by Lili Petkova
| May 08, 2012
What do I need to start a Facebook ads campaign?
You’ve decided to invest in a Facebook ads campaign, but you’re not really sure about the effectiveness of it. In fact, it depends on the way that you’ve created the ad, the ad type and the way that you manage the ads during the campaign. At first sight it sounds really complicated, but it’s not. Just take your time to understand the logic behind the Facebook ads and how to manage them – it’s not so different compared to any other way of online advertising.
So, let’s begin with some practical advice. What do you need and how do you start advertising on Facebook? In this, and a couple of following posts, you can learn the basics of Facebook advertising and start doing it yourself. In fact, hands-on experience is the best way to learn!
The first thing that you need to start a Facebook ads campaign is to have a Facebook ads account – it’s connected to your credit card, so that you can pay for your ads. Login into your Facebook account and let’s find your Ads Manager.
Step 1: Accounts in Facebook Ads Manager
Every personal profile has a Facebook ads account by default – the account is on your own name. You can create another account if you want to. You can see your ad accounts, their status, currency and spent money in your Ads Manager -> Account tab.
Facebook Ads Manager is the place where you have access to all the information related to your ads and accounts. From there you can manage your past and current campaigns, see their status, get reports on their effectiveness etc.
Step 2: Manage you Facebook Ads account settings
When you choose your account in your Ads manager, you have a Settings tab in which you can fill in the information about your business.
You have a couple of options how you can pay – with credit card, direct debit, PayPal, Invoiced credit or Facebook coupon. The information about your payments you can see in the Billing tab. There by month and payment method you can track your billings, the amounts that you owe, how many you’ve spent etc.
You can see the information about your payment method in the Billing tab ->Funding sources. There you can see all the credit cards linked to your account – or other payment methods. If you want to add a Funding source, click on the button in the right upper corner (“Add new Funding Source”), than choose your funding source and fill in the requested information.
There is a list of accepted currencies from Facebook. Be careful – when an account is linked to a particular currency, you can’t change it. You can set the preferred currency of your profile from your Account settings, on the Payment tab.
Step 3: Creating a group account
You have an option to create an Account Group from the tab Account Groups ->”Create a group” button in the right upper corner. With an account group you can give access to a particular Facebook ads account to a number of people. This allows, for example, your employees to manage the advertisements. Remember that every Facebook ad is linked to a particular user account, so this is one of the things you should really be careful of, especially if you are the administrator of a couple of accounts.
After you have named the group account, you need to link it to an Account ID, so that the payment information can be taken from there. You have different user permissions (roles): Administrator, General user, Reports only. These allow you to assign different roles to different people – the Administrator can change the settings of the group and has full rights to everything that’s going on with the ads associated to this account. The General user can only manage the ads, he doesn’t have access to group settings. Reports only are users who can only see the reports from ad campaigns – they cannot manage the ad budget, period etc. Group accounts are the perfect instrument when more than one person needs to have access to your Facebook ads.
The payments and funding sources of group accounts are managed the same way as for an individual account (see Step 2 above).
So, once you’ve set up your Facebook Ads account, or created a group account if you needed to, you’re ready to start with your campaign.
The first step of a Facebook ads campaign is to choose which type of ad you’ll use – Facebook ad or Sponsored story.
What are the differences between them? We’ll find out in the following article Practical guide for Facebook ads, Part 2: Choosing Facebook Ads or Sponsored stories.
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