How to advertise on Facebook, and help your business or brand reach new audiences

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• You can advertise on Facebook through the Help Center, allowing you to build your business or brand’s audience and reach new customers.
• When you advertise on Facebook, you’ll have access to a wide range of metrics, which can help you tailor your ads to your specific audiences and increase their effectiveness.
• Before you create your advertisement, you’ll need to provide Facebook with information about what you want the advert to accomplish.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Facebook ads provide a way for small businesses to easily reach a targeted audience.

With a variety of ad formats to choose from, you can reach your target audience in a way that fits your brand, whether it’s through videos, polls, slideshows, augmented reality games, or stories.

Facebook also gives you access to metrics so you can figure out how your ad is performing, and make changes to better suit your audience in the future. Advertising on Facebook is relatively straightforward, provided you already a Facebook business page and know what you want your ad to look like.

When you’re ready to start creating ads, Facebook will offer two workflow options: Guided or Quick Creation. If you’re new to Facebook ads, you’ll want to take the guided route, as it offers step-by-step directions for setting up your ad. More advanced business page users can opt for the quick workflow, which allows them to set up a campaign and then create ads later.

Regardless of the workflow you choose, here’s what you need to know to get your Facebook ads up and running. You can do this through any internet browser on a Mac or PC.

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How to advertise your business on Facebook

1. On your Mac or PC, go to the Facebook Ads Help Center and click the blue button in the top-right labeled “Create an Ad.”

2. If necessary, choose the correct account using the dropdown box in the top-left corner of the Ads Manager. Then follow the prompts on the left-sidebar to create an ad. 

3. To start, choose a marketing objective for your ad. The questions you’ll need to be able to answer here are, “What do you want your ad to deliver for you?” and “What do you want the customer to do with the ad?”

5. Name the campaign and opt-in to A/B testing and budget optimization once you select an objective. You may have to click “set up Ad account” to continue, in which case you’ll have to provide your current country, currency, and time zone.

6. Determine your audience by narrowing it down through location, age, gender, education, relationship status, previous purchase behavior, and even specific interests. 

7. Pick where to place your ad by manually choosing which platforms and methods to use for ad placement or by doing auto-placements and letting Facebook select where they believe the best places to run your ad would be.

8. Create a budget by choosing between a daily and a lifetime cap. 

9. Choose one of eight ad formats.

• Photo
• Video
• Stories
• Messenger
• Carousel
• Slideshow
• Collection
• Playables

8. Place your order for the ad.

9. Your ad will go to the Ad Auction — this happens each time there’s an opportunity to show a user an ad and is used by Facebook to ensure the relevance of ads for the user. Since many advertisers may be competing for the same eyes, the winning ad (which the user ends up seeing) is selected based on the following, according to Facebook:

• The bid amount placed by the advertiser.
• The estimated action rate, or how likely the ad is to be engaged by a user.
• The quality of the ad as determined by quality assessments and Facebook user feedback.

10. Measure your results.

You can use Facebook’s Ads Manager tool to access the metrics and figure out how the campaign is going.

Related coverage from How To Do Everything: Tech:

• How to list and sell items on Facebook Marketplace, Facebook’s version of Craigslist

• How to post a job listing on Facebook using a business account

• How to delete a Facebook business page, or ‘unpublish’ it from public view so you can return to it late

• How to schedule a post on your Facebook page or profile from a desktop or mobile device

• How to change the name of your Facebook business page on desktop or mobile, when you’re looking to rebrand

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