Are you interested in Facebook advertising and what it can do? Maybe you have heard that many people get new customers, sales or orders for their online store with Facebook and Instagram marketing, but you do not know how advertising actually works? In this post I go through Facebook advertising especially from a beginner's point of view, as clearly as possible.
What is Facebook advertising and marketing?
In my view, digital marketing has two paid advertising channels that everyone doing business online should master. They are:
- Google Ads (Google search advertising and, for online merchants, Google Shopping)
- Facebook Ads (paid advertising on the Facebook and Instagram platforms)
In my experience, these two channels together are enough to reach six- and seven-figure revenue, and both are often (especially for online merchants) among the most important cornerstones of the business. From here on, though, let's focus on Facebook advertising.
Note also that by Facebook advertising I usually mean paid social media advertising as a whole. Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook, also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, and ads on all of them are made in the same Meta Ads Manager.
Why is Facebook advertising worth it?
While scrolling social media, you have surely come across ads from different companies, companies you do not necessarily follow. Ads may have appeared in your Facebook and Instagram feed among posts from people you follow, and while you browse stories. These are examples of Facebook ads.
With ordinary organic social media posts, visibility is free but extremely limited. Your posts and stories are seen mostly by your followers, and not nearly all of them either, only some. You also cannot define the targeting of organic posts.
With paid ads, depending on your budget and targeting, you reach anything from thousands to even millions of users. The users you reach are also targeted (or at least that should be the assumption), potentially interested in your service or products. The ads run for as long as you decide and reach potential customers continuously, day after day.
Facebook advertising cost: how much do Facebook ads cost?
Good news! You set the budget yourself. Facebook advertising, like Google advertising, is based on an auction. So you can get started with just €5 a day if you like, but depending on the industry, products and customer base (B2B / B2C), click prices vary wildly. It is very likely that very small budgets will not produce significant results, but you can certainly get started.
The CPC (Cost Per Click) of Facebook ads varies for everyone, and no specific figure can be given in advance. In my own online stores, though, click prices have ranged between €0.05 and €1, sometimes lower, sometimes even higher.
Who is Facebook advertising for?
I still hear people say "Facebook advertising doesn't work" or "My customers don't use social media". I am not claiming that every business operating online will succeed with Facebook advertising; for most, the results remain fairly thin. Still, those statements say more about preconceptions or bad experiences.
Instagram has about 2.5 million monthly users in Finland (NapoleonCat 2026), and Facebook's user base is clearly older than other social channels, with the 45+ age group especially significant. I would argue that most businesses and entrepreneurs operating online can reach their customers with Facebook advertising.
How to get started with Facebook advertising
All Facebook and Instagram advertising is done in Meta's ad tool, Ads Manager, which you manage from Meta Business Suite. Create a business portfolio for your company at business.facebook.com.
After signing up, you need to create an ad account for your business. Everything happens under the ad account, from creating campaigns and ads to tracking and managing budgets and targeting.
Next, let's look at creating your first campaign.
Choose the campaign objective
In Meta advertising you choose one of six objectives for a campaign:
- Awareness
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Leads
- App promotion
- Sales
All objectives have their place depending on the campaign, but almost always the most important is of course increasing sales, which is why for an online store I almost always choose Sales as the objective.
Name the campaign and choose "Continue".
Next you set the budget. I recommend Advantage campaign budget (formerly campaign budget optimization), where Meta automatically spreads the budget to the best-performing ad sets and ads. You can leave A/B testing switched off at this stage.
Advantage campaign budget means that Meta optimizes your campaign at the campaign level and favors the best-performing ad sets and ads. Previously, optimization happened at the ad set level (and this is still possible), but I have got better results with campaign budget optimization. These are not universal truths, so as you do more advertising, it is worth boldly testing different approaches and setups and finding the settings that bring you the best results.
For an online store it is also worth trying an Advantage+ sales campaign, where Meta handles targeting and placements automatically.
Define your ad's audience
After the campaign settings, you move to the ad set level, where the main targeting happens. You can target ads by location, gender, age and interests, among other things. You can also target by actions, and a bit later you can even create different audiences based on your site's visitors (such as everyone who has ordered from your online store).
Targeting is one of the most important stages of Facebook advertising, and there are practically endless options, possibilities and audience combinations, so I will not go deeper into targeting in this article. These days the default is Advantage+ audience, where you only give Meta a direction and the algorithm finds the buyers. That makes the ad creative an ever more important part of targeting.
Choose the placements where your ad appears
As mentioned at the start, Facebook ads appear in the feed, between stories and in many other placements. I recommend choosing Advantage+ placements to begin with, so your ads appear everywhere. If you like, you can exclude some placements or choose only story placements, for example.
Create a Facebook ad
In the last step, you create the ad itself. Choose from the list the Facebook and Instagram accounts the ad will be shown under. These appear as the profile picture on the ad.
Facebook ads come in a few different formats:
- A single image or video ad
- Carousel (several images, videos)
- Collection (a group of items such as products that opens into its own view in the Facebook/Instagram app)
After choosing the ad format, you write the text and headline for your ad and add a link to the landing page you want. Finally, choose "Publish" and your ad goes into review and live!
What a Facebook ad is made of
We have now gone through Facebook advertising and creating a campaign in general terms. Next, let's take a closer look at what a single Facebook ad is made of. Please note that not all of these parts of the ad appear in every placement.
I chose an ad by Telia as an example. I will not guess whether the ad is good or bad, but it makes it easy to show the structure of an ad:
- Ad image
- Ad headline
- Ad text
- Link / CTA button
- Link description
#1 The ad image/video
The ad image/video is usually what catches a visitor's attention first. That is why it is important to invest in the ad's visual look, so that the user stops at the ad in the first place.
#2 The ad headline
On Facebook, the ad headline appears in large text below the ad image, and on Instagram it is the first 1-2 lines below the image. The headline gets attention right after the image, so it should be interesting. It is worth keeping it short, though, so it shows in full for mobile users.
#3 The ad text
On Facebook, the ad text appears above the image, and on Instagram after the headline in the caption. With ad text, it pays to be creative and test both short and long texts. The text needs to catch the user's attention immediately and make clear what the ad is about.
#4 The ad link (Call to Action)
The ad link appears as a button in Facebook ads. When creating ads, you can choose the button you want; the most common texts are "Shop now" or "Learn more".
#5 The link description
The short text placement below the headline mostly appears only in the Facebook feed on mobile and desktop. This is a good place for a short extra detail about your ad/offer, but the text should be such that it does not matter if it is left out.
Finally
I hope you found a lot of new information about Facebook advertising in this article. As you surely noticed, the article only covered Facebook advertising on a very surface level. If you are interested in learning more about Facebook advertising, I recommend taking a look at my guide for digital product merchants, which includes plenty of information on Facebook advertising.
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