Advertising on Facebook and Instagram by Meta

Advertising across Facebook and Instagram can help you expand your audience and drive more sales both online and offline. 

To advertise products from your online store, you have to sync your online store catalog to Facebook. Once synced, products will appear in the Facebook catalog and become available in Meta Ads Manager. Ads Manager is a Meta tool that allows you to create ads across Facebook and Instagram using product info from your catalog, such as images, descriptions, prices, and so on.

Meta Ads Manager offers a variety of tools to create detailed ad campaigns with specific objectives, allowing you to target particular locations or audiences based on their interests.

Creating ad campaigns is not included in your online store subscription. You have to pay for it separately in your Meta Ads Manager. 

Understanding Meta advertising

Starting August 2023, Meta has limited the number of countries that can sell on Facebook and Instagram and use features related to Meta shops. If you are not in the list of countries, you no longer will be able to create new custom or lookalike audiences derived from people who visited your store. Still, you can create new custom or lookalike audiences derived from your website visitors or ads viewers.

Ads on Facebook and Instagram can have different goals, or objectives. Depending on your goals, you can create a specific ad campaign, or run several campaigns with different goals at once. All Meta ad objectives can be grouped in three types:

Awareness. Increasing brand awareness and reaching a broader audience.

Consideration. Encouraging engagement, traffic, or interaction with your content.

Conversion. Driving actions such as purchases, sign-ups, or app installations.

The most popular option for e-commerce merchants is conversion, or driving sales. To optimize advertising strategies to drive sales, Meta offers Advantage, an algorithm-first advertising tool that uses AI to simplify ads creation and audience setup. 

With Advantage, you can create different ads, both dynamic and static, that show your products to the most relevant audience across Facebook and Instagram. The AI-based tool can help you generate creatives for your ads and deliver a personalized customer journey to reach more people who are likely to be interested in your business.

In addition to that, for the US-based stores Meta offers the Shops ads objective. This is a type of conversion ads that drives sales to your online store.  When you select Shops ads as your goal, Meta will automatically send potential customers to either your website or your Facebook shop, depending on where we think they are most likely to make a purchase.

Requirements for advertising on Facebook and Instagram

Starting August 2023, Meta has limited the number of countries that can sell on Facebook and Instagram and use features related to Meta shops. If you are not in the list of countries, you no longer will be able to create new custom or lookalike audiences derived from people who visited your store. Still, you can create new custom or lookalike audiences derived from your website visitors or ads viewers.

To run ad campaigns across Facebook and Instagram, you need to meet the following requirements: 

Creating ads with Facebook Ads Manager

You can create your ad campaign directly on Facebook, in the Meta Ads Manager

Since the ad creation process varies depending on your ad objectives, location, number of items in ads creative, and whether you’re using the Advantage AI-tool or create the ad manually, in the instructions below you will find the general steps for creating ads. For more detailed instructions on specific ad campaigns, please visit the Facebook help center.

To create an ad on Facebook or Instagram:

  1. Sync your store catalog with Facebook.
  2. Open Meta Ads Manager.
  3. Click Create on the top left.
  4. Select your Objective and click Continue.
  5. Choose Advantage+ Shopping Campaign to automate your bid strategy, placements, audience and to generate personalized ad creative for each person who views your ad. Or, click Manual sales campaign to set up your campaign manually. 
  6. Click Next.
  7. (for Shops ad) At the ad set level, under Conversion, choose Website and shop as your conversion location. You can choose your Commerce account and Pixel below.
  8. Review and edit settings for audience, destination, and budget. 
  9. Once you’re done adjusting settings, click Next.
  10. Choose your ad creative and enter the text content that will appear in the ad.
  11. Preview your ad and select Publish.

You may be asked to provide a payment method for your ad account if you haven’t added one yet. When the billing is sorted out, Facebook will review your ads and they will be live.

For more detailed instructions, please follow the Facebook help center guides:

Canceling Facebook ads

You can cancel your Facebook ad campaign at any time.

To stop your Facebook ads campaign:

  1. Go to your Meta Ads Manager.
  2. Click Campaigns, Ad Sets, or Ads to find the campaign, ad set, or ad you want to stop.
  3. Click to check the box next to the campaign, ad set, or ad you want to delete.
  4. Select the trash icon from the action bar. If you do not see the trash icon in your action bar, select More and choose Delete from the dropdown menu.

You can learn more in the Facebook Help Center.

Was this article helpful?

Awesome! Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks for your feedback!

Sorry about that! What went wrong?
1 out of 4 found this helpful
We use cookies and similar technologies to remember your preferences, measure effectiveness of our campaigns, and analyze depersonalized data to improve performance of our site. By choosing «Accept», you consent to the use of cookies.
Accept cookies Decline