Module 1 · Foundations: Before You Spend a Dollar

Set up your accounts — and own every one

Time to build. In this lesson you set up the accounts your campaign will live in — and you do it under one rule that will save you more money than any optimization trick in this course: every account gets created in your name, on your email, owned by your business.Not your nephew’s, not a freelancer’s, not an agency’s. Yours. The clicks take half an hour; the ownership doctrine lasts as long as you’re in business.

Why ownership is the whole ballgame

Here’s what beginners can’t see yet: your ad account, your Facebook Page, and your pixel (the tracking you’ll install in Module 3) are not just logins — they’re business assets that appreciate. Every campaign you run teaches Meta’s system who your buyers are. Months of spend build an account history, a trained pixel, and warm audiences of people who engaged with you. That accumulated learning is worth real money.

Now imagine all of it lives inside a vendor’s Business Manager because they “handled the setup.” Fire them — or watch them fold — and you don’t just lose a vendor. You lose the history, the trained pixel, the audiences, sometimes the ad account itself. You start from zero, and they keep what your money taught the system. You’d never sign an office lease in your property manager’s name. Same principle, same reason: you can hire someone to run the office, but the lease is yours.

The build order

Meta’s interface renames itself constantly (Business Manager is also called “Meta Business Suite” or a “business portfolio” depending on the screen), so the video above carries the current clicks. The lesson carries what doesn’t change — the order and the reasoning:

1. Create your Business Manager (business portfolio) at business.facebook.com — on your own work email, with your legal business name. This is the container that will own everything else. If a helper offers to “just set it up” on their account, you know the answer now.
2. Claim your Facebook Page and connect Instagram. If a Page already exists — even a half-abandoned one — claim it into the Business Manager rather than creating a duplicate. Connect your Instagram account so ads can run on both apps from one place.
3. Create the ad account inside your Business Manager. Set the correct country, currency, and time zone — these are locked after creation, and a wrong time zone quietly skews every daily report you’ll ever read.
4. Add your payment method — a business card, on the business’s billing details.
5. Set an account spending limit. This is the beginner’s airbag: a hard ceiling on total account spend that no runaway setting or fat-fingered budget can crash through. Set it near your Module 1 test budget. You can raise it in seconds later; you cannot un-spend money.
6. Verify your domain. A few minutes in Business Manager settings plus a small record added where your website is hosted — the video shows the current flow. Do it now, while nothing is urgent; skipping it is a classic source of launch-week friction, and Module 3’s tracking setup assumes it’s done.
7. Add people as users with roles — never as owners. Your bookkeeper, a designer, a future freelancer: each gets invited with the minimum permission that lets them do their job. Access you can grant is access you can revoke. Ownership isn’t.

Two safeguards while you’re in there

• Turn on two-factor authentication — for your profile and anyone with access. Hijacked ad accounts with live payment methods are a favorite target, and Meta will eventually require 2FA anyway. Do it on your terms today.
• Add a second admin you trust — a partner or your most senior person. Lockouts are real, account recovery is slow, and a second admin turns a potential three-week support ticket into a two-minute favor.

Before you call this lesson done

• Business Manager exists, on your email, under your business’s legal name
• Facebook Page claimed and Instagram connected inside it
• Ad account created inside your Business Manager — right country, currency, time zone
• Payment method added; account spending limit set
• Domain verified
• Two-factor authentication on; a second trusted admin added
• Every helper is a role-limited user — nobody but you owns anything

Watch this step

Account setup is all clicks, so it's worth watching — these show the Business-portfolio setup this lesson steps through (pick whichever pace suits you). It’s from an independent creator — credited below, so go give them a follow.

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