Meta Ads strategy: Our tips for getting started

Setting Up Your Meta Business Account

Essential Steps for Configuring a Meta Business Account

To create a Meta Business account, a series of steps must be followed. You'll see that it's easy to get lost in the maze of information provided by Meta—we simply want to save you from opening fifteen help pages.

First, prepare your basic business information. Then, go to the Meta Business Manager website. Click 'Create Account' and follow the instructions.

• Start by entering your business name.

• Then, provide your name and professional email address.

• Next, confirm your identity using your personal Facebook account.

This step is essential to ensure the security of your Meta Business account. Once this information is entered, you'll have created your Meta Business Manager account. We recommend creating this account rather than managing your ads from the default advertising space—you'll have access to many more features.

Don't forget to link your professional Facebook and Instagram pages to this account. This will allow you to efficiently manage your advertising on these platforms from your Meta Business account.

To finalize the setup, you'll also need to define security settings and access management. These steps will be covered in the next section.

Security and Access Management

To ensure your account's security, two-factor authentication is an essential measure. This feature adds an additional layer of protection to your account by requiring confirmation from you during each login. While it makes account access more complex when working as a team on the same account for social ads (and that's precisely the point), it provides better security.

For access management, you can define specific user roles. This allows you to control who has access to what in your Meta Business account. It's essential to regularly verify who has access to your account and revoke access for those who no longer need it. If you work in a company or agency, you must ensure that the people you want to add have a Facebook account. Our advice is to create a fictional "professional" one to avoid mixing everything with personal accounts!

It's also recommended to use the accounts space to manage trust and privacy settings. This allows you to control information shared between your different Meta accounts.

Meta Ads Campaign Structure

How to Create Meta Advertising (Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads): Understanding the Information Hierarchy Will Enlighten You...

Your Meta Ads campaign structure is based on three levels: Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad. The Campaign level is where you'll define the overall objective of your advertising, whether it's increasing brand awareness, generating traffic to your website, or converting users into customers.

At the Ad Set level, you determine the budget, schedule, target audience, and ad placement. This is where you refine your strategy to achieve the objective defined at the campaign level.

Finally, the Ad level is where you configure the creative content of your ad, whether it's text, images, or videos.

Each level plays a role in achieving your objectives, and a good understanding of this hierarchy is essential for optimizing your Meta Ads campaigns.

How to Intelligently Allocate Your Budget Between Different Campaigns and Ad Sets

Budget allocation is a crucial step for maximizing the performance of your Meta Ads campaigns. To make an informed choice, you must first clearly define your campaign objectives. Are you looking to generate traffic to your website, increase conversions, or strengthen brand awareness?

Next, it's often recommended to use the budget management tools offered by Meta. For example, Advantage Campaign Budget allows you to set an overall budget for the campaign, which is then distributed in real-time between different ad sets based on opportunities. However, our advice, even though it's tempting to entrust budget management when starting out, is to allocate it yourself.

• Focus more budget on ad sets that have high performance (if any already exist).

• Remember to regularly reassess your budget allocation based on ad set performance.

• Pay attention to performance variations based on days of the week or times of day. This can help you optimize your budget allocation.

Don't forget that the goal is to achieve the best possible results while minimizing costs.

Select and Customize Your Audiences

Audience selection and personalization of your Meta Ads are two essential elements for optimizing the impact of your campaigns. Several advanced techniques exist for targeting and retargeting your audiences.

The first involves using Meta Business's advanced targeting, which allows you to refine the group of people to whom you distribute your ads. You can define criteria such as location, age, gender, or interests of your audience.

Another technique involves targeting your competitors' fans using Audience Insights. This tool provides a wealth of information that helps you better understand your Meta followers and adapt your targeting accordingly.

Additionally, it's possible to stack audiences in your advanced targeting. This strategy, called Interest Stacking, involves combining multiple audiences to reach a broader public.

Finally, using audience data is fundamental for message personalization. For example, you can use the Meta Pixel to track user behavior on your website and adapt your messages based on their interactions.

For maximum effectiveness, these techniques should be used complementarily and constantly adjusted based on your ad performance.

‍Campaign Launch and Optimization

Create Increasingly Engaging Content for Your Meta Ads

It seems obvious that you need to create engaging content... certainly, but what does that translate to concretely? Is it related to your Social Media Marketing?

Meta Ads performance is directly linked to content quality. The message conveyed and the associated visual play a major role in generated engagement. Just as you might do organically for your social networks, the rules are almost the same.

• Opt for clear and concise messages that effectively convey your value proposition.

• Use high-quality visuals, whether photos, graphics, or videos. Visuals should be relevant to your message and captivating enough to attract attention.

• Don't forget to integrate a strong call-to-action at the end of your message to encourage users to interact with your ad.

• Test different ad formats such as images, videos, carousels, or Collection Ads to see which generates the best conversion rate.

• Finally, think about user experience. Your content should offer an immersive and interesting experience for the user while facilitating conversion.

By keeping these tips in mind, you can create advertising content that captivates your audience and encourages engagement. So you'll understand that this needs to be aligned with your targeting strategy (mentioned previously).

Monitor and Adjust in Real-Time: Your Ads Manager for Performance Tracking

Ads Manager is a powerful tool that allows you to track and evaluate the performance of your Meta Ads in real-time. It offers a multitude of key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rate (CTR), cost per acquisition (CPA), or return on ad spend (ROAS). This data is essential for evaluating your campaign effectiveness and adjusting your strategy accordingly.

• Real-time monitoring: Ads Manager allows you to monitor your ad performance in real-time. This is a major asset for quickly spotting trends and reacting accordingly.

• Data analysis: The data collected by Ads Manager is rich and varied. It allows you to analyze your ad behavior in depth and understand what works or doesn't.

• Performance-based optimization: Based on your data analysis, you can adjust your campaign to maximize its performance. This may involve changing your targeting, adjusting your budget, or modifying your ad content.

Mastering Ads Manager and its analysis tools is therefore a key element for optimizing your Meta Ads campaigns.

Important note: We're talking about real-time monitoring, which allows you to react quickly if you identify optimizations. However, avoid spending your time making changes to your campaigns, especially if they're major ones. This will only restart the learning phases and won't work in your favor (even if it comes from good intentions).

The Importance of Tracking Your Meta Ads Campaigns

Setting Up an Effective Tracking System

For effective user activity tracking, the Meta Pixel is a key tool. This piece of code, once integrated into your website, allows you to track user actions, such as viewing a page or adding an item to the cart.

• Meta Pixel Configuration: To configure the Meta Pixel, access the Meta Events Manager and associate data sources with your website. Name your pixel and create it.

Once done, it's possible to configure specific events for more precise tracking. An event can be a conversion, like a purchase, or a key action, like adding an item to the cart.

• Retargeting: The Meta Pixel also serves to retarget users who have already interacted with your site. You can thus offer them personalized ads based on their previous actions.

Anticipate that you'll need help from a technical person or someone with access to the site code to implement the pixel. Alternatively, you can also do it via specific plugins if you use certain CMS platforms.

We're discussing this last in this article, but it's definitely something you need to do before launching your campaigns!

Data Analysis for Informed Decisions from Your Ad Manager

Tracking data analysis is a crucial process for optimizing Meta Ads campaign performance. The data collected through the Meta Pixel we just discussed allows you to precisely identify user behaviors, evaluate your ad effectiveness, and adapt your strategies based on obtained results.

• Data interpretation: Performance indicators such as click-through rate (CTR), cost per acquisition (CPA), or return on ad spend (ROAS) are key elements to monitor. Careful analysis of this data can reveal trends or patterns that can help adjust your strategies.

• Strategy adjustment: Using performance data provides you with necessary information to refine your campaigns. For example, you might discover that certain hours of the day or certain days of the week generate better results, allowing you to adjust your ad distribution accordingly.

• Budget management: Tracking data can also help efficiently manage the budget allocated to your campaigns. By analyzing cost per acquisition or return on ad spend, you can identify campaigns that offer the best return and allocate more budget to them.

Tracking data is therefore a valuable tool that, when used correctly, can greatly improve the effectiveness of your Meta Ads campaigns.