How to Set Up Your Facebook Ad Campaigns For Businesses

I really understand why most online marketers in Nigeria see Facebook paid ads as a superlative marketing opportunity. With a single Facebook ad campaigns, you can get thousands of impressions, not just that alone.

Your Facebook ad targeting is not restricted on a geographical basis, unlike Google Adwords which deals with search. It doesn’t stop there too; you can go as far as targeting a lady in Festac Town who likes Sanitary Pads “Lady Care” for instance. Can you see how powerful the Facebook ad is? To me, this is particularly awesome.

If you’re looking to develop your digital marketing skills, and run a successful Facebook ad campaign, check out our comprehensive digital marketing course at DMSI.

On the flip side, with all these potentials of reaching any particular individual depending on your target audience, it still seems like Facebook ad campaigns don’t produce the desired result. You end up getting low click-through rates, as well as low Return on Investment.

Does it mean that the low results from Facebook ad campaigns are from Facebook or the PPC marketers? In other words, does it mean that Facebook is preventing your ad from driving the necessary results or are you doing the wrong thing during setting up your campaign?

The other day, a friend called me on the phone and said: “I have been running a campaign on Facebook for about 5 days and I have already spent 20 dollars without seeing a single website conversion let alone of sales”.  This is the kind of situation most internet marketers, especially newbies go through.

Now, I am going to share with you the reasons your Facebook ad campaign is not yielding any results. All you need to do is to read, understand, and fix errors.

After you have fixed all the errors, you will start getting results on your Facebook ad campaigns.

What are Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are a form of paid advertising on the Facebook platform that allows businesses and marketers to promote their products, services, or brands to a targeted audience.

Imagine you could put up a sign that only the people you want to see it would see. That’s basically what Facebook Ads do, but online.

These ads can appear in several places on Facebook:

• In people’s news feeds as they scroll
• On the right side of the screen on computers
• Facebook Stories
• Even on Instagram, which Facebook owns

The cool thing about Facebook Ads is that you can be very specific about who sees your ad. For example:

• Where people live (great for local businesses in Nigeria!)
• How old they are
• What they’re interested in
• Their behaviors on Facebook

You don’t need a huge budget to start. You can spend as little as a few hundred Naira a day if you want.

Why Advertise on Facebook?

Facebook has emerged as a powerful advertising platform for businesses of all sizes. offering a range of compelling benefits that make it an attractive choice for digital marketing.

Out of the 3.065 billion monthly active users, 2.1 billion people use Facebook daily. The platforms offer a range of compelling benefits that make it an attractive choice for digital marketing to get more business opportunities.

Let’s take a closer look at why you should consider advertising on Facebook,

Reach a Wide Target Audience

Facebook has over 2.9 billion monthly active users, making it a massive platform with a diverse audience. Additionally, Facebook’s advanced targeting options let you reach your ideal customers based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and even custom audiences.

Engaging Ad Formats

On Facebook, we also have various ad formats like images, videos, and collection ads that you can use for your campaigns. These allow you to create visually appealing and interactive content that grabs your audience’s attention.

Performance Insights

To check the performance of your Ads, you can use the Facebook Ads Manager. It gives you detailed analytics and reporting to track your campaign performance. These allow you to measure some key metrics like reach, and conversions and to make data-driven decisions.

Cost-Effective Advertising

Compared to traditional advertising, Facebook ads can be more affordable, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. You can set a flexible budget and choose different bidding options to get the best value for your advertising money.

When you leverage some of these benefits in your businesses in Nigeria, you can effectively reach your target audience, increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales through strategic Facebook advertising campaigns.

Types of Facebook Ads

Facebook offers many different ad formats to help businesses achieve their marketing goals. Some of the types of Facebook ads you can use for your campaigns include:

Image Ads

Single-image ads let you showcase your products, services, or brand visuals. Image ads are great for building brand awareness, promoting offers, or showcasing your products to your target audiences.

Video Ads

Video ads enable you to create more engaging and attention-grabbing content for your Facebook campaigns. This ad format allows you to tell a story, demonstrate your products in action, or share informative and educational content with your target audience in a visually compelling way.

Carousel Ads

Carousel ads allow you to showcase multiple images or videos within a single ad unit. This format is ideal for highlighting a range of your products, showcasing different features or angles of a single item, or telling a more detailed story to capture your audience’s attention.

Stories Ads

Stories ads appear in the Facebook and Instagram Stories sections, taking advantage of the full-screen, vertical format. These immersive ads can include images, videos, or even AR effects to create a more interactive experience that engages your audience and drives them to take action.

Marketplace Ads

Marketplace ads enable you to promote your products or services directly within the Facebook Marketplace, where users are actively searching for items to buy. This ad placement allows you to reach potential customers who are already in a shopping mindset, making it an effective way to drive sales.

By understanding these different ad formats, you can choose the ones that best fit your marketing objectives and create more effective, engaging, and targeted advertising campaigns on Facebook.

How to Create Facebook Ads For Your Campaign

Create a Facebook Ads Account

The first step in running Facebook ads is to set up a dedicated Facebook Ads account. This is different from your personal Facebook profile. When you have a separate ads account, it gives you access to the Facebook Ads Manager tool.

In the Ads Manager, you can create your ad campaigns from scratch, manage all aspects of your ads, and track their performance. The Ads Manager provides a centralized hub for your Facebook advertising efforts. It’s an essential tool for building, launching, and optimizing your ads to achieve your marketing goals.

Setting up a Facebook Ads account is quick and easy. You can do it right from your existing Facebook Page or personal profile. Once it’s set up, you’ll be ready to start creating and managing your ad campaigns in the Ads Manager.

You can read more on how to create a Facebook ads account.

Define Your Advertising Objectives

After you create your Facebook ad, you need to decide what you want to achieve with your advertising. So when you get to your ad manager, click on Create to select your objective.

This could be increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, generating leads, or boosting sales. Facebook offers several campaign objectives to choose from, each with its strategies for optimizing your ad performance.

So make sure you define your advertising goals upfront to meet those objectives. This ensures that your ads are targeted and effective in achieving your desired outcomes.

Target Your Audience

One of the biggest benefits of Facebook ads is the ability to precisely target your ideal audience. Facebook provides a wide range of targeting options you can use, including:

• Demographics like age, location, gender, and language
• Interests and hobbies
• Behaviors and purchase history
• Custom audiences based on your existing customer data

This advanced targeting allows you to reach the exact people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. You can get very specific and narrow down your audience to improve the effectiveness of your ads.

Create Your Ad

In the Facebook Ads Manager, you can design your ad using a variety of different formats, including:

• Image ads
• Video ads
• Carousel ads (multiple images/videos)
• Collection ads

To create an effective ad, you’ll need to:

• Write compelling ad copy that grabs the attention
• Choose eye-catching visuals like photos or videos
• Include a clear call to action to encourage people to engage

The ad format you choose, along with the creative elements, should work together to deliver your marketing message engagingly. This will help drive the results you want, whether that’s website visits, leads, or sales.

The Ads Manager provides the tools you need to easily create high-performing ads for your Facebook campaigns.

Set Your Budget and Bidding Strategy

When setting up your Facebook ad campaign, you’ll need to determine your ad budget and choose a bidding strategy that aligns with your advertising goals.

Facebook offers several bidding options, including:

• Cost-per-click (CPC) – You pay each time someone clicks on your ad
• Cost-per-impression (CPM) – You pay for every 1,000 times your ad is shown
• Cost-per-action (CPA) – You pay when someone takes a specific action, like making a purchase

Selecting the right bidding model will depend on whether your priority is driving clicks, impressions, or conversions. Facebook’s tools can help you choose the best strategy based on your campaign objectives.

You’ll also need to set a total budget for your ad campaign. Facebook provides controls to manage your daily or lifetime ad spend, so you can stay within your desired budget.

Monitor and Optimize Your Ads

After you launch your Facebook ad campaign, it’s important to regularly monitor its performance. The Facebook Ads Manager provides detailed analytics and reporting tools that allow you to track key metrics like:

• Reach
• Engagement
• Conversions
• Cost per result

When you closely monitor your ad’s performance, you can identify what’s working well and what needs improvement. This will enable you to make adjustments to optimize your campaigns over time.

Maybe you need to tweak your ad creative, target a different audience, or change your bidding strategy. The data in the Ads Manager will give you the insights you need to continually refine and improve your Facebook advertising efforts.

How to Get Results from Your Facebook Ads Campaign

If you are getting clicks to your website but no conversion

Now, let me ask you, how you can quantify the conversions you are getting from organic traffic. With Google Analytics, you should be able to track the performance of your landing page, in terms of how it converts your organic traffic sources. After figuring that out, it will give you an insight into how well your landing page is performing.

In other words, if the organic traffic conversion is usually low, then you have to work on your landing page. On the other hand, if the conversion rate of your landing page is good then you may have been targeting the wrong set of people. It is either your landing page has to be reworked or you are targeting the wrong people.

Your Facebook ad banner or image is not catchy enough

When it comes to advertising on platforms like Facebook, the ad image becomes very crucial. It is the image that captures the attention in the first instance, it draws the attention. But for platforms like Google (Search Ad) it is not the image that counts.

People go on Google to type specific queries, and they are not captured by any image, meanwhile, on Facebook, there are no specific searches. It is only if an ad (designed with a beautiful image) interests you, then you click on the ad.

This is a very big challenge; on Facebook, nobody is searching specifically for any product or service, and most Facebook users are just there to read news feeds or hang on with friends.

However, the only way to get this situation salvaged is by using eye-catching images on your ads that are relevant to your Facebook ad campaign. The layout, the design, and the graphics of your image should be appropriate.

Your Facebook ad campaign is not well targeted

Selecting your target audience is not confusing, yet that is where most people get it wrong. If you get this stage wrong, you will waste your advertising budget and run at a loss.

As I said, Facebook is a social platform constituting some of the people who wonder through it aimlessly, you cannot target such an audience and expect the result.

For instance, I have seen different Facebook ads pop up on my Facebook profile advertising industrial equipment, how on earth will I need that? That is wrong targeting. This is what happens and you need to take cognizance of that.

According to Sujan Patel, despite the vast capabilities of the Facebook targeting system, plenty of advertisers wind up targeting markets that are either too large or too small.  And while no set target market size will optimize every single Facebook ad campaign, you can use your past results as an indication of how well your ads are targeted.

Your Facebook ad copy is not A/B split tested

To avoid wasting your time and money, you need to create up to two versions of your Facebook ads to know the one that would drive the needed result. It is not a bad idea to create two versions of your ad to figure out the ones that perform better. You can try that.

Your Facebook ad copy is not right

Aside from content writing, another area of digital marketing that I consider very paramount is copywriting. The world’s best copywriters have made a lot of sales through copywriting. If you don’t have copywriting skills, it becomes daunting to come up with a compelling headline that will attract prospects.

Facebook only allows you to write up to 25 characters for your title and 135 characters for your description, by implication you’ve got to say a lot in a very small amount of text. Your ad copy has to be explicit, succinct, and clear enough to convey the message.

Conclusion

Facebook ads have emerged as a powerful and cost-effective digital marketing tool for businesses in Nigeria. When you leverage the platform and the features available, you can create highly effective advertising campaigns that drive real results for your company.

Whether your goal is to increase brand awareness, generate leads, boost website traffic, or drive sales, Facebook ads can be tailored to meet your specific marketing objectives.

By following the step-by-step process outlined in this article – from setting up your ads account to monitoring and optimizing your campaigns – you’ll be well on your way to mastering Facebook advertising and unlocking new growth opportunities.

Did you enjoy this article? We have a comprehensive digital marketing course that consists of actionable steps you can take to help you increase your sales and customer base online faster.

FAQs

How Much Does It Cost to Do a Facebook Ad Campaign?

The cost of a Facebook ad campaign varies depending on several factors, including your budget, bidding strategy, ad format, and target audience. Facebook offers a cost-per-click (CPC) bidding option, where you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. The cost can range from a few cents to several dollars per click, depending on your industry and the competitiveness of your ad targeting.

How Do I Structure My Facebook Ad Campaign?

To structure your Facebook ad campaign effectively, follow these steps:

• Campaign Level: Define your campaign objective and set the overall strategy for your ads. This includes choosing the type of ads you want to run and the audience you want to target.
• Ad Set Level: Set the targeting, budget, and optimization for each ad set within your campaign. This allows you to fine-tune your ad targeting and budget allocation for specific audience segments.
• Ad Level: Create individual ads within each ad set. This includes designing the ad creative, such as images, videos, or carousel ads, and writing the ad copy.

How Many Facebook Campaigns Should I Run at Once?

The number of Facebook campaigns you should run simultaneously depends on your marketing goals and the complexity of your ad targeting. Generally, it’s recommended to start with one campaign at a time to understand its performance and optimize it before adding more. However, if you have multiple marketing objectives or target different audience segments, you may need to run multiple campaigns. For example, you might run separate campaigns for brand awareness, lead generation, and conversion optimization. This allows you to tailor your messaging and targeting to each specific goal and audience segment.

More resources

Facebook Ads for Nigerian Businesses: How to set up your Facebook Ads

Facebook Engagement Strategies for Nigerian Businesses

Driving online traffic: How to use Facebook to drive traffic online