Facebook Ads Checklist — Guarantee You Don’t Waste Another Penny

8 min readJul 23, 2021

Facebook advertising is one of the cheapest methods of advertising online with one of the biggest audiences worldwide. You can start from as little as £1 a day in advertising and target your ideal customer.

Introduction

This guide aims to help your Facebook ads strategy with a checklist to follow for maximum results. Please note this guide has been written after IOS14 as well….so yes, everything is up to date.

This list of steps will guide you in implementing your new Facebook ads campaign. This will include setup, campaign curation, data analysis and ongoing optimisation for maximum results. We will touch on audience targeting, best strategy to use and I’ve also included my SOP that I use internally for you to steal…don’t say that I don’t treat you well.

The Facebook Ad Checklist…

Please find a checklist of everything I’d recommend considering within your campaign strategy. Underneath this section you will find some of these pointers explained if you want to know more detail. In addition you can get a free copy of my SOP sheet which I give away at the end of this article. Happy advertising!

Ensure Facebook Pixel is installed on the website
Facebook pixel is tracking all the correct events
Use events manager to ensure there is no double firing of key events
The clients events within their funnel are all firing (e.g. content views, add to cart, checkout and purchase)
Install the Facebook pixel via Google Tag Manager
Install the Facebook pixel via shopify
Complete the Facebook Advertising Blueprint
Are you aware of the compliance and terms of service checklist?
Is the attribution setting on 7 day click 1 day view?
Have we got access to all the clients assets?
Has the client sent us over any assets to email lists for audiences?
Is the ad account currency in line with the details of the clients objectives within the onboarding form?
Are there any issues with the clients payment methods?
Ensure the domain has been verified in events managerIs automatic advanced matching switched on?
Is conversion API tracking turned on?
Sitespeed is good or great? (Use GT Metrix for help)
Remove any scripts or tags you don’t need or use (including any extra pixels you may have found)
Do you have the target URL (or app) which you will be running campaigns too?
Confirm UTM Strategy with ad account
Have you considered landing page compliance with the end URL you’re directing traffic?
Has the client got Shops setup correctly?
Has the client got a catalogue setup?
Product feed created and all items accepted?
Is the catalogue associated to the correct ad account and pixel?
How to structure Facebook Campaigns properly for 2021.
Choose your naming convensions
Confirm your strategy for this account
Review The List Of All The Different Audiences Available To Target
Create List Of Audiences To Target For The Business
Have you labelled the audiences in such a way they can be analysed and exported easily?
Have all audiences been created and saved in business manager?
What’s the ONE thing that the campaigns and ads need to achieve?
The targets for the account — KPI agreed and realistic expectations are set
Confirm the monthly account budget
Ad positioning — brainstorming USPs
CBO or ABO?
Do we need top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel campaigns?
Choosing your campaigns objective.
Daily budget or lifetime budget?
Correct naming convensions for the ad set level?
Select the correct pixel for the campaign?
Select the correct event (if applicable) for the conversion goal?
Dynamic creative or regular ads?
Select your audience(s)Detailed targeting expansion?
Automatic placements or manual?
Optimisation and delivery?
Choose your creatives wisely depending on stage of funnel
Have you created a range of different creatives?
Are the creatives signed off by the client (or internally)
Select the correct FB and Instagram Page
Apply the correct UTM
Double & triple check the ad copy for spelling, grammar and logic
Do you need to use more then one language?
Cropped the images to match the correct placement?
Have you created a product set?
Have all the products been approved?
Ensure the product descriptions being pulled through correctly
?Are the URLs for each product correct?
Double check the copy and headlines to ensure they’re correct.
Do you need to use more then one language?
Create remarketing audiences for MOF and BOF
Double check exclusions with all audiences to avoid any audience overlap
Check for any tracking issues and early indicators
Budget distribution?
Dynamic creative or regular ads?
Check performance over 3, 7 and 14 days to understand results
Test budgets and performance of tests?
Any deviation from monthly target spend and correct where necessary
Automated rules
Disapproved ads
Quality score of FB Page

**PRO TIP** Use my SOP Google sheet which you can get access to by clicking below and making a copy — no optin required…

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kwwVF8jTyfKVBCuuP2LkM6pwTCuQOZjv9xbWAwBnEnw/edit?usp=sharing

1. Setup Your Ad Account

First up you need to have your business manager setup, pixel created, Facebook pages created and billing details correct. Once you’ve signed up on business.facebook.com and follow the setup process you are ready to start. Please remember that when starting with a new ad account Facebook will initially limit you to only £50 per day in advertising spend and increase this gradually.

It’s advised to setup a new ad account if you’re advertising for a new business. In other words under your business manager account you could hypothetically have up to 5 different ad accounts, however from a data standpoint it makes most sense to start fresh with a new business each time.

2. Install Facebook pixel

Facebook is a tracking cookie that monitors customers activity on our site. Want to see how many click to your products? Or how many move from cart to checkout to purchase? Make sure you have the pixel installed. To use this feature, log in to the Events Manager and select the Pixels tab then create a new Pixel by clicking Create Pixel from there and make sure you to verify your domain too.

3. IOS14 Tracking — Conversion API Tracking

Now this is where things get fun…or complicated depending on how technically minded you are. Basically Apple introduced IOS14 to give consumers an option to opt out of tracking. As a result this means that we could lose the ability to see where we’re spending our money — not useful at all.

However Facebook has introduced the conversion API to help avoid these issues. You can learn more on the Facebook site here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2041148702652965.

This is supposed to be a checklist for launching and optimising your campaigns so I’m not going to go into great detail for this. Nevertheless I would strongly advise you use a 3rd party tool such as Customer Labs or RedTrack to get your tracking working efficiently. This will save you a lot of money on your Facebook ads.

4. Choose Your Objective/Goal?

You must establish clear objectives on how to run an advertising campaign. Your KPIs will help with deciding which ads types and KPIs you plan and implement. Within Facebook you will see a variety of options from video views to app installs to conversions and engagement focused objectives.

This means you need to be aware of your strategy, broadly speaking most people will be conversion focused (either generating leads or purchases). Therefore you would pick ‘conversions’ as your main goal.

5. Choose The Right Target Audience

Who do you want to target? Who wants to buy your products/services? Answer these questions first and simply add in the targeting details on the ad set level. You’re able to target based on age, gender, location, interests, behavioural insights, demographic backgrounds and even income groups.

Facebook is becoming smarter with AI so what I would advise you do is select 5 different audiences to start. Typically I would pick broad targeting, 2 x lookalikes, 1 x custom audience, 1 x interest audiences and see which ones perform the best. Once you can identify a winner you’re able to then put more budget behind that audience.

6. Write Ad Copy Tailored To Your Audience

Creatives are the most important factor when it comes to advertising. Good images, videos and copy will help your customers engage with your offers and brand. With Facebook you need to appeal to the audience’s interests, not just state facts about your products/services.

When writing copy you want to firstly conduct market research to understand what the different benefits, pain points, obstacles and apprehensions are in the market. I’d then take a look at the ads. your competitors are running and use these as your starting point for copy.

digital marketing, create, best practices, ads

7. Use A Variety Of Creatives

Facebook allows you to create ads that fit your company’s specific needs. The imagery in an ad is the most important element, and should convey your brand message clearly. The best recommendation I can give is to ensure you’re testing multiple ad designs and copy, then find the ones that give you the most ROI. For example I would include an image, video, carousel when starting a new campaign and have copy being written based on customer research.

8. Naming conventions

The name of your campaign helps analyse your traffic across different channels and ensures a uniform workload across the team. For example in my agency we use consistent naming conventions with our audiences, copy, creatives and landing pages so we can easily identify what’s performed well over time.

For example, if I have a copy variation titled ‘C1’ I can then simply login to business manager and filter by any ad which has ‘c1’ in the title and analyse what the results have been in the lifetime of the account.

9. Analyse your data

You need to firstly understand your breakeven metrics, secondly you need to understand where you are now. If you make a copy of the google sheet I shared at the beginning of this article there’s a tab called ‘breakeven metrics’ which calculates this for you.

Let’s say your profit margin on a product is 50% and your target cost per purchase is £20, we need to also understand what the target CPC, add to cart and checkout is. This will give us a foundational understanding of where the biggest problem within your ad account is.

10. Monitor Your Ad Performance Metrics

Now you’ve calculated your breakeven metrics and launched your campaigns you know what to keep an eye on. For example if we know that the max CPC is £0.50 but we’re paying £1.50 then we definitely have a CPM or CTR issue.

However if we’re paying £0.40 but the conversion rate is half what the breakeven number should be then we need to improve the sales page (or the quality of the audience). This is how we optimise our campaigns and maintain performance…by being aware of what the baseline metrics should be for the ad account.

11. Use Standard Operating Procedures

To make your life easier you want a simple step by step checklist which is up to date and doesn’t miss a step. You can easily have this by making a simple copy of my google sheet checklist. As you can see in the gif below it covers everything from start to finish when it comes to facebook ads.