• Navigate to Events Manager and ensure you're on the correct Ads Manager account if you have multiple.

• On the panel on the left side of the page click the + button labeled, "Connect Data sources

Since we'll be installing the pixel on your website, choose "Web," as your data source. 

Click "Create a New Dataset"

We recommend naming your Pixel with the name of your business.

Most website managers support seamless connecting with Meta Pixel. This is the easiest way to connect your pixel. Find your website manager in the partners list and follow Facebook, and your web manager's instructions for how to install the pixel. 

If you don't see your web manager on the list, or you want more control over the installation of your pixel click "Connect Manually."

If you're connecting manually be sure to select "Meta Pixel and Conversions API," because we will need the Conversions API. 

Click "See Instructions," for both Meta Pixel and Conversions API.

• Copy the base code and paste it above the ending </head> tag in your websites code.

• Be sure to paste this on every page on your website.

• Most website builders offer easy ways to add code to your website head, and the ability to inject it on all pages, for example in Wix Studio it's called "Custom Code."

• Search your website builder on Google and "Custom Code," for specific instructions on how to add custom code to your website. Or, send this custom code to your web developer. 

• Be sure to turn on advanced matching to coorelate user data with meta account data and improve your data accuracy.

• By default all fields are checked. Advanced Matching will only work for fields that can be found on your website.

Installing the Conversions API can be really simple if you're able to use a partner integration. Meta is constantly adding new partner integrations. There is a good chance that your Website Builder has built in integration. If not we reccomend choosing the "Set up with a Conversions API Gateway," and using Stape to handle your integration. It's the most affordable serverside tracking option that doesn't require any coding knowledge. 

If you have a web developer this is a good task to hand off to them, choose "Set up manually," and you'll be re-directed to a page that allows you to forward instructions to your developer. 

Now that you have the Meta Pixel and Conversions API set up, navigate to your website's contact form and send yourself a test lead. We'll need the signal generated so that our ads know which website event to optimize for. After you send your lead it will take about 20 minutes to show up in your events manager. 

If you're an ecommerce brand perform and add to cart action, and a purchase action on your website instead. 

• Your test lead could take over 20 minutes to show up in events manager.

• Meta is pretty good at automatically recognizing leads, but there is a chance you'll have to configure a custom event.

• If your Conversions API is working correctly you should see that both the Browser and Server are listed under Connection Method.

• You can see in our Events Manager an event called "Mineral_Lead," this is a custom event that we created so that we can have more control over how our server sends the event to Meta. Creating this custom event is not neccessary at all. 

• Once you see an event called, "Lead," you're ready to create an ad!

• If your an ecommerce brand using Shopify or another sales platform you'll want to look for an "Add to Cart," or "Purchase," event. 

• Head over to Ads Manager

• Click "Create," in the upper left portion of the screen.

Select the objective for your ad campaign.

• Most of our clients at The Salt Lick are working on increasing leads, if that's you select the Leads objective.

• If you are one of our e-commerce clients you should choose the Sales objective.

• If you have a custom event on your website choose the Engagement objective. Custom events can be more complicated to set up, and the steps to create custom events are not covered within this guide.

• Stay away from Awareness and Traffic objectives unless you are building a custom audience with your campaign. More on that later. 

Meta will recommend their "Tailored Leads Campaign," don't use this. Instead select "Manual leads campaign."

Throughout this guide we'll often be steering you away from many of Meta's suggestions. Some of Meta's suggestions are good, and many are improving, however many of them will result in trading ease of set up for ad cost. Most of their recommendations lack the customization needed to truly test and refine ad campaigns. 

There are three levels to any Ad Campaign. It's easier to understand if we start backwards from the Ad level, and work our way up to the Campaign level:

• Ad Level

  • This is where you upload your Ad Creative and set your Destination URL

  • The Ad Creative is the video itself, and the primary text, headline, description and Call To Action button.

  • It's normal to have multiple ads within an ad set. This way you can test different Ad Creatives, and even different offers linking to different destinations.

  • In terms of analytics, the Ad Level can show you which ads are performing the best, and which elements of your creative are performing the best.

• Ad Set Level

  • Ad Set is where you define your audience and select your placements.

  • It's normal to have multiple ad sets within a campaign to test different audiences, or to push different ads to to different markets. The latter is fairly common for businesses who want to push different ad creative to people in Denver than people in Boulder.

  • In terms of analytics, the Ad Set Level can show you which audiences and markets provide the cheapest results, and which are the most expensive.

• Campaign Level

  • Your campaign contains all of your ad sets, and thus all of your ads.

  • This is where you set your Lifetime Budget, and your Daily Budget, and the overall objective of your Campaign.

  • In terms of analytics, looking at metrics on a campaign level will give you overall data on how much money you're spending across all ad sets, and your average cost per result across all of those ad sets. 

As you continue to create more ad campaigns naming convention becomes especially important so that you can understand key information about a campaign without having to open it and explore it's ads.

We recommend a naming convention that clearly states your business name, your campaign objective, and the time period in which you're running the campaign.

It's great to set a campaign spending limit, especially if you intend on running a campaign with a high daily budget. Adding a campaign budget is also a great way to control the duration of an ad campaign. If your daily budget is $500 and you set a lifetime budget of $45,000 your campaign will run for 90 days. 

As you begin to run more campaigns, ensuring that your campaigns won't overspend their welcome is really important to your annual marketing budget. 

Keep in mind, once the campaign spending limit has been reached the campaign will stop running, you can always increase the spending limit later. 

We recommend leaving Advantage Campaign Budget turned on.

This is where you set your daily budget. This budget will be distributed across all of your Ad Sets according to their performance. Meta automatically prioritizes ad sets with the lowest costs. 

Since Ad Sets are where you handle targeting it's important to describe your targeting parameters in your Ad Set. We recommend including the following in your Ad Set name.

• Business Name

• Interest Targeting

• Geographic Targeting

• Timeframe

Within objectives that support conversions, the Ad Set is where you define the specific conversion you're optimizing for.

Since we're building a Leads campaign for our website we'll:

• Set the conversion location to Website

• Performance Goal: Maximize Conversions

• Pixel: Select your Pixel

• Conversion Event: Lead

Audience Controls is where you can define where your ads can be shown. Unlike targeting, ads will not be shown to people who do not meet these criteria.

• For location, you can add multiple locations to target your service location, or if you're trying to target the front range market more broadly search for Denver, DMA

• Minimum age can be useful if your service doesn't apply to people below a certain age

• It can be helpful to set Languages to the language used in your ad creative, especially if you have versions of your ads in different languages. 

Meta's AI continues to get more and more advanced. Advantage+ targeting allows your Ad Set to learn who it's best audience is. If you're daily spend is over $200/day this is probably your easiest option, as Meta should be able to hone in on an audience within a few days. You can actually leave all of these parameters empty and let Meta figure it out.

If you want to start the AI on the right path it can be helpful to include Audience Suggestions. Meta's AI will test users who match those suggestions first, and then expand from there.

For a more detail oriented approach to ad targeting you can switch to "Original Audience Options," which will allow you to create narrower audiences, and test which of those audiences performs the best.

Original audience options allows you to furhter define your audience. You can choose interests or demographics, and then further define your audience by ensuring that they overlap with other interests and demographics.

The population of Colorado is 5.8 millio people. If we target that entire population we risk wasting ad spend on irrelevant audiences, but at the same time we don't want to target too narrow of a population or we risk missing our niche audience, or increasing ad fatigue among our target audience.

Depending on your industry and your ad spend aim for 400k-1M. If you have a high daily budget you'll burn through a narrow audience very quickly. If you have a lower daily budget it may be cost effective to limit your ads to a smaller audience. 

By default Meta turns on Advantage+ Placements, using Advantage+ may lower your CPM, but it often won't lower your cost per result. Meta's platforms, especially facebook are filled with low-quality placements that Meta wants to make revenue off of, these placements are much cheaper, but they don't perform well. They're usually in less visible parts of the platform, or served in parts of the platform where users are actively trying to avoid ads, such as Facebook Messenger. 

We recommend turning off Advantage+ Placements and selecting only high quality placements like feeds, stories, and reels. 

Here are some of the placements we recommend turning off:

• All Audience Network Placements

• Facebook Right Column

• Facebook Marketplace

• Facebook Video Feeds

• Facebook in-stream videos

• Ads on Facebook Reels (You can leave Facebook Reels turned on)

• Messages

Now let's move on to the Ad Level. Since this is where we'll build our creative we need to make sure we include which ad we are running in the name. If you're running multiple offers within an ad set it's also good to include the offer, and the destination if you're running ads to separate destinations. 

If you have multiple Facebook and Instagram profiles "Partnership Ad," may be turned on by default, you can turn this off.

Identity is where you select the Facebook & Instagram Profile that your ad will be delivered from. Building up your Facebook and Instagram profiles with high-quality organic content can help drive even more conversions and further reduce your cost per result. If you're interested in producing organic content, reach back out to us!

For our Essential Minerals package, each video we produce is designed to be run on its own, so select "Single image or video," under format. We also recommend turning off multi-advertiser ads.

Now scroll down to Ad Creative an upload one of your ads. 

After you upload your video you'll be directed to this screen where you can edit your video for different placements. The Essential Minerals package provides you with files specifically designed to fit all of these placements, so click replace and upload the corresponding file.

• 16:9 = Horizontal

• 9:16 = Vertical

• 1:1 = Square

Within your Essential Minerals deliverables folder there is a document with Primary Text and Headlines that correspond with ads. Choose the text for the ad you've just uploaded and paste it into corresponding fields. 

Scroll through the options under Call to action and choose the one that is most relevant for your offer. This is what will be displayed on the button that links to your destination.

Advantaeg+ Creative turns on optimizations by default. We can turn most of these off. These are great for publishing ads that you shot with your phone, but we don't need any brightness, color, or text adjustments to our professionally produced ads. 

You can leave on "Relevant Comments," and "Site Links," but if we see your add with "Visual Touch-Ups," or godforbid, "Add video filter," we will cry.

• The website URL should be the relevant landing page for the offer mentioned in your ad creative.

• The Display Link should be the domain name of your website 

• We don't recommend browser add-ons. We're optimizing for leads on your website so these alternative actions will detract from that optimization, but feel free to experiment with these features.

• Underneath Website URL click Build a URL Parameter.

Building a URL Parameter allows you to coorelate actions with ads via Google Analytics or your website builder's built in analytics platform. These are extensions to your URL that don't change the destination, but log key information about where your site visitor came from.

We recommend setting up your paremeters exactly as shown. The items in the bracket are dynamic. Just click within each field and you'll be shown all of the dynamic options. 

Now that we've built our first Ad Set and Ad, this structure will probably make a lot more sense! 

• To create more ad sets click on the elipses and choose "Quickly Duplicate"

• You can do the same for Ads, and then replace the creative with a different video.

Once you are happy with your campaign move click on the Campaign level and click Publish and all of your ad sets and ads will be published at once!

Once your ad has been reviewed and approved by Meta it will entered what is called the Learning Phase.

Do not to make any adjustments to your ad sets or your ads while in the learning phase!

During the learning phase, Meta's AI is testing your ad within different subsets and expansions of your target audience to find the best results. Each Ad Set requires 50 conversions to exit the learning phase. If you make an adjustment you start back at 0. This means if you continue to make adjustments while in the learning phase you could waste a lot of money, especially if your conversions are very expensive.

Results during the learning phase will often be much higher than where your campaign will stabilize to, so if you see higher numbers than expected don't worry. It's best to not pay attention to your campaign too much while in the learning phase. 

One more note about the learning phase— all the data that is tracked within a campaign stays within that campaign, meaning if you've been running ads for a year that campaign has a full year's worth of data. If you create a new campaign you'll be starting from scratch. Mature Ad Campaigns can definitely speed up the learning phase for future ad sets because they're able to find your target audience faster. 

You can evaluate results on a campaign level, ad set level, or ad level. All of these data points provide great insights into performance.

By default you'll see metrics for the campaign level, when you click on the campaign you'll move to the ad set level, and when you click on ad set you'll move to the ad level of that ad set.

We want to focus on Cost Per Result, Link Clicks, and CPM. 

• Cost Per Result: How much is average cost of a result from the results that you've received so far? A result is when a user performs the action that you specificed at your ad set level, i.e. a Lead.

• Link Clicks: How many clicks is your ad generating? Link clicks are a good sign that customers are interested in your product or service. Through re-targeting we can turn many of these link clicks into leads. If your link-clicks are considerably higher than your results that may indicate an issue with the messaging on your landing page, the location of your leads form, or other issues related to your offer. 

• CPM: CPM stands for Cost Per Mille. It's the cost of 1,000 impressions on your ad. When you run an ad Meta will bid in an ad auction against competing ads within your target audience. Comparing the CPM for different ads and ad sets can help you determine which ads have the lowest costs, and which audiences are the least competitive.

When analyzing your results it's important to consider the time-frame of those results. All of the values are averages, and it may be difficult to discern a decrease in Cost Per Result if you're looking at the end of the month and you spent the first 7 days of the month with all of your ads in the learning phase. 

Setting shorter time frames is a great way to look at how your ad is currently performing. 

Custom audiences can leverage data from your website, and from your ads account to make more specifically tailored audiences.

Let's start out by creating a Custom Audience. Even if you're not using these audiences for ads right now, they are great audiences to build for future ads or for tweaks in your targeting. We'll get to Lookalike Audiences later, but we need to populate some Custom Audiences first. 

Custom Audiences allow us to build lookalike audiences, and custom audiences are great for re-targeting peolpe who have expressed interest in our products or services in the past.

Lookalike audiences allow us to reach people similar to the people in our custom audiences.

Let's start by creating some custom audiences from our website. This uses the Meta Pixel to link web visitors with Meta user accounts.

The first audience we'll create is a catch all for all web visitors. 

• Set your source to your Pixel

• Select "All Website Visitors," from Events

• Set your Audience retention to 180 days as this is the furthest we can go back for web sources.

• Give your audience a descriptive title such as "Web Visitors 180" 

Ever visit a specific page of a website and later get bombarded with ads for that exact product or service? This is how! 

If you provide different services on your website and you want to be able to run specific ads for those specific services create several audiences with the following parameters:

• Select "People who visited specific web pages," from the Events drop down.

• Paste an unique part of the URL for that specific page into "URL contains", for example if I'm targeting people who visited our Essential Minerals landing page I could include essential-minerals-ad-creative-production to properly identify the page

• Do this for all the of the pages you plan to run ads to if you are advertising several different products or services

A great way to qualify your most interested web visitors is by using the "Visitors by time spent," event. Let's create an audience for the top 25% of visitors who spend the most time on our website. This will help us create a valuable lookalike audience later!

The last custom audience we'll create from our Website is visitors to our website that filled out our lead form. We don't need to push more ads to these people, and we can even exclude them from our ads if we want to, but what's even more valuable about this audience is that we can create lookalike audiences of the people who converted on our website. This is one of the most useful custom audiences we can create. 

There is a lot of valuable data within your Meta acconts. Choosing a meta source such as Instagram Account or Facebook Page will allow us to access that data, build custom audiences from it, and eventually create lookalike audiences.

Ad Engagement is a really useful audience to create from meta sources. Meta sources hold data for 365 days so we can set a larger audience retention. These are people who engaged with our ads in some way, i.e. turning on the volume, liking, commenting or even clicking the link in the ad. We can use this audience to re-target our ads to people who seem interested in them, and we can even define the audience further within our ad set by excluding our audience of Leads so that we are only targeting the people who interacted with our ads but didn't convert.

This is also a great custom audience to create a lookalike audience from. Ads that receive more engagement are given a higher "Quality Rating," by Meta which means they'll perform better in the ad-audction giving you a lower CPM.

When we want to create a Lookalike Audience from our Custom Audiences we need to select "Other Sources," to access our custom audiences.

Custom audiences will usually take about 24-48hrs to populate. You can set up Lookalike audiences before they are populated, but hold off on runing ads with them until they are fully populated. 

You can create Lookalike Audiences based on your custom audiences. These are audiences of people who are in the top X percentile of users most similar to your custom audiences.

• Lookalike Audiences can only be defined nationally, so select United States as your location.

• The Audience Size can be adjusted with the percentage slider.

• Keep in mind, 1% of the United States' population is 2.81 million people across the country. When you user this audience in your Ad Set it will be limited to the geo-targeting of your ad set, so that 2.81 million might turn into 40,000 within your target location. It can be beneficial to cast a wider net here, and let AI further define your audience during the Learning Phase. 

Here's a look back at the Ad Set Level of how we can use our custom audiences and lookalike audiences together to create defined and highly relevant audiences.

• We're using Original Audience Options for more control

• We are including people in our 1% Lookalike Audience of Web Visitors Who Converted (Leads)

• We are excluding our custom audience of Web Visitors who converted so we don't waste our ad budget on people who already contacted us (If you have a bunch of leads that are ghosting you, maybe you want to keep pushing ads to them! Throw them into the Include section!)

• We're targeting the Denver, DMA

• We're leaving Advantage Lookalike+ turned on because our Lookalike is small and we're okay with the AI expanding it. 

This is our prefered approach to Audience Targeting within Ads Manager, but it takes time to set up. It is totally fine to run interest, demographic based ads, or broad targeting ads while you build web traffic and ad engagements, and if you're just starting out we recommend it. Custom and Lookalike Audiences work best when your account and your website has a lot of data, if you're new at this it's great to use ads to accelerate that collection of data and then refine your targeting a few months later. 

Keep in mind, changes to targeting will put your Ad Set back into the learning phase. 

We hope this guide was helpful, and we wish you tremendous success in running your ad campaigns. We're always here if you need us. Don't hesitate to reach back out if you have questions about anything in this implementation guide, or if you want to produce more video content.