How to optimise facebook ad campaigns? The basic goal for any facebook ad campaign is to find buyer audiences that can be scaled. What we are looking is for highly efficient audiences. And see whether these audiences are really converting. Winning audiences will be subjected to scaling. But before scaling occurs we have to optimise the ad as much as we can.
Optimising facebook ads is therefore an important step that all marketers should be doing. Finding the sweat spot of every campaign is the goal.
The Goal
The basic goal for any facebook ad campaign is to find buyer audiences that can be scaled. It’s that simple. You need to test a number of audiences with a specific offer and see if these audiences respond well to your offer and ad creative.
What is the meaning of good? Here is where you need to have some reference point. Most facebook marketers have no idea what the metrics of the funnel should be. Broadly speaking we need to target three metrics so it keeps in line with our conversion goals: click through rate, cost per click and squeeze page conversion rate.
But how to optimise an ad to achieve our goals? There are basically three stages.
Stage 1: Achieve the Goal
In the first stage of ad optimisation you are mainly concerned with achieving the conversion goal you aim. And this involves working on your offer and your ad creative – and see if the audience you picked is strong enough.
Most of the times, you have a good audience but your offer and ad creative sucks.
Reach and Impressions
Most people cut their ads too early whenever they do not see a conversion – be it in the form of a lead or a sale – they cut the ad too early. When you create your ad sets with different audiences you should at least create 3-5 different ads inside the ad set.
Here is the problem: if you assign a small budget to the ad set to start with they facebook will not have time to fully optimise your ad. You therefore need to allow facebook to give your ad a full chance of proving its worth.
What is meant by full chance? Well you need a minimum of 500 reach or between 1000-200 impressions. Only then, and if the ad is not performing, should you think it is time to cut it.
Not getting enough Clicks/Clicks costing Too Much – Improve CTR and CPC
When your CTR is not hitting the numbers you want it to hit you need to look at your three main things:
- Is your offer good enough?
- Is your ad good enough – text and images?
If you are confident with the offer, you will need to change your text and your images to they improve the click through rate.
But most of the time it is your offer that is underperforming. Either it just doesn’t hit what your audience/s are looking for or it is not enticing enough. Remember: a good offer/lead magnet needs to be something of incredible perceived value to your potential customer.
If you are not delivering this value then you will not improve your CTR.
Also, don’t forget to check the comments made on your ad. Sometimes this can be the cause of a drop in CTR.
Clicks but not getting enough Conversions
A good indicator of the quality of your landing page is the relevance score. This indicator is a really powerful one because it subjectively identify the connections between your ad and the landing page.
If you have a low relevance score, this basically means that there are improvements to be made in the landing page.
Is the creative in the ad directly related to what you are offering? Do you have grammar mistakes in the landing page? Do you have catchy title and is your offer good?
Sometimes if your have reasonable CTRs and CPC but the relevance score rates are diverging, it is time to look at your landing page!
Second Stage: Further Optimisation
Once you found your sweet spot in the ads your are running you can further drill down and look at key areas of optimisation. Namely:
- Look into Placements. Where is your ad performing better? Desktop or mobile?
- Look at Countries/Locations. What locations is it performing better?
- Look at Ages. Amongst what ages is it performing better?
These are just three areas that can be looked at when you are running facebook ad optimisation. You can go further in this analysis. By the end of it you will have a winning ad.
Third Stage: Focus on the Sweet Spot
This is the final stage of the optimisation process. Once you found the sweet spot of your ad, it is time to focus on what a certain audience really likes. You need to be broad enough in this selection yet with precise targeting.
Rinse and Repeat
In the beginning of this blog post it was written something like this “The basic goal for any facebook ad campaign is to find buyer audiences that can be scaled”. Now that you found a winning audience ready to be scaled, it is time to go back to the drawing board and find new audiences.
