How to Run Facebook Ads Step by Step (2026)

Running a Facebook ad for the first time means working through several Meta systems that don't explain themselves: a Business Portfolio, an ad account, a Page, a pixel, and a campaign structure with three layers. None of it is hard once you know the order. This guide walks through it for a local or service business, or an agency setting it up for a client, using what Meta documents rather than what forums repeat.

The short answer

Question	Answer
What do I need before I touch Ads Manager?	A Business Portfolio, an ad account inside it, a Facebook Page, a payment method, and a pixel connected through Events Manager.
How many campaign objectives are there?	Six: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App promotion and Sales.
Advantage+ audience or build my own?	Start with Advantage+ on, since it's the default for most objectives. Switch to manual only for a specific reason, such as a very narrow service area.
Daily or lifetime budget?	Daily for anything ongoing. Lifetime only for a fixed end date, so Meta paces spend across it.
What is the learning phase?	A period after launch, or after a significant edit, where delivery is less stable. Meta ties exiting it to around 50 optimisation events in the 7 days after that edit.
Lead form or website form?	An instant form for the fastest, cheapest leads. A website form if the offer needs explaining first, or you want the lead straight in your own CRM form.
Why did my results stall?	Usually the learning phase resetting from an edit, a tracking gap, or too small a budget to collect enough optimisation events.

Before you open Ads Manager

A handful of pieces must exist before a campaign can run.

A Business Portfolio (what used to be called Business Manager). This is the account that owns everything else: ad accounts, Pages, pixels and people. Create one at business.facebook.com if you or the client doesn't already have one.
An ad account, created inside the portfolio, holding billing, campaigns and reporting.
A payment method attached to the ad account. Without one, Ads Manager won't let a campaign go live.
A Facebook Page. Every ad needs a Page to run from, even an Instagram-only ad, because the Page is the identity behind the ad.
A pixel or dataset, set up in Events Manager, plus the Conversions API alongside it where you can. The pixel alone misses people who block browser tracking or convert off-site; CAPI fills in events the pixel never saw, and lets a Leads or Sales campaign optimise for a real outcome instead of clicks.

For an agency, the client should own the Business Portfolio and ad account and grant the agency partner access, rather than the agency building it inside its own portfolio. That keeps the ad history and any account warnings with the client if the relationship ends.

If any step gets rejected or the ad account gets disabled before launch, see why Meta ads get rejected, Facebook ad account disabled and Meta Business Verification.

Choosing an objective

Meta locks you into one of six objectives at creation, and you can't change it once the campaign is running, so pick based on what you want Meta to optimise delivery for, not what sounds impressive.

Awareness. Shows your ad to as many of the right people as possible. Use it to introduce a new business or location, not to get leads.
Traffic. Optimises for clicks to a destination. Useful for visits, but Meta is optimising for clicks, not what happens after someone lands.
Engagement. Optimises for likes, comments, shares, video views or message starts. Good for building a following, not leads.
Leads. Optimises for people submitting an instant form or website form. The objective most local and service businesses want.
App promotion. Drives app installs or in-app actions. Not relevant unless you have an app.
Sales. Optimises for purchases, usually a website checkout. The default for ecommerce.

Engagement and Traffic will both happily spend your budget and report healthy numbers of likes or clicks while producing zero actual enquiries, because that's exactly what you told Meta to get you. If what you're after is enquiries or bookings, choose Leads.

Advantage+ audience vs a manual audience

For most objectives, Meta turns Advantage+ audience on by default. It takes whatever audience signals you give it (a customer list, an age range, an interest) and lets its system look beyond them for people likely to convert, rather than stopping at your exact targeting.

Minimum age, location, language and custom audience exclusions stay as hard rules even with Advantage+ on. Age range, gender, detailed targeting (interests and behaviours) and custom audience inclusions become suggestions rather than strict filters.

Go manual when your service covers specific towns, your own data shows a particular audience outperforms the broader pool and you want to force it, or you're deliberately testing a narrow segment such as a past-customer list. Otherwise, start broad with Advantage+ on: a new account has no conversion history for manual targeting to be based on.

Placements

Placements decide where the ad shows: Facebook feed, Instagram feed, Reels, Stories, Messenger, Audience Network and others.

Advantage+ placements is the default and lets Meta's delivery system buy the cheapest results across every eligible placement rather than a fixed share in each one. For most accounts, especially new ones with no data yet, this is the right setting: Meta is looking across the whole inventory for the lowest average cost, not the lowest cost in each individual placement.

Switch to manual only for a specific reason, for example a placement that's clearly producing low-quality leads in your own data, or creative built for one exact format. For Leads, Sales and App promotion campaigns, excluding even one placement turns off the rest of Advantage+ for that ad set.

Budget: daily vs lifetime, and campaign vs ad set

Two choices sit under "budget": how long it runs, and where it's set.

Daily vs lifetime. A daily budget is what Meta aims to spend on an average day, spending more on a strong day and less on a quiet one. A lifetime budget is a hard cap across the campaign's run dates, and only a lifetime budget lets you schedule ads to specific days or hours (dayparting).

Campaign level vs ad set level. Meta calls campaign-level budgeting Advantage campaign budget (formerly CBO): one budget on the campaign, split across ad sets by Meta's system based on which is predicted to deliver the best results at that moment. It needs at least two ad sets, the same budget type across them, and the same bid strategy. The alternative, ad set budgets, gives direct control over how much any one audience gets, and suits deliberately testing a few audiences against each other.

Use Advantage campaign budget if you want the algorithm choosing where spend goes. Use ad set budgets, or the spend limit option inside Advantage campaign budget, to guarantee a new or small-audience ad set gets spend instead of being starved by a stronger one.

Creative formats

Which formats are available depends on your objective and placement choices:

Single image. The simplest format, still effective for most local and service businesses.
Single video. Works well for Awareness and Engagement, and for explaining a service before a lead.
Carousel. Several images or videos in one ad, useful for a range of services or before/after results.
Collection. A cover image or video with products underneath, more common for ecommerce.
Instant Experience. A full-screen experience that opens after someone taps the ad.

For a Leads campaign, your creative sits above either an instant form or a website form, and which one you choose matters as much as the image or video itself.

Lead form or website form

Both sit under the Leads objective; the choice is where the submission happens.

Instant forms open inside Facebook or Instagram without leaving the app. Fields can auto-fill from what the person already shared with Meta, so they're usually faster to fill in and typically cheaper per lead. The lead sits in Meta's own Leads Center until something pulls it out, manually or through an integration.

Website forms send the click to your own landing page, and the lead lands wherever your form handler sends it, usually straight into your CRM. These suit offers that need more explaining first, higher-ticket services, or anything where you want full control over the page and fields.

A form that isn't connected to anything is the most common way a good cost per lead turns into a bad week: the leads sit unseen in Meta's Leads Center instead of reaching anyone who can follow up. See connecting Facebook lead ads to your CRM, and meta conversion leads explained for the performance goal that feeds lead quality back to Meta through the Conversions API.

Launching and the learning phase

Once you publish, a new or significantly edited ad set goes through a learning phase. Meta's guidance ties exiting it to the ad set collecting around 50 optimisation events (whatever action you told it to optimise for) in the seven days since its last significant edit. If an ad set isn't on track to reach roughly that number, Meta marks it "Learning Limited." Meta is explicit that this isn't a penalty: it's a sign the budget, audience size or bid isn't giving the system enough to learn from.

Editing targeting, creative, the optimisation event or the bid strategy resets the count, as does adding a new ad or pausing the ad set for more than about seven days. To exit faster: combine audiences into fewer, better-funded ad sets instead of splitting a small budget thin across many, raise the budget if it's too low to reach a meaningful number of optimisation events in a week, widen the audience if it's capping how many people can complete the event, and leave the ad set alone for a few days after launch before editing it again.

Reading your results

Check the campaign against what you set out to measure, not against vanity numbers:

Cost per result against the objective you picked, not a different metric that happens to look better.
Results by placement, age and gender in Ads Manager, to catch one segment quietly costing far more than the rest.
Whether tracking actually saw the outcome. A campaign can look like it's underperforming when the real problem is that conversions never reached Meta. See Event Match Quality if reported results and your CRM numbers don't line up.
Frequency. If it's climbing and results are falling on an Awareness or Engagement campaign, the audience has likely seen the ad enough times already.

Common mistakes

Boosting a post instead of building a campaign in Ads Manager. Boost uses a simplified setup with far fewer targeting and optimisation options.
Picking the objective that sounds impressive rather than the one that matches the goal. Engagement gets you likes and comments; if you want enquiries, pick Leads.
Launching without a pixel or Conversions API connected. Meta has no signal on what happened after the click, so a Leads or Sales campaign has nothing real to optimise against.
Editing the ad set every day during the learning phase. Each significant edit resets the count towards roughly 50 optimisation events.
Spreading a small budget across many narrow ad sets, so none of them collect enough optimisation events to learn properly.
A lead form that nothing is connected to. Leads sit unseen in Meta's Leads Center while the business assumes the campaign isn't working.
Judging results after a day or two. The learning phase and normal variance both need more time before the numbers mean anything.

Running this through Inflowave

If you're managing Meta ads for clients, Inflowave's ads reporting pulls campaign, ad set and ad performance into the CRM, so you can see results per client without logging into Ads Manager for each one. Automated rules can pause or enable a campaign, ad set or ad, or adjust its budget, when a condition such as cost per conversion or ROAS crosses a threshold you set. On tracking, Inflowave's Conversions API integration sends hashed, normalised customer details with each Lead, Schedule or Purchase event, plus the click ID, browser ID, IP address and user agent, with a shared event ID so the pixel and server event deduplicate instead of double counting. If you run Facebook lead ads (instant forms), Inflowave receives the leadgen webhook, fetches the answers, and creates the lead with the ad, ad set and campaign attached.

Questions people ask

What is the best course to learn Facebook ads?

Meta's own Blueprint courses, free at the Meta Business Help Center, cover the current six-objective setup directly from the source. Treat paid third-party courses as a supplement, since Meta changes the interface and defaults often enough that older courses go stale.

How can I get 1000 followers on a Facebook page?

That's a different goal from running ads for leads or sales, and Meta doesn't document a guaranteed way to do it. An Engagement campaign can grow a following, but followers alone don't produce enquiries, so most local businesses are better off putting budget against Leads or Sales instead.

What is the 20 percent rule on Facebook ads?

A Meta data point, not a fixed rule: Meta has said advertisers who keep less than 20% of overall spend sitting in ad sets still in the learning phase tend to see lower cost per purchase. In practice, consolidate into fewer, better-funded ad sets rather than constantly launching new ones that permanently relearn.

How much does it cost to run an ad on Facebook?

Meta doesn't publish a fixed price. Cost depends on your objective, audience, placement, creative and the competition in the auction at that moment. Start with a budget you're comfortable testing with, watch cost per result for the first week, and adjust from there rather than picking a number in advance.

How many campaign objectives does Meta offer now?

Six: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App promotion and Sales. These replaced the older three-tier structure of Awareness, Consideration and Conversion.

What's the difference between CBO and Advantage campaign budget?

Nothing functionally. Advantage campaign budget is Meta's current name for what used to be called Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO): one budget set at the campaign level, split across ad sets by Meta's system rather than fixed per ad set.

Should a new account use Advantage+ audience or build a manual audience?

Start with Advantage+ audience on. It's the default for most objectives, and a brand new account has no conversion history yet for a manual audience to be based on. Move to manual targeting later only if your own data shows a reason to.

Why is my ad set stuck in learning limited?

Usually a small audience, too low a budget for the optimisation event chosen, an infrequent optimisation event, or too much overlap with your other ad sets in the same auction. Meta's fixes are to widen the audience, raise the budget, consolidate ad sets, or pick a more frequent optimisation event.

Do I need the Conversions API if I already have the pixel?

For a Leads or Sales campaign, yes, if you want Meta to optimise against your real outcome and not just clicks. The pixel alone misses people who block browser tracking, convert off-site, or come through a phone call. See Facebook Conversions API setup.

Can I change the campaign objective after launching?

No. Once a campaign is created under one objective, you can't switch it to another. You have to build a new campaign if the goal changes.

Is an instant form or a website form better for leads?

Instant forms are usually faster to fill in and cheaper per lead for simple, fast-moving offers. Website forms suit offers that need more explaining, higher-ticket services, or when you want the lead to land directly in your own CRM form.

What counts as an optimisation event for the learning phase?

Whatever action you set the ad set to optimise for, for example a lead, a purchase or an add to cart: the same action shown as your "performance goal" when you set up the ad set.

How to Run Facebook Ads: A Step by Step Guide for 2026