Discover some of the best practices for insanely successful Facebook ads via LeadBytes in-house performance marketing experts.
Creatives are an essential part of user acquisition that often gets overlooked. Optimized creatives combine two crucial dimensions that have an impact on your conversion. Marketers can test many creative elements in their banner ads – from value propositions to taglines to images and styling – so it can be hard to understand where to start. When followed, these methods can reduce the time needed to optimize your creatives!
Set up a split test campaign that tests your best creative with five variations of primary text, with every other factor of the creative remaining consistent (same headline, description and call to action). Run this test for at least 1-2 weeks. Doing this will allow you to discover what primary text works for your chosen audience based on your click through rate (CTR). The higher the CTR percentage, the more engaging your primary text is. For each variation to have a fair chance, it's important to put each creative in an individual ad group so you can allocate a set budget for each version of the creative. By assigning each creative a stand-alone budget, you are forcing Facebook to give it a fair shot rather than the algorithm making assumptions and favouring specific creatives over others.
Once you have identified your best creative and primary text, you can test your best headline, keeping the Creative and Primary Text the same but testing 10 different headline variations. You can then follow this same process for your creatives, description and CTA, eventually finding your best possible variation for each segment, ensuring you're putting your best foot forward.
You are putting all your eggs in one basket by relying on one campaign if a competitor launches a new campaign with a big budget, you could find your most successful campaign down in the dumps with wild CPMs; as a result, it's essential to have a Plan B. This Plan B could be to do the ever-popular quick fix of duplicating your best campaign to keep your ads fresh in facebooks mind. After the testing strategy mentioned previously has been implemented, you'll reduce ad fatigue and freshen up the ads' primary text/headline/description/CTA with the latest winners of your test campaigns.
Tracking your cost, revenue and ROI in real-time is vital in enabling you to make decisions in real-time, as not all duplicated campaigns will perform and be left to run throughout the day. Not tracking your campaigns' cost, revenue and ROI, you would be taking a shot in the dark and risking overspending with potentially poor returns. Whilst monitoring the live cost, revenue and ROI, you can launch multiple large-scale campaigns at the start of the day and turn off the underperforming campaigns in real time. This process ensures that there's zero spending and thus guarantees you only run profitable campaigns. Your real-time dashboard is a crucial tool enabling you to identify when it is best to turn off these campaigns, such as poor cost per result, negative profit/ROI, low CTR, etc.
When deciding on ads, ad groups and campaigns to turn off, you may be inclined to optimise your ads on what meets the eye on the Facebook ads interface. This is a considerable risk. Instead, source an external software that tracks your leads' validity and sold rates. What may look like it's underperforming on Facebook may be generating the highest percentage of valid information and selling every tip to your buyer(s), consequently making you the most profit. Fortunately, Facebook allows you to post feedback, allowing your dashboard columns to show valid, sold, revenue, profit, and Return on Investment ROI, giving you a singular hub of data to make the most informed decisions in real-time.
Once you have third-party software tracking your valid and sold leads, as previously discussed, you would then have the power to create audiences based on your sold leads. By targeting sold leads, you can hone in on your desired audience, which will convert at a higher percentage.
Go broad & bold with your targeting and budget. There’s no denying it. Facebook rewards those that like to spend the big bucks. The more you spend, the more Facebook will reward you regarding your market share in the highly competitive Facebook ads landscape. If you are confident in your creatives and have tested as described earlier, putting your best foot forward, then going bold with your budget should help put you ahead of your competition. The broader your audience on Facebook, the more likely you are to gather the market research required to find your desired audience.
Using external tools such as Google Analytics, you can hone in on an audience you may not have seen going narrow with your targeting, ensuring these leads convert and sell. The more information your pixel gathers with this strategy, the brighter it will become. It is worth trusting Facebook on this one. They want you to keep spending and know you won’t if you are not seeing your desired results. Therefore they will find the diamonds in the rough for you when searching through your broad audience.
If your offer isn’t something with mass appeal, you may see going broad and bold as a big risk, especially with a limited budget. That’s understandable. In this scenario, you can ensure you are being precise with your targeting by layering. Layering combines multiple facebook interests, behaviours, etc., and selecting them all to be present to find your audience. When selecting interests on Facebook, users often look to create as broad of an audience as possible, so choose to include the ‘or’ option when selecting interests to target.
Imagine you sell protein powder and choose to target Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘or’ bodybuilder 1 ‘or’ bodybuilder 2. You will often find that your audience is built up of Arnold enthusiasts who may not be interested in your protein powder. Suppose you were to apply Layering and ensure all these conditions are met in your audience, so they are interested in Arnold Schwarzenegger AND’ bodybuilder 1 ‘AND’ bodybuilder 2. Therefore, the user likely has a passion for bodybuilders and will be more likely to give your protein powder a second look. This could result in a higher cost per result; however, it should yield higher conversion rates and more sales due to a more targeted audience. You can ultimately determine how this backs out for you with the right tracking in place, removing the shot-in-the-dark guesswork you may have previously experienced.