Author: Mihail Atanasov
So you’ve decided to set up an account?
Facebook advertising has a vast amount of aspects. From the creatives you will use to the settings of your business manager – there are so many things to take into account. To start advertising with any chance of success you need to implement a certain amount of tasks and it’s easy to get lost. If you never used the ads manager before you’ll face many challenges for sure.
That’s why we created this article where we wanted to give you our onboarding checklist with all the steps you need to take when starting from 0 – without an account. We’ll guide you as a reader through each of those steps and explain the why’s and how’s.
At Markademics we are always making sure the following steps are done correctly as they are absolutely crucial for any account, no matter the niche or the size of the business.
Ready to dive in? Let go.
1. Ad account
Create the ad account – to do anything with Facebook Advertising, you need an ad account, so you’ll have to do it if you still haven’t. In your business manager settings go to Ad Accounts >> Add >> Create a new ad account.
2. Billing
Next, it’s time to set up your payment method for your ads. Facebook will not allow you to launch a campaign before the payment method is set. You’ll be able to do this in the billing page that can be found on the tool menu.
3. Pixel
To be able to track what visitors are doing on your website, you must have a pixel, so Facebook can collect this data and use it to optimize your ads for better results.
Make sure your pixel is correctly set up and connected to the website. It is crucial that all major web events (landing page view, viewed product, add to cart, initiate checkout, purchase) are coming through properly. Do a test on those within the event manager in the tool menu.
4. Product catalog
All eCommerce stores with multiple products need a product catalog that’s synced to their online store. For Shopify store owners it can be easily done with out-of-the-box apps that sync with Facebook and create a data feed so that whenever a product is added to the store, it also appears in the Facebook catalog. Go to the Commerce manager in the tool menu to make this setup.
5. Catalog-pixel connection
To run dynamic retargeting (showing viewed items to visitors who saw a product page) you must have your pixel and product catalog connected. Go to your product catalog settings in the Commerce manager. Then open the Business assets section where you’ll be able to find and connect a data source (pixel) to the catalog. Run a few tests afterward to ensure it’s done right and the pixel recognizes the products people are engaging with.
6. Custom audiences
In order to build your scalable advertising structure, you need to first build your audiences that’ll be used in your ad sets targeting options. These will be based on the events that your pixel detects (purchase, add to cart, etc) and it’s therefore so important that your pixel works correctly.
7. Email lists
If you have email lists with your customer or even just subscribers, you can upload them on Facebook and it will match the emails of those people with their Facebook profiles. That way, you can target them with your ads and/or create lookalike audiences based on those lists. If you are using Klaviyo, you can leverage its integration with Facebook which will dynamically sync the lists you have in Klaviyo with a Facebook audience of your choice. You can find more information about his integration here.
8. Creative plan
Next, make sure you have a proper creative plan. What ads are you going to test? At what time? What is the copy going to be? What are you going to run at each stage of the funnel? Do you have the right visual assets? Ask yourself all those questions before launching to avoid ending up with a setup that only wastes your financials.
9. Initial structure setup
Now is the time to assemble your advertising structure – create your campaigns and the ad sets inside. We’ll release a new post about the structures we use but now, all you need to keep in mind is that you need to have a proper top-of-the-funnel campaign where you target your potential customers and retargeting campaigns that target the different types of people who engaged with your brand in any way.
10. QA – CHECK EVERYTHING
Often during initial setup, mistakes happen and things tend to get missed. To prevent surprises later on, go through all the steps above again and test everything. You definitely don’t want to discover your pixel is not recording purchase events when you’ve already started advertising.
11. + Bonus – additional tracking
After the Apple iOS14 update, the days when you could rely on your pixel to give your precise data are gone! Nowadays, attribution issues are a common thing and we can often see the pixels of our clients underreporting despite everything being correctly set up. To be able to make smart decisions as much as possible, you need to look at other data sources like Shopify Analytics and Google Analytics (keep in mind data will not always be precise there as well) to have a different perspective on your performance. It’s definitely not as straightforward as it was before, but as advertisers, we have no other choice but to adapt.
We hope you find this checklist useful. We tried to make it as short and easy-to-grasp as we can. Of course, many of the steps are more complicated than they seem and you need to use tutorials if you’re not familiar with them. Stay tuned for our next articles as we are about to share more content about each of these steps in the coming months.
Setting up the essentials is one thing, but running your ad account in a way that’s profitable for your business is a whole another, way more complicated world. If you need a partner to rely on for running your ads, our team will be happy to connect and discuss the opportunities of your brand.
To cooperate with us, fill in our contact form: https://markademics.com/book-a-call/#whyus
