How to Advertise on Facebook: A Step-By-Step Digital Advertising Guide

By Chris Hislop October 13, 2023

Facebook is one of the world’s most-visited platforms–it sees more than 2.5 billion active users each month. Many love to use Facebook to share family photos or to keep in contact with friends all over the world. While it’s undoubtably a useful communication platform for individuals, it’s also an incredibly powerful tool for businesses. Facebook Ads offers highly-customized targeting opportunities for digital advertisers to reach their target audience.

The digital advertising landscape is continuously shifting and evolving, making it difficult for marketers to stay on top of news, updates, and best practices. For anyone whose never used the Facebook Ads platform before, it’s easy to get intimidated by the seemingly endless options available. And even for anyone with experience, it’s still difficult to keep track of all the updates, tricks, and best practices.

Luckily, Raka is here for you! We’ve created our Digital Advertising Guide with aspiring digital advertisers like you in mind.

When you’re ready to start growing your business with digital advertising on Facebook, download the guide. We’ll walk you through the basics of setting up a Facebook Business account down to the details of creating ads.

Master Digital Advertising in a Few Clicks

Facebook Ads structure explained

For anyone who has advertised on Facebook or Google before, this hierarchy will look very familiar. From a Facebook Business account, advertisers can set up campaigns, ad groups, and ads. There are quite a few different ad formats available as well–choose between video ads, image ads, or more interactive Collection ads (we’ll explain more about each format in our guide).

Digital Advertising Guide for Facebook

Depending on your product or service offering, you might decide that some ad formats work better than others. Say, for example, that your company sells stylish accessories for men. You business releases a new collection each season, so you want to use a Carousel ad to showcase all your new fall items. Users can scroll through up to 10 photos to see all your brand’s accessories showcased with unique captions. You can even link to each individual product, making it easier for users to make a purchase.

Our Digital Advertising Guide will help you choose the right ad format that matches your goals and walk you through the entire setup process!

Three Facebook advertising mistakes to avoid

There are three crucial mistakes we often see advertisers make on Facebook:

  1. Not doing any A/B testing.
  2. Doing too much A/B testing.
  3. Setting the wrong campaign or conversion goals.

Mistake 1: Not doing any A/B testing

A/B testing is a great, low-budget way to improve your advertising results. Our advertising experts recommend starting off with testing CTAs, creatives (images), and ad heading copy. Maybe your audience on Facebook will respond better to calls-to-action that say “Learn More” over CTAs that read “Apply Now”.

Facebook Ads CTAs

An example of a Facebook CTA

Start out small with a couple of tests to find out if a particular CTA or image performs better than another. We actually wrote a super helpful blog post that will help you identify what A/B tests are most important to try, and which ones you can ignore.

Mistake 2: Doing too much A/B testing

We definitely recommend that advertisers test out different creatives and messaging in ads to see what performs the best, however, there’s no sense in spreading your entire budget way too thin across dozens of tests. It’s easy to lose track of all the tests you’re running and it prevents your ads from being served to as many people in your target audience as possible throughout the course of the day. While it may be tempting to test everything you possibly can (because Facebook makes it so easy), be patient and run just a couple at a time.

Mistake 3: Setting the wrong campaign or conversion goals

You do want to be very particular about setting campaign and conversion goals in your Facebook Ads account, and this can be fairly time-consuming depending on how much experience you have with digital advertising. Facebook offers 11 different conversion goals, but it can be difficult to choose the right one without any experience. Luckily, we’re here to help! Our guide will help you identify if your brand wants to:

  • Generate brand awareness – Create interest in your brand’s products or services.
  • Develop brand consideration – Inspire users to seek more information about your brand.
  • Encourage conversions – Embolden interested users to make a purchase.

We’ll even help you choose corresponding conversion and campaign goals that align with your brand. While we will dig deeper into this topic in the guide, here’s a brief overview of each goal available through Facebook Ads:

  1. Brand Awareness
  2. Reach
  3. Traffic
  4. Engagement
  5. App Installs
  6. Video Views
  7. Lead Generation
  8. Messages
  9. Conversions
  10. Catalog Sales
  11. Store Traffic

What to expect from the Digital Advertising Guide

If you’re raring to go, download our Digital Advertising Guide to get started with advertising on Facebook. It will be a useful resource to guide you step-by-step through the set-up process, as well as a valuable tool to keep as a reference. With our guide, you’ll learn how to:

  • Set up a business account in Facebook
  • Set up a campaign
  • Set up an ad set
  • Create an Image ad
  • Create a Carousel ad
  • Create a Video ad
  • Create a Lead Generation ad
  • Create a Collection ad
  • Define and create conversions

There are also additional sections that will walk you through digital advertising on Google and Instagram, making this the ultimate all-in-one guide for advertisers who need a helping hand. Be sure to save the guide to your computer so you can always fall back on it for help with digital advertising.

Master Digital Advertising