Improving
Facebook Ad
results
Learn Facebook Ads in five steps
Step five - improvements
Experimenting, testing, measuring, and improving ads should be the key focus of running effective Facebook ad campaigns (or any other type of paid ad strategy).
Whilst there are various strategies for improving ad performance, remember to be patient when updating campaigns. Due to iOS14 changes, data can be delayed which may lead advertisers to believe ads aren’t generating website traffic or conversions.
Avoid making day-to-day changes and checking your campaigns every hour. Allow Facebook adequate time to optimise campaigns and performance before you start making major changes.
Even if ads appear to be underperforming, Facebook is still gathering data (in this case, discovering what isn’t working).
When making changes you can try out different media types (images, videos, headlines, copy etc), different audiences, different budgets, different placements etc. Ensure your making changes within ABO testing campaigns, not CBO scaling campaigns. Once you’ve found what works really well, use those insights to build more effective ads in future.
If you find a campaign, ad set or ad is performing exceptionally well, leave it alone. Let it continue to perform well and avoid making changes to creatives, audiences, settings etc in search of additional performance and results. There is no need to micromanage or alter high-performing campaigns.
Tip
Remember to change only one thing at a time when testing ads. If you change images, copy and audiences all together and ad performance suddenly improves, it can be difficult to know what caused the improvement. If testing creative changes, keep the original audience the same.
Scaling Facebook ads for greater performance:
Scaling Facebook ads is the process of improving the reach of well performing ads so you can achieve an even greater number of results. Scaling can be done vertically (increasing the budget) or horizontally (adding new campaigns, ad sets and targeting).
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When comparing horizontal and vertical scaling, vertical is the preferred option as it keeps variables the same (e.g. good performing ads, effective audiences etc). The only major change is the budget.
Tip
You don’t want to test and scale at the same time (meaning changing variables and budgets simultaneously), if you see improvements in your campaign, you won’t be sure where the positive results came from.
When scaling campaigns, it’s important to only include your best performing ads and creatives. Don’t include as many ads as you can, only your best performers. Usually only three to four ad sets will be included within a CBO scaling campaign.
When moving well-performing ad sets and creatives into a scaling campaign, CBO is usually the preferred budgeting method. These ad sets have demonstrated strong performance during an initial ABO testing campaign and can now be moved across to a dedicated CBO scaling campaign.
ABO is usually reserved for testing, not scaling, as adding a $60 budget evenly across three ad sets helps maintain consistency and fairness. If CBO was used for testing, the $60 may be unevenly spread across the three ad sets skewing the results.
Whilst vertical scaling can be achieved by adding more money to the budget, you need to ensure the cost per result does not exceed your target cost per result.
For example, if your profit margin allows for a CPR of $50, a conversion cost cannot exceed that $50. Higher budgets can mean more expensive CPR’s. When you first start with a smaller budget, Facebook is targeting the cheapest and most responsive people in the audience (a limited number). The more money spent, the more people Facebook needs to find – the responsive group gets smaller and smaller.
A lower CPR isn’t necessarily best, higher costs are OK if resulting volume and sales are much higher. Many advertisers make the mistake of turning off one ad set if the cost per result is much higher than another ad set. This first ad set, however, may be providing a much greater number of conversions through a higher quality audience.
If you choose to scale vertically, you want to slowly scale up the budget up each week (e.g. $100 extra a week if you’re already spending $500) until you reach the point where your CPR becomes too high. Daily budgets can make scaling ad sets easier.
If you have a successful Facebook ad campaign that you want to scale, there are a few general rules to follow:
1. Make sure you have some room between your actual cost per result and your target cost per result, because your cost per result will almost always go up during the scaling process.
2. You can scale at much higher percentages earlier on in the process.
3. Give each daily spend increase a week to settle in before changing it again.
4. If your cost per result becomes higher than try lowering your spend rather than turning off your campaign.
5. You can scale again after a few weeks if your cost per result starts to go down.
One best practice when running, and improving, Facebook ads, is to be patient. Facebook needs time to optimise campaigns and find users who will respond the best to your ad creatives. Before moving ads from a testing campaign to a scaling campaign, ensure the testing campaigns can sustain their performance over additional time.
For example, an ad may initially start delivering conversions early on leading an advertiser to begin scaling the campaign. This performance, however, may drop off after a few days. Ensure any ads moved to a scaling campaign will be able to sustain performance over a longer time period, not just the first few days of the campaign. Some ad specialists will wait until they have at least 75 conversions (depending on the brand/campaign) before scaling.
The Facebook Power 5 approach:
Facebook have created guidelines to maximizing campaign and ad performance by using five key approaches when building campaigns:
- Auto advanced matching
- Simplified account structure
- Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO)
- Automatic placements
- Dynamic ads
By integrating these approaches into their campaigns, advertisers are able to leverage Facebook’s AI system to its full potential. This means advertisers don’t need to rely so heavily on testing and optimisations and can use Facebook’s own intelligence to automatically improve campaigns.
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Automated Facebook Ad rules:
Facebook ads can be managed and improved by using Facebook’s automated rules.
These rules help save time as you don’t need to manually review and make changes to ads every day. Generally, automated rules are for larger, more advanced advertisers with large budgets as these rules can become complex to set up and manage.
Smaller advertisers may prefer to make campaign changes directly through Ads Manager as ad accounts contain a more manageable group of campaigns, ad sets and ads.
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Rules have three main components: what the rule will apply to (campaigns, ad sets and ads), what actions make up the rule (what will happen) and conditions (what requirements need to be met before the rule will activate).
Rules can be run continuously (every 30 minutes) or set to a certain time period (e.g. day of the week or time). A schedule can be useful if you determine ads are most profitable at, say, nighttime as more people are using Facebook. This can result in your ads not being shown during the day and saving more of the budget for night.
Examples of automated rules include:
Turn off if performance is too low
If an ad set has spent more than $100 but has not resulted in any conversions, the set will turn off.
Turn off if price per action is too high
If the cost per acquisition, app install or conversion event is too high (e.g. above $10), the campaign will turn off. This can be useful when you have a limit on how much a conversion can cost before you start becoming unprofitable when selling a product (i.e. the cost base becomes too high).
Increase budget spend if performance is doing well
If an ad set achieves more than a certain number of conversions (at a certain price point) which indicates a low competition (i.e. cheap conversions) day, the rule will have a campaign automatically spend more.
There is also an option for rules to not activate but to send a notification instead (i.e. an email). This is useful so you can firstly manually review ad performance and then decide if a rule/change should activate.
Resource
If you’re interested in learning more advanced strategies for advertising on Facebook, Jon Loomer runs a very good blog.
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Using Facebook Ads with a fully integrated digital strategy
A smart approach to Facebook Ads won’t focus on Facebook in isolation but will use each channel within the wider digital strategy to improve overall performance of Facebook campaigns and ads.
Using other channels to improve
the performance of Facebook ads
How Facebook Ads can be improved by:
SEO:
Retargeting website users can be one of, if not the, best audiences in terms of results. If a website has minimal traffic, few people can be retargeted on Facebook meaning most ads are targeted towards a completely cold audience. The more traffic and users a website receives, the greater the potential audience size for remarketing efforts and lower costs with higher results.
Attracting additional traffic to a website can also help improve the quality of lookalike and custom audiences as Facebook now has more data to work with.
Organic blog posts/content which have performed particularly well (in terms of receiving traffic from Google) can be used to promote your brand further via Facebook ads. If SEO traffic is strong, this indicates both Google and users find value and use from the content (i.e. it solves a problem).
These content-based ads can perform better than standard sale-focussed ads as people already see value in what is being promoted (i.e. the content can help them rather than an intrusive ad just trying to make a sale).
Sending users to a website with a poor user experience is an almost certain way to lose initial traffic. SEO should ensure your website loads quickly for ad traffic, is easy to understand and navigate and provides a clear call-to-action once users are on your site.
Google Ads:
You can use Google Ads to generate highly valuable traffic to your website (i.e. they have arrived through commercial/purchase-intent keyword searches). These users may purchase, sign up to an email list, submit their details for a callback etc. These types of users are considered extremely valuable to a business so a lookalike audience can be created on Facebook using these Google Ads visitors as a base.
Highly relevant and commercial-intent traffic from Google ads can also help season the Facebook pixel by providing more data.
Perhaps many younger users visit informational content pieces on the website but it’s actually older users who end up viewing bottom-of-funnel content (e.g. features and benefits of products) and who ultimately end up purchasing.
If you create a lookalike audience of the younger visitors, you may be able to reach these types of users on Facebook, but they may not purchase. The better option is to create a lookalike of audiences who are most likely to purchase/convert – such as older users who arrive through commercial focused Google ads. Having a dedicated sales page (with the Facebook pixel installed) can help act as the basis for building highly-valuable lookalike audiences. If users visit the website and jump from page-to-page, it can be difficult to track where the most valuable audience is based.
You can also use Facebook ads to retarget users who clicked on a Google ad (they may be ready to buy) but didn’t purchase or signup. When setting up Google ad campaigns, you can set up UTM tracking parameters or, if using Google’s auto-tagging, the destination URL will have a Google click ID (gclid=, within the URL). If using the Facebook pixel, these pages and users can be added to a Facebook campaign and retargeted.
By looking at high performing Google ads (i.e. strong click through rate, conversions etc), you can use similar ad copy to help create copy for your Facebook ads.
Social Media:
Due to iOS14 changes, it can be challenging to retarget website visitors via Facebook ads. A new approach is to retarget users who have previously engaged with past ads, page posts or other activity which is carried out on Facebook (opposed to an external site).
A strong Facebook business page with content which is tailored to both providing value for users and maximising organic reach (i.e. by understanding how the algorithm works), has the greatest chance of building a strong audience which can be retargeted in future.
These highly engaged audiences can also be the basis for creating lookalike and custom audiences for future ad targeting.
Community groups can also be a place to share content and direct users back to a business profile (providing this content is almost purely focussed on helping them rather than being salesy or pushy). Once these users have engaged with your profile (e.g. viewing a video), they can be retargeted with future ads.
Users don’t always click on external links on ads, sometimes they prefer to look at the page which has created the ad before they leave Facebook. Having a strong Social profile can help build trust when users click on your brand name and view your business page.
You can use existing organic posts as the basis for creating a paid ad. This is managed through Ads Manager, not through the boosting function, and keeps existing organic engagement on the post. This can help the ad appear more natural within the news feed. The existing engagement provides a sense of social proof as to the post quality (i.e. not just an ad pushing a sale) which can help stop people scrolling (i.e. they want to see what other people are commenting on).
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eDM’s:
A strong email list (i.e. a large number of subscribers, kept free of unengaged people, high lifetime value customers) can be used to create both custom and lookalike audiences on Facebook.
A custom audience can be used to directly target users on the email list (providing they have a Facebook account and have signed up with the same email address).
A lookalike audience can use the email list as a basis for identifying users with similar characteristics who will, ideally, also become paying customers.
By using high-LTV customer lists, you’re providing Facebook with the best quality data for finding potential customers who are most likely to convert. Providing a list of all customers, for example, may result in Facebook finding users similar to those customers who only purchased once or had a small order total (e.g. less than $20).
Analytics:
Analytics can be used to measure the engagement rates (i.e. time spent on page, bounce rate etc) of users who visit the website via an ad on Facebook.
If these users quickly leave the site, there may be a disconnect between what they thought the ad would deliver vs what they actually received once on the site. Maybe they were interested in the product but found the price too high. Adding the price to the Facebook ad copy in future can help deter unwanted costly clicks from these types of users.
Analytics can also provide insight into targeting options through demographic, affinity and in-market audiences.
You can use analytics to view conversion data broken down by age, location, interests etc. This can help with targeting options on Facebook but also with creating ads (e.g. if older users are converting more, the creatives and tone used in the ad should be tailored more towards this group).
Device use reports within Analytics can also help when determining placements and creative developments for Facebook ads. Developing ad creatives only suitable for desktop viewing will cause issues if the majority of your traffic is on mobile.
This concludes step five of learning Facebook Ads (improving campaign results). In the next section (Google Ads), we’ll cover how Search Ads can provide even greater targeting options for reaching users online. We’ll also discuss how to use this medium to identify and attract users who are near the end of their customer journey and are ready to buy.
Learn digital marketing in five steps
