There are a few steps developers should complete to set up an app for successful app ads and to prepare your app to use Facebook SDK and App Events. This page describes all the required and optional setup for your app.
To start, you need to create a Facebook app, which is an object that represents your actual application and stores settings and information for it.
Create a new app and app ID. When you do this, you automatically register the app and generate a new Facebook App ID. For full instructions, see Create and Register Apps.
Create New AppOnce you complete the wizard, your app appears in App Dashboard. The dashboard is where you can finish setting up your app and where you can make changes to your app's settings, such as adding or deleting ad accounts that can run ads for your app.
After you create an app, you can go to App Dashboard and provide all the information and settings for your app. For app ads, make sure you complete the following:
You must provide a Privacy Policy URL.
You need to provide platform information for each platform you deliver your app on. For each platform, go to Settings > Basic and click Add Platform.
Each time you add platform information, select either iOS, Android, or Facebook Web Games. A new panel appears where you can provide information specific to your application's platform.
Provide URLs and location of your app in the iTunes store or Google Play store. You may need to get this from the developer who built the application. After your ads run and someone clicks on an ad to install an app, they see the app in the app store.
If you have separate applications for iPhone and iPad, provide each separate ID.
For Android, provide the Google Play package name for the application.
Under Settings > Advanced > Business Manager, select a business manager. This represents the company that owns the application.
Under Settings > Advanced > Advertising Accounts, provide one or more IDs for authorized ad accounts to be used to run and pay for app ads. If more than one business plans to run app ads for the app, also provide the business manager IDs for those businesses. For example, if a business runs ads for a subsidiary or if an agency runs ads for a client, provide the business manager IDs in Authorized Businesses.
Make sure your application is publicly available in the correct app store. Then in App Dashboard, under App Review > Make new app public?, select Yes.
Check the status and setup of your app and your app ads in App Ads Helper.
Developers can later use Ads Helper to see if App Events work and if you have any app installs. This tool provides other information that is useful when you want to efficiently run ads for apps.
After you complete this setup, you have an app that is set up for you to run app ads. Developers can revisit App Dashboard to update app settings. Typically, you revisit it to update ad accounts and other settings.
At this point, you can create and run ads using the APP_INSTALL objective. However, we actually optimize delivery of your ads for the LINK_CLICKS objective, because we don't have enough data about your app to target it more accurately. This means your ads are optimized for any person likely to click on your ad. You do not necessarily reach the audience most likely to install your app until after you implement Facebook SDK and App Events in your application. After that, we can optimize for app installations. But if you don't have any app installs within any given 28-day period, once again we won't be able to optimize for app installs. Instead, your app installs campaign will be optimized for link clicks until an app install takes place.