How to Plan and Launch a Successful Meta Ads Campaign, Part 1

This content series was re-purposed from a course delivered through 30 text messages. Through bite-sized, modular sections, it will teach you how to launch a digital ads campaign, focused primarily on Facebook ads. My name is Alex and I’ve launched over 300 ad campaigns, and previously worked for Obama’s lead digital agency, working with clients like Google, Team USA, Sierra Club, and Freedom to Marry. I love the combination of analysis and creativity that goes into digital ads, and I’m excited to teach you the basics of what I’ve learned. We’ll also begin to delve into slightly more nuanced concepts. 

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Auction-based, Competitive, Real-time

It’s important to understand some basic principles about how digital advertising works before diving into planning. Digital ads operate in an auction-based, competitive, and real-time environment. This means that when you launch a campaign, you are automatically and repeatedly bidding against other advertisers for the chance to reach the most relevant audience with your ads.

In auction-based campaigns, which comprise the vast majority of digital ads, bidding is done in two primary ways: impressions and clicks. When you bid for impressions, you pay for ads based on CPM pricing, or cost per thousand impressions. When you bid for clicks, you pay based on CPC, or cost per click. CPM is more common in Facebook Ads, and CPC is the standard for Google Search ads. If you are promoting a video, either on Facebook or YouTube ads, you can often bid with CPV (cost per view), where you only pay for every video view.

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Privacy: set up privacy policy and cookie disclaimer

Privacy is quickly becoming a mainstream issue in the digital landscape, and ads stand at the heart of it. If you want to learn more about this world, just google GDPR (European privacy law) and CCPA (California Privacy Law, which sets much of the precedent in the US). Otherwise, the main things you need to ensure before launching an ads campaign are that 1) you have a privacy policy on your website and 2) you have a cookie disclaimer set up, especially if you want to do retargeting and/or optimize for conversions (will be explained in future days). If you don't plan to use the Facebook Pixel to do either of these, the cookie disclaimer is less important. 

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For a sample cookie disclaimer and customizable tool, visit Cookie Cutter.‍