Facebook Paid Ads Checklist

Facebook paid ads can be an effective tool for reaching your target audience and driving conversions. To maximise the success of your Facebook ad campaigns, it's important to follow a comprehensive checklist that covers planning, research, tracking, setup, and optimisation. In this exercise, we will explore a Facebook paid ads checklist to ensure your campaigns are well-structured and optimised for success.

Goal:Structure your Facebook ads account and optimise your campaigns.

Facebook Paid Ads Checklist

Account

Planning

• Determine an acceptable cost per acquisition (CPA) to guide your budget decisions.
• Estimate the maximum cost per click (CPC) you are willing to pay.
• Approximate a test advertising budget to allocate for your campaigns.

Research

• Define your target customer groups based on demographics, interests, and behaviours.
• Identify target interests and behaviours on Facebook that align with your audience.
• Identify custom audiences for retargeting purposes, including email lists and lookalike audiences.

Tracking

• Verify your domain in business settings
• Place the Facebook pixel for conversion tracking on your website.
• Verify the pixel's functionality using the Facebook Pixel Helper tool.
• Use a URL builder to add tracking parameters for analytics tools.

Campaign structure

The Meta advertising platform consists of three layers: Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. To advertise effectively, you want to be testing different ads and ad sets against each other. It’s therefore recommended to use a cascading structure in which each campaign has at least 2 ad sets, and each ad set has at least 2 ads.

Ad set structure

• In the Ad Set section, we’ll go deeper into the audience and ad set settings, but given the above table structure, we already wanted to highlight that it is effective to set up at least three different ad sets for the below audiences. If you don’t have the budget to run all ad sets, then don’t worry, just create the audiences and start collecting the data, so that if you have a bigger budget in the future, you have better data to start off with.

Prospecting

This could be different ad sets for different audiences:

• 1% Look-a-Like Purchase All Time
• 1% Look-a-Like Add to Cart 180d
• New Audiences based on interests

Past customers

This could be different ad sets for different audiences:

• Past Customers All Time
• Past Customers 180d
• Past Customers 30d
• Past Customers 10d

Remarketing to potential customers

This could be different ad sets for different audiences:

• Remarketing 30d
• Add to Cart 30d
• Visitors Top 25% 30d
• FB Engagement 30d
• IG Engagement 30d
• Remarketing 180d
• Add to Cart 180d
• Visitors Top 25% 180d
• FB Engagement 180d
• IG Engagement 180d
• Product view 30d (Viewed or added to cart but did not purchase. Ad needs to be specific to the product they viewed.)
• Product view 180d (Viewed or added to cart but did not purchase. Ad needs to be specific to the product they viewed.)

Campaign

Campaign objective

When running a Meta ad campaign, it's crucial to establish a clear goal that aligns with your business objectives. Meta offers several campaign goal options to help you achieve specific outcomes. Consider the following campaign goals and choose the one that best suits your needs:

• Awareness: Select this goal if you want to generate interest and increase brand visibility. It aims to create awareness about your product or service offerings among your target audience.
• Traffic: If your primary objective is to drive traffic to your website or landing page, choose this goal. It focuses on increasing the number of people visiting your online assets.
• Engagement: This goal is suitable if you want to encourage audience interaction and engagement with your content. It aims to generate likes, comments, and shares, fostering a sense of community around your brand.
• Leads: If your focus is on capturing potential customer information, such as email addresses or contact details, select this goal. It aims to generate leads that can be nurtured and converted into customers.
• App Promotion: Choose this goal if you want to increase app installations and engagement. It directs your ad audience to install and engage with your mobile application.
• Sales: If your ultimate goal is to drive conversions and generate sales, this goal is the most appropriate. It focuses on optimising your ad campaign for direct sales or revenue-generating actions.

Campaign name

Depending on the number of campaigns you want to come up with a structured way of naming each campaign. More on this in the Ad Set naming section below. However, when starting out it’s recommended to stick to 1 campaign and thus the naming won’t be important.

Special ad categories

You can skip this section unless you are advertising in one of the mentioned categories, then you’ll have to select the appropriate option.

Campaign details

Depending on your campaign goal, here you can change your buying type and objective, as well as, set your campaign spending limit. You don’t have to set a limit, but if you do then keep in mind that the advertising algorithms will go through a learning phase and need around 50 conversions per week to become more effective. It’s, therefore, necessary to set a budget limit that allows you to reach enough conversions. However, if you’re running a “small” experiment and want to limit the max budget across all ad sets you can do this here.

Ad set

Ad set name

Identify the key elements of your Ad Set:

• Audience: Determine the specific audience you are targeting with this Ad Set. Consider their demographics, interests, behaviour, or any other relevant characteristics.
• Placement: Determine the placement options where you want your ads to appear. This could include Facebook feed, Instagram feed, Audience Network, or other specific placements.
• Dynamic Creative: Decide if you are using dynamic creative to automatically optimise ad components like images, headlines, or descriptions based on your audience.

Use a structured format for your Ad Set name:

• Begin with the relevant audience details, such as job title, industry, or interest. For example, "Owner," "Digital marketing."
• Add the preferred placement for your ads, such as "mobile," "feed," or "stories."
• Specify the targeted location, if applicable. For instance, "UK."
• Include any relevant age or age range, if necessary. For example, "25-40."
• State whether Dynamic Creative is on, “DC-On”

Combine the elements into a concise and informative Ad Set name:

• Example: "Owner | Digital marketing | mobile | feed | UK | 25-40"

Implement the structured Ad Set naming convention consistently across your Meta ad campaigns to facilitate easy identification and organization.

Conversion

• Depending on your Campaign goal, select the conversion location.
• Depending on whether you have past performance data, fill in the optional cost per result goal.

Dynamic Creative

Decide whether to use Dynamic Creative. This enables you to automatically promote your entire product catalogue across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network without having to create thousands of individual ads. It’s especially helpful for companies with a large product portfolio that needs advertising. If you have few products and prefer having control over your ads then turn it off.

Budget & schedule

Depending on your goal, you should adjust your budget so that you can benefit from Facebook’s optimisation algorithm. Facebook suggests having a minimum of 50 conversions per week. For you, this might be 50 clicks, 50 web visitors, 50 adds-to-cart, 50 customers, etc. What’s important is that you adjust your budget so that you can at least hit that number.

Depending on your advertising objective, you should set a fixed schedule or leave the end date open. When you’re experimenting, it’s usually wise to set a fixed end date for when you expect to have collected enough data. That way you don’t spend an unnecessary budget.

Audience

• Decide whether to use:
• New Audience
• Custom Audience:
• Lookalike Audience:
• Targeting options

Locations. Target ads to people based on locations. You can select country, state, province, city, congressional district, zip and post codes. Most objectives let you target worldwide (type in "worldwide"), by region (for example, "Europe"), by free trade area (for example, "NAFTA", the North American Free Trade Agreement) or by app store availability (for example, "iTunes app store countries").

Age. Target ads to people within an age range.

Gender. Target ads to women, men or people of all genders.

Languages. Target ads to users of certain languages.

Detailed targeting. Include or exclude people from an audience based on criteria such as demographics, interests and/or behaviours.

Custom Audiences. Custom Audiences are select audiences of people that you already know, created from information that you provide or from information generated across Meta technologies. You can create Custom Audiences from a list, the Meta pixel, the Facebook SDK and engagement across Meta technologies.

Lookalike Audiences. You can also use Custom Audiences to create Lookalike Audiences. A Lookalike Audience is an audience that we create based on a Custom Audience source that finds other people across Meta technologies who are the most similar to the people in the source.

Excluding. You can include or exclude people in a Custom or Lookalike Audience from the audience you want to reach.

Placements

Placement: Select between Advantage+ and Manual placements depending on your needs. If you want more control over where your ads are shown, then opt for the manual placements.

Devices: Depending on where your audience hangs out online decide between Mobile and/or Desktop placement.

Platforms: Depending on which platform your audience uses the most, select the appropriate channels. By default, all channels will be selected, so be careful with selecting too much as your audience will likely not be everywhere.