Congratulations! You’ve gotten your shark tank deal locked in and now you’re ready to run ads to keep Mark Cuban on your side. Well, unfortunately, Meta’s Business manager is an ever changing and complicated animal, so we’ve put together a quick checklist of items you’ll need to do in order to get it all set up and ready to run ads.

Note that there’s a lot of automation of account creation that bad actors online use to create fake accounts so there’s a few steps in here that can take some time and that Facebook will put a time-lock on. It might not be possible to get an account created and up and running in the same day, so make sure to give yourself some lead time.

Create a Business Manager Account

Start at http://business.facebook.com and login with your facebook account credentials. If you don’t have a facebook account, follow this documentation from our good friends at facebook: https://www.facebook.com/help/188157731232424

There’s a few hoops to jump thru here, so make sure you’ve got access to that email address and verify the email.

Add the Facebook Page

This is the facebook account that will represent your ad account.

Add the facebook page by identifying the page. Make sure you’re an admin of the page. If you don’t have a page, create one:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1199464373557428?id=418112142508425

Add the Instagram Account

This is the instagram account that will represent the ad account.

Make sure you’ve got correct access to the instagram account you want associated with your ad account.

A Quick Warning in Regards to Page Content

Make sure there’s content on your Facebook page and Instagram page and that it adheres to the community guidelines. If either of the pages look spammy or like they were created by a bot, the entire account can get flagged and shut down. It’s a painful and long process to create a whole new business account, facebook page and instagram account.

Create an Ad Account

Here’s the meat & potatoes we’re going for. Create a new ad account. If you somehow already have an ad account, you can associate it with your Business Manager here as well:

Create a Data Source

This is how we’re going to transmit user behavior from your website to the Meta Ad Platform. Hang tight, this part can be a little tricky.

Create the data set with the appropriate connections. If you’re using Squarespace or Shopify which are our favorites, you’ll also use the Conversions API. You can create the pixel only here at first, then we’ll get in-depth for Squarepace and Shopify Integrations in future SBS posts. If you have a website developer, you can share the code with them and get it deployed on site. For now, make sure you have a datasource & pixel.

Once you create a dataset and a pixel, go to connected assets —> Assign Assets and make sure the pixel is associated with your ad account.

Add a Domain

This just makes sure that data is coming from the correct domain to the ad platforms and your platform data isnt getting spammed by random people on the internet. You’ll have to confirm ownership of your site, so make sure you or someone in your organization has access to your website platform or domain vendor.

Run thru the verification process:

once verified, assign the domain to your facebook page:

Update your Business Information

This is how facebook gets a hold of you and makes sure you’re a real business. Just a hoop to jump through.

Add a Payment Method

This is how they take your lettuce. It’s paid ads after all.

Add a payment method here and associate it with your ad account:

Wrapping up

OK So that’s a lot and we didn’t go into super deep detail, but stay tuned for additional content on pixel integration for the next SBS series of posts. Additionally, things change in the meta platform pretty frequently so if you’re reading this post sometime after Summer 2024, things may have shifted around. We’ll try to keep this post updated.

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SBS#6 - Setting Up Meta Business Manager for Meta Ads