There are over two billion people active on Facebook and that number is only growing.
With so many people are congregating on this social media platform, it isn’t that shocking that Facebook Ads are one of the best ways to advertise your business.
Yes!
That’s 2 billion people that YOU can reach with YOUR ad campaign!
Although setting your Ads account up isn’t too difficult, getting results can be. Facebook is always updating and making changes to its Ads platform.
It isn’t uncommon for business owners and marketers to give up and move on to other forms of marketing when they don’t see fast results. It is also not uncommon to waste a LOT of money trying new things.
You’ll always have to deal with tricky things regardless of which advertising platform you’re using.
When it comes to Facebook Ads, however, it’s usually one of five things that can cause people to give up.
Here are some changes that you may have to make to your Facebook advertising strategy to take it further than it’s ever been before:
1 – Learn to understand your audience
Facebook’s Audience Insights tool is incredibly useful. I highly recommend spending a few minutes on it. It can do wonders in the effectiveness of your campaigns.
With the help of audience insights, you’ll understand more about your audience and what they’re interested in, their spending habits, pages they follow, and more.
You can see exactly how relevant other interests tend to be. You can also lookup the demographics of your current audience such as their gender and their age, filter by specific interests. Their location will be a big help too. The more you understand your audience, the better you can target them with your ads.
Start by choosing the initial interest of your audience OR analyze the interests of the audiences connected to your page and the potential audience you can reach via the pages they like.
2 – Target the right audience with the right ads
One mistake that a lot of amateurs make is identifying one huge target audience. They figure out the interests that they all have in common and target ALL of them with ONE ad.
Unfortunately, this isn’t as effective as you’d think. Facebook Ads Manager manager makes the process of selecting a Facebook audience seem simple. It even gives you many suggestions for the options to choose from. Some of these options may hurt the performance of your campaign.
You may end up spending more and hurting your ROI. Plus, you won’t be able to measure your results as well so you won’t know exactly who was interested and why they were.
By segmenting your target audience into several groups and creating several levels of campaigns will help you with getting the best return on your investment.
There are 3 typical levels of the campaign
Top of Funnel
These are used for generating initial awareness of your product and to expand the reach of your audience.
Target: core audience interests and lookalikes of your existing customers
Best Assets: videos.
Budget: $2-$5/day
Middle of Funnel
These are used to engage some of the engaged audiences and to drive the traffic to your page.
Target: Custom audiences of video views (those who watched 50% or 75% of your videos, fans who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram pages. You would want to exclude people who already bought from you in the past.
Best Assets: videos, images, carousels or dynamic ads (but these require additional setup)
Budget is $15-$20/day
Bottom of Funnel
The goal of this campaign is to convert your website visitors into buyers.
Target: Create custom audiences of website visitors, people who visited specific pages, people who spent time on your pages.
Best assets: images or carousels
Budget is $15-$20/day
Remember to test assets frequently (but not more than once a week) and increase the budget of the winning ad sets but not more than 25% per week.
3 – Start small
Business owners like you want to make sure that they’re getting their money’s worth.
This is why a lot of people make changes to their ad copy, images, targeting, and budget the moment they see lacking results.
However, two things are incredibly important to your success:
a) starting with the right options off the bat
AND
b) making small changes over a long period rather than making sporadic big changes.
The Facebook algorithm needs time to adjust. It’s usually a good idea to wait for three to five days until you have enough data to conclude. When you make changes frequently, you have to gather data all over again.
If you want to make changes, ALWAYS create a new ad (or ad set or campaign) with the new changes and compare the old and the new.
PRO TIP: use a naming convention that describes your changes. A naming convention we typically use:
Page Name – Campaign Type – Campaign Name – Date (If applicable) – Audience (if Applicable) – Ad Name
Example:
TreDigital – Engagement – Ad Optimization Blog – December Week 1 – Lookalike of Engaged Fans – Ad 1
4 – Make changes based on data
I am a HUGE fan of using gut feelings in business…
However, Facebook campaign optimization decisions ALWAYS need to be backed by data. Luckily, Facebook gives you quite a lot of it. You just need to know where to look.
Aside from the age, gender, and location of your target audience, you can learn about the ad relevance score. This is an incredibly useful number that will help you figure out how relevant your ad is for different people. Higher relevance means lower costs for you. And who doesn’t want lower costs?
Besides the ad relevance score, you can also take a look at your positive and negative feedback scores. This will help you identify the effective ads as well as the ineffective ads so you can modify them accordingly.
5 – Test, test, test
One thing I LOVE about Digital Marketing is that it never gets boring. Nothing is ever going to stay the same.
The best skills for success you can develop are staying agile and changing when you need to.
And how will you know when to change if you don’t test?
Successful Digital marketing professionals are constantly performing tests. They test everything ad images, copy, calls-to-action, buttons, and more. The process may seem long and tedious.
However, your long-term success depends on you figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Make sure you constantly test so that you can make the changes you need for your ads to deliver results.
As long as you have a solid structure in place, you will be able to systematically test your ads.
Start with 5-10 Interests + 2-3 versions of the message. Create an ad set for each interest and each of the messages.
Once you have a winning interest/message combination, modify your ads to fine-tune the message. To do that, keep the best performing ads in the top-performing ad set and create additional versions of the ad. Always remember to
a) keep the original best performing ad (do not turn it off if it’s working)
and
b) duplicate the best performing ad set/ad before you make changes.
In addition to watching the cost per your desired result, pay attention to CPM and your ultimate ROI metric.
Learn How to Test your Ads, Product, and Ideas with Facebook.
