From creation to conversion: A step-by-step guide to using UGC content in Facebook ads

Introduction & requirements

In this blog post, I will show you how you can use your promotional video to create a successful Facebook or Instagram campaign in just a few minutes. But before we dive into the depths of Facebook Ads Manager, here are a few important requirements:

If you don’t have a Facebook Business Account and/or Ad Manager Account yet:

1. You should have a Facebook or Instagram account and be logged in to the platform.
2. You should create a business page if you don’t have one yet. This is necessary in order to place advertisements. You can create a business page on Facebook by going to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Pages’ and clicking on ‘New Page’. On Instagram, you can create a business page by setting your profile to ‘Public’ in “Settings” and then clicking on ‘Convert to a Business Page’. You can find the official Facebook guide here.
3. Now it’s time to set up an ad manager. The ad manager is located under your Business Manager and is the tool for all marketing activities on Facebook and Instagram. To set up the ad manager, follow these steps:

• Go to: Facebook Ad Manager
• Click on the ‘Go to Ads Manager’ button and follow the steps to create your Ad Manager. You will also be asked to specify a payment method for your ads. Don’t worry, you have full control and nothing will be debited in advance.

If you have already set up Facebook AdManager:

1. You should have sufficient knowledge about the target audience for your advertising campaign, including age, gender, interests and location. This will help you to target your advertising and achieve better results. It is best to define 3-4 target groups (for example: students aged 18-21, football enthusiasts aged 30-35, etc.).
2. Finally, you should also have creative content for your advertising, such as images or videos that will pique the interest of your target audience. At stylink UGC, you can get advertising videos that are specially optimised for social media at an affordable price. You can use these 1:1 for your Facebook/Instagram ads. We will also use a UGC video from stylink UGC for the upcoming setup.

If you already meet all these requirements, you can now start creating your ad!

Select campaign type

Navigate to your AdManager at: https://de-de.facebook.com/business/tools/ads-manager

To create an ad, click on the green ‘Create’ button in the top left corner. This will open the campaign creation window. First, you need to select the type of campaign you want to create. The options are:

• Awareness
• Traffic
• Engagement
• Leads
• App promotion
• Sales

The two most common types are awareness and traffic:

• Awareness campaigns: these are optimised to show your ad to as many people as possible at the lowest possible cost. This mode is therefore suitable for increasing awareness of your brand. In this mode, you pay per 1,000 impressions.
• Traffic campaigns: These are more targeted and optimised to get users to click on your ad and then visit your website. You pay per click. These two campaign types should be sufficient for you to effectively promote your brand.

If you want more information about engagement, lead or app install campaigns, you can read more here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/

We will create a traffic campaign here to bring visitors to our website. However, you can also create an awareness campaign in the same way.

When you click on ‘Continue’, you can now set a name for your campaign at the top. How about: ‘Traffic Ad | Date’? You can leave all other settings on this page as they are. However, we strongly recommend that you activate the ‘Advantage campaign budget’ button at the bottom. With this mode, you can create different target groups or creatives, and Facebook will automatically decide how much to invest in which campaign groups.

We will talk about creating campaign groups in a moment. Here you can set your daily budget. You can also select ‘Lifetime Budget’ on the left and simply enter the maximum amount you want the campaign to cost until the end. Let’s just go with £20 per day.

Create ad groups

Next, we’ll create an ad group. We’ll upload the promotional video to this group later. Campaign groups are primarily used to test different target groups for your ads. First, give your group a name such as ‘Students Vienna’ if you want to target students in Vienna, or ‘Vegetarians Austria’ if you sell vegetarian products in Austria. You can leave the conversion set to ‘Website’. We want users to come to our website when they click on the ad.

• Budget & Schedule: Here you just need to set when your ads should run. If you have specified a daily budget, you can also choose no end date, provided you want your ads to run daily (you can turn them off or pause them at any time anyway).
• Target groups: Now we come to the real magic behind Facebook Ads: the target groups. First, adjust your location and age to your target group. For now, we’ll stick with the student target group and set the location to ‘Vienna’ and the age to 18-30.

But the fun really starts with ‘Detailed Targeting’. Here you can enter all sorts of things, from interests such as FC Bayern Munich to influencer marketing, sneaker collectors or anything else. Take your time here and brainstorm a few ideas.

Once you have entered 2-3 suitable keywords, Facebook will even automatically suggest other suitable target groups that you can simply select. As you can see in the screenshot, you can also target very precisely (TU Vienna or WU Vienna). First, create a target group for a specific topic (in our case, students) and save other suitable target groups for later. You should create a campaign group for each target group so that you can see which one actually performs best. More on this at the end of this article.

You can activate the ‘Advantage Detailed Targeting +’ button unless you only want to deliver to your target group. Advantage Detailed Targeting also targets people outside your interest groups if this achieves a better result.

• Placements: The next step is placements. These determine the formats in which your ads are displayed, such as story ads, feed ads, Facebook or Instagram, and much more. Switch to ‘Manual Placements’ and select the appropriate ad types. We recommend selecting only “Instagram” and ‘Facebook’. For UGC videos, ‘Stories and Reels’ are particularly interesting for you, as our videos are usually shot in portrait format. You can read more about other placement types here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/

 

Now you are ready for the final step in creating your campaign. Click on ‘Continue’.

 

Create ad sets

Now that your first target group is ready, it’s time to create the ad. First, give the ad a name such as ‘Advertising video UGC 1’ and select your Facebook/Instagram page. Scroll down to ‘Ad Creative’.

 

• Ad Creative You can now upload your video here. Click on Add Media and upload your video. You can now add text and a headline to be displayed alongside your video. Feel free to use emojis here too!

  

• Destination: Here you copy the URL of your page. In our case, ‘https://stylink-ugc.local/de/creators/’. Users will be taken to this page when they click on your ad.
• Website tracking: If you have installed website tracking with the Facebook pixel on your page (highly recommended), you can select the respective pixel here. This allows Facebook to collect data about your users when they are browsing your website. This is very useful for creating target groups based on your visitors later on. Learn more about this topic in this video.

Now just click on Create and voilà: your first campaign is ready! But we’re not quite done yet. Remember that we wanted to create additional campaign groups with our defined target groups? Let’s quickly take care of that now. There’s an efficient trick in the Ads Manager for trying out additional target groups:

Quick tip: Ideally, you should test 2-4 different advertising videos per ad group against each other. On our stylink UGC platform, we recommend commissioning 3 UGC videos. Simply repeat steps 3a, b and c for each video.

Navigate back to the target group level and select the target group you just created on the left. Then click on ‘Quickly Duplicate’ next to ‘Duplicate’. You now have a 1:1 copy of the target group you just created, including the creative. Now you can relax and just change the desired targeting options in the target group and leave everything else the same. In our case, we would remove the student targeting and test another target group, for example: ‘Young Entrepreneurs’. Name the target group accordingly, enter appropriate keywords in the detailed targeting and save them.

You can repeat this process as often as you like and thus test several target groups against each other. You can also divide them into age groups, e.g.: 18-21, 21-25, and 25-30. Facebook will automatically optimise these 3 target groups.

Ad monitoring

After 3-5 days, you can then look at your campaign and turn off the ad groups that are significantly more expensive than others. Let’s say our first student target group has a cost-per-click (CPC) of 0.50 cents and our ‘Young Entrepreneurs’ group has a CPC of 0.99 cents. In that case, we would simply turn off the latter and continue to show our ads only to the student group.

The same applies to your various advertising videos: navigate within a target group to the ad level and compare the CPCs with each other. Is a particular video working particularly well? Then you should deactivate the others.

And that’s it! Admittedly, this is a slightly longer blog article. But the goal was to create a step-by-step guide that each of you can follow 1:1 to advertise successfully on Facebook. If you have any further questions or would like to arrange a free expert call with us, we look forward to getting in touch with you.