How to Start Advertising on Facebook and Instagram Step by Step

To start advertising on Facebook and Instagram without an agency, you need a Meta Business Suite account, a campaign objective that matches your sales stage, an audience, a budget, creatives, and a simple test. The whole process comes down to seven steps: setting up your account, choosing an objective, defining your audience, setting a budget, preparing creatives, publishing in Meta Ads Manager, and monitoring results. Each step is described below so that someone with no marketing experience can complete it on their own.

What accounts and tools do you need to get started?

Before you spend your first dollar on advertising, you need a few basic elements. Meta requires them to link your campaign to a specific business and payment method.

• A Facebook account (personal, used for logging in and managing).
• A Facebook Page or Instagram profile that you are advertising.
• A Meta Business Suite account (the hub for managing your business).
• An ad account with a payment method attached (card or another available option).
• A Meta Pixel or Conversions API on your store's website if you want to measure purchases and other events.
• Access to your product photos, names, prices, and descriptions to build your ads.

If any of these are already set up, the step takes only a few minutes. The most common mistake at the start is a missing pixel — without it, campaigns still run, but you cannot see which ads actually drive sales.

Step 1: Choose your campaign objective

Meta Ads Manager asks you to choose an objective before you create an ad. The objective affects who sees your ads and how Meta optimizes delivery.

• Awareness: showing the ad to as many people as possible.
• Traffic: sending people to your website or store.
• Engagement: likes, comments, messages.
• Leads: collecting contacts, for example through a form.
• Sales: focusing on purchases and optimizing for events in your store.

For a new store, a sales objective usually makes sense if you have the pixel installed and event data. If you are just starting and have no data yet, a traffic or engagement objective helps you gather your first insights into who responds to your ads.

Step 2: Define your audiences

An audience is a set of characteristics describing the person you want to reach. To start, you do not need complicated combinations — two or three well-thought-out groups are enough.

• Cold audiences: people who do not know your brand yet, matched by interests, location, age, or gender.
• Lookalike audiences: groups created based on existing customers or people who took a specific action.
• Retargeting audiences: people who visited your site, added a product to the cart, or viewed a specific product.

With a small budget, it is not worth splitting the campaign into too many groups. Testing two different audience concepts and comparing their results is better than spreading the budget across ten narrow groups.

Step 3: Set your budget and schedule

You can set the budget at the campaign or ad set level. Meta also lets you choose whether the spend is daily or spread over the entire campaign period.

• Start with an amount whose loss will not disrupt your finances — this is a test, not an investment with a guaranteed return.
• Set a daily budget high enough for Meta to collect the data needed for optimization.
• Plan for at least several days of running before drawing conclusions — a single day is too small a sample.
• Write down how much you spent and how many orders came in, so you can compare it with future attempts.

In practice, the first campaign is about testing a few variants. Only after collecting data do you know which audience and which creative work best.

Step 4: Prepare your ad creatives

A creative is an image or video, a headline, primary text, and a call to action. It decides whether someone stops at your ad in a scrolling feed.

• The image or video should show the product or the result of using it in a realistic context.
• The headline must be short and specific — one thought, one benefit.
• The primary text expands on the headline's promise and explains why it is worth clicking now.
• The call to action should be unambiguous: “Shop Now,” “See Collection,” “Learn More.”
• The first seconds of a video and the first words of the text decide whether someone pays attention to the rest.

A good practice is to prepare several versions of the headline and text to check which message resonates with your audience. If you are short on ideas for creatives matched to your brand, tools like AdAlchemy generate ready sets of headlines, primary texts, descriptions, and calls to action based on your store's URL, along with text image prompts to use in an external image generator.

Step 5: Publish your campaign in Meta Ads Manager

Once all elements are ready, you create a campaign, an ad set, and individual ads. Meta guides you through this process with a wizard.

• In the campaign step, you choose the objective and budget.
• In the ad set step, you define the audience, placement (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network), and schedule.
• In the ad step, you upload creatives, set the headline, text, description, and call to action.
• Before publishing, check the preview on a phone — most of your audience will see the ad there.

Keep in mind that AdAlchemy does not publish the campaign automatically to your Meta account. It generates ready-to-use content that you copy into Meta Ads Manager and launch manually. This way, you keep full control over what is published and when.

Step 6: Monitor results and draw conclusions

After launching the campaign, it is crucial to look at the data, not just whether the ad “looks good.” The key metrics to watch are impressions, clicks, CTR, cost per click, cost per purchase, and return on ad spend (ROAS).

• CTR shows whether the creative catches attention.
• Cost per click tells you how much you pay for interest in your offer.
• Cost per purchase and ROAS show whether the campaign earns money or just spends budget.
• Platform breakdown (Facebook vs Instagram) shows where your message performs better.

If you want to track these metrics in one place, AdAlchemy offers a Meta Ads results dashboard. You simply add AdAlchemy's Business ID as a partner in Meta Business Suite and provide your ad account ID (optionally a specific campaign ID) — no token generation needed. The dashboard shows Graph API data: impressions, clicks, CTR, spend, purchases, ROAS, daily charts, and platform breakdown, with 7, 14, 30, and 90-day ranges.

Step 7: Test and improve your campaign

The first version of a campaign is rarely the final one. The greatest value comes from systematically testing individual elements.

• Test headlines: same text, different headlines.
• Test creatives: same headlines, different images or videos.
• Test audiences: same creative, different groups.
• Turn off what is not working after collecting enough impressions.
• Write down conclusions so you do not repeat the same mistakes in future campaigns.

Many tools also let you fix a single element without rebuilding the whole campaign from scratch. With AdAlchemy, every purchase includes one free regeneration of the entire campaign and a “report a problem” flow that fixes a single creative without creating a new version.

How much does it all cost to start?

Costs can be divided into two parts: the ad budget that goes directly to Meta and the cost of preparing creatives and texts.

• The ad budget depends on your industry, competition, and objective — for a small store, it often starts at a few dozen dollars per day.
• The cost of preparing creatives depends on whether you do them yourself or use a tool.
• Ad text generation tools usually have several price tiers: AdAlchemy offers a Starter plan (10 PLN) with one ad set and three creatives, a Growth plan (29 PLN) with two ad sets for different audiences and headline variants for A/B testing, and a Pro plan (59 PLN) with three ad sets across a full funnel, ten creatives, and budget and schedule recommendations.
• You pay for the generated campaign only after seeing the result — the first website analysis is free.

For a small business, this means the barrier to entry is no longer knowledge of Meta Ads Manager, but simply deciding how much to spend on ad delivery itself.

Common beginner mistakes

• Choosing an “awareness” objective without a budget for scale.
• Audiences that are too narrow, preventing Meta from gathering data.
• Missing pixel and no purchase measurement.
• One creative with no variants to test.
• Turning off campaigns too quickly before collecting data.
• Not recording results and drawing conclusions.

Being aware of these pitfalls saves time and budget while helping you reach a campaign that actually brings orders faster.