching program and, of course, but we wouldn't use that for this specific offer.

So when it comes to the AI-generated text options, yes, have a look; yes, you can use some, but just you've got the context that the AI can't have around whether that's actually good for your offer or not.

Again, you can add in other headline options and look to add it up to five, but one is absolutely fine. If in doubt, one clear, direct, very clear what the introductory offer is, like this free strategy session, is a good way to go.

Description: "We create, manage, and optimize your ad campaigns." We create, manage, and optimize ad campaigns for our clients. Again, you can add up to five. Meta hasn't automatically generated any here, but you can add in other descriptions.

Then we've got the call to action button. So if you're familiar with what Facebook ads look like, I'll show you in a second. We've got the call to action button, and here there are a number of options. You just want to select the one that most accurately describes what it is that you're offering.

Depending on your campaign objective, you select—you will see different options here as well, by the way. So don't think, "Oh, hang on, there's none of these apply." I think "Learn More" for an offer like this makes complete sense.

People are like, "Oh, okay, yeah, Ben's agency does done-for-you services, right? That's interesting. Yeah, maybe I should just hand over my ads; I'll get better results." Okay, in that mindset, what do they want to do at that point? They want to learn more.

Okay, I'll click through; I'll book this free session; I'll find out what it is they do and how they can help and what they charge. By the way, if all this seems really complicated and you would just like my agency to do all this for you—to run your ads, create them, optimize them—we'll almost certainly get you much better results than if you manage it yourself.

You can book a call, and obviously inquire; there is a link in the video description below. Click on that and come through, and hopefully, get a chance to work together.

Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and click "Next." That's our text. Now we need to go ahead and add media. So I'm actually going to go ahead and upload an image for one of the ones that we're actually running.

You can't see it right now, but I've just got it selected. I'm going to go ahead and click "Next," and then when it gets added, automatically into the various ad formats that we might want to use, so you can kind of see what this looks like.

I'll talk a bit more about the image when we get into the preview in a second, but I just wanted to go through the three categories. So Meta, there's lots of different placement options, as you saw when we went through that section, but Meta sort of grouped them into three categories, with these first two being by far the most important.

So you've got feeds, in-stream ads for videos and Reels, and we've got the original here. Meta recommends roughly square 1:1 ratio—sometimes slightly taller. Then you've got Stories and Reels, which is obviously typically going to be a vertical format.

So I can go ahead and select 9:16 on that, but you can see, look, it cuts off some of the text; it cuts off some of the most important information on this image. That's not right. So we probably go with the original.

Meta is going to make that top and bottom look better, by the way, than just a gray block. They'll use what's called standard enhancements, which we'll get to in a second, to make that look better.

What we would typically do—I won't do it here, and I don't think it's necessary for you as a beginner—but what we would typically do is we would create a square version that will look great on the feeds, and then we would create a vertical version, a different format, like our designers would do that, that would look better on Stories and Reels.

I'm not going to add that in here; not something that you strictly need to do; it's sort of an optional extra, but it will get you better results than something I should mention. We would normally do that.

Then we've got right column here, which is like a sort of more landscape-type format. If we select original, Meta gets a little bit angry with us; it'll be automatically cropped. If we go with recommended, stuff's cut off.

Again, we would replace that with a different image, and you can see we've got "Replace." "Replace" obviously looks fine there, and we would put in different options, but I'm not going to go ahead and do that.

Like I said, it is not typically necessary. If you're just going to create the one format, square is probably the best way to go.

Okay, then we've got another AI tool as part of the ad creation process, and this is where it's going to use AI to create versions of our images. So you can see that we've got different—we've got a couple options here. You can select backgrounds only, so you can see that this is a business advertisement in this bag, and then the AI put this background in.

Create variation; we've got AI for full images. You can see that the original creative is like a plant, and then Meta's gone ahead and made more plants, similar things with water being poured in.

If you're advertising typically e-commerce products with relatively simple images of your product, this often works quite well. If you're advertising something like what I demonstrated, which is a service with a lot more text, this does not work.

This is not what I would typically recommend. You can have a play around with it, so you can select full images and then select "Generate Images," and you know Meta is going to take a bit of time and then generate some images, and you can obviously then choose to either use them or not, depending on whether you think it's appropriate.

Just like with the text AI tools, you absolutely have to go through these and don't just go, "Oh, okay, it's AI-generated; let's go ahead and tick it and use it." A lot of them won't work well, so like I said, for the type of business that I'm advertising here, particularly because me being in the image is really important, and we're putting them in front of warm audiences, these images are terrible because they're not me.

So it's definitely not going to work, so like we can't use these. Hopefully, that's pretty obvious, right? These wouldn't perform anywhere near as well, so I'm going to click "Skip" and continue.

For some businesses, like e-commerce bus products, they can work much better. Okay, but I'm not going to add those in for sure.

Now we've got into the optimize, like the enhancement section. One, what you see here in terms of the options for creative enhancements will depend on the type of ad creative you've used.

So here, 3D animation—that's taking an image and making it animated, like this, look, making it move. It says it's not compatible with this image, which makes sense because of the type of image it is with text and things like that.

So can't do it with an e-commerce product-style image; going to work much better. Same with image animation—similar setup; you can see the examples. You can see here, see four more active enhancements.

Again, the ones that will show for you will depend on what you upload because there are lots of different enhancements, but these two aren't turned on. These two have been turned on by default; I can choose to turn them off.

So we've got "Add Overlays." This is going to be the preview; it says it's not available, but this is going to be overlays over the top of the image if they want to add in text. For a lot of images, that's fine.

I would actually probably go and turn this off for this image in particular because it's already very text-heavy. We've got visual touch-ups; this is just sort of making it look better in different places.

So you can see here, look, they've changed the aspect ratio a little bit; that's no longer square. They've sort of zoomed in and elongated. If I have it, so this is what they're going to do and make it look like on the Reels and Stories.

Remember I said it wouldn't just look like a gray block; it would look better. So you can go ahead and select those options.

Okay, so now we get to the review section. So this is where you can see everything that you've set up. You can see the ad preview on the right-hand side. You can see how it looks on different placements.

You can see how it looks on mobile, how it looks on desktop, how it looks on Instagram, how it looks on Facebook. You can see all the different placements, and you can go through and check everything.

If you want to make any changes, you can go back and edit any of the sections. You can go back and edit the ad set; you can go back and edit the campaign

Gray at the bottom, top. The AI is going to make it look better, and they've put a black top and bottom on it. You can see what it looks like there on Reels. I'm quite happy to leave that on most of the time.

Music—add some music to the image. Yeah, no issue with that. You can be selective and go through and change the music and work out, "Okay, hang on, what song do we want to do?" Always remember, this is what's going to be put in front of your audience. So if it's not appropriate, you can turn it off. But provided the music fits with the offer, I'm normally quite happy to leave that on.

Like I said, you can click change music and change it. Then we've got text improvements. Now, what that allows Meta to do, if you have it turned on, is to take your headline, your primary text, your description, and sort of move them around. They go, "Oh, actually, we think this primary text would work better as a description, and we think this primary text would be better as the headline."

I think as beginners, if you've got fairly basic copy in all scenarios and it's quite changeable, it's fine to leave that on. Most of the time, we are going to turn that off as an agency because we're looking to take people through a journey. We've really thought about these headlines, these primary texts, and do we want people—do we want the ability to move those around? Usually not.

Like I said, remember this is what's being shown to people. Again, the options you see here will depend on your creative. You have to go through each one, like I just did, and decide which you want to use and which not to. It's not as simple as saying yes or no all the time.

Then there are some that you might want to use, but you might want to adjust, like music, for example. You want to be like, "Does that work for my particular ad creative?" Because if it's got the wrong feel and tone, that's not going to help.

Okay, then we go ahead and click done. Now, what we can do here is turn on this ad preview, and we can see what this ad looks like in various placements. So, for example, on the Facebook feed, we've got our primary text up here. That's what our ad image looks like. We've got our headline, we've got our description in there, and we've got our "Learn More" call to action button.

I just want to quickly talk through this image because we've got something really quite simple here. We have much more complicated ad creative. There's like—we've got videos that are skits between me and another version of me, and it's all edited together. I'm sure you've seen the sort of thing I'm talking about as content online.

But I wanted to demonstrate a simple example because I don't want this to seem really intimidating. The ad creative, the ad creative is, after the offer itself, the single most important part of your ad. But that doesn't mean it needs to be really complicated.

So this is an ad for our done-for-you Facebook advertising services, like we discussed. And what have we got? It's a bit small, but hopefully, you can still see it. So on this image, we've got our Trustpilot thing at the top because we've got, I don't know, like 150 plus reviews with like a 4.7 Trustpilot rating, which, by the way, for a marketing agency is like unheard of.

That's incredibly high to get 4.7 on—I think it may be even more than 200 views. I don't know exactly, but 150, 200 views, something like that. So it's absolutely fantastic. We'll have that in there. The most sought-after Facebook Ad Agency in the UK is like a headline within the image itself—really clear and obvious.

It's got a picture of me. It's not just a picture of me; it's a picture of me speaking up, talking on stage at a conference. So there's a lot of credibility there. There's also going to be the recognition from people that know me. These ads are mostly going to be put in front of our warm audiences.

I have, you know, a couple million people in warm audiences at this stage, generated millions for our clients across multiple industries, led by one of the most trusted ad gurus in the industry, Ben. Really simple—couple of benefits associated, some credibility indicators, and then we've got "Start Scaling Now" as the button people can click through.

Very simple image that has worked well—like literally, not can work well. This has been running as an ad and has worked well. You can create something similar. What that looks like for your business will have to vary depending on what it is that you offer, but you can create very simple ads like that, and they can work very well. Just to let you know, right?

Then we can scroll down. You can see, by the way, we've got the primary text that we entered and the headlines and descriptions. That's all been added in here. Then we can go ahead and edit these. So like we went through the creative creation process, put in the ad together, but we can also come and edit them from within here.

Call to action button—we can change. We already talked about Advantage Plus creative. Then we've got the destination. So obviously, you want to make sure that you are sending people to the place that you want them to be sent.

I cannot tell you how many ads I've seen where people get this wrong, so just double-check this is actually taking people to the right place. For example, I can come here. This is a page for our done-for-you services, and I can jump back in and add that in and make absolutely sure that we are sending people to the right location.

Then beneath the website URL, we've got the display link. Sometimes, like the link to the website just doesn't really make any sense in terms of the words, and you want to display something different. If you want to, you can enter that in, and you see on the ad here where we've got the display link as just my website. That will replace it with something else.

I'm very happy for it to just stay as my website, but sometimes you want to change it. Browser add-ons—it's not something I'd recommend you mess around with as a beginner. It's something you can play around with; you can look to get calls directly. But yeah, more complicated than you need to worry about as a beginner.

I want to simplify it. There's already enough elements to worry about. The same is going to apply to instant experiences, and the same is going to apply to Facebook events unless, of course, the whole point of this is for you to run an ad to an event that you have on your Facebook page, in which case you're going to have to go through that.

But yeah, I don't want to include that here. Then we've got languages. You can see here it says, "Add your own translations or automatically translate your ad to reach more people in more languages." That may or may not be important to you, depending on where it is you're advertising.

So you can turn that on and, like I said, add in your own translations or let Meta AI have a stab at it. Again, you're going to have to monitor those things. Tracking—you just want to double-check that you've got your pixel all set up.

So this, like, has—we set things up, and I've talked about watching the other video on how to set up a pixel. You then want to make sure that this ad specifically, yeah, it's using this pixel. We've got the ad set up to be optimizing for that conversion event that we want.

So Meta knows what's going on; they know what we want to track, and we can use Meta systems to get the best results possible. Don't worry about app events. URL parameters can help increase tracking. That is an advanced thing I would not recommend that you mess with because, like I said, it can get pretty complicated.

So now that we've created this ad, we can go ahead and give it a name. Again, you want the name to just be something quite descriptive so that when you've got multiple ads in the future, you can easily see it. So we could have BH for me—black and white image, heavy text, something like that—just so I know, "Okay, yeah, it's that one," when you're going through and analyzing the results.

Now, the only thing you need to do to get this ad live is to go ahead and click publish down here on the right-hand side. Now, once you click publish, Meta is going to take a bit of time to review the ad. It's not going to be done by a person; it's going to be done by their automatic systems just to make sure it doesn't violate any of the advertiser policies.

That takes a varying amount of time depending on your ad account and whether ads have, you know, been through and been approved previously. But it shouldn't be too long. With a relatively new ad account, it's probably going to be live within half an hour or so. Sometimes it can take longer. Don't worry if that's the case.

Also, if your ad does get flagged for violating one of the advertiser policies, Meta should give you some information around that. You can adjust the ad and try again. You should be able to, or you could appeal the decision if you think it's been incorrectly flagged for violating advertiser policies.

But yeah, you go ahead and click publish, and then you can get the ad live. A few things I want to mention now that we've been through that process. The first is going to be around campaign structure.

So here, we've just created one campaign, one ad set, one ad. You can start with that structure. I think that's absolutely fine. You are most likely going to want to add in other things later on, particularly if you have different offers and things like that.

So I'll include a link in the description to another video that shows you all about campaign structure, ad account structure, and things like that—how many campaigns, how many ad sets, all that good information.

Another thing to note is that once you've got this ad live, you're going to want to assess the results, analyze the results that are coming through, and know how to actually optimize that campaign because optimization over time can make a really big difference.

So again, another video all about optimization—link in the video description. And of course, in this video, the ad that I've created as an example is a fairly basic one. It doesn't mean that it can't produce results, but to get the best possible results, at some point, you're going to want to create more sophisticated ads, more engaging ads—often video ads—that are going to grab your audience's attention better.

They're going to help convince them to click, help convince them to become a lead, help convince them to make that purchase. So I strongly recommend that you check out this video next. In it, I demonstrate my favorite Facebook ad creative strategy. I walk you through one that we use all the time that can deliver absolutely fantastic results.

It's something that can be done by beginners. So after you've been through this and you've set this up and you feel like you're up and running on your Facebook ads journey, this is what I check out next.