Is it ridiculous to aim for a successful campaign each time you create your Facebook ads? Most certainly not! Norman Vincent Peale once said: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” In this article, you will learn 10 Facebook ads optimization hacks that you can implement today to help you run successful Facebook ad campaigns. Here we go!
#1 Create Your Facebook Ads Campaign For Posts With Existing Engagements
The first is to create ads for posts with existing engagements so that your ads receive better delivery by Facebook’s algorithm. At some point, you’ll probably see this message from Facebook stating that your post is “Performing better than 90% of your other posts on your page. Promote or boost it to get more great results.”
This is the best time to run ads towards these posts as Facebook is more likely to reward you with better delivery and results. Getting at least a few likes or comments or shares is better than nothing, but having all three types of engagements is best.
#2 Select the Right Marketing Objective
Choosing the most efficient marketing objective starts with setting a well-defined goal. Your marketing objective tells Facebook what’s the ultimate goal of your ad campaign, and helps its algorithm optimize your ad delivery for best results. Similar to training your puppy where to do its “business”, you need to train the algorithm to deliver your ads accordingly so you can achieve your goal.
#3 Know Your Target Audience Down to a T
Knowing the 4 main segmentations of your target audience will put your business in an advantageous position. These 4 main segmentations are:
1. Demographic — Your audience’s characteristics (i.e. age, gender, family size, education, etc).
2. Psychographic — Lifestyle and personality characteristics (i.e. interests, activities, etc).
3. Geographic — Physical location of your audience (i.e. United States, Australia, etc).
4. Behavioral — Purchase behavior (i.e. engaged shoppers).
Pro Tip: You can also leverage recent Purchasing Behavior among Facebook users. Targeting engaged shoppers allows you to display ads in front of people with buying intentions.
You can also leverage on Life Events targeting, which opens a lot of area for creativity. The Life Events targeting is unique in the sense that you can choose to target people at a specific time of their lives. For instance, you can target people who are celebrating their birthdays and might want to buy a present for themselves.
#4 Save Your Target Audience
A big mistake that is often made by advertisers is not saving the built audience. When you save your audiences, you are able to save a lot of time when you run another ad campaign. Also, saving your audiences allows you to create lookalike audiences to expand your targeting. These are 4 audiences that you should create to save you plenty of time,
1. Website visitors
2. Email and Messenger lists
3. Facebook fans
4. Lookalike audiences
Pro Tip: When saving your audience, use a specific name that you can easily recognize. This saves you from scratching your head trying to figure out which saved audience to use.
#5 Facebook Ads Placement
How you select your ads placement will affect your advertising cost. Depending on where your audiences usually “hang out”, you only need to place your ads on Facebook and/or Instagram news feeds. The remaining options should be unchecked to save you from unnecessary ad spend.
While the rest of the options might bring business your way, it is not worth spending resources and time on them. Use the Pareto principle 80/20 rule and focus on the 20% that will bring in the majority of the conversions.
#6 Facebook Ads Budget: Always Go From Low to High
When you set your daily budget, remember to always go from a low to a high amount depending on how your ads campaign is performing. For instance, you can start off with $5 then increase your budget to $10 when you start seeing results (i.e. likes, comments, shares, link clicks, etc). It’s like rewarding a kid with sweets if he’s well behaved.
Pro Tip: If you don’t see results, tweak the ads one element at a time and try again.
You do not want to start an ad campaign with a higher amount then reduce it as this will also reduce the traction gained from the Facebook algorithm.
You do not want to start an ad campaign with a higher amount then reduce it as this will also reduce the traction gained from the Facebook algorithm.
Setup your Facebook Pixel to set your ad campaigns for success! Facebook pixel is a set of code that you place on your website to understand the actions people are taking on your website.
Facebook Pixel collects data that enables you to track conversions from ads so you can build custom audiences for future ad campaigns and remarket to people who have already taken some kind of action on your website.
There are 3 ways to set up your Pixel as shown in the image below,
You can learn more about Facebook pixel HERE.
#8 Remember to Use Ad Rotation to Fight Ad Fatigue
Facebook Ad Fatigue occurs when target audiences are shown your ad’s frequently. Your CTR (Click Through Rate) decreases as your Frequency rate (how many times it’s seen per user) increases resulting in an increase for your CPC (Cost Per Click). The image below by AdEspresso best describes this.
So, how often should you rotate your ads? Some experts suggest every week while some suggest every three days. It is best to ignore these rules of thumb and instead keep a close eye on your CTR and Frequency metrics instead because data speaks for itself.
Pro Tip: Keep in mind that the fewer people you target, the faster all of them will see your ads. Also the more money you spend, the faster you will cover all your audience.
You can use ad rotation to fight ad fatigue by creating more ad sets with different creatives (i.e. images) for the campaign and tweak it based on feedback from actual campaign data.
#9 Leverage On Custom and Lookalike Audiences
Both Facebook Custom and Lookalike audiences are advanced, powerful features that you can use to expand your ads to reach more potential customers. You can access your Facebook Ads Audiences HERE.
You can upload your email list to create a Custom Audience on Facebook and promote special offers to existing customers to increase your lifetime customer value and customer loyalty.
Once you have a Custom Audience with good sales conversion, you can create a Lookalike Audience to expand your reach and target potential new customers. If you don’t have an email list, you can still create a Lookalike Audience with your existing Facebook page fan base or website (where your Pixel is being installed) traffic.
Pro Tip: When creating your Lookalike Audience, be sure to keep the audience size at 1% for a more accurate targeted audience.
#10 Exclude “Converted” Customers From Your Target Audience
Last but not least, this is another great way to expand your ad campaign’s reach without breaking the bank — by excluding “converted” customers from your target audience.
Think about it, would you ask your customer who recently bought a new set of kitchen knives to buy again the following day or week? Most probably not! Hence, you shouldn’t spend additional ad budget on displaying your ad to this person again.
You can create a Custom Audience of the people who visited a specific webpage (i.e. your thank you page) and exclude them from your ad campaign’s audience as shown in the screenshot below.
Final Thoughts
It is extremely important to optimize your Facebook ads. While the entire process involves a lot of A/B testings and learning from mistakes, it will save you a significant amount of resources and time in the long term. Run, analyze, tweak, and repeat the process until you have a winning campaign.
Remember to apply these hacks mentioned above and you will most certainly avoid a lot of costly mistakes and achieve success for your ad campaigns. If you have any other questions, feel free to comment below or drop me a message.
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