Many businesses fail to benefit from Facebook because they do not understand how the platform works and formulate a strategy aligned with business requirements. Let us look at the most critical steps to follow.
1. Be clear about what your campaign wants to achieve
The Facebook delivery system considers the end-user value; in other words, what people would like to see and interact in the context of your desired outcome. Even though the goal of any business sales or leads, you must break it down to more specific objectives. Facebook has many campaign objectives from awareness, consideration to decision. So, choose an objective which best delivers your goal. This information helps Facebook to match your ads with the right people.
2. Using constraints to guide the bidding strategy and control cost
Bid based on your willingness to pay for conversion after you calculate the break-even point or specific return on ad spend need for profitability
For instance, your optimization event is a purchase. You know you make $20 profit if you keep the cost of purchase is $150 or less. Then you can set a high budget if you pair it with a bid cap or cost target of $150 or less. If you profit from sales, you want to maximize the number of transactions with this control.
Eventually, the campaign might reach saturation and run out of new purchases or the creative might stop working, but this approach is preferred than you are missing out on profit due to low budget.
3. Select broader targeting options or select targeting expansion
Since you have many targeting options available, you may tend to hyper-target and end up with a too specific audience. We must remember that we are working with machine learning algorithms, and they need enough data to build a model. When the reach is too narrow, the system does not gather data to learn.
Therefore, it is best practice to create a defined audience at least to start with and monitor the result as you go for further optimization. The Facebook system can connect many data points to identify a customer who is likely to interact and complete your desired outcome than what you can humanly determine.
4. Optimization towards the highest intent event that has enough data
If you want to optimize for conversions, Facebook needs a minimum number for the best result. Usually, Facebook needs about 50 conversions per week. It is because the delivery system needs data points to find people who likely to take actions your ad set is optimized for.
What if you do not have enough data? Consider using common events. For instance, if you optimize for online sales and you do not have enough sales, then optimize for add to cart instead.
5. Let Facebook optimize your placement
The recommended practice is that choosing automatic placement when you create the campaign. It allows Facebook to explore all available placements and show your ads to the right people at the right time in the proper format. It helps you to bring the cost down and improve return on ad spend. But you should have a wide range of creative assets (format) to suit more placements.
6. Relevancy and user experience matter
When delivering ads, Facebook tries to balance two factors which are advertiser value and customer value. After the ad is served more than 500 times, it receives daily relevancy score factoring positive and negative feedback it receives. If the ad performs well, it has a higher relevancy score. Few things to consider improving the relevancy.
- Where are my customers?
- Demographics of my customers?
- What languages do they speak?
- Am I excluding strategically?
If you do not have definitive answers to these or unsure, use Audience Insights to inform about your target audience and refine your creative and messaging.
I hope these tips spark some new ideas to improve your existing campaigns or to consider for next campaign. However, Facebook is a very advance and robust platform, and it is highly recommended that you hire a Blueprint Certified Professional or agency to manage your Facebook campaigns to benefit to the potential. RISING Digital has accredited specialist to help you with any business objective.
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