In this article we have collected some instructions to help you create your ads campaigns on Facebook and Google accounts. These guides provide only an overview from the point of view of an Emarsys customer and are not maintained as regularly as the networks' own documentation. You should rely on the networks' own documentation when creating and maintaining your ads campaigns.
Creating Facebook Ads Campaigns
Once you have connected to your Facebook account and created your audience you are ready to create your Facebook Ads campaigns.
The instructions below will guide you through the creation process. Please note that power users may be able to perform some of the steps using the Power editor or other such optimization tools.
Creating the campaign
To create a Facebook Ads campaign, proceed as follows:
- First, log into your Facebook Business manager/Ad account, making sure that you are logging in with the same account that you used when creating the initial connection to Facebook.
- Here you can see all the audiences you have created with Emarsys. Click Create Ad to create the Ads campaign.
- Choose your objective and click Continue. The most common objective, especially for people who are new to Facebook Ads, is to drive website conversions.
- Now you define the campaign settings.
In the Conversion Event section, you must choose a Facebook Conversion Event / Conversion Pixel. If you do not yet have one, click the Learn more link for an explanation on how to set it up.
It is very important to select a Facebook pixel, as this is what enables CRM Ads to report revenue and conversions from the campaign inside Emarsys (see below).
In the Audience section, choose your audience form the Custom Audiences drop-down. In Facebook your CRM Ads audiences are described as Customer Lists. You can then define additional segmentation options from Facebook’s own data, such as Locations, Age, Gender and Languages. Please note that Emarsys can already create highly targeted segments for you, so you should use these options carefully (e.g. for larger, more generic segments) so as to avoid reducing the audience size and effectiveness.
- The next step is to create the ad itself. Here you can define the ad content, select where it will be displayed and preview these locations.
- When you are finished, click Place Order to launch the Ad campaign.
Editing live campaigns
Once a campaign has been launched, you can edit the content and settings in the Facebook Ads Manager. For example, if you see that it is not performing as expected, you might want to alter your bidding strategy or reduce the reach.
In Emarsys, you cannot change the campaign settings, you can only influence which contacts are in the audience.
- For Segment audiences you can change the criteria of the segment that the audience is based on. These changes will be pushed to the audience immediately and will not wait for the daily synchronization.
- For Lookalike audiences you can change the criteria of the segment that the audience is based on. These changes will affect the composition of the Lookalike audience the next time that Facebook refreshes it.
- For Automation Center audiences you can pause the program and make changes to the paths and criteria that will lead to contacts entering or leaving the audience.
- Note: Be careful when editing programs to ensure that you do not leave contacts in the audience indefinitely.
Campaign reporting
After launching your campaign in Facebook, the status of the audience will be changed to Live in Emarsys.
Here you can track your campaign objectives. You can select multiple Ad-Sets as well as define the timeframe over which you wish to analyze the results.
Remember: For your Facebook campaigns to have meaningful data you will have to have the Facebook conversion pixel properly set up.
Creating Google Ads Campaigns
Once you have connected to your Google account and created your audience you are ready to create your Google Ads campaigns.
The instructions below provide an overview of the creation process. Please note that the campaign creation process is quite flexible in Google and this is not meant to be a comprehensive guide. You should familiarize yourself with the Google documentation for AdWords.
Creating the campaign
To create a Google Ads campaign, proceed as follows:
- First, log into your Google Ad Words account, making sure that you are logging in with the correct account (the one that you used to connect to Google previously).
- To see the audiences you have created with Emarsys, click Shared Library, Audiences.
- To create a campaign for Gmail or YouTube, click All campaigns, Campaigns and select Display Network Only.
- In the Campaign Settings, select No marketing objective and All features. We also recommend to select All countries and territories since the Emarsys segments are usually highly targeted and you do not want to reduce the size of the audience further.
- In the next step you can either create an ad group for your campaign, or skip this step and create the ad group later. Please note that it is recommended to create separate ad groups for Gmail and YouTube campaigns for reporting purposes. If you do create the ad group now, you should select Interests & remarketing.
- This will open the Targeting page, where you filter for Customer email lists and select the audience that you have created through CRM Ads.
Make sure to set the targeting as shown above for each ad group that you want to target.
- The next step is to create the ads themselves. We advise not to follow the wizard for this step but instead to open the campaign from the All campaigns menu. When the campaign is open, click the Ad group you want and then +AD, Ad gallery.
- For instructions on how to create a Gmail Ad, click here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6105478.
- For instructions on how to create a YouTube Ad, click here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375463.
- If you do not already have conversion tracking set up you should do so now. Click here for instructions: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722054?hl=en.
Conversion tracking is important since it enables CRM Ads to report revenue and conversions from the campaigns in the Emarsys Marketing Platform.
Once the campaign, ad group and ads are all enabled, and the audience has been selected in the Targeting page, the campaign is effectively launched. The status of the audience will now be changed to Live in Emarsys.
Editing live campaigns
Google lookalike audiences are deprecated and they are no longer supported by Google. On 1st August 2023, lookalike audiences will be fully removed from Google Ads.
Once a campaign has been launched, you can edit the content and settings in Google. For example, if you see that it is not performing as expected, you might want to alter your bidding strategy or reduce the reach.
In Emarsys, you cannot change the campaign settings but you can influence which contacts are in the audience.
- For Segment audiences you can change the criteria of the segment that the audience is based on. These changes will be pushed to the audience immediately and will not wait for the daily synchronization.
- For Automation Center audiences you can pause the program and make changes to the paths and criteria that will lead to contacts entering or leaving the audience.
Note: Be careful when editing programs to ensure that you do not leave contacts in the audience indefinitely.
Campaign reporting
After launching your campaign in Google, the status of the audience it uses will be changed to Live in Emarsys.
Here you can track your campaign objectives. You can select multiple Ad-Groups as well as define the timeframe you wish to analyze.