Intro to Facebook ads management for your clients: 8 tips to get you started

For businesses of all sizes, Facebook remains a powerful platform for delivering ads to targeted, relevant, and motivated audiences. If you’re a reseller of PPC advertising solutions, you need to know how to run Facebook ads for clients.

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Whether you’ve tried your hand at Facebook ads management in the past or you’re completely new to it, we’ve got you covered with everything you need to know to set up a successful campaign.

Anatomy of Facebook Ads: the basics of running Facebook ads for clients

Getting started with a Meta ad manager account

Bear with us, because this first part is a little confusing. Once your client’s ad accounts are properly set up, things become much more straightforward.

There are several important account types within Meta that are related to managing business and ad-related assets:

• Ads Manager
• Business Suite
• Business Manager

Only an Ads Manager account is strictly needed to start running Facebook ads for clients, but it’s strongly recommended to create a Business Suite or Business Manager account as well.

Business Suite and Business Manager are roughly interchangeable—they’re both central hubs for business-related assets like Ad Manager accounts, pixels, and business pages. Meta Business Suite was rolled out more recently, and features a desktop and mobile interface, while the Business Manager is desktop-only.

The bottom line: it’s only necessary to create one of these, but using them in addition to Ads Manager will keep everything much more organized.

Setting up Business Manager or Business Suite

You can walk your client through setting up their Business Manager or Business Suite by having them follow these steps:

1. Visit https://business.facebook.com/overview
2. Click the “Create Account” button
3. Complete the business name and business email fields, and hit submit

That’s it!

Setting up Ad Manager

Once your client has a Business Manager or Business Suite account, they can move an existing Ads Manager account in or create a new one. The interface will look similar to this (yours might vary slightly depending on updates and whether you’re looking at a Business Manager or Business Suite account):

Under the “Accounts” tab in the left-hand panel, click “Ad accounts”. Then, you’ll see a list of existing ad accounts populate to the right. When an ad account is selected, the people (individuals) and partners (agencies like yours) will appear listed. If no ad account exists yet, these areas will be empty.

Next, click the “Add” button. You’ll get a drop-down menu that looks like this:

If your clients have an existing ad account that is only associated with a Facebook user, they can click “Add an ad account” to move it to the Business Manager. The ad account number is required to move the account. Once it’s moved, it can’t be removed from the business manager.

If your client doesn’t have any ad accounts yet, or is happy to start a new one, click “Create a new ad account”. Complete the account name, currency, and other required fields to set up the account. Your clients won’t need the “Request access to an ad account” feature, so that can be disregarded for now.

Too busy to guide your clients through the creation of these accounts? Using white-label ads management experts who work under your agency’s banner can get your clients up and running in no time.

Defining the target audience and objectives of Facebook ads

With all necessary accounts properly set up, it’s time to get into the more exciting parts of running Facebook ads for clients. Any effective digital marketing strategy, including Facebook ads management, starts with a solid understanding of the client’s business goals and their target audience.

Both of these require collaborating with your client to draw out this important information. In some cases, the client may not even be completely clear on what their specific goals are and what characterizes their target audience. With that said, taking the time to work through these together will help you deliver the best possible ROI down the line.

Zeroing in on your client’s goals

Start by determining the business objectives. Sure, at some level, every SMB client wants more sales. But given constraints such as the budget and how well-known the business is, different goals may be better stepping stones toward the larger goal of growing their business. For example:

• A new business might prioritize brand awareness to build buzz about their offering.
• A business with great conversion rates may want to use ads to drive traffic, which will ultimately boost their bottom line.
• A SaaS business with a long sales cycle might prioritize generating leads, since conversions require further engagement with the prospect.

Determining these objectives will help you choose the most appropriate campaign type later in Facebook Ads Manager.

Establishing the target audience

Just as important is identifying your client’s target audience. The beauty of Facebook advertising—and the reason it has become such a powerful platform for PPC ads— is its super-granular targeting capabilities.

Clients should have a clear understanding of their target audience’s demographics, psychographics, interests, and behaviors. If they don’t, working with them to create buyer personas can be a useful exercise. These are fictionalized customers representing the ideal buyer for your client’s offering.

Keeping these personas in mind is a useful shortcut to better decision-making: throughout the Facebook ads campaign management process, continuously ask yourself what can be done to appeal to that ideal buyer. In all likelihood, you’ll succeed in appealing to more real-world shoppers who are similar to that buyer persona.

Create scroll-stopping ad campaigns

The goal when running Facebook ads for clients is to have their audiences stop mid-scroll because they just have to see what an ad is all about. The levers you can control to achieve this result are the ad format, visuals, and copy.

Choosing the right ad format

Facebook supports a variety of ad formats, and the best choice depends on what you’re trying to achieve with the ad:

• Image ads: Ideal when you have a strong standalone visual promoting a single product or service.
• Video ads: This highly engaging format is great for testimonials, user-generated video content, product demos, and even still images enhanced with moving text and graphics.
• Carousel ads: Ideal for advertising multiple products or telling a story that unfolds as the user scrolls through up to 10 slides. Each slide can have a unique link.
• Instant experience ads: These provide a highly immersive and engaging experience by taking up the whole screen and incorporating interactive elements.
• Collection ads: Instead of just one image or video, these are accompanied by additional smaller images underneath, and turn into an instant experience ad when clicked. These are well-suited to e-commerce businesses since multiple related products can be showcased at once.

Using compelling visuals

When running Facebook ads for clients, obtaining (or creating) strong visuals is a must. Without these, even the best campaign strategy can fail to produce ROI.

Whether you’re using still images or videos, keep these best practices in mind:

• Ensure the visuals are clear and high-quality
• Stick to a recognizable brand visual style, such as punchy and bright or minimal and airy
• Use the optimal dimensions recommended by Facebook for your ad format
• Make the images or videos used are relevant to the product or service being marketed
• A/B test visuals to see what resonates with the target audience

Write conversion-boosting copy

Visuals may be the first thing that gets a user to stop scrolling, but copy can compel them to convert. Use these copywriting best practices when you run Facebook ads for clients:

• Keep it simple: while some advertisers are successful with very long ad copy, most of the time, brevity is the name of the game.
• Don’t forget the call to action (CTA): Always nudge the audience to take an action, like “Buy now” or “Click to sign up”.
• Repurpose reviews or testimonials: Working positive reviews into the copy can provide a valuable measure of social proof to your ads.
• Don’t forget emojis: While you don’t want to overdo the emojis, their strategic and sparing use can make your ad copy pop.
• A/B test: Just like your visuals, you should A/B test ad copy continually as part of your Facebook ads campaign management strategy.

Put your ad into the world with appropriate targeting and budget optimization

With your ad copy and creating ready to go, it’s time to go live. When creating a new ad in Facebook Ads Manager, you can select from a wide range of targeting options to ensure the target audience sees your ad. These include:

• Demographic characteristics
• Interests
• Behaviors on Facebook-owned properties and, to a smaller extent, around the web
• Custom audiences, such as audiences created by your imported email list
• Lookalike audiences, or audiences that resemble people who already follow or client or have purchased from them

The precision of some of these targeting options has been negatively impacted by newer privacy developments and regulations, so you may not be able to get quite as hyper-specific about the niche you’re targeting. But that doesn’t mean Facebook ads aren’t still highly effective, it just means you may have to play around more to discover the perfect targeting strategy.

Similarly, your Facebook Ads campaign management workflow should include testing different ad placements to see how they perform. For example, ads can appear in the news feed, in between stories, and in the right-hand sidebar, among others.

Finally, you’ll determine the ad budget. This is, of course, constrained by your client’s budget. By using case studies and industry benchmarks, you can help your client understand what’s reasonable given their monthly spend, target audience size, and goals.

Ongoing Facebook Ads management: Monitoring and ad optimization

Once your ad, ad set, or campaign goes live, regular monitoring is required to make sure you stay on target and don’t waste ad dollars on ineffective placements.

This is where Facebook Ads management tools like Vendasta’s Advertising Intelligence can make life much easier for both you and your clients. It makes it easy to get a birds-eye view of all active campaigns and to keep an eye on key metrics like:

• Click-through rate (CTR): If this is low, it means something about the ad isn’t encouraging people to click. A/B testing can help you refine the copy and creative.
• Conversion rate: The higher this is, the better. If the CTR is high but the conversion rate is low, it’s possible that your targeting is off or that the ad doesn’t fully represent the offering.
• Cost per click (CPC): This will vary depending on the competitiveness of your client’s niche, but a great ad with a healthy CTR and anc conversion rate will likely have a lower CPC.
• Impressions: If this is too low, you might need to bump up your budget.
• ROAS: The ultimate PPC ads metric, indicating how much money is generated by a given ad spend.

Based on these metrics, you can make decisions about bidding strategies, audience targeting, and the ad itself. Tracking these important indicators will help steadily guide you toward more effective ads and lower-cost marketing.

The legal stuff: Facebook ad compliance and policies

The last thing you want after putting all those resources and time into running Facebook ads for clients is to lose the Ads Manager account. Take the time to get familiar with Facebook’s ad policies, especially when it comes to restricted products and services like alcohol, online pharmacies, and gambling platforms.

If your clients do operate in any of these restricted industries, ensure that they understand which declaimers they’re legally required to include in their ads.

8 Tips for next-level Facebook Ads campaign management

As a PPC reseller, you can differentiate your agency and set yourself up to deliver serious results by implementing these tips:

1. Leverage custom audiences

Harnessing the power of custom audiences can be a game-changing strategic move when running Facebook ads for clients. This feature lets businesses advertise to an audience pool that’s already aware of their brand, enhancing the likelihood of engagement and conversions.

Whether your clients are handling their Facebook ads management in-house, using your agency’s digital advertising services, or you’re outsourcing to a team of white-label experts, using data sources for custom audiences can make their ad budget go much further. For example, these can be newsletter subscribers or website visitors.

The value of this approach comes from the ability to retarget, getting in front of individuals who’ve already shown interest in your client’s brand. These are the people most likely to respond positively to ads. The result? Your Facebook ads management will begin yielding results much faster, helping your clients reach their goals and winning your agency their business long-term.

2. Tap into the power of lookalike audiences

Facebook’s Lookalike Audience feature is an advanced Facebook Ads management tool that helps amplify reach beyond existing customers. In simple terms, it generates a new audience segment that shares the attributes of an existing audience. Since the users in a lookalike audience exhibit similar behaviors and interests as current customers, they’re more likely to be responsive to the same offerings.

This is a potent tool in our age of increased digital privacy regulations. Highly niched-down audiences on Facebook are smaller these days as a result of these changes. With Lookalike Audiences, you can find more like minded customers effectively because the data used to identify these audiences is all contained within Facebook.

3. Become a master copywriter

SMBs without much digital marketing expertise can underestimate the effectiveness of persuasive ad copy. The relatively few words that accompany a Facebook ad may seem like an afterthought after creating a show-stopping visual, but it can often be that extra push that urges an interested user to click or convert. Keep these best practices in mind:

• Focus on benefits: Instead of focusing just on the features of a product or service, refine your ad copy to draw attention to the benefits to the customer. How will it make their lives better, easier, more beautiful, more enjoyable, or more affordable?
• Use the brand voice: Ensure the language in all ad copy reflects the client’s brand voice. Are they playful, professional, aspirational, or something else?
• Include a CTA: Just because it’s an ad, don’t assume users know what you want them to do. Be explicit with a clear, punchy CTA.

4. Consider ad placements across Meta

Different Meta-owned platforms—Facebook itself, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger—offer unique opportunities for ad placement.

Each of these platforms has its own user base, and each user base may interact with content in different ways. For example, a fashion business marketing to Gen Z will likely be better off focusing on Instagram placements, while a cruise ship company advertising to more mature audiences should focus on Facebook placements.

Another good approach is to simply leave all placements on for a while when you start running Facebook ads for a client, and to prioritize placements once you have some data about which convert best.

5. Get creative with ad scheduling

Facebook’s ad delivery system, backed by robust analytics, allows advertisers to identify the peak times when their target audience is most active on the platform. By identifying these optimal time slots, you can produce a better ROAS for Facebook ads you're running for clients.

For example, if a client’s target audience is mostly active when they get home from work on weekday evenings, scheduling ads to display during these periods would increase their chances of being seen and engaged with. This approach to ad delivery can drastically improve reach and engagement, resulting in more effective campaigns and a healthier bottom line for your satisfied client.

6. Set up proper conversion tracking before you start

As the old management adage goes: what gets measured gets managed. Effective Facebook ads management requires reliable conversion tracking, so that you can measure the impact of your ads.

The Meta pixel is a powerful Facebook ads management tool that enables clients to track the actions users take on their website and on Meta’s apps. This means advertisers can track when a conversion happens and attribute it to a specific ad. If you’re running a campaign with 3 ad sets, each containing 10 ads, chances are they won’t all perform equally well. Being able to identify the ones that are driving conversions means you can allocate more budget to those ads, resulting in better ROI.

As your agency grows, and you land more digital marketing clients, using white-label PPC services can help you stay on top of these important conversion tracking activities and keep valuable time to ensure every client gets the attention they deserve.

7. Run retargeting campaigns

The real Facebook ads campaign management magic comes when you start implementing retargeting campaigns. This strategy is also made possible by the pixel, since the idea behind these campaigns is to target users who have already taken an action like browsing your website or adding a product to their cart.

This audience is more likely to convert since they’ve already shown interest in the advertiser’s offerings. For example, say a user sees a Facebook ad for a car accessory business, clicks it, browses the site, and adds a steering wheel cover to their cart. They then get distracted and close the browser window. The next time they open Facebook and Instagram respectively, they see retargeting ads for the specific steering wheel cover, return to the site, and complete their purchase.

This personalized approach can remind users of their initial interest and drive them to convert, leading to supercharged conversion rates. At scale, incorporating retargeting into your Facebook ads management can deliver serious results. Bundling PPC and local SEO services can help you get even more data on that pixel by combining organic and paid traffic.

8. Use dynamic product ads

Dynamic product ads are another way to personalize ads to each user’s interests. These ads automatically display products to users based on their past actions or browsing behaviors, showcasing what each person is most likely to be interested in.

These are particularly effective for clients with large product catalogs since the product information auto populates from their website. Instead of having to create unique ads for each product, dynamic product ads automatically populate with the products that are most likely to convert.

Frequently asked questions

What are the key metrics to track and measure for successful Facebook ad management?

Key metrics for successful Facebook ads management are reach, impressions, CTR, conversion rate, ROAS, and ROI. Tracking these metrics allows for evaluating campaign effectiveness and optimizing ads for better performance over time.

What are the common challenges and pitfalls to avoid in Facebook ads management?

Common challenges in Facebook ads management include setting unclear objectives, targeting an overly broad or inappropriate audience, underusing Facebook’s ad targeting features, neglecting ad copy and creative, and failing to monitor and optimize ads based on key performance metrics.