How to advertise on Facebook 

Advertising on Facebook can open your business up to millions of potential customers. With a range of advanced tools and analytics available, you can deliver campaigns to your ideal target audience without needing to find them yourself. And in many cases, it can be good value for money.

But with a huge list of metrics and campaign goals to choose from, we’ve broken down the essentials of advertising on Facebook – and how to do it effectively.  

• Why should I advertise on Facebook?
• What is a Facebook business page?
• How to create a business page on Facebook
• What is Facebook Ads Manager?
• How to use Facebook Ads Manager
• Facebook Ads Manager vs boosted posts – what’s the difference?
• Tracking Facebook ad performance
• Retargeting and lookalike audiences
• Do Facebook ads work?
• How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook?
• How to create a business page on Facebook – FAQs

Why should I advertise on Facebook?

With over three billion global users, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. A diverse base of people use the platform, which makes it a great place to find new customers. 

Facebook has unique tools that help you target specific audiences with your adverts, so you can connect with the people who are most likely to be interested in your business. We’ll cover how the specific tools work later in the article. 

What is a Facebook business page?

A Facebook business page allows you to showcase your business and share key information such as your location and opening hours. Though these pages look similar to personal Facebook accounts, they work in a different way. 

There are lots of business-orientated features to benefit from when you use Facebook for business, including: 

• page analytics 
• call to action buttons
• advertising tools 
• ratings and reviews 
• service listings 

How to create a business page on Facebook

Setting up a page is simple and we’ve gone through each step in our guide to setting up a Facebook business account. 

It’s very similar to setting up a personal account – the only extra steps are adding the details of your business like what you sell, your opening hours, and address. 

What is Facebook Ads Manager?

Facebook Ads Manager is the central hub for you to plan, track, and execute your advertising campaigns. You can essentially organise a whole marketing campaign in one place. 

You can do all of these core functions from ads manager on Facebook: 

• set campaign goals – like raising brand awareness or generating leads 
• audience targeting – create a detailed demographic of your ideal customer 
• advert placement – choose whether you want your ads to appear on Facebook, Instagram, or other Meta-owned sites 
• budgeting and scheduling – set how much money you want to spend on ads and when you want them to run
• track performance – see how your ads are doing with detailed analytics 

How to use Facebook Ads Manager

There are three stages to using ads manager on Facebook: 

• campaign – this is where you set your campaign goals 
• ad set – where you define your audience, ad placement, budget, and schedule
• ad – where you create the final ad your audience will see 

Campaign – set your goals

Once you click “create” in the top left corner, you’ll need to select your campaign’s objective.  

Choose the one that works best for you, name your campaign, and you’re ready to move onto your target audience. 

Ad set – choose your ideal customer 

This is where you’ll select the specific details of the people you’d like to target with your ads. 

There’s a few different approaches you can take to building your audiences – it all depends on how much you know about the demographic of your customers. 

You can build your own custom audience from data you already have, like a customer list or people who’ve previously visited your website. 

But people tend to use the two other options – lookalike audiences and detailed targeting. 

Lookalike audiences are a group of people who have similar interests to your existing customers. You provide something called a ‘seed audience’ –  which is usually a list of your current audience – then Facebook creates a new audience from their own database with the same characteristics. 

And detailed targeting works in a similar way, except you enter the characteristics yourself. 

Ad set – decide your budget and schedule   

Setting the budget and scheduling for your campaign are crucial steps and they relate closely to each other. The schedule of your campaign directly affects how you spend your budget. 

For example, when you first set up a campaign, you decide if your budget will be used as an average daily spend (daily budget) or over the whole duration of your campaign (lifetime budget). 

So depending on the length of your campaign, you may choose to do one type over another. 

If you were doing a six month-long campaign, you might choose to spend £5,000 in total, and use the lifetime budget to spread the spend equally over the six month period. 

But if you were doing a month-long campaign – having a daily spend might be better as you’d have more control over your budget. 

Ad – the finishing touches to your advert 

This is where you’ll import your advert and apply the finishing touches before it’s sent out into the world. You can upload adverts in a variety of ways, like a: 

• single image, carousel, or animation
• short-form video 
• collection of your products 

You’ll need to add a headline, supporting text, and a call to action button with an active phrase like ‘buy now’ or ‘sale ending soon’ to encourage people to click the advert. 

Then you can set up the tracking of your ad, preview how your advert will look, and publish it when you’re happy. 

Tracking Facebook ad performance

The detail of analysis on Facebook Ad Manager is one of its most useful features. There are a few standard columns that help you track your campaign:

• results – the number of times your ad achieved its desired outcome (based on your campaign objective)
• reach and impressions – how many unique people saw your ads (impressions can be higher than reach if the same person sees your ad multiple times) 
• cost per result – the average cost to achieve one result based on your objective, like clicking through to your website 
• amount spent – the total amount of money you’ve spent on the campaign
• schedule – how long your campaign is set to run
• delivery – whether your campaign is active, in review, or has ended  

But there’s also more specific metrics that can help you understand the details of how your ad is performing: 

• click-through rate (CTR) – the percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked on it. A higher CTR generally indicates a more relevant and engaging ad
• cost per click – the average cost for each click on your ad 
• return on ad spend (ROAS) – a metric that helps you understand the effectiveness of your campaign by calculating your revenue against your total ad spend 

Once your campaign has been running long enough, you’ll be able to use these metrics to understand how effective your ad is. Then you can adjust your campaign based on these results. 

For example, if your advert has a high CTR but low conversions, you know that your ad is engaging enough for people to click through but something on your landing page isn’t resonating with your audience. 

Or your impressions are high but your CTR is low, you’d know that your ad isn’t engaging the audience you’re targeting.  

Retargeting and lookalike audiences

Retargeting and lookalike audiences become more effective tools once your campaign has run for a little while and there’s more data on who’s engaging with your ad. 

Retargeting is when you send your ad to people who’ve already engaged with your business in some way. Whether that’s by clicking on your ad but not purchasing, or liking your business’s Facebook page, retargeting focuses on those with an awareness of your business. 

Some businesses have a lot of success with retargeting by reducing the reach of their ad and increasing the focus on those who’ve shown an interest.   

And it’s similar with lookalike audiences. Once you’ve got enough data to know who’s engaging with your business, your lookalike audiences will become more accurate. This is because Facebook’s algorithm learns the characteristics of your target audience and expands its reach to more new users.  

Do Facebook ads work?

Facebook ads can work really well if you have an engaging campaign, a specific target audience, and clear objectives. Because of the huge number of users on Meta’s database, the potential for success is massive.  

But setting up a campaign to run for six months and checking back occasionally to see how it’s performing isn’t the best strategy. The most effective campaigns are usually the ones that use retargeting and lookalike audiences, with tweaks made based on performance. 

How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook?

Depending on the type of campaign you’re running, the amount it costs to advertise on Facebook can vary significantly. With all of these choices affecting the cost:  

• campaign goals – conversions are more expensive than awareness campaigns, for example 
• target audience – very specific or in-demand target audiences will be more expensive than broader ones 
• ad placement – more desirable places for your ad to appear, like instagram feeds or stories, are more costly
• seasonality –  it costs more to advertise in peak seasons like Christmastime 

Here are some estimates from Gupta Media that can give you a rough idea of the average price range: 

• average cost per click – £0.20 to £1.26 
• average cost per mille (mille is a thousand impressions) – £0.76 to £10.31 
• average cost per lead – £3.75 to £16.50 (potentially much higher depending on industry)
• average cost per action – around £13.50 to £15
• average cost per like – roughly £0.01 to £0.19

Key takeaways – how to advertise on Facebook

Advertising on Facebook can be a simple and effective way to market your business to new customers. Advanced tools in Facebook Ad Manager can help you to find a specific target audience and advertise to them on a variety of platforms. 

And with in-depth data on your campaign’s performance, you can make changes to your ad to make sure it’s as effective as possible. For example, you can adjust your budget or retarget parts of your audience. 

You just need to make sure you’re evolving your campaign throughout its duration – tweaking the journey and strategy based on the data you get back from the engagement metrics. 

How to create a business page on Facebook – FAQs

Does a Facebook business page have to be linked to a personal account?

Yes, a Facebook business page must be linked to a personal Facebook account. This is mainly for security reasons, so Facebook can verify who’s running the page. But don’t worry, your personal account is kept completely separate from your business page.

Can you create a Facebook business page for free? 

Yes, creating a Facebook business page is completely free. But advertising with ads manager on Facebook isn’t free and can become expensive depending on how you target your audience.  

Can I separate my business page from my personal account on Facebook? 

No, you can’t separate your business page from your personal account but there are ways to limit the connection between the two. Mainly by changing the privacy settings on your personal account so your email address and phone number can only be viewed by you. 

How do I create a business page on Facebook?

To create a business page on Facebook you need to log into your personal account and click on the ‘create’ section. Then select ‘page’ and add all of your business’s information like address, email, phone number, and opening hours.