You will be able to build a Meta campaign in Ads Manager with the right settings at each level.
Farah sat down to build her first proper Meta campaign with everything ready: an account plan from lesson 2.4, tracking tested in lesson 3.4, an audience plan from lesson 4.4 and six ad drafts from lesson 5.5. This time the screens in Ads Manager were not asking her to invent anything. Each one was asking her to enter a decision she had already made.
That is how building should feel. This lesson walks through a Meta campaign in Ads Manager from top to bottom, in the order the screens usually ask for things. Meta moves buttons and renames options often, so follow the decisions rather than the exact labels, and check the help centre whenever a screen does not match.
Open Ads Manager and start a new campaign. The first choice is the objective. Pick the one from your account plan, following lesson 2.1, The objective tells the platform what to find. For Farah, it is Sales.
Meta may then offer a choice between a more automated setup and a manual one. The automated version, sold under the Advantage+ name at the time of writing, makes more decisions for you about audience, placements and sometimes creative. The manual version lets you set those yourself. Lesson 2.3, Keep the structure simple enough to read, laid out the trade-off: automation suits small budgets with reliable tracking, while manual setup shows more detail. Either can be right. Choose deliberately, and write down which you chose.
Name the campaign with your naming pattern. Then decide whether the budget sits at the campaign level, shared across ad sets, or on each ad set. Farah chose a shared campaign budget so Meta could move money between her two audiences.
The ad set is where most of the setup happens.
First, the conversion. Meta asks where you want conversions to happen, such as your website, an app or a messaging app. Choose the one that matches your tracking. For a website, select your pixel and the event to optimise for. Farah chose her pixel and the Purchase event. If the event shows a warning or no recent activity, stop and go back to lesson 3.4, Install and test your tracking. A campaign optimising for an event that is not firing will spend money learning nothing.
Next, the budget and schedule if they sit here, and the start date. Set an end date or a spending limit for a test, so the campaign cannot run on unnoticed.
Then the audience, from your audience plan. Set the location carefully. Farah chose Singapore only. Check whether the location option includes people who live there, people recently there, or people travelling there, and pick the one that matches your business. Add any genuine limits, such as age or language, then any custom audiences and exclusions. If you are using Meta's broader audience options, note that your choices may be treated as suggestions.
Finally, placements: where the ads can appear. Meta can choose placements automatically across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and its partner network, or you can choose them by hand. Automatic placements often give the system more room to find cheap results. Manual placements let you leave out places your creative was not made for. Farah kept Facebook and Instagram feeds, Stories and Reels, and removed the rest because her videos were not made for them.
At the ad level, choose the Facebook Page and Instagram account the ad will run from. Then choose the format, such as a single image or video, or a carousel of several.
Upload creative in the right shapes for your placements. Feeds generally suit square or slightly tall images and videos. Stories and Reels are full-screen vertical. Meta's ad specifications page lists the current recommended sizes and ratios, so check it before you export. Where Meta lets you upload different versions for different placements, do it, rather than letting a square image sit awkwardly in a vertical frame.
Write the primary text, headline and description from your drafts, choose the call-to-action button that matches your objective, as lesson 5.3, One offer, one proof, one action, explained, and enter the landing page address. Make sure the ad's tracking section shows your pixel.
Meta shows previews of how the ad will look in each placement. Go through every one. Look for text cut off by buttons, faces cropped out of frame, captions hidden behind the interface in Reels, and images that look tiny or stretched. Fix what you find by uploading a better-fitting version or removing that placement.
Open the preview on your own phone if Meta offers a way to send it there. A placement can look fine on a laptop and wrong in the hand.
Then stop. Ads Manager keeps unpublished work as a draft, so you can close it and come back. Farah left hers as a draft overnight and reviewed it the next morning with fresh eyes, which is when she noticed the landing page link on one ad pointed to her homepage instead of the blouse collection.
Lesson 6.4, Mistakes that waste a first budget, gives you a checklist to run before you publish. For now, the activity below asks you to build your own Meta campaign to the draft stage from your account plan, and leave it unpublished.
Build a Meta campaign up to the draft stage using your account plan, without publishing it.
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