Here are the basic steps to make Facebook ads: set up a Facebook Page and add a payment method, open Meta Ads Manager, click Create, pick a campaign objective, choose your audience, budget, and schedule, then upload your creative and publish.
Nothing here costs money until the ad starts running, but many sellers worry about burning their budget on their first try. In this guide, we’ll show you how to make Facebook ads, from the setup to what you can expect to pay.
Key takeaways
- You create Facebook ads in Meta Ads Manager, which is free to use once you have a Page and a payment method.
- Ads Manager works in three layers: the ad campaign sets your goal, the ad set determines who sees it and how much you spend, and the ad itself is what your target audience sees.
- You can set a daily budget (an average amount Meta spreads across the week) or a lifetime budget (a hard ceiling on the whole campaign).
- With Print on Demand, a poor ad costs you only the ad spend – we print each order only after someone buys.
What you need before you make a Facebook ad
Before learning how to run ads on Facebook, make sure to have:
- A personal Facebook profile – Every Facebook account comes with an ad account and an ad account ID already attached, so there’s nothing to create. Your profile stays private from your customers.
- A public Facebook Page – Your ads run under the Page name, so shoppers who tap the profile see a real brand.
- A payment method on the ad account – Meta bills the card or PayPal account you add here. No ad delivers until one is on file.
- A link for shoppers to open – Every ad needs a destination, so have the URL of your website, marketplace store, or product page ready before you start.
Quick tip
Learn how Printify seller Henry built a print-on-demand business on Facebook ads and bought his dream car with it.
How do I advertise on Facebook?
Facebook ranks among the biggest social media platforms worldwide, so the audience is there. Here’s how to advertise on Facebook:
1. Set up your Facebook Page and payment method
Start on Facebook and:
- Access your ad account – Open Ads Manager, and your ad account should load automatically.
- Create a Facebook Page – Log in to Facebook, click Pages on the left, then Create Page and follow the prompts to finish the setup.
- Add a payment method – Open Billing and payments in your Ads Manager, click Payment settings, then Add payment method. You can’t publish an ad without one, so do this before you build a campaign.
2. Open Meta Ads Manager
Ads Manager is where you create and manage every ad you run. Go there directly, or open Meta Business Suite and find it under All tools in the sidebar. If your account is new, you will land on the account overview page first, and it will walk you through any remaining setup.
The dashboard looks busy at first, but it’s really just three levels sitting inside each other.
- Campaigns hold your objective and your buying type.
- Ad sets contain the audience, placements, budget, and schedule.
- Ads include the images, video, and copy that shoppers actually see.
You will also find columns to track results, reach, amount spent, and cost per result for ads that are already live.
Away from your desk? Use the Ads Manager app for Android and iPhone. It doesn’t include every desktop feature, so it’s best to build your ad campaigns on a desktop and use the app to check in and pause anything that’s not working.
3. Click Create and pick your campaign objective
In the Ads Manager, click Create to start a new ad campaign. The first screen asks you to define your ad’s goals – pick from Meta’s current objectives:
- Awareness – Show the ad to people most likely to remember it.
- Traffic – Send clicks to your store, your app, or a Facebook event.
- Engagement – Chase messages, video views, or post engagement.
- Leads – Collect contacts through a form, a call, or a sign-up.
- App promotion – Drive installs and in-app activity.
- Sales – Boost conversions by reaching people who are likely to make a purchase.
For Sales, Leads, or App promotion, Meta recommends running an Advantage+ campaign, which applies its own automation across most of the setup.
Important note
The Sales objective always requires the Meta Pixel, and so do any Leads or Traffic campaigns that point to your own site. It’s a small piece of code that logs what visitors do there. Without it, Meta can’t tell which clicks converted.
4. Name your campaign and declare a special ad category
Name the campaign something only your team will see. Date plus product plus audience is a format that holds up (November-hoodies-coldstates), making it easy to tell which campaign is which.
In the Special Ad Categories section, tick it if your ad relates to any of these:
- Credit
- Employment
- Housing
- Social issues, elections, or politics
Skipping it when you should have ticked it can get the ad pulled. That said, most print-on-demand sellers choose nothing here and move on.
5. Choose your audience and placements
Scroll to the ad set level, where the Audience panel decides who sees your ad. You have two routes here:
- Advantage+ audience – Meta’s AI picks the target audience on your behalf based on their past conversions and reactions to your earlier ads.
- Manual targeting – You set the demographics (location, age range, gender, and language) yourself, then layer on the interests and behaviors that match your product. For example, someone selling cat-themed tees can target pet owners rather than everyone who once liked an animal video.
Under Placements, choose where the ad runs:
- Advantage+ placement spreads your budget across Facebook Feed, Instagram, Messenger, Reels, and Stories.
- Manual placement lets you switch off anything that doesn’t suit the creative, like Stories when your only asset is a wide image.
Whichever route you take, keep the audience wide enough to spend the budget. Meta runs out of new people to show the ad to within days, and your costs can climb fast.
6. Set your budget and schedule
Choose how your money gets spent:
Daily budget
Meta can spend more than your average daily amount on a good day (going up to 75%) and less on a slow one. That means if you set $15 a day, a busy day might cost you $26. Over a full week, Sunday to Saturday, you never pay more than seven times the number you set.
Lifetime budget
A hard ceiling on the whole campaign. Meta spreads the spend across your dates and will not cross the total.
Next, set your start and end dates. Leave the end date open only if you plan to check the account every day.
You can also schedule ads for set days and times, which suits a weekend promo or a lunchtime audience.
Quick tip
Start at $10-$20 per day and let it run for a full week. Meta needs about seven days for your ad to show before the results settle, so give it that time. Then look at what each sale costs you, not at how many likes you got.
7. Design your ad
Open the Ad level in the left menu, pick the Page and Instagram account that will represent you, then assemble the ad:
- Select a format – Single image or video, carousel, or collection, chosen from the formats section below.
- Add media – Upload your photo or video, then crop it for each placement so nothing important is cut off under the headline.
- Add text – Write the primary text, the headline, and the description around one offer and one benefit.
- Add a destination – Paste the product URL, a Page, or an event. Send people to the exact item in the ad, not your homepage.
- Add a clear call to action – Pick the button, from Shop now and Learn more to Sign up, matching the promise in your copy.
Before publishing, open the Enhancements section. Advantage+ creative is switched on by default for several formats, which means Meta can change what you uploaded. It might crop your image, add music, or rewrite your headline. Open the section and switch off anything you want left alone.
The preview panel on the right shows your ad in Feed, Stories, and Reels. Check all three to make sure each one looks good.
Quick tip
Try duplicating the ad you just made, swapping the image or the headline, and leaving everything else alone. Both ads share the same audience and budget, so whichever gets the cheaper result tells you which creative works.
8. Publish, review, and track what happens
Click Publish to submit your campaign to Meta’s ad review. This checks your images, video, text, targeting, and the page you’re sending people to against Meta’s advertising standards.
Reviews usually finish within 24 hours, and Meta can review the ad again after it has gone live.
If your ad is rejected, Meta will email you a link to see the reason. From there, you can address the cause of the rejection, create a new ad, or request another review if you think the call was wrong.
Once your ad starts running, you’ll start seeing numbers for these metrics in the Ads Manager:
- Cost per result – What one purchase, lead, or click costs you. This is the number that decides whether the ad stays on.
- Click-through rate – The share of people who saw your ad and tapped it, which tells you whether the image and headline are working.
- Amount spent against sales – Compare what Ads Manager says you spent with the orders in your store over the same dates.
Give a new ad a few days before making any judgment. Pause whatever is losing money and reallocate that budget to the ad that is winning.
Facebook ad formats and when to use each one
Meta’s ad formats each suit a different job. Pick one per campaign rather than running all of them at once.
Image ads
A single still image with a headline, primary text, and a button. Image ads are the fastest to build and the easiest to test, making them the right starting point for a first campaign and for promoting a single product.
Get the image right, because it carries the whole ad. Show the print-on-demand product on a person or in a room rather than floating on a white background, and leave the center clear so the headline never covers the design.
Video ads
Video ads use motion and sound to show a product in use, which suits apparel, mugs, and anything with detail that a photo flattens. They work for sellers who want to show fit, texture, or packaging.
No need for a film crew – phone clips work. Shoot three short takes – the product being unboxed, worn, and used – then cut them together in Ads Manager’s built-in editing tools. You can also learn how to make Facebook video ads out of your own images.
Keep the duration short, start with the product rather than a logo, and add captions so the message lands with the sound off.
Carousel ads
Carousel ads hold 2 to 10 cards, each with its own image or video, headline, link, and description. They suit a product range, a set of colorways, or one design shown across a custom t-shirt, a hoodie, and a tote.
Make the first card the strongest one, since that’s all most people see. Give every card the same crop and background treatment so the set reads as a cohesive ad.
Collection ads
Collection ads pair a cover image or video with a row of products underneath, and tapping opens a full-screen browsing view without leaving the app.
Connect your store catalog before you build the ad, because that’s where the products are from. Use a lifestyle shot as the cover and let the tiles do the selling.
Messenger ads
Messenger ads appear in the Chats tab between conversations and open into a message thread or a landing page when tapped. They suit made-to-order products where buyers ask about sizing, personalization, or delivery before committing.
Only run these if someone from your team can reply, or set up saved replies first. You paid for that message, and a shopper who waits a day for an answer buys somewhere else.
Ads showing product media
Ads showing product media pull products from your catalog automatically and show each shopper the item they viewed or added to the cart. They suit stores with steady traffic and abandoned carts to recover.
Your product feed has to be clean for this to work. Keep titles, prices, availability, and image links accurate in the catalog, because the ad shows whatever the feed says.
Lead ads
Lead ads open a pre-filled form inside Facebook so people can sign up without typing their information from scratch. They suit newsletter building, launch waitlists, and discount-code sign-ups ahead of a product drop.
Ask for as few fields as you can. Every extra question gives someone a reason to drop out halfway, and a name plus an email is usually enough to start emailing them.
Stories ads
Stories ads run full-screen and vertical between Stories, and they disappear the way organic Stories do. They suit a one-day sale, a restock, or a new design announcement.
Shoot vertical rather than cropping a wide image, and keep text away from the top and bottom edges where the profile bar and the call-to-action sit.
How much does it cost to make Facebook ads?
Creating a Facebook ad costs nothing. You only pay once it starts running, and you decide the amount up front with a daily or lifetime budget.
What that budget buys depends on the auction. Meta charges you per click (CPC) or per 1,000 impressions (CPM), and those rates shift constantly.
As of October 2026, the average CPC on Facebook is around $1.08, and the average CPM is $18.05. Treat both as rough references, not quotes. Your own rates depend on the month, the country you target, and the objective you picked.
The metric you need to watch depends on what you asked the campaign to do, so find your objective in the table below.
| Objective | What Meta optimizes for | The metric to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Reaching as many relevant people as possible | CPM |
| Traffic | Clicks through to your store | Cost per click |
| Engagement | Comments, shares, video views, messages | Cost per engagement |
| Leads | Form fills and sign-ups | Cost per lead |
| Sales | Purchases completed in your store | Cost per purchase |
Whichever metric you’re tracking, these eight factors can affect it:
- Season – Black Friday, Christmas, and back-to-school send every advertiser after the same shoppers, so prices go up.
- Audience – The smaller and more in-demand your audience, the more each click costs.
- Ad quality and relevance – Ads that match the audience cost less to deliver. Once an ad reaches 500 impressions, Meta’s ad relevance diagnostics scores it for quality, engagement, and conversions.
- Ad placement – A click in Feed, Reels, Stories, or Messenger doesn’t cost the same.
- Ad bid – The bidding strategy you choose determines whether Meta chases the lowest cost or a target cost.
- Ad budget – Small budgets gather data slowly, so your costs stay unpredictable for longer.
- Industry – In crowded niches, the advertisers want the same shoppers, and those clicks cost more.
- Ad objective – A purchase costs more than an impression, because you’re asking the shopper to do more.
Can you make Facebook ads for free?
Building and designing a Facebook ad is free. You pay only once it starts running, up to the budget you set.
If you want to promote your print-on-demand products without ads, here’s what you can do on Meta:
- Grow the Page itself. Every follower you gain is someone who sees your next launch for free, which lowers what you need to spend on ads later. Our guide to monetizing a Facebook page covers the options.
- Post organically to your Page, Stories, and Reels, where your followers see it without any spend.
- Reuse the product images from your listings rather than shooting or buying new ones for marketing purposes.
How to make good Facebook ads that people act on
- Hook people in the first three seconds with a product, a face, or the offer itself. Anything that starts with a logo animation gets scrolled past.
- Pick a single product and a single benefit to promote. Having multiple offers in one ad splits attention.
- Design for mobile before desktop. Use vertical or square visuals, then open the preview panel and check how it looks in Feed, Stories, and Reels.
- Show proof from real customers, like a review quote or the number of orders you have shipped. They carry far more weight than any adjective you write about yourself.
- Run two creatives at the same time. Keep the audience and budget identical and change only the image or the hook. After a few days, keep the one with the lower cost per result and pause the other.
- Write the headline around what the shopper gets – like “Get free shipping on hoodie orders.”
- Know when to stop an ad. If a week of steady spend leaves your cost per purchase above your profit per sale, pause it and move that budget behind the ad that is working.
Check out our blog’s marketing section for more tips and tricks.
Common Facebook ad mistakes to avoid
New sellers often waste their budget by:
- Sending traffic to the homepage – Someone who tapped an ad for one hoodie should land on that hoodie, not on a storefront with 40 other things competing for their attention.
- Judging an ad after a few hours – Early numbers swing wildly, and pausing too soon throws away data you already paid for.
- Changing everything at once – Edit the image, the audience, and the budget one at a time so that you know which change made the difference.
- Picking an audience too small to spend the budget – With only a few thousand people to reach, Meta runs out of new eyes within days.
- Ignoring the comments – A question under a live ad is someone close to buying, and a quick answer often turns that comment into an order.
How to make money with Facebook ads and Print on Demand
Print-on-demand services like Printify let you test a product with paid traffic before you spend anything on stock or scale your business. Design the item in Product Creator, list it on your store, then follow these steps to see which product idea wins:
- Price for profit. Take your retail price and subtract the product cost shown in the Printify Catalog. What’s left is your profit on every sale.
- Run the ad. Point the campaign at that product page, not your homepage, so every click lands on the exact item in the creative.
- Compare the numbers. Check the cost per purchase and hold it against your profit per sale. Say you make a $12 profit on a hoodie, and the ad’s cost per purchase is $8. That leaves you with $4 per order after the ad is paid for.
- Scale the winner. Once an ad brings in more than it costs to run, spend more on it. Raise its budget, pause the rest, and check the numbers again in a few days.
Printify’s 70+ Print Providers only print and ship each order after a customer buys it – so an ad that flops costs you the ad spend and nothing else.
Start selling with Printify
Choose from 2,000+ products, add your design, and list it on Etsy, Shopify, or TikTok Shop in minutes. We print and ship each order after someone buys, so there’s zero upfront investment and no stock to clear if a campaign misses.
How to make ads on Facebook: FAQ
Conclusion
Now you know how to make Facebook ads from start to finish. Keep one offer per ad, run two creatives against each other, and let the cost per purchase decide where the money goes.
No product to promote yet? Create a free Printify account today and have something to advertise by tonight. If the campaign doesn’t work, the ad spend is all you lose.
