How to Create an Ads Campaign on Meta Ads for your E-commerce (ULTIMATE GUIDE)

Do you feel like your Meta Ads aren't generating the sales you were expecting? 💸

Have you invested dollars in advertising, but the clicks aren’t converting into sales?

This doesn’t mean social media ads don’t work; you just need to improve the strategy and setup of your campaigns to maximize your budget.

In this tutorial, we'll show you step-by-step how to successfully set up a campaign on Meta Ads, from choosing the right objective to targeting and optimizing your ads. 

If you learn better visually, you can watch the tutorial here:

Let's get those results! 🚀

First, what types of campaigns are there in Facebook Ads?

Before starting, it’s important to know the 6 objectives available for ad campaigns on Meta:

1.- Brand Awareness

It’s used to give your brand more reach so more people can learn about your product or service.

2.- Traffic Campaigns

They allow more people to go directly to your website or app.

3.- Engagement Campaigns

Facebook aims to generate the highest level of engagement in your ads, whether through messaging via WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram.

4.- Lead Generation Campaign

These are key for generating databases of interested contacts for later promoting a service. For example, in real estate, where users fill out a form and are then contacted with various project offers.

5.- App Promotion Campaigns

These are specific for applications. Imagine you have a fitness app and want to showcase the new features or highlight its benefits to increase downloads.

6.- Sales Campaigns

They are recommended for e-commerce stores wanting to sell through a website or WhatsApp. This type of campaign works for selling clothes, shoes, wallets… all retail items.  

Tutorial: How to Configure a Campaign on Meta Ads

Now we’ll show you the process of creating campaigns that actually work on Facebook and Instagram (Meta Ads)

Step 1: Enter Ads Manager from your business's Facebook ad account

This is the best way to post ads because you can monitor and set up campaigns from one place that you always have access to as a business.

Step 2: Press the “Create” button to generate a new campaign.

You’ll find it in the top left corner as a green button.

Step 3: Select a campaign objective

We’ve already seen that there are 6 objectives for an ad campaign.

In our experience, the best options to generate sales in your e-commerce business are engagement campaigns and sales campaigns.

If you are a new brand and few people know you, it’s likely they’ll have many doubts when deciding to buy from you. That’s why the best you can do are engagement campaigns. This way, you encourage them to message you about your products and your sellers can respond to close the sale.

Now, if you have an established brand that has built trust with its audience, sales campaigns can help you optimize the buying process and lead your customers directly to the final conversion.

Here’s a more detailed comparison:

⚡ Engagement Campaign / Messaging

• Optimized to get the maximum number of conversations started

• Facebook prioritizes showing the ad to people more likely to send messages

• It’s ideal when you need:

• To explain details of your product/service

• To resolve doubts before purchase

• To provide personalized attention

• To build a relationship with the customer

• To make sales that require negotiation

• For example: Selling tour packages where the customer has many questions before deciding to purchase.

⚡ Sales Campaign

• Optimized to get the highest number of sales

• Facebook prioritizes showing the ad to people more likely to buy.

• It’s ideal when:

• The product has a fixed price

• The buying process is more direct

• You have a product catalog

• You aim to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS)

• For example: Selling clothes where the price is fixed and there’s less need for negotiation.

PRO TIP 💡: If you have an e-commerce, you’re probably already running sales campaigns with a 1% to 3% conversion on your website (this is normal!). You could test with engagement/messaging campaigns that go directly to WhatsApp and see which one is more profitable. 

Why are conversions on WhatsApp often better than on a website? 

Primarily because of the consumer. In Latin America, there is fear in online shopping when placing a card on a website or virtual store because you don’t know if it’s a scam or if the product will actually arrive. Therefore, the closeness of a conversation is required in the purchase process. Test both campaign strategies and see which works better for your e-commerce.

Step 4: Name your campaign

Ensure it indicates the objective and is descriptive so you can find it quickly when monitoring or if you need to modify it.

Step 5: Add special ad categories

If you see that your business doesn’t fit into any of the categories, leave it empty or as default.

Step 6: Complete your campaign details

We recommend selecting the Bid or Auction option and checking that the campaign objective is the one you selected at the start.

Step 7: Choose how to allocate the budget in your campaign

Before proceeding, you need to know there are two ways to allocate budget to your campaigns: Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) and Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO)

How do you know which is right for your business? It all depends on your experience creating campaigns, gathered data, and the budget you have to invest.

Let’s examine them in detail:

• Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO): In this method, Facebook distributes the budget by ad set.

This works very well for clients who already have historical data and have tested their ads several times. They have a budget ranging between 50 and 100 USD in daily investment.

• Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO): It consists of manually setting the budget for each ad set to have more control over how much you spend on each particular ad.

It is preferable to use this for clients who have little budget or experience in advertising and/or want to conduct A/B testing in these ad sets.

If you want the CBO setup, now is the time to activate it in the “Advantage campaign budget” option. 

Step 8: Name your ad set

Include a name for the first set of ads in your campaign.

Step 9: Review where your ad conversions will occur

If you selected an engagement campaign, the conversion location will be the messaging apps, for example. 

Then, ensure the Facebook page receiving the messages or conversion is your company’s. Here you can also add your WhatsApp Business number.

Step 10: Choose your performance objective

The “Performance Goal” indicates the desired outcome. In this case, we would select “Maximize the number of conversations.”

Step 11: Set your budget

Now it's time to set the daily or scheduled budget for your ads. For example, you can choose to spend 100 USD daily or 700 USD in a week. 

The main difference is that in the daily option, ads never stop running, day and night.

While specifying dates, you have the flexibility to indicate the hours when you want to spend that budget the most and when not to show the ad.

💡 If you’re not 100% sure how to assign the budget, we recommend using the daily budget and letting Facebook's algorithm optimize your ad distribution so you can learn when you have attention spikes throughout your campaign. 

Step 12: Select your audience

Here you configure who will see your ads and who won’t. 

You can use the map to delimit your audience's geographic area. As well as input language, age, gender, and/or pre-saved audiences.

💡 Our suggestion is that, if you don’t have a strong restriction on delivery capacity, don’t restrict the audience too much.

Remember that the more people and information there is, the more opportunities the algorithm will have to optimize and that you don’t exhaust your audience (you don’t want a small audience to see your ad everywhere!). This could be even counterproductive and saturate people with the same ad. 

Step 13: Name your ad

Now we enter the individual ad part. The names you placed in previous steps correspond to the campaign and ad set.

Step 14: Upload your ad's creative

Upload your ad file in image or video format. You can even opt to create a carousel with your creatives.

Remember to activate the preview option in the top left to visualize how your ad will look once launched. 

💡 We also recommend activating the “Multi-advertiser ads” option.

Step 15: Enter your ad texts

Write a headline, a description, and a call-to-action for your ad. You can also use Meta Ads' artificial intelligence to generate texts in this section.

Step 16: Set up the message template (optional)

If you selected the engagement or messaging campaign type, you'll be able to determine the greeting your user receives when they send that first contact message.

Step 17: Publish your campaign

At this point, you are ready to launch your campaign with the green “Publish” button.

➡️ Remember this is a process of trial and error. Keep testing different ads and closely review your metrics and results to understand what works with your audience.