How to make a Facebook Ad Set
This blogshows how to set up a Facebook ad set step by step, choosing conversion goals, attribution windows, audience targeting, placements, and budgets to maximize efficiency and avoid wasted spend.
Let's set up the ad set for a Facebook ad campaign.
In Facebook at the ad set level, we can see ad set name conversion and all of these white modules that we're going to work through chronologically.
Starting with the name.
We're going to name this ad set with our ad set level settings.
In this example, we've got all products from our campaign level 20% off, which our promotional offer.
Then we're going to move through these settings and come back to the top and rename our ad set.
Under conversion, we're going to select our conversion location.
This is where we want to drive sales from our Facebook ads.
That could either be website and shop, putting website and our shop destinations on Facebook and Instagram shops into competition for results.
If we're going to see more results from our website, we'll spend more sending users to our website.
But if we're able to drive more purchases from shops, we'll send more people to our Facebook and Instagram shops.
Don't worry, Facebook won't spend all of your budget on Facebook and Instagram shops.
It'll only send those users that are most likely to purchase from Instagram and Facebook shops to your shops.
We have Website.
We might select this if we're primarily a subscription-based business and shops just doesn't work for our business.
We might select app if we're running an app exclusive campaign.
We might select website and app if we're happy for the purchase to happen either on our website or on our app.
And lastly, message destinations and calls, for most of you this isn't going to apply.
My recommendation, is to choose website and shop or website and app if you have an app.
Under performance score, we have two options, and both of them are perfectly fine.
If you're happy taking the shortest path and the most simple path to setting up your campaign, you can leave this at maximize number of conversions.
The only time where you would want to switch to maximize value of conversions is when you want the best bang for buck for every dollar that you spend.
If you have expensive products on your store, which normally require more persuasion and higher cost per purchase, a maximize number of conversions performance goal, won't work for these products.
You'll sell through your cheaper products exclusively with this campaign.
If you're looking to drive sales across a wide variety of products at different price ranges and get the best bang for buck, the best distance between input, ad spend and output revenue, select maximize value of conversions.
But if you're just getting started, you won't have this option in your account, so you have to select maximize number of conversions.
Under data set, we want to make sure we're selecting the pixel for this account.
Under conversion event, we want to leave this alone.
We're looking for purchases, so we want to leave it at the default purchase conversion event.
Then you can see that your cost per result goal or a ROAS goal is grayed out.
If you go to the campaign level, you can switch from highest volume or value to cost per result goal or ROAS goal to set an efficiency target in this section.
I definitely recommend this if your ad account isn't brand new and you have a lot of data in your ad account.
But if you're a brand new advertiser, this can actually be an impediment to you getting started because your campaign won't know how to drive results at that cost for result goal or at that ROAS goal.
It won't know how to hit your efficiency target.
Then we have the attribution setting.
We've got two options and for serious advertisers, I recommend selecting incremental attribution.
If you haven't spent on ads in the past, incremental attribution is new, it's novel, there may be some arbitrage in there for some.
But for advertisers that are just getting started, you may want to stick with the tried and true standard attribution.
The difference between these two is that standard attribution will optimize for results within an attribution window and a certain engagement whereas incremental attribution won't take credit for purchases that would otherwise have been achieved without the interaction with Meta.
Then we're going to select our attribution window.
We can choose between seven day click, one day view.
Or just one day click, one day view.
Or one day click, and no view through.
What does this all mean?
What is attribution window?
Should I even be changing this?
You can leave this to 7-day click on 1-day view, but if you already have loads of customers coming to your store that are likely to buy, your Facebook campaign may end up optimizing for closing the sale. Showing ads to people who are already going to buy it anyway.
If that is you, select a none, under view throughs.
Now, for click-throughs, what's the difference between 7-day click-through and a 1-day click-through?
If you think about a 7-day click-through purchase conversion, that might be someone who clicks today and then purchases on the weekend, maybe 4 or 5, 6 days later.
Not 8 days later because that wouldn't be within the 7-day window.
That type of customer isn't so sure.
They're taking a few days to make their decision.
Their consideration period is longer than one day.
Whereas a 1-day click attribution only takes credit for purchases that happen within 1-day of clicking on your ad.
These people are impulse buying.
They're seeing your ad and they're clicking right away.
There's a very big difference between somebody who buys within 24 hours and someone who buys over the course of 7 days.
Telling Meta only take credit for people who click on my ad and buy right away, you're using the smallest subset of data on the highest value customers to inform who is shown your next ad.
This is extremely powerful if you have a high volume of people coming to your site and purchasing.
But if you don't, I definitely recommend selecting 7-day click through window.
If you have that high volume and you're able to get 50 purchase conversions through from impulse buyers, from people who click on your ad and make a purchase right away, I recommend switching to 1-day click.
Under budget and schedule, we can leave this alone.
We don't actually have to change this because you should have set our budget at the campaign level.
Under audience controls, we can exclude our existing customers by selecting our existing customer match list.
This could be an integration with Meta that we set up at the campaign level or it could be a CSV that we upload.
Whatever it is, you can exclude your existing customers here to ensure that your ad spend and your marketing cost is spent showing your ads to new people because you need new customers to get returning customers.
Do you want your marketing budget to be gobbled up showing your ads to people who've already purchased from you before?
The tricky thing is that if you do that, you're going to see your lowest CPAs and your highest ROAS from your returning customers.
And it might skew your overall results.
And the problem with that is that Meta then learns to go and show your ads to this type of customer.
The customer that doesn't need any persuasion, you're returning customer and then most of your budget is spent driving purchases that may have happened already.
Do you want to do that with your marketing budget or do you want to do expanding your active customer base that pool of customers that can come back and buy more?
I recommend excluding your existing customers under exclude these customer audiences.
Then you can select a language if you like, you can select English or the primary language for your demographic.
Under Advantage+ audience, we can add in some interests here like golf and tennis, if these are interests that overlap with your customers.
If they aren't and you don't have interests that come to mind, don't worry, this isn't a needle mover for your campaign performance.
Adding in interests here just gives matter a push in the right direction, but it's still going to use data based on everyone who purchases from your store to inform who to show the next ad to.
This is really just a little bit of icing on top, a little bit of a gentle push in the right direction and it won't limit who your ads are showing to.
The number one thing I definitely don't recommend doing is switching to original audience options and Meta doesn't recommend it either.
In fact, Meta says using Advantage+ audience may improve potential outcome up to a 7.2% lower cost per result.
You can change this up if you're very particular about where you want your ads to be shown.
By clicking edit, you can select manual placements and then remove different placements like Facebook entirely as a platform.
This isn't what I'd recommend. If you switch to manual placements, you will even get a notification that tell you that your performance might be impacted by manual placements.
The final module here is suggested ads.
Here we can import high-performing ads from our account or create an advantage plus catalog ad.
This is an ad that adapts to show each user the product that they're most likely to purchase in the format that is most likely to get them to purchase.
I recommend launching an Advantage+ catalog ad in your ad set.
That is how to launch an ad set in your Facebook ad campaign.
