Facebook connects billions of people around the world, it currently has a huge 1.49 billion active daily users, making it the biggest social media channel in terms of reach. This provides endless opportunities for brands to reach their target audience and generate sales, event sign-ups, applications - whatever the objective.
You can target audiences on Facebook Ads Manager with several different advertising formats, not to mention the endless criteria you can choose from. However, this isn't to say you can just put money behind content and expect good results. There is running ads, and then there's running ads intelligently. The difference with doing it intelligently is through constantly building on the process - learning and testing, and improving your strategy when you find what works for your brand.
This article is about the key Facebook and Instagram advertising optimisation tricks that can help you continuously improve your Facebook and Instagram ads and take your campaigns to the next level.
1. The first 10 seconds is key
Assume people will only read the first half of a sentence. Research shows the average human attention span is now 8.25 seconds, so it's crucial to ensure the first part of your content highlights the key message and action you want readers to take. In other words - write for a goldfish!
If people are not taking action on your ads, perhaps the creative needs adjusting. When uploading video content, be aware that on average people only watch around 15 seconds, so make sure your key message is during the first part of the video or post.
2. Think carefully about your ad structure
If you have a fairly big budget and a new piece of content - such as an engaging video, it might work well to start with a broader audience and roll with a 'brand awareness' campaign to generate reach and post engagements. A little bit of time after you can then launch a retargeting campaign with a different piece of content. This is the second phase of the funnel. Using a custom audience, such as people that engaged with the video in the first phase of your campaign, or website traffic from the last 30 days.
Usually, this retargeting phase is more direct and includes a clear call to action (CTA). You'll need a Facebook pixel to run a retargeting campaign, see below for more information.
3. Add a Facebook Pixel to your website to track all audience activity
Adding a pixel is key for understanding how your audience interacts with your Facebook and Instagram campaigns, and also to understanding web traffic. The pixel is set up via the Facebook Business manager, and by simply adding code to your website landing pages and once it's there you will be able to see exactly how many people are clicking through to your website, and how many people have interacted with your ads and page. See Facebook's foolproof guide to setting up a pixel here.
4. Use Lookalike audiences
The Facebook algorithm will target people based on previous customers and leads, and it's a great way to reach people that are similar to to your existing customers and followers. Using Facebook's Ad Manager, you can choose between a range of 1%-10% of the total population in your chosen target country, with 1% being those who most closely match your source. I would recommend starting with 1% so you can be as targeted as possible. You can also add detailed targeting such as interests and demographics if you want to drill the audience down even more.
5. Keep an eye on ad frequency
This is one of the most overlooked metrics on the Ads Manager dashboard. However, it's one of the most important, as it determines how many times people are seeing your ads. People are busy, and they are also inundated with ads on a daily basis. While in a dream world, you want people to see your product or service and take action there and then, this is not what happens in reality. Actually, people need to be reminded several times that you exist and that whatever you are promoting is available. With this in mind, you want to aim for an ad frequency above 1, but in my experience, anything over 12 is likely to be saturating the audience. However, some retail brands have been known to reach ad frequencies of 30,40 even 50. So it's important to find your optimum frequency and what works well for you.
6. Are your ads costing more than anticipated? Have you tried setting a manual bid cap?
When you're running campaigns be sure to monitor the cost per click (CPC). If you have your campaigns set up as Facebook auto-bidding it may actually be more cost-effective to think about a manual bid cap. This would differ depending on your campaign type - for example, if you were promoting a video to a new/cold audience you would perhaps want to spend no more than £0.50p per click (which Facebook recommends). However, if you are retargeting (so targeting a warmer audience) than this would cost more, as this audience has already engaged with your brand, so you may want to set a higher cap at £1.50 per click.
Please note that there are many factors that may cause expensive ads, such as competition and other brands targeting the same group. Another may be that your target audience is not reacting to your ads, so you may want to test a new audience or new ad creative. See more info below (number 8) on ad relevance.
7. Adjust audience sizes
When planning campaigns, use the Facebooks 'estimated results' function on Ads Manager. This will give you an idea of the reach and engagements you are expected to receive for your selected audience size and budget. Facebook recommends an optimal audience size of 100,000. This does depend on the budget you have set for your campaign, as if your budget is too big you will end up with an extremely high ad frequency, which could have a detrimental effect on both your CPC and campaign performance.
8. Keep an eye on relevance scores
Another overlooked metric on the Ads Manager. 5 is average and ideally, you want to aim for a high score of 6 or 7 as anything lower than 4 means that your ad creative is not resonating well with your target audience. Other things that affect this score are negative feedback - this is the number of people hiding or reporting the ad. So when your relevance score dips to the low levels, it's time to test some new content.
9. Reallocate your budgets accordingly
After 24 to 48 hours of a campaign launching, the campaigns would have finished the 'learning phase' and you will have a good idea of how your ads will perform in terms of reach and CPC. If you have multiple ad sets within different audience groups or placements, you may start to see a significant difference in performance between the different groups. Likewise, if you are running campaigns on multiple channels, one channel may be outperforming the other. In this case, it will be more cost-effective to adjust your budget to the best performing campaigns or adsets to ensure you get the maximum results.
10. Update content regularly
If you are running campaigns regularly, and especially if you have an ongoing retargeting campaign with smaller audience sizes - then it's crucial to change your creative as regularly as possible. Try using different formats such as videos, gifs and carousels (multiple image galleries) and change the creative every few weeks to avoid ad saturation.
11. Be careful not to compete with yourself
Unfortunately, this happens a lot more than you think. If you have two campaigns running at the same time, then you need to make sure there is no audience cross-over. If there is, you are essentially bidding with yourself, meaning that the CPC will be higher and the campaign performance will dwindle.
The best way to avoid this is by excluding audiences via the Ads Manager 'custom audiences' section. For example, if you are running a campaign targeting people that engaged with a video on your Facebook page and also people that visited your website, it's likely there will be crossover here, so exclude one list from the other so that you are not being charged twice.
12. Reach out to facebook
Lastly, be sure to utilise the Facebook Business functions available for businesses. There are lots of tips and articles on advertising. These resources are there, for free, so you should use them as much as you can to help you along the way! Visit the Facebook .business centre here.
Top Tips - Summary
1) Creat content for a goldfish - the first 10 seconds is key for stopping thumbs scrolling through their social feeds
2) Set up a Facebook pixel - and do retargeting (turning cold audiences in to warm)
3) Aim for a relevancy score of above 6
4) Keep an eye on ad frequency - how many times your audience is seeing your ads.
If you have any questions on any of the above or you would benefit from some social media consultancy, feel free to drop me a line any time at jesselderdigital@gmail.com
Thanks for reading!