Accounts & Setup

What you'll be able to do

• Set up a Business Manager that survives contact with reality (bans, breakups, staff turnover)
• Run ads on pages you don't own without anyone having to share a password like it's 2014
• Never lose an ad account to a preventable mistake

The short version: Business Manager is the advance sheet of your ad operation - nobody enjoys doing it, everyone enjoys having done it. Set up a Business Manager, create your ad account inside it (timezone and currency are permanent, so breathe before clicking), verify your domain, add a backup payment method, turn on two-factor for everyone, and add a second admin. Then learn Partner access, because in this industry you will spend your whole career running ads on other people's pages.

The boring module that saves your business

Here's a fun industry fact: the most common way music and nightlife operators lose their entire ad operation isn't a policy violation. It's structural. One person set everything up on their personal profile, that profile got restricted (or that person quit, or the co-promoter situation went the way co-promoter situations go), and everything attached to it went down with the ship.

This module exists so that never happens to you. It's the load-in of this course. Do it right and every show after this gets easier.

Business Manager: your venue, not your apartment

A Business Manager (business.facebook.com) is a container that owns your business assets - pages, ad accounts, pixels/datasets, catalogs - separately from any one person's Facebook profile. People get ACCESS to the container; no person IS the container.

Why this matters (the because): personal profiles are fragile. They get hacked, flagged, and restricted for reasons that have nothing to do with your ads. When assets live in a Business Manager with multiple admins, one person's bad day doesn't become the whole operation's bad month.

The permanent decisions

When you create an ad account, two settings are forever: timezone and currency. Choose wrong and your only fix is a new ad account, which means abandoning your account history - and account history is part of what delivery optimizes on. Set the timezone to where your shows actually happen. Your reporting days should end when your business days end (fine, 4am, we know who we're talking to - midnight is still the setting).

Domain verification and payment hygiene

Verify your domain (Business settings → Brand safety) - it proves you own the site your ads point to and unlocks full control over link presentation. Takes ten minutes with a DNS record or meta tag.

Payment: add a primary AND a backup method. Ads stop the moment a card declines, and cards love to decline at 11pm on the Thursday before your biggest show, because the universe has a sense of humor. If your card has a low limit, know your account spending limit settings too - useful guardrail when multiple people can touch the account.

Two-factor and the two-admin rule

Every person with access: two-factor authentication, mandatory, non-negotiable. Business Managers get hijacked through the weakest personal account attached to them, and hijacked ad accounts get drained running someone else's scam ads on your card.

And the two-admin rule: your Business Manager needs at least two trusted admins. One admin is a single point of failure. This is the ad-ops version of never giving one person the only key to the cash drawer.

Partner access: the section this industry actually needs

Here's where generic courses wave goodbye and we keep going. In events and music, you almost never run ads only on assets you own. The promoter runs ads for the venue's page. The manager runs ads for the artist's page. The label runs ads through the roster's pages. Welcome to the whole job.

There are three ways to get access to someone else's page, in ascending order of correctness:

1. They share their password. No. Never. This is the marketing equivalent of leaving the safe open because counting the drop is annoying. It's also how accounts get flagged for suspicious logins.
2. They add you as an individual with a page role. Fine for tiny situations, fragile at scale - access is tied to your personal profile, and offboarding is manual and usually forgotten.
3. Partner access (the professional standard). Their Business Manager grants YOUR Business Manager access to specific assets with specific permissions. Clean grant, clean audit trail, clean removal when the relationship ends. Both sides stay owners of what's theirs.

The because: partnerships in this industry end - residencies move, managers change, labels and artists part ways. Partner access means offboarding is one click instead of a password-changing panic and a group chat that ends three friendships.

Naming conventions (yes, really)

Decide a naming scheme now: pages, ad accounts, datasets, campaigns. Something like [CLIENT] - [ASSET] and [CLIENT] - [SHOW/RELEASE] - [PHASE] - [DATE]. The because: in six months you'll have dozens of assets, and "Untitled Campaign (Copy) (Copy)" is how spend ends up on the wrong show. Ask us how we know.

From the field

A promoter we know ran everything through the personal profile of one team member - pages, boosts, payment. That team member's profile caught a restriction over something unrelated to ads entirely. Every page went admin-less overnight, mid on-sale, and recovery took weeks of appeals. The rebuilt setup: Business Manager, two admins, partner access, 2FA. Total setup time: under an hour. The outage cost more than every hour of setup they'll ever do, combined, for life.

Common mistakes

• Running the whole operation from one personal profile (see: everything above)
• Wrong timezone/currency at ad account creation - permanent, no appeal, straight to jail
• Sharing passwords instead of Partner access
• One admin, no backup payment method
• Skipping 2FA because "we're small" - hijackers love small; less monitoring, same stealable card

Take-home

Account Setup Checklist - BM → ad account → domain → payment + backup → 2FA → second admin → partner access flow → naming conventions. Print it, do it once, keep it for every client onboarding forever.

Learn more

Optional extra credit. Nothing below is required for the quiz, the certificate, or the job - the full lesson is above. This is for the sickos who want more.

• Meta Business Help Center: Business Manager setup, Partner access, domain verification (business.facebook.com/help) - the primary docs, dry but authoritative
• Our Module 9 covers what happens when accounts DO get restricted and how appeals actually work

Sources & dates: Meta Business Help Center (accessed July 2026) · Restriction-cascade behavior per practitioner consensus and Meta policy docs (July 2026)