How do you run Facebook ads as a beginner?

Everything starts in Ads Manager, and the order of the screens is the order of the work. Meta organises every ad into a campaign, an ad set and an ad. The campaign holds the goal, the ad set holds budget and audience, and the ad holds the picture, video and words.

Your first ad in Ads Manager

1. Open Ads Manager and click the green Create button.
2. Choose a campaign objective. The list is Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion and Sales. Meta's own page on choosing an objective is here.
3. Name the campaign. If your ad is about housing, jobs, credit or politics, declare a special ad category here. Meta explains how in How to Choose a Special Ad Category. Those categories carry extra limits, so read that page before you build anything.
4. At the ad set level, set a daily or lifetime budget, then the audience and placements. Leaving audience and placements on Advantage+ lets Meta choose them for you.
5. At the ad level, pick a format, add your image or video and text, check the preview, then click Publish.

After you publish, the ad goes to review, which can take up to 24 hours. Do not edit it while you wait.

Pick the objective that matches the one thing you want a stranger to do. Sales fits a store that wants purchases. Leads fits a service business that wants enquiries. Traffic fits when you only want visits to a page.

Sales and Leads need your website to tell Meta when that action happens. That is the job of the Meta pixel, and Meta has a page on best practices for Meta pixel setup. On Shopify, Shopify's Help Center lists the steps to create a Meta pixel and add it using the Facebook and Instagram by Meta channel. Set it up before you spend money. Without it, a Sales campaign has nothing to learn from.

If you have no pixel yet, start with Traffic and add the pixel in the same week.

Start small and keep it running long enough to see a pattern. Facebook accepts budgets as low as one dollar, and Hootsuite says $5 to $10 a day works for testing, local campaigns and early data. A daily budget is averaged over a week, so a single day can run up to 75% over.

Expect to pay per click, not per view. Hootsuite puts a typical click at $0.50 to $2.00 depending on industry and objective, and Shopify reports an average of $1.02 per click in September 2026. Your own numbers will differ, and nothing here predicts what you will sell. For a full breakdown, see how much Facebook ads cost, and for a number to set per day, see the Facebook ads budget guide.

Change one thing at a time: the image, the first line of text, or the audience. If you change all three, you will not know which one moved the result.

Most beginners get stuck here, not in Ads Manager. You need at least one image or a short video, a headline, and a line of text that says what you sell and who it is for. Our step-by-step guide to making an ad from scratch walks through the parts, and Facebook ad examples shows real ones.

If you cannot afford a designer or UGC creators, you can make the creative with a tool. We built ScaleShot for this: you paste your website or Shopify store link, it learns your logo, colours, fonts and voice, and its Ads Agent writes a 30-day plan and makes image ads and short video ads. Plans start at $19.95 for the first 2 weeks with 500 credits, then $42 every 2 weeks, with a 14-day money-back guarantee. An image ad costs 10 to 20 credits and video costs 10 credits per second. With a connected Meta ad account it can launch campaigns and pause ads or change budgets, and it asks before it changes anything. It runs Meta only, does not guarantee sales, and Meta bills your ad spend separately.

You can also do all of this by hand with free tools. The workflow above is the same either way.

• Choosing Sales with no pixel. Meta cannot find buyers if your site never reports a purchase. Fix the pixel first.
• Skipping the special ad category. Housing, jobs, credit and politics ads must be declared at campaign level, and the category limits what you can target.
• Editing during review. The review can take up to 24 hours. Wait for the result before changing the ad.
• Judging after one day. Daily budgets are averaged over a week, so one quiet day tells you little.
• Running one ad. Make two or three versions of the image so you can compare. To judge results, read what a good ROAS for Facebook ads looks like, and if you want the same steps in more detail, see how to run Facebook ads.