How To Run Facebook Ads For Beginners (2026 START UP GUIDE)

In this video, you'll learn everything you need to know to run profitable Facebook ads for your dropshipping or ecommerce brand in 2026. So if you've never run an ad before, set up looks to overwhelming or maybe you're worried about losing a bunch of money, then you're in luck and you're in the right place. Since 2021, I've generated over $7 million in revenue through Facebook or meta-ass. And once you understand how simple they really are, you'll have wished that you started years ago. So today, I'll break down the whole setup process into four simple steps that anyone can follow. By the end of this video, you'll be able to confidently launch your first Facebook ad campaign and finally start making that online money. Okay, so step one of this whole process is setting up your business manager. And don't worry, it's a quick process, so just follow along. First, you want to go to this website and log in with your Facebook account. And real quick, if for some reason you don't have an e-commerce store ready to sell yet, I got you. In the description, you'll also find a link to my free AI store builder that will build you a ready to sell Shopify store loaded with winning products in just five minutes. So as it says right here, the meta-business suite basically manages all your business activity across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. And once you get started with creating an account, then all you have to do is set up a Facebook page, and that's how you can get access to the actual ads manager itself. So go ahead and click get started. Now once you put in a few basic fields of information, you'll get taken to the meta-business suite that looks like this. Now the ads manager tab is right here, which is what we're going to dive into in a second. But to make sure you guys are prepared, I want to make sure that you have a Facebook page already set up and ready to go. You don't know how to do this. It's super easy. When you're on Facebook itself, all you have to do is go over here to the left hand side where it says see more. Go to pages and then go ahead and click create page. Now I've already created this page at the top here that's just my name. And so going back over to the meta-business suite from there, all I have to do is click on ads manager. It's going to prompt you to set up your first ad account with a few basic fields of information. Just follow the process and you'll end up into a page that looks like this. And where all your ad campaigns are going to be. On the left hand side, you have an account overview, you have some settings, you can set up some audiences and do a bunch of other stuff that comes later down the line. But for now, since we're just trying to set up our first ad campaign ever, all we have to do is go up here to the top left corner and hit this big green button that says create. Since I already have the ad account set up, I don't need to do this, but if you're setting up a brand new account, go to settings and make sure you fill out your businesses information. It just requires your address and some other identification things to make sure you're a real person. Now, when you get to this page, things start to maybe look a little bit complicated, but don't worry because it's actually super simple and it's never been easier. Since you have an e-commerce brand or a dropshipping store, just go down to the bottom where it says sales, because that's your objective. You're looking for purchases and conversions. Go ahead and hit the blue button here that says continue and then it's going to take you into your very first campaign. So on the left hand side, we have the three different levels of the campaign. Right now, we're inside of the campaign level, which is the one at the very top. So this is where you name the entire campaign that's going to run all of your ads. I'll just go ahead and call it test campaign. Now, you can keep these settings the same and scrolling down a little bit, you're going to reach the budget category. So I'd recommend spending at least $25 to $30 a day at the bare minimum. You can come out the gate with 50 or $100 or however much the account will let you, and it seems to be different every time based on a number of factors. For me, I've never used this specific ad account before, and so the maximum daily spend is $43. So that's what I'll set it to. The reason why you wouldn't want to go under $20 is because at that point, you're basically just delaying the time that it takes for you to get enough data to see if your ads are doing well. Now, explain a little bit more on that later when we're talking about reading the metrics of the campaign. But for now, the next thing that you want to do is head over to the next level of your campaign here, which is called the ad set. So the ad set is basically a group or a collection of different ads that are going to be housed underneath it, which we'll get to in just a moment. So for this one, I'll just call it ad set one, and you can really use whatever naming strategy you like to keep things clean and organized. Now down here, it's going to say conversion location. We want to keep this on website, maximize number of conversions, and this is where you're going to be setting up your pixel. So your Facebook pixel is basically just a little snippet of code that gets installed on your website, and it tracks all the different events that people will take on your website. An event is basically an action. So let's say an ad to cart begin checkout process, of course, a purchase. And the reason why you want the pixel to be gathering all of this data is so it can get better and better at finding out who are the types of people who are most likely to take actions on my website, and eventually make a purchase. So over time, the Facebook algorithm can get better and better at sniping out the customers that are right for you. Now if you don't know how to set up your pixel, it's super simple. If you head over to your Shopify store and type in the search bar Facebook, you're going to see Facebook and Instagram. Go ahead and click on that. It'll show up in the left hand side of your menu. And then only have to do is go to settings, follow a couple of quick fields that are going to pop up, and then it's going to automatically install that code on the website for you. So now, if you're getting back over to the ads manager, as far as the conversion event goes, same thing, you just want to select purchase here, and then go ahead and click set up conversion event. And what this is going to do is it's going to make sure that your pixel is indeed firing correctly, and it will be tracking all of the purchases, so they'll show up inside of your ad campaigns. Now scrolling down, this is a key section, this is the budget and schedule section, and so basically what you want to do here is you want to set your campaign to begin at midnight. And the reason why you want to do that is so the budget gets distributed effectively throughout the entire day. I guess pretty late. It's 930 pm for me right now, so if I were to just launch the ads right this second, Facebook might try to do some weird stuff on me. It might try to spend all my budget within the next couple of hours here, and it might not reach my customers in the most efficient way, and you might end up wasting money. So always set it up for midnight the next day. Now scrolling down to the audience tab, this is where you can start to get specific, and you can pick out who you want the ads to go to. Now in theory, that sounds really good. Six years ago, I would use this tab a lot. I'd be testing all different kinds of interests, but today the Facebook algorithm is so good. It's collected so much data over its two billion users over the past two decades, and so it's just going to be a lot better at finding people than you are. Even if you think you know exactly who's going to buy the product and you start getting hyper specific, you're maybe missing out on a whole different type of people who might be buying your product for a different reason. Like let's say you're selling a baby product, right? And you think that the only people buying a baby product are going to be moms. Well that might not be the case, because people might be buying moms, baby products as a gift. And so Facebook is going to do its best job to find these different customer avatars or different people from different groups that would be purchasing your product. The only thing you really want to control here is the locations, and you want to set it to whatever markets you're able to ship to or however you run your business. For me, it's mostly just a US in Canada. Facebook also has this feature that's relatively new called Advantage Plus. I recommend keeping it on. It's basically just saying that it's going to improve the performance over time with AI. And we'll get a little bit more into that when we reach the ad section, but it's going to allow the algorithm to have the freedom to serve up the right ad to the right person that it makes the most sense to go to. If that makes sense. Okay, so scrolling down a little bit, everything else we can pretty much leave as is, and now let's head over to the ad section. So this is the actual ad itself. I'll go ahead and turn on the ad preview on the side here so you can see how it looks. As far as the identity section goes, you want to make sure you have your Facebook page that you created connected. You have maybe an Instagram account connected if you plan on placing the ads on Instagram too, which I'd recommend. So maybe set up a quick Instagram for your brand if you don't have one already. And then same thing with Threads profile, although that happens automatically when you have an Instagram account as it did for me here too. All right, so now scrolling down to destination. This is actually really important, more important than people realize because most beginners or people who are running ads for the first time, they end up putting their homepage or their website URL here because it says website URL. You're probably scratching your head thinking, well, yeah, that's where I want to send people what's wrong with that. Well, there's nothing wrong with it, but you actually want to send people to the landing page. So the actual shopping page on your website instead of the homepage. And the reason for that is because you want to remove as much friction in the buying process as possible. If you send people to the website, maybe they'll get confused, maybe they'll end up scrolling around and not actually buying the product. People have shorter attention spans than ever nowadays. And if they're interested in your ad, you want them to buy as quickly as possible. That's the whole essence of dropshipping. So it's especially important if you're dropshipping. So put the landing page to your product here and nothing else. Now you can start to see things popping up on the right hand side here. You're going to get a little preview of how your ad's going to be looking at in all the different placements, such as Instagram stories and Facebook feeds. So down here under ad creative is where you're now importing the video or images that you created. So if you click on image ad and you click next, this is where you can easily go ahead and upload the images of your product. And it's going to show you how it's going to look across different ad placements. Here also going to get an option right here as well to give the primary text, the headline and the description. It says 105 because you can add five different primary texts. And again, with advantage plus and Facebook's AI, it's automatically going to serve the text that it thinks will do best with the customer to the right customer. So let's just go ahead and right by one get one 50% off by one get one free special Valentine's Day sale. And then headline the best deal of the century shop now. And then instead of learn more, you typically want to go and look for the shop now button click next. It's going to allow you to do some enhancements or improve your ads with some small features. And then you go ahead and click done. And just like that, you can now see that the ads are loaded up and it's going to show you how it looks across all the different placements. If you want to get more technical, if you want to start customizing these placements and making small changes, you can do so here. And I do encourage you to spend a little bit of time much more than I did thinking about what the text the headline and the description will actually be. And then taking a look at how it will look. Now the advantage plus campaign is going to go ahead and also give you some recommendations on how to improve your campaign as well. And the crazy part is just like that. You literally set up your very first ad campaign ever and all you have to do is hit this little green button down here. It says publish. And once it's published, it's going to look something like this. Remember, it's not going to start until midnight and you're not going to get any data coming in yet. But when you check back in 24 hours, that's when things will start to get interesting and you can start to read the data. Now as far as reading the data goes, what you can do is you can customize these columns at the top. So you can see all different kind of metrics about how your ads are performing. If you click on here where it says columns all you have to do is click customize columns. Then you can start to add the most key metrics that you're looking for right here and then go ahead and click apply. But if you have no clue what you're looking for when it comes to, should I scale or should I kill my ad campaign? Then listen carefully. Cost per acquisition or your CPA is king. The first thing that you need to do is you need to determine how much you can spend on your ads to profitably acquire a new customer. And to do that, the formula is quite simple. So to find your break even CPA, you take the average order value on your store and you multiply that by the gross margin. So let's say that every time a customer buys from your store on average, you get 60 dollars in revenue. And let's say that your gross margin is 60%. So basically 40% of that 60 dollars, you have to spend on fulfilling the product. Then all you have to do is take the 60 dollars multiplied by 60% and you find out that your break even CPA is 36 dollars. Now the rule of thumb here is if your CPA is below break even, so you're profitable, then you want to scale carefully. If your CPA is 10 to 20% above break even, so maybe it's costing you 40 dollars to get a purchase, then you're in the optimization window. If your CPA is way above break even, and you're just not acquiring customers or customers are costing you hundreds of dollars in spend, then kill the campaign. Another key metric you should be looking at is the three second view rate. So generally on Facebook, you want to look for 30% or more. That's quite strong, and it shows you that people are really engaging with your ads, and the content you've created is interesting. If it's 20 to 30%, workable, but it could probably use some more optimization or changes. And if it's below 20%, that's a good indication that it's a bad ad. Next you have CTR or click through rate. So this is the percentage of people that see your ad, and then decide to click on it and go to your website. Generally, looking at 1.5% and above is quite healthy. If you're below that or under 1% then you should definitely optimize or start making new ads. It's likely that you have a bad angle or a week offer. Another metric to keep in mind is your CPC or your cost per click. So if the CTR is high, meaning that tons of people are clicking on your ad, but the cost per click is also high, then maybe it's a targeting mismatch. And your ads are just going to the wrong people, or you're in a super competitive market, and you should probably switch the marketing angle and try to find a new customer avatar. If the CTR is very low, and the CPC is also high, then that just tells you it's a bad creative, and it's costing you a ton of money to drive any kind of clicks. Now I can go on and on about all the different metrics that you could read. But remember, CPA is king, and you want to make sure your creative is good by looking at the three-second view rate as well as the CTR and how the CTR compares with the CPC. I hope you're still with me. I know if it's your first time hearing this stuff, probably doesn't even sound like English, but really this is all you need to know, and it is a lot simpler than people make it out to be. Just start running your first ads and you'll figure things out along the way. Now for the last step of this whole process, you need to make sure you know how to avoid getting your ad account, band, or restricted. Because let me tell you from experience, how things sucks more than waking up one morning and seeing zero dollars on your dashboard because your ad account got shut down overnight. But before we jump into that, if you're someone who wants step by step, mentorship and guidance, someone over the shoulder there with you in the ad account on your store, helping you optimize and reach success, then I'm so excited to present to you my new partnership with AutoDS. And no, this is not just some 24-year-old guru on the internet trying to sell you on a course. This is the biggest and best dropshipping platform in the world with over 200 employees who has already revolutionized the game and now they're entering the coaching space and opening up the biggest mentorship for dropshipping in the entire world. I'm so lucky and so excited to be a part of it and able to promote it. So if you want more information, I'll leave that link down below in the description. Now back to Not Getting Band. So it all comes down to three simple steps I want you to follow. First, as I mentioned in the beginning, make sure all of your business information is set up correctly in the meta business suite and on your ads manager. Because Facebook is really picky about making sure you're a real person, you're not a bot and things like that. So the last thing that you want to do is piss them off by putting in some incorrect information or not filling in out at all. Second thing you want to do is keep your creative safe. You know, read the terms and policies if you absolutely must, but generally, no sexualized content, no weaponry, no explosive, no drugs, just no crazy shit, you know the drill. And third, don't go from spending, you know, 20 dollars a day on your ad account, all of a sudden to $300 next day. No normal person is scaling like that and Facebook actually doesn't like to see it either. They see you doing that, they might end up imposing further restrictions on your count, flagging it and then looking into things deeper and at some point shutting you down. So I just really wouldn't recommend scaling like a madman. And honestly, I wouldn't recommend doing it anyway. It's not the healthy way to scale up profitably. So just like that, we covered everything you need to know to launch your very first Facebook ad campaign. If you want to see me putting this into practice live, I recently attempted a seven day drop spring challenge from scratch. Spoiler alert, it didn't go as planned, but I'll leave it on screen if you want to watch it here next. Anyways, thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate it. All the support. I can't wait to keep making great videos for you guys. And don't forget to leave me a like, subscribe to the channel and I'll see you guys next week. Peace.