Now that you have chosen the audience your ad will target, let's tackle the next step: creating your ad. For the sake of this guide, we will assume this is a "Traffic" campaign. We'll go through all of the parts of this page, from choosing a creative to go in your ad, to choosing your ad format and other details needed to prepare your campaign.
Your page will look like this:
Let's focus first on the top of the screen:
From the left of the bar, we have five buttons:
The first one lets you navigate between each step of the campaign creation (Objective, Audiences, Creatives, and Settings)
The second one gives you access to your Creatives Library where you will find your previously used posts and the ones that you have published organically (in the case of FB)
The third button gives you the option to search for an existing post by its URL/ID
The fourth button will allow you to display your creatives information (link, copy, headline, etc) instead of the preview
The fifth button enables you to preview your post in different placements. Selecting another placement will reload the preview, and show you what it will look like!
On the right of the bar, you can see an option that lingers all throughout the flow - Drafts. Feel free to save a draft if you're in a rush, or if you just want to start working on a campaign. You can load it afterward in a second!
Let's look at the bulk of the page now:
On the left:
At the very top, you'll see a few Icons: those are the Ad Formats you can use for your campaign.
The Message is going to be the text displayed on top of the image you chose for your ad.
The Link is the target for your ad, where you want the users to end up.
In Call to Action, you will get a selection of options for your CTA button at the bottom of your ad.
The Headline will usually fill itself based on the link you're choosing.
The Link Description should also fill itself, in the same way, your Headline did. That doesn't mean you can't change it yourself ;)
The Display link shows a shortened link instead of your full website URL in some placements. The link should go to the same domain as your website URL.
On the right, you will get a preview of the post you're building.
Once you have created your new posts or have selected them from the library you'll see your selection in the lower part of the screen:
Hovering over a post will give you the option to remove it for your campaign ( by clicking on the checkmark icon✅at the top right corner), view the post on Facebook by clicking on the icon under (number 1 in red in the screen-shot above), and you can also duplicate the post (number 2 above), add a tag to the post to find it later (number 3) or delete it with the last icon (number 4).
Once you're done, you can move on to the last part: the Settings!