For optimization process of Facebook ads campaigns you must need to know first your goal so that it can help you out to measure success. Here, in the first chapter we will discuss about the most common strategies which will help you to achieve your goal.
Generating sales
The most common goal of Facebook Advertisers is to driving more sales and it may also be the most complex to achieve this. Have you ever thought? Why we login into Facebook everyday? We can say , to connect with friends, colleagues, to know their activity what they are posting overthere. Or to make ourselves aware about what is happening around the world. So in the same manner, if you are selling a consumer product or you are going to sell a business product , it will make strive the users to pay the level of attention as they are giving on others.
As you know, companies are made of people, and there are millions of users who access Facebook everyday. Selling business to business product (B2B) on Facebook is tougher but not impossible.
Generating Sales for B2C Products
Type of Ads used: Page Post Ads
Business to consumer product are that, which directly connect to its consumers. Like housekeeping product, kitchen crockery etc. defining a Facebook Ads campaign strategy for such companies is not so tough, and you can easily achieve an amazing ROI also.
Consumers ultimately want to see the product image so you must keep in mind to show bigger image of your product on news feed. Placement is another important factor to consider.
Your goal- send traffic to your website or landing page to generate sales.
Ad’s Creative: Always use a professional pictures of your product adding human element alongwith it. It will somehow increase the number of clicks by gaining more attention from the users. Tell more about the benefits not the features. Send traffic to highly targeted landing pages so that users must see your product after clicking on the ad
Ad’s Targeting: Target your audience , if the product is for a gender specific , focus on it. If it is for an age specific , focus on it. You can grow interest to target competitors or interests related to your industry.
Pro Tip: you must always use Facebook conversion tracking. What you really want to measure is your Facebook Ads’ cost per conversion. Once you’ve got conversion tracking in place, oCPM is usually the best bidding method. Split test everything to find the right audience and design.
Generating Sales for B2B Products
Type of Ads used: Page Post Ads, Right-hand column Ads
As it was earlier discussed that achieving good results for Business oriented product (B2B) is quite tougher than B2C product but not impossible. Many B2B companies generate an amazing ROI (Return on investment) from Facebook Advertising with the right campaign strategy . Achieving results for business oriented products and services is tougher, but not impossible. In fact, many B2B companies generate an amazing ROI from Facebook Advertising with the right campaign strategy.
However, sometimes immediately selling a business product can be challenging. But you can just change your strategy. Instead of a sell you just try to aquire a new lead. You must try to make a connection with the users and for this purpose you can offer them something valuable for free like eBook, a quick consultancy call etc. Once you do this you can perform lead nurturing via email to convert them into customers.
Your Goal: Your ultimate goal is to generate sales for your product or establish trust in your brand and generate qualified leads.
Ad’s Creative: You can use pictures of people using your product or services .If this is not possible you can show that how their working life become much better after using your product or services. Must social validation like how much companies are using this . After that , highlight the value you are offering them for free once they click the ad.
Ad’s Targeting: While generating leads, the best way is to use precise interests targeting competitors and key media publications in your industry; this will allow to reach a broad target. If you have a broad network on Linkedin, you can also target your Facebook Ads to your Linkedin contacts.
Pro Tip: The best way to advertise B2B products on Facebook is on your news feed. However, once the users know your brand through freebies, you can retarget them through Custom Audiences and Custom Audiences from Website on the right-hand column. These ads are often cheaper than other and if the user recognize the brand, they will click on your ads even if they’re on the less visible right column.
Brand Awareness
Since beginning, generating Brand Awareness has been one of Facebook’s strengths. For a well known brand it is very easy to get a huge amount of likes and views on Facebook. While small brands can also quickly get thousands of likes as well. Which doesn’t sound so bad.
Here are the two most common Facebook campaign strategies you can use to make your brand a social rockstar.
More Likes for Your Page
Everyone thinks that getting a huge amount of likes on Facebook is an easy key to get social success. While now fake likes can be bought also. Reality is something different, likes can’t be said as the scale of measuring success on Facebook , but users who really get engaged and love your brand are the key success behind your seccess.
Nowadays one can easily get a hundred and thousands of likes on their post but only a few of them actually see that what you post.
That’s why many brands today have simply stopped doing advertising to get page likes but instead of this they prefer directly promoting their page’s posts. On the other hand it is also true that advertising to get page likes is still relevant but quality must be focused rather than quantity.
Your Goal: Acquire likes ONLY from highly targeted people.
Ad’s Creative: Must show your logo if you’re a recognizable brand. It will put a more impact on users. Never exaggerate with your content words what you are writing about your product. Don’t try to lure the people by offering free giveaways to get more like.
Ad’s Targeting: Similar interests or competitors, Custom Audiences to get your customers or newsletter subscriber to follow you on Facebook.
Pro Tip: While you are promoting to acquire likes, never include the people who are already fans of your page. Displaying advertisements to them is nothing but wasting your money. Try to target the friends of your fans , it can work well.
More Engagement for Your Posts
For getting more engagement on your posts, the most important thing is to generate brand awareness among the people. You can do this by posting interesting content about you and make sure that it will reach to your audience.
There’s no secret tip or golden rule here — you can make a conversation with the people but in a good manner. You must follow the etiquettes of talking and listening as well. Do experiment by posting interesting links, videos and whatever they likes. Make them engage. Never publish an endless series of links to your products and websites. It can bother others.
Your Goal: Engage your audience with letting them like, share, and comment on your posts. Seed your viral content with paid advertising and then let word-of-mouth spread your content across the globe.
Ad’s Creative: Use great pictures and for this you need to be extremely visual. Ask audience to comment or share. Always be yourself, be personal, be original and most importantly have fun with this.
Ad’s Targeting: Start advertising to your fans to ensure all of them see your message. Fake people must not be considered.
Pro Tip: It’s very hard to predict what will work and what won’t among your audience. You just launch the content, observe organic response, and start promoting it with a small amount (from $5 to $100 according to how big your page is). After that you can spend more on content t more share and comment to viral effect. always monitor comments, and respond quickly.
Mobile App Install
Mobile is one of the hottest markets for Facebook Advertising and usage, revenues, and engagement are all surging. Facebook now has more than 1 billion mobile users — nearly the same number it has on desktop, not counting Instagram and WhatsApp! In the last quarter, Facebook generated 59% of all the advertising revenues, up from a mere 30% the previous year. Long story short, it’s no surprise that mobile advertising is huge on Facebook.
However, as the platform matures and more advertisers embrace it, prices are going up. While in 2012 you could literally pay pennies for an app install, nowadays the average CPI in US is around $3. Picking the right Facebook campaign strategy to boost your mobile business has become a must if you want to break even.
Getting More Installs for Your App
Once prepare your App and it is ready and published on the Appstore, the first thing you want is to create a decent user base. You should also try to increase you App rank on App Store. You can try to trigger some viral effect to get on the Top 10. With the ever-increasing prices of Mobile App Installs, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll manage to get a top ranking just with paid advertising. Now you need to immediately implement Facebook event tracking. Right now, you want more users.
Your Goal: Get as many app installs as you can at a reasonable price and start gathering data to further optimize your strategy based on ROI with time.
Ad’s Creative: App screenshots tend to work well if you have a nice looking app. If you’re promoting a game on your App, use a short claim challenging the user to solve the puzzle or engage with their friends. If it’s not a game, try to add a human element, such as someone using the app.
Ad’s Targeting: If your app requires a big download (is big in MB), target only users who are connected on a WiFi network. Start targeting people with the most recent version of iOS or Android since they’re more likely to be early adopters. Match the creative’s shown device with the device targeted (ie: picture of an iPad shown only to iPad users). If you have launched similar apps before or have a website presence, use Custom Audiences to target your other apps or website users.
Pro Tip: Keep an eye on Facebook’s recently launched “Facebook Audience Network” which will allow you to run ads not only inside Facebook, but also on the mobile App using other person. It could allow you to get cheaper installs, more targeted advertising, and it’s also a potential source of revenue for your app.
Increase App’s Usage and Profits
You can’t consider yourself successful once users install your App. It is the first step of your success. Users install the App through Facebook or other channel is easiest goal to achieve. According to recent stats, only 22% of downloaded apps get used more than once.
Your Goal: Get users who already installed your mobile app to use it again or engage active users also and have them complete the desired action like in-app purchases.
Ad’s Creative: They already know you since they’ve installed your app, so using your brand in text or in picture form can be very effective. So try to be as specific as possible. Don’t promote your generic value proposition. Show the users the it’s benefits, and link directly to the page inside your app where they can purchase it.
Ad’s Targeting: The best way to target this kind of ad is through Custom Audiences for mobile apps. track users who have not completed your onboarding flow to have them complete the signup, and so on. Keep in mind that you’ll need some help from your development team to add the tracking inside the app.
Pro Tip: Define the key steps that each user should do inside your app to get addicted. For each step, create the appropriate event tracking. Set-up multiple mobile custom audiences and ads’ designs to target each step. And also create multiple campaigns to get the target engaged.
There no any magical wand which can help you to get success in Facebook advertising with no effort. There is only way to promote your product is a lot of hard work and testing. we’ll discuss here how to successfully perform Facebook Ads split testing.
What is an A/B Test ?
A/B testing is also known as split testing. This is a method by which you find out the proper ad headlines, body copy, images, call-to-actions, or a combination of the above work best on your target audience. It is all about the ad design, that how creative , attractive and impactful you design. Demographic profile of your audience must be keep in mind while you design your ad.
There are endless opportunities for testing Facebook Ads: Titles, texts, links, images, age, gender, interests, locations, and so on.
Facebook Ads Split Test: Can you imagine manually creating 100 ads on the Facebook Ads Manager? It would take forever! Even if you did it, you’d still have to deal with an analytics interface not meant for analyzing all of this data!
This leaves you with two options: Either create smaller experiments with four or five variations or use an external Facebook Ads Manager specifically designed for A/B testing.
Overall, once you start dealing with a budget higher than $2,000 per month, our suggestion is to go for an external Facebook Ads tool that will make your life easier by saving both time and money.
What to test in Facebook Ads and how?
When you think of a Facebook Ads split test, the most critical decision is what you want to test. It’s a hard pick as the options are virtually endless:
Possible Ads’ Design Tests: In this section you test title, image, text, landing page, link description, call to action, placement.
Possible Ads’ Targeting Tests: In this section you test country, city, language, age, gender, relationship status, precise interests, behaviors, advanced demographics profile, custom audiences, mobile devices, school, work, title, and many more.
Particularly if you’re on a tight budget, it’s critical to pick the right elements to test. We want to start with those experiments that are likely to have the biggest impact on our ROI.
Let’s define a framework to plan your first few rounds of experiments.
- Exclude useless experiments: This is strictly related to your business. If you’re selling beauty products for women, you won’t need to test the other gender as you want to advertise only to women.
- 2. Define two macro experiments: Don’t overdo it — start with only a couple experiments. For example, test two or three different pictures and the gender. In your first round of A/B tests, you want to be disruptive: Test very different variations. It’s pointless to test the same image with white and grey background since the impact will be marginal. Instead, test two totally different images, such as one photo with a human and one with an illustration. You could also highlight different value propositions. The same applies to most of the elements you can test. It’s pointless to start testing age ranges like 18-19 versus 20-21. Instead, try 18-40 versus 41-80.
- Split test different elements and fine tune existing ones: Once your first round of Facebook Ads split tests have generated results and you have a winner, still there is no time to rest. Now it’s time to test new factors such as interests and titles, while still using a disruptive approach and fine tuning new, more granular experiments than previously tested. If you saw that people aged 18-40 are performing much better, you can now refine the experiment testing on over age people.
- Never stop testing: Once you’ve found the perfect combination of ads’ design and target audience… well it’s time to start testing again! Scale the budget on what’s working but, at the same time, start testing everything from scratch. Test totally different images, texts, interests, and so on. Remember, when dealing with Facebook Advertising, the lifespan of a design or target should be pretty short. Because athey will start ignoring them. Always keep testing so when the moment comes, you’ll be ready to scale the budget on a brand new campaign.
Now it’s time to go to make your plan your first experiment — the sooner you start, the better edge you’ll have over your competitors.
To jumpstart your experiments, we did a quick analysis on more than $3 million in Facebook Ads A/B tests that have been managed through AdEspresso. Here are the factors testing impacted in terms of customer campaign performance:
Countries
Precise Interests
Mobile OS
Age Ranges
Genders
Images
Titles
Relationship Status
Landing Page
Interested in
Have fun testing!
Using AdSets for a relevant split test
For an accurate split test there is one fundamental building block: The distribution of impressions or budget must be even among all the experiments you’re running.
It’s pretty hard to understand what’s working better for you among two different pictures if one received 100,000 impressions and the other one 1,000. There would be no statistical relevancy.
Unfortunately, this is the exact behavior you can expect from Facebook Ads: Facebook quickly picks a favorite ad that will receive most of the impressions and budget while all other advertisements will receive too little exposure to be seriously compared. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Fear not! Facebook (partially) listened to the complaints and recently restructured the campaign’s structure to make it more simple to run a reliable Facebook Ads split test. With the introduction of AdSets, you can now allocate your advertising budget in a more granular way. Instead of having a common budget shared by all the ads of the campaign, you can now create groups of ads (called AdSets), each with a dedicated budget. Exactly what we needed!
The results are amazing. Let me show you some data from two identical AdEspresso’s campaigns, one running A/B tests with multiple AdSets and one without:
Facebook Ads Split Test Country AdSets
Spent distribution in a country split test with multiple AdSets
Wonderful! Every country had nearly the same budget spent for our test with multiple AdSets. Let’s see the AdEspresso reporting for the same campaign created without AdSets:
Facebook Ads split test country no adsets
Spent distribution in a country split test with no AdSets
This is an awful and totally inconclusive A/B test. United States alone got more than all the other three countries together! France and the UK received such a small percentage of the budget they likely generated just a couple of conversions. This is not enough information to find a winner for our test!
Facebook’s best practice would be to create an AdSet for each demographic targeting you’re testing (i.e. one for males 18-25, one for females 18-25, one for males 25-35, and one for females 25-35). While we generally agree, if your main focus is split testing the ads’ designs, we’d suggest you to create one AdSet with a dedicated budget for each design element you’re testing.
The right budget for Facebook Ads split testing
Now the question arises that what’s the right budget to run a split test?
The answer? It depends. While in theory you can create a split test of hundreds of ads with as little as $5 per day, this means you would wait for a months before getting result.
However here are some basic suggestions to setup a good budget for your Facebook Ads split tests:
- Create a small campaign either in CPC or oCPM with no tests in order to understand an average Cost Per Conversion.
- Once you have a basic Cost Per Conversion, set up your split test. Ideally, you want to allocate a budget big enough to allow each ad to receive at least 20 conversions. So, if you’re testing five pictures and your cost per conversion is $2, you want to have a budget of $200 .
- There are several constraints that you’ll need to respect in terms of budget. For example, when bidding on CPC, your AdSet must have a budget at least 2x the highest ad’s bid. In addition, each AdSet must have at least $1 budget.
Overall, the general suggestion is to not overdo. It will be pointless to create hundreds of experiments inside a single campaign unless you have thousands and thousands of dollars in budget. Start with micro experiments, testing only few elements and give them a reasonable budget.
You’ll want to start optimizing your campaign fast — it’s extremely helpful to get quick and reliable results for a few important split tests rather than running a long campaign to have results for hundreds of different tests all together.