Setting up Meta Business Manager and your first campaign

Part 1 covered the mechanics. This part is the actual setup — Business Manager, the required connected assets, and Bright Leaf Coffee's first real campaign, structured from the start rather than assembled ad hoc.

Business Manager: the account container

Business Manager (at business.facebook.com) is the administrative layer above individual ad accounts, Pages, and Instagram accounts — a business, not a personal profile, owns assets here, which matters immediately for any account with more than one person involved: access can be granted and revoked per person, per asset, without ever sharing a personal login.

The assets a campaign actually needs connected

Facebook Page: Bright Leaf Coffee (required — every ad runs "as" a Page, even an Instagram-only one)
Instagram account: @brightleafcoffee (connected to the Page, for Instagram placements)
Ad Account: Bright Leaf Coffee Ads (where campaigns, budgets, and billing live)

Every Meta ad, regardless of which platform it actually appears on, is associated with a Facebook Page — this is a real structural requirement, not optional even for a business primarily focused on Instagram. Connecting the Instagram account to that same Page is what unlocks Instagram-specific placements and lets ads display the correct Instagram handle and profile.

Choosing a campaign objective

Objective: Sales

Meta groups campaign objectives into three categories — Awareness, Consideration (now folded into Traffic/Engagement), and Conversion — and asks for one upfront, similar to Google's own campaign-goal selection. For Bright Leaf Coffee's first campaign, Sales is correct: the real goal is subscription purchases, and this choice shapes which optimization events and bidding options are available later in setup, covered fully in part 3.

Setting a starting budget

Daily budget: $25/day

Similar reasoning to the Google Ads series' starting-budget guidance: modest enough to gather real delivery and conversion data within a couple of weeks without risking a meaningful loss if the initial targeting or creative misses, with room to scale once real performance justifies it. Meta's delivery system also needs a real "learning phase" (covered in part 13) that a too-small budget can struggle to exit efficiently.

The campaign structure being built

Campaign: Sales — Coffee Subscriptions
  Ad Set: Core Audience — Coffee Enthusiasts
    Ad: Carousel — Subscription Plans
  Ad Set: Core Audience — Gift Shoppers
    Ad: Single Image — Gift a Subscription

Two ad sets from the start, split by audience and intent — "Coffee Enthusiasts" targets people with a general interest in specialty coffee, "Gift Shoppers" targets a distinctly different intent (buying for someone else), mirroring the same reasoning the Google Ads series applied when splitting Bright Leaf Coffee's ad groups by intent rather than lumping everything into one.

Placements: automatic, to start

Placements: Advantage+ (automatic across Feed, Stories, Reels, Audience Network)

Meta's default recommendation is automatic placement — letting the system decide where a given ad performs best across every available surface, rather than manually restricting to specific ones. Starting with automatic placements is the right call for a first campaign with no delivery history yet; part 12 covers when and why to override this once real per-placement data exists.

Next: campaign objectives in full — Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, and Sales — and matching the right one to a real business goal.