How to Do Facebook Ads: A Step-by-Step Workflow
Doing Facebook Ads well is a sequence: get your tracking foundation right before you spend a dollar, build a campaign structure that gives Meta’s algorithm room to learn, launch with patience, then optimize on a set cadence instead of reacting to daily noise. Skipping the foundation to “just launch something” is the single biggest reason accounts underperform.
- Step 1: Set Up Business Suite and Account Structure Correctly
- Step 2: Install Tracking Before You Launch Anything
- Step 3: Define One Clear Objective Per Campaign
- Step 4: Build Your Audiences
- Step 5: Structure the Campaign
- Step 6: Build Creative for the Funnel Stage
- Step 7: Launch and Leave the Learning Phase Alone
- Step 8: Review and Optimize on a Cadence
- Step 9: Scale Deliberately
This is the workflow we run at Salterra for every new client account, refined over more than a decade of managing budgets across ecommerce, local service, and lead-gen businesses. It’s not a theoretical framework — it’s the actual sequence, in order.
Step 1: Set Up Business Suite and Account Structure Correctly
Before touching a campaign, set up Meta Business Suite properly. Create one Business Portfolio, connect your Facebook Page and Instagram profile to it, and add your ad account underneath. If you’re an agency or consultant working on someone else’s account, use Business Manager’s partner access feature rather than asking for a personal login — it’s cleaner, auditable, and doesn’t put your client’s account at risk if your personal profile ever gets restricted.
Assign roles deliberately. Give full admin access only to people who need it, and use the “Employee Access” or “Partner Access” tiers for contractors. Account structure mistakes made here — like connecting the wrong Page, or building on a personal ad account instead of a business one — are painful to unwind later.
Step 2: Install Tracking Before You Launch Anything
Install the Meta Pixel on your website and set up the Conversions API alongside it, ideally through a server-side integration like a tag manager or ecommerce platform’s native Meta integration (Shopify, WooCommerce, and most major platforms have one). Running both the pixel and Conversions API together, with event deduplication configured, gives Meta the cleanest possible signal in a post-iOS-privacy world.
Use the Events Manager “Test Events” tool to confirm your key events — PageView, ViewContent, AddToCart, Lead, Purchase — are firing correctly before you spend a single dollar on ads pointed at that site. Also set up Aggregated Event Measurement priorities if you’re tracking multiple events, since iOS-attributed conversions are limited to eight prioritized events per domain.
Step 3: Define One Clear Objective Per Campaign
Pick the objective that matches what you actually want the campaign to produce — Leads, Sales, or Traffic being the most common for direct-response advertisers. Resist the urge to build one campaign trying to do everything. A cold-traffic awareness campaign and a warm-audience conversion campaign have different jobs and should live in separate campaigns with separate budgets and separate creative built for that stage of the funnel.
Step 4: Build Your Audiences
Before creating ad sets, build your audience building blocks in Audiences (inside Ads Manager):
- Custom Audiences from your customer email list, website visitors (via pixel), and people who’ve engaged with your Page or Instagram profile.
- Advantage lookalike audiences modeled on your best customer list or highest-value website converters.
- Exclusions — build a custom audience of recent purchasers or existing customers to exclude from cold prospecting campaigns, so you’re not paying to “acquire” people who already bought.
For most accounts today, we start ad sets on broad or Advantage+ audience targeting for prospecting, letting the algorithm find buyers using creative and pixel signal rather than narrow manual interest stacking, which has grown less effective as Meta’s own targeting has improved.
Step 5: Structure the Campaign
Build a simple structure to start: one campaign, two to three ad sets maximum (for example, one broad prospecting ad set and one retargeting ad set), each with three to six ads inside. Use Advantage Campaign Budget so Meta can shift spend between ad sets toward whichever is performing, unless you have a specific reason to control budget at the ad set level.
Set your optimization event to the action that matters most down-funnel — Purchase rather than AddToCart, Lead rather than Landing Page View — even though it may show a higher initial cost per result. Optimizing for a shallow event fills your funnel with people unlikely to convert on the metric you actually care about.
Step 6: Build Creative for the Funnel Stage
Cold-audience creative and warm-audience creative should not be the same ad. Prospecting ads need to earn attention and explain the offer from a standing start — hook in the first second of video, clear value proposition, minimal assumed context. Retargeting ads can assume familiarity — social proof, objection-handling, urgency, or a stronger offer to convert someone who’s already shown interest.
Produce at least three to five creative variations per ad set at launch. Vary the hook and format (one video, one static image, one carousel) rather than making five near-identical versions of the same ad — that gives you a real read on what’s working, not noise.
Step 7: Launch and Leave the Learning Phase Alone
Once you hit publish, resist checking the account every hour. New ad sets need to pass through the learning phase — roughly 50 optimization events — before performance stabilizes. Editing budget, creative, or targeting during this window resets the clock. Set a calendar reminder to review results after three to five days rather than judging on day one.
Step 8: Review and Optimize on a Cadence
After the learning phase, review performance weekly rather than daily for most accounts (higher-spend accounts can review more often). Look at cost per result, frequency (watch for creative fatigue above roughly 3-4 for a given audience), and click-through rate as your early warning signals. Kill clearly underperforming ads, but give winners room to keep running rather than pausing them prematurely out of impatience.
When you do make changes, change one variable at a time — creative, audience, or budget — so you can actually attribute the result to the change you made. Changing three things simultaneously and seeing a shift in performance tells you nothing about what caused it.
Step 9: Scale Deliberately
When an ad set is consistently profitable, scale budget in increments of roughly 20% every few days rather than doubling it overnight, which can knock the ad set back into a fresh learning phase and destabilize performance. Horizontal scaling — duplicating a winning ad set into a new campaign with a fresh audience — is often more stable than pushing vertical budget increases too aggressively into one ad set.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the first thing I should do before running Facebook Ads?
Install and verify the Meta Pixel and Conversions API on your website. Without accurate tracking, you can't optimize campaigns or trust any of the results Meta reports.
How many ads should I launch with?
Three to six ads per ad set is a reasonable starting range, with real variation in hook and format rather than minor tweaks to the same concept.
Should I use Advantage Campaign Budget or set budgets manually per ad set?
Advantage Campaign Budget works well once you have at least two ad sets you trust, since it lets Meta shift spend to the better performer automatically. Manual ad set budgets give more control when you specifically need guaranteed spend on a particular audience, like a limited retargeting pool.
How often should I check my Facebook Ads account?
Daily glances are fine, but make optimization decisions on a weekly cadence for most accounts. Checking hourly and reacting to normal auction volatility leads to overcorrection and resets the learning phase unnecessarily.
What should I do if a campaign isn't converting?
First confirm tracking is firing correctly in Events Manager — a broken pixel looks identical to a bad campaign. If tracking is solid, diagnose funnel stage by stage: are people clicking (creative/targeting issue) but not converting (landing page/offer issue)?
Do I need a separate campaign for retargeting?
Yes, in most cases. Cold and warm audiences respond to different creative and typically warrant different budgets and optimization events, which is cleaner to manage as separate campaigns or at minimum separate ad sets.
Terry has 30+ years in software and SEO. He’s the founder of Salterra Digital Services and SEO Spring Training, host of the Roundtable SEO Mastermind, and lead instructor at SEO University — teaching the exact tactics his team uses on client work.
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