Facebook’s paid advertising is a labyrinth of choices and options, and can bring entirely different results for different businesses and brands. However, there are a few sure-fire ways to optimise your paid campaigns. These changes can see your cost per click (CPC) or cost per metric (CPM) drop exponentially and ensure you’re getting the maximum performance out of your ads.
1. Campaign Objective
The very first thing you should do when setting up an advert is to choose the marketing objective. Facebook gives you a number of campaign objectives to choose from including brand awareness, reach and website traffic. There are over ten different options that all optimise your ads in different ways.
Start with a clear strategy from the beginning with clear KPI’s, to help you choose the correct campaign objective to help you reach your goals. This will set your ad off on the right track from the off. It may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people can get this bit wrong as it’s critical to Facebook understanding your goals to deliver your ad correctly.
2. Targeting a specific audience
The most obvious ways to achieve your campaign goals, is to create an audience that’s specific to your brand and campaign. Be as detailed as you can with your audience criteria, as it will improve the chances of the right person seeing your campaign. With a broad audience, you may receive good vanity metrics (such as reach and impressions), but you’re unlikely to see good conversions as it’s not going to be your preferred audience every time. By refining your target audience, it enables you to find those who are perfect for the campaign which will improve your conversions and click throughs.
Facebook actually has something called a ‘relevance score’, which can be triggered if your advert is being hidden by people or reported. If your campaign’s relevance score drops, your ad could be shown to fewer people, or even stopped by Facebook. This is another reason defining an audience is vital to see great performance.
3. Set up a Facebook Pixel
The Facebook pixel is a few lines of code that you can insert into your website in order to track conversions and other data from people that visit your site through Facebook. The Pixel has the ability to collect highly detailed data, such as; where your visitors live, what they earn, what things have they bought recently and much more, this can help to build an audience profile which can help shape your ads.
Another great feature of the Pixel is the ability to retarget visitors to your website by showing them additional ads after they’ve visited your site. You can even retarget your audience based on the actions they have taken on your website previously, for example, if they’ve added an item to their cart or set up a payment method. This tool can bring even more optimisation to your adverts to ensure you’re targeting people that will more than likely lead to more sales.
4. Test different ad visuals
Setting up a good Facebook campaign is about more than just a strong audience and good copy, this visual element of your ad is extremely important to the performance. It’s amazing to see how changing your image can make a dramatic change on your results and CPC. You can also try using videos or graphics. Because visuals are the key to grabbing someone’s attention when scrolling through the news feed, if you test multiple visuals as part of one overall budget, you can then monitor the results to identify a clear winner and use the remaining budget on this ad set. This is a simple way to improve the overall results you’ll see from your campaign.
5. Rotate your creatives
Research shows that the more people see your ads, the more bored they’ll get. By rotating your creatives or copy, you can freshen this up and ensure you don’t see a long-term decline in click through rates. You can easily set up 4 individual campaigns as part of a 1-month overall campaign, each with different imagery or set to go live on alternating days. These small changes will ensure people see a different ad each day or week and can be particularly helpful for options like a retargeting campaign to keep your audience interested.
6. Analyse your results
There’s no point running a campaign at all if you’re not going to analyse the data and find the good and the bad from the performance. It’s also important to understand that you don’t need to check your results every 5 seconds. It can take some time for your campaign to begin getting conversions, so you should always give your campaign at least 48 hours to start running before you check and make any necessary adjustments.
Facebook ads are just one of many options available to get leads for your brand at a very low price or retarget already interested shoppers to keep them coming back – if your social media is struggling, feel free to contact Mobas. Our social strategists can help to offer advice and consultancy that will help you deliver powerful advertising campaigns to help your business achieve its objectives.
