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

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

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

• Set up your Facebook Business Manager that owns both your business's Facebook Page and an ad account. If you have a personal ad account, then you need to connect it to a Business Manager. If you've never run ads with your personal ad account, then you need to create a new ad account inside Business Manager before you can create Facebook ad campaigns.
• Connect your catalog to Facebook. 
• Add a Facebook pixel to your website.
• Your store domain is verified so that Facebook knows that you are the owner of the website.
• (Recommended) Create product sets within your catalog to narrow down which items you want to appear in your ads. Having different sets improves ads targeting.
• (To run Shops ads in the US) Checkout on Facebook and Instagram is enabled in your store.

Creating ads with Facebook Ads Manager

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

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:

• Create ads on Facebook or Instagram manually →
• Create Advantage+ shopping campaign →
• Create Advantage+ catalog ads →
• Create Shops ads campaign to redirect customers either to your site or Facebook/Instagram shop (for US only) →
• Create retargeting audience with Advantage+ →

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.