Running an advert on Facebook or Instagram can look deceptively simple. You choose an audience, create an advert, decide how much you want to spend and press Publish. But before you get to that point, there is a fair amount going on behind the scenes.
Your Meta advertising account needs to be set up correctly, the right people need access, your payment details need to be in place and your Facebook Page and Instagram account need to be connected properly. If you’re sending people to your website, you’ll also want to make sure your tracking is working so you can see what happens after somebody clicks your advert. Otherwise, you can end up spending money without having a clear idea of what you’re actually getting in return.
So, before you launch your next Facebook or Instagram campaign, it’s worth taking a step back and asking a more important question: Are you actually ready to advertise?
What is Meta Ads Manager?
Meta Ads Manager is the part of Meta’s advertising platform where you create, manage and analyse paid campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and other Meta placements.
It’s where you’ll find the tools for setting campaign objectives, audiences, budgets, placements, adverts and performance reporting. However, Ads Manager doesn’t work completely on its own. It sits within your wider Meta business setup.
Your Business Portfolio provides the business-level structure around your assets and access, while Ads Manager is where you actually work with your advertising campaigns.
That distinction matters because having access to your Facebook Page or being able to post on Instagram doesn’t necessarily mean your advertising setup is ready. You can have perfectly healthy social media accounts and still have an advertising account that is poorly configured, linked to the wrong business or missing the tracking you need.
Before you spend money, find out which ad account you’re using
One of the first things to check is which advertising account actually belongs to your business.
This sounds straightforward, but it’s surprisingly common for businesses to have more than one advertising account, particularly if they’ve been advertising for several years or have worked with different employees, freelancers or agencies. Before creating another account, take some time to investigate what already exists. You should know which advertising account you’re using, which Business Portfolio it’s connected to, who has access and whether the account is active and ready to run campaigns.
It’s also worth checking the account’s currency and business information, particularly if somebody else originally set it up.
Creating a brand-new advertising account because you can’t immediately find the original one can sometimes make the situation worse. You could end up with multiple accounts, duplicate tracking and a growing collection of assets that nobody is quite sure how to manage.
Bonus tip: If an agency has been managing your advertising, don’t assume that means the agency should own your advertising account. Your business should understand where its advertising assets sit and retain appropriate control of its own digital presence. What if you stop working with that agency in the future?
Is your payment method up to date?
Once you’ve established which advertising account you’re using, check how it is being paid for. Meta needs a valid payment method before your campaigns can run, and it’s easy for this information to become outdated if the account has been around for a while.
Perhaps an old company card is still attached. Maybe a previous employee originally added the payment method, or an agency used its own arrangements when it was managing your campaigns. If the business has changed ownership or financial details, there may be another reason to review what’s there.
It’s much better to discover a payment problem while you’re checking your setup than after you’ve spent time creating a campaign that won’t run. And, again, this comes back to ownership. You don’t want your business’s advertising activity to depend on somebody outside the company being the only person who knows how the account is configured.
Is your payment method up to date?
Once you’ve established which advertising account you’re using, check how it is being paid for. Meta needs a valid payment method before your campaigns can run, and it’s easy for this information to become outdated if the account has been around for a while.
Perhaps an old company card is still attached. Maybe a previous employee originally added the payment method, or an agency used its own arrangements when it was managing your campaigns. If the business has changed ownership or financial details, there may be another reason to review what’s there. It’s much better to discover a payment problem while you’re checking your setup than after you’ve spent time creating a campaign that won’t run.
And, again, this comes back to ownership. You don’t want your business’s advertising activity to depend on somebody outside the company being the only person who knows how the account is configured.
Are your Facebook Page and Instagram account connected correctly?
Your advertising account doesn’t exist in isolation. The Facebook Page and Instagram account you want to advertise from need to be connected to the appropriate business and advertising setup. This is particularly worth checking if your business has changed its name, has more than one Page or Instagram account, has acquired another business or has worked with several agencies over the years.
You don’t want to get halfway through creating a campaign only to discover that the Instagram account you want to use isn’t connected properly, or that you’re working with an old Facebook Page. Taking a few minutes to check the connections beforehand can save a lot of head-scratching later.
What about your Pixel or dataset?
Now we get to one of the most important parts of advertising readiness: tracking. If your adverts are sending people to your website, you’ll usually want to understand what happens once they arrive. That’s where Meta’s tracking tools come into play.
You may see references to a Meta Pixel, dataset, events or other tracking features, depending on your account and the current Meta setup.
The terminology can change, but the principle remains the same: you need to know what you’re tracking, where that tracking is connected and whether it’s actually working. This is another area where old accounts can become messy.
You might discover that somebody created a Pixel several years ago, a second one was added by a previous agency and a third tracking asset is now being used by your website. If nobody knows which one is the current version, you have a problem before you’ve even started your campaign. Don’t automatically create another tracking asset because the existing one looks confusing. First, find out what you’ve already got.
Is your website connected properly?
Your advert might be brilliant, but the important question is what happens after someone clicks it. For many businesses, the journey looks something like:
For an online shop, it might be:
The advert is only one part of that journey. If your tracking isn’t configured properly, you may be able to see that people clicked your advert, but you may not have a reliable picture of what happened afterwards. That’s why your website and Meta tracking need to be considered together.
Before launching a campaign, check that the relevant tracking is installed correctly and that the actions that matter to your business are being recorded. And don’t just assume that because a Pixel or dataset says it’s connected, everything is working perfectly – test it. That may sound obvious but we’ve come across many campaigns that weren’t set up correctly!
A test enquiry or other appropriate test action can be much more useful than discovering three weeks into a campaign that your important conversion wasn’t being recorded.
What do you actually want to measure?
This is probably one of the most important questions to answer before spending any money. It’s very easy to get caught up in clicks, impressions, reach and engagement because Meta gives you lots of numbers to look at.
But what does your business actually want the advertising to achieve?
If you’re a local service business, you might be interested in enquiries, telephone calls or booking requests. If you’re selling products online, purchases and revenue might be much more important. If you’re promoting an event, registrations could be the number that really matters. There isn’t one magic metric that every business should be chasing.
The important thing is to decide what you’re trying to achieve before you launch the campaign, and then make sure your advertising and tracking are set up to measure it. Otherwise, you can end up with a campaign that generated hundreds of clicks but very few enquiries and still looks impressive when you open the Ads Manager dashboard.
Don’t confuse clicks with results
One thing we think businesses should keep firmly in mind when looking at advertising reports is that clicks aren’t the same thing as results.
It’s very easy to get excited when you see the numbers climbing. You’ve spent £300 on a campaign, generated thousands of impressions and hundreds of website visits. Brilliant, right? Well… possibly.
If your actual goal was to generate enquiries, sales or bookings, those impressive-looking numbers don’t tell you what happened once people arrived on your website. And that’s the bit that really matters. The more useful question isn’t simply “How many people clicked my advert?” It’s “What did those people do after they clicked?”
Did they fill in your enquiry form? Pick up the phone? Book an appointment? Buy something? Or did they have a quick look around and disappear into the internet, never to be seen again? That’s why tracking matters. Good tracking helps you move beyond “People clicked my advert” towards something much more useful: “People clicked my advert, visited this page and then took this particular action.”
It gives you a much better idea of whether your advertising is actually contributing to the outcome you’re trying to achieve, rather than simply generating some very impressive-looking numbers.
Of course, things aren’t always quite that neat. Attribution can be complicated, and not every enquiry will follow a perfectly trackable journey from advert to website to sale. Someone might see your advert, forget about it, come back three weeks later through Google and then phone you. Analytics can’t always connect every dot.
That doesn’t make tracking pointless. Quite the opposite. A sensible tracking setup gives you far more useful information to work with than simply counting clicks. It helps you understand what’s happening after the click, spot where things might be going wrong and make better decisions about where your advertising budget is going.
Because ultimately, a campaign that gets people clicking isn’t necessarily a campaign that gets people buying – and that’s a rather important distinction.
Is the website ready for the traffic you’re paying for?
There’s another important check that sits slightly outside Ads Manager itself: your website. If you’re paying to send people to your website, make sure the page you’re sending them to is actually ready to receive them.
Does it clearly explain what you’re offering? Is it easy to use on a mobile phone? Can visitors quickly understand what they should do next? Does the contact form work? Is your telephone number easy to find? Are there any annoying pop-ups, broken links or slow-loading elements getting in the way? And perhaps most importantly, does the page match the advert?
If your advert promises one thing and the landing page talks about something completely different, people may leave before they ever become an enquiry. You can’t fix a leaky website funnel simply by putting more money into the advertising.
Bonus tip: Before sending paid traffic to a page, use it yourself on your phone. Pretend you know nothing about the business and try to complete the action you want a new visitor to take. You’ll often spot problems that are easy to miss when you’ve been looking at your own website for years.
Guide: Need help checking your website over before a big paid advertising campaign? We offer website audits so that you can get a professional set of eyes on your website – and this isn’t an automated report. Find out about potential technical issues, content problems and layout suggestions for a more optimised website. Need help making the changes? Don’t worry, we can do that as well!
Don’t forget the campaign objective
When you’re ready to create your campaign, take some time to think about what you’re actually asking Meta to optimise towards. Your campaign objective should make sense for the outcome you’re trying to achieve.
If you’re trying to generate enquiries, for example, your campaign shouldn’t simply be built around getting as many people as possible to interact with your advert if that doesn’t help you reach your actual goal. Likewise, if you’re trying to sell products online, you’ll want your campaign and tracking setup to support that journey.
It sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to choose an objective based on what sounds attractive rather than what the business actually needs.
Start with the business goal and work backwards.
Give your landing page the same attention as your advert
It’s easy to spend hours choosing the perfect image and writing the right advert copy, only to send everyone to a generic page that doesn’t really help them. Your advert and landing page should feel like part of the same journey.
If your advert talks about a particular service, send people to a page that explains that service. If you’re promoting a specific offer, make sure visitors can immediately find the information they were promised. The easier you make that journey, the more useful your advertising data becomes too, because you’re giving people a clear opportunity to take the action you’re trying to measure.
Don’t forget the boring stuff!
Before you press Publish, it’s worth doing one final sweep of the things that are easy to overlook. Check your spelling and links, make sure your images are displaying correctly and confirm that the dates, prices and offers in your advert are accurate. If you’re advertising locally, make sure your targeting actually covers the areas you want to reach. And don’t forget to check the advert from the customer’s point of view!
Would you stop scrolling for it?
Would you understand what the business is offering?
Would you know what to do next?
You don’t need to make every advert complicated. In fact, a clear advert with a straightforward message can often be much more useful than something packed with information.
Your Meta advertising readiness check
Before you put your budget behind a campaign, make sure you can answer yes to the important questions.
A little preparation can save a lot of wasted budget
There’s a temptation to jump straight into Ads Manager because that’s where the exciting part happens. You get to choose your audience, create your advert and decide how much money you’re going to put behind it. But the less exciting parts matter too.
If your advertising account is in the wrong Business Portfolio, your payment method is outdated, your agency has the wrong permissions or your tracking isn’t working properly, you could end up trying to diagnose a technical problem while your advertising budget is already being spent.
Getting the foundations right doesn’t guarantee that a campaign will be successful. Good advertising still needs the right audience, messaging, creative, budget, offer and landing page, and even then there are no guarantees.
What good preparation does give you is a much clearer picture of what you’re spending, where your money is going and what you’re getting back from it. That’s a much better place to start.
Meta Ads Manager is only one part of the picture
The biggest thing to take away is that Meta Ads Manager doesn’t exist in isolation. Your advertising sits within a wider system involving your Business Portfolio, Facebook Page, Instagram account, advertising account, payment details, people and permissions, website and tracking.
That’s why being “ready to advertise” means more than simply having a Facebook Page and a bank card.
You want to know who controls your advertising account, what you’re spending, where you’re sending people, what you’re measuring and whether your setup is ready to tell you what happened next.
If your Meta setup has evolved over several years, been managed by different people or involved more than one agency, it’s worth checking the foundations before you put more budget behind your campaigns. At Shine On Digital, we can help businesses make sense of the practical side of Meta, from advertising and social media management to access, permissions and tracking.
Need help getting your Meta advertising setup ready? Talk to Shine On Digital.
Call us on 01706 482017 or arrange a call back.
