Module 3 · Build: The Campaign, Piece by Piece

Assembling it in Ads Manager

Everything you’ve built this module — the page, the tracking, the audience bounds, the copy, the creative — now gets loaded into Ads Manager. This is the lesson beginners expect to be the hard one. It isn’t, because you did the hard parts already; today is moving-day, not architecture. One warning up front: Ads Manager will offer you many helpful suggestions along the way. Most of them are for Meta’s benefit. We’ll decline politely.

The structure you’re building is the one from Module 1, Lesson 3: one campaign, one ad set, several ads. Simple beats clever at your budget, because the algorithm needs data density, not fragmentation. Meta’s interface labels shift with every redesign — the curated video above walks the current screens click-by-click — but the decisions below don’t change, and the decisions are the job.

The campaign level: one decision

The campaign holds exactly one choice that matters: the objective. You want the Leads objective — you’re telling Meta to hunt for people likely to fill out your form, not people likely to click, watch, or like. Module 1 called the objective the steering wheel, and this is the moment you set it. Choose Traffic here and everything downstream does its job perfectly while the campaign fails — Meta will dutifully deliver you the world’s cheapest clickers, who click and vanish.

The ad set: where, who, how much

Four decisions live here, all of them already made on your Planner page:

• Conversion location and event. Tell Meta the conversion happens on your website, and point it at the Lead event you verified in Lesson 2. This is the wiring that connects everything: ad to page to pixel to algorithm. If your Lead event doesn’t appear here as an option, stop and go back to Lesson 2 — nothing else matters until it does.
• Budget. Your pilot number from Module 2, Lesson 6, entered as a daily amount. Meridian’s came straight from the allowable-cost-per-lead math in Module 1 — yours did too, which is why there’s nothing to decide here today. Resist the urge to shave it down “just to be safe”: an underfunded test doesn’t derisk the decision, it just delays it.
• Audience. The Lesson 3 settings: your geographic bounds, your honest age floor, everything else left broad — including accepting Meta’s automated audience defaults, which is the one “suggestion” you take. One ad set. Not five little ones at a fifth of the budget each — that fragments your data and starves the learning.
• Placements. Where the ads appear across Facebook and Instagram. Leave this on the automatic default (Meta’s Advantage+ placements). Hand-picking placements is a lever for media buyers with data you don’t have yet; the default spends your budget where results are cheapest, and that’s the correct call at this stage.

The ads: load the set

For each of your three to six creatives from Lesson 5, create an ad inside the ad set:

• Upload the creative — video, carousel cards, or static.
• Paste its matched primary text and headline from Lesson 4. Resist last-minute “improvements” typed into the box; edits made standing up skip the compliance pass.
• Set the destination URL to your landing page — the exact page from Lesson 1, not your homepage.
• Pick the button that matches your ask (a download-style button for Meridian’s checklist; a booking-style button for a direct-to-call campaign like Riverbend’s).
• Check the preview on mobile. That’s where it will almost always be seen. Confirm the hook is visible before the “see more” fold and the creative isn’t awkwardly cropped.

While you’re in there, Ads Manager may offer to enhance your creative automatically — cropping, text tweaks, generated variations. For launch, turn these off where you can. Your ads passed a compliance check as written; you want what you wrote running, at least until you have data.

Save as draft. Do not publish.

Everything in Ads Manager saves as a draft until you hit publish — and today, draft is exactly where this stays. Not because anything’s missing, but because launching is a procedure with its own checklist — payment limits, a live end-to-end test lead, the follow-up process armed — and that procedure is Module 4. An unpublished campaign costs nothing and loses nothing by waiting a day. A published one with a dead notification email wastes real money by breakfast.

This is the same discipline as everything else in this course: the calm version of you wrote a plan, and the plan says launch happens by checklist. You’re one module away.

Watch this step

This is the whole build on screen: a step-by-step lead campaign assembled in Ads Manager, the same pieces this lesson has you wire together. It’s from an independent creator — credited below, so go give them a follow.

1:06:40