Set up your first Meta ad campaign in order: Business Portfolio, Pixel and Conversions API, a campaign objective that matches your goal, ad set targeting, creative, and a budget you can actually learn from.
Short answer: to set up Facebook ads, create a Meta Business Portfolio with your Page and ad account, install the Meta Pixel (and ideally the Conversions API) on your website, then build a campaign in Ads Manager in three layers: a campaign with an objective that matches your goal, an ad set with budget, audience and placements, and ads with your creative and link. Run it for about a week before judging.
Facebook and Instagram ads are both bought through Meta's Ads Manager, so everything below covers both. Interface labels change often; the structure has stayed stable.
Most beginner problems (ads rejected, no conversion data, account locked) come from skipping setup. Do these in order.
Test the Pixel with the Test events tool in Events Manager: visit your site, submit your form or add to cart, and confirm the events appear.
Click Create in Ads Manager and pick an objective. Current objectives are grouped as:
| Objective | Use it when you want | Optimizes for |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | People to remember your brand | Reach and recall |
| Traffic | Visits to a page | Link clicks or landing page views |
| Engagement | Messages, video views, post engagement | Interactions |
| Leads | Form fills, sign-ups, calls | Lead events or instant forms |
| App promotion | App installs | Installs and in-app events |
| Sales | Purchases or other valuable conversions | Conversion events from your Pixel |
For most small businesses, the answer is Leads or Sales. At campaign level you also choose whether to use Advantage campaign budget (Meta spreads one budget across ad sets) or set budgets per ad set. For a first campaign with one ad set, it makes no practical difference.
If your ad is about credit, employment, housing, social issues, elections or politics, you must declare a special ad category. That restricts targeting options, and skipping the declaration gets ads rejected.
Conversion location and event. For Leads or Sales, choose where the action happens (website, instant form, messaging, calls) and which Pixel event counts, for example Lead.
Budget and schedule. Choose daily or lifetime budget. A practical way to size it: estimate your cost per result, then pick a budget that can produce several results per week. Meta has noted that ad sets need a reasonable number of optimization events per week to exit the learning phase, so a tiny budget chasing an expensive event may never stabilize. If budget is tight, optimize for an earlier, cheaper event (like Lead instead of Purchase) while you gather data.
Audience. Meta now leans on broad targeting with Advantage+ audience, where your inputs are suggestions. Beginners do well with:
Resist stacking many narrow interests. It raises costs and usually does not help.
Placements. Advantage+ placements (automatic) lets Meta show ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network. Start automatic, then check the breakdown by placement after a week and exclude placements that bring poor results.
Create two or three ads in the ad set so Meta can find a winner.
Format. Single image, video, or carousel. Vertical 9:16 video fits Stories and Reels; 1:1 or 4:5 works in feeds. Upload versions for each shape if you can.
Creative that works for beginners:
Copy structure. A simple pattern:
Primary text: the problem and the specific outcome ("Leaky tap? Same-day plumbing in Leeds, fixed price before we start.") Headline: the offer ("Book a same-day visit") Button: matches the action (Book now, Sign up, Shop now, Get quote)
Add URL parameters (UTM tags) so your analytics shows which ad brought each visitor, then use Preview to check every placement before publishing.
Ads go through review before running, which is usually quick. If one is rejected, the reason is shown in Account Quality, where you can edit or request another review.
Customize columns in Ads Manager to show: Results, Cost per result, Amount spent, CTR (link click-through rate), CPM, Frequency and, for sales, Purchase ROAS.
The ad earns the click; the page earns the result. Build one page per offer that repeats the headline from the ad and has one form or button. Our collection of landing page examples that convert shows the patterns. With We.Inc you can describe the offer in a chat and get a mobile-ready landing page, hosted with SSL, then paste in your Pixel code.
Enough per day for the ad set to get a meaningful number of results within a week or two. Work backwards: if you expect a lead to cost around $20, a $10 daily budget produces very few leads and very little learning. Start with an amount you can afford to spend entirely on learning, run it for at least a week, and check current costs in your industry.
Yes. Ads on Facebook and Instagram run on behalf of a Facebook Page (and optionally a linked Instagram account). You also need an ad account, which is easiest to manage inside a Meta Business Portfolio.
Boosting promotes an existing post with limited options, often optimized for engagement. Ads Manager gives you the full set of objectives, targeting, placements, budget controls and reporting. For sales or leads, use Ads Manager.
Match it to the action you want: Sales for purchases, Leads for form fills or sign-ups, Traffic only if you just want visits, Awareness for reach. Meta optimizes delivery toward the objective, so picking Traffic when you want sales usually brings clicks that do not buy.
Give a new ad set about a week without major edits so delivery can stabilize. Large edits to budget, targeting or creative can restart the learning phase. Judge on cost per result from your objective, not likes or clicks.
How we research, test and update this page: our editorial policy. We.Inc is our own product.
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