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5 Tips for Optimising Facebook Ad Campaigns

Posted By Guest Blogger 28th of October 2015 Advertising 0 Comments

This is a guest contribution from Luke Moulton.

Blogging about something you’re passionate about? Chances are there are others just as passionate as you, and chances are, a high percentage of these people hang out on Facebook and share the stuff they’re passionate about. Using Facebook ads to reach your target audience can get people Liking and sharing your content, and kick-start your traffic if you’re just starting out.

If you’ve dabbled with Facebook ads and not seen much success or traction, here are a couple of techniques to try to improve performance.

1. Laser Focus on Your Target Audience

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make with Facebook ads is to go too broad with their audience targeting. You probably have a good idea of your target demographic. For example: new Mums living in Los Angeles. So when you setup a Facebook Ad Set, make sure you target your audience accordingly.

1-Facebook-Audience-Targeting

Recently I was helping an Australian e-commerce client with his Facebook ad campaigns. He has a range of items that are season and weather-dependent. Digging into his campaign,s I found that performance varied for cities in the north of the country compared to the south. Give it was winter in Australia at the time, he was wasting money trying to promote warmer climate items to those in the souther states (remember, we’re in the Southern Hemisphere). Segmenting his campaigns down into regions (such as cities or states) help him to target products according to the weather in that region.

2. Boost Facebook Posts that are already getting traction

You may already have a healthy bunch of Facebook followers who share and like your content. When you notice a new piece of content you’ve posted getting more traction than usual, this is a good indication that the content could be popular to a broader audience.

This is a great opportunity to broaden you follower base.

2-friend-of-people-who-like-your-page

The trick that will ensure you get maximum engagement for you spend is to boost your post to “Friends of people who like your page” AND share a similar interest to what you blog about.

Doing this means that the “Friends of people who like your page” will see a little social proof on the ads that appear in their news feed. And social proof is a powerful motivator.

3-social-proof

3. Test vastly different images

Facebook is a very visual medium and the right image can make a huge difference in engagement and clicks to your ads. When you setup a new campaign, make sure you test at least two different ads that are identical except for the image.

Try adding a call to action to your image, making sure you your copy takes up 20% or less of the image space, as specified in Facebook Ads terms and conditions.

4. Setup Facebook conversion tracking

Wether you’re building an email list or selling product, Facebook conversion tracking gives you the ability to see which audience segments convert better, therefore giving you the ability to focus on getting more of those people to your website.

Running a Facebook ads report with Conversion metrics will show you (for example) which age range are converting best.

4-running-reports

In the example above, Women aged 55-64 are converting the best and costing the least. If you see something like this as an on-going trend, it can be worthwhile separating this audience out into their own Ad Set so you can try to better tailor your ads to this demographic.

5. Rotate your ads

If you’re targeting the same audience on an ongoing basis, eventually they are going to get sick of seeing the same ads week in week out. Try to set a monthly schedule to refresh your ads, or focus more on promoting your better performing posts.

Luke Moulton is a digital marketer specialising in Facebook Ads campaign management. Checkout more tips on his blog at Plankton Digital.

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Optimizing Facebook advertising is still the most successful marketing strategy simply because it works. However, you mentioned that there are also other people having the same passion as mine – that’s very true. Thus, I should always think of innovative ways to ensure that I maximize the capabilities of Facebook to my business advantage. You mentioned about the target audience, tracking and all. But my favorite is the trick of using two identical ads with a different image to test which will work best. I would say that it is a simple but is surely an effective strategy.

  2. I get the idea of blogging on social media, but I always worry that people will thing my links to my site will come of ads and be ignored. What do you think is the best way to not get written off?

  3. Huge point on the laser focus Luke. I have done 1 FB ad campaign and flopped a bit because I lacked focus. Zero in. See your ideal viewer or customer. Build your ads around that avatar. If you can see that person you can cater something appealing to them. Persistence works well too; expect increasing returns by fine tuning your ads and through publishing FB ads on a regular basis. 1 or 3 ads does not a campaign make. Usually. Thanks for the helpful share Luke.

    Ryan

  4. Thanks for the tips, I’ve been so frustrated with Facebook lately!

    • Test vastly different images; this section is really effective so far I think. I already applied this.

  5. I like google adwords more as it provides audience that had typed particular search query but Facebook ads generally produce audience of least interest.

  6. Thanks for this. I like the idea of trying out different images and reposting the popular pieces. That makes a lot of sense. If anything Facebook becomes a great focus group!

  7. Facebook ads doesn’t work as good as adwords, people are not searching for a problem over facebook so that doesn’t seems to be working. According to me wider audience will reach more people thus will increase the chance for conversion.

  8. Dean Gebert says: 11/07/2015 at 12:10 pm

    Totally agree on testing new images/creatives.

    In a CPM campaign, our new (drastically) different carousel images just hit double digit CTR (11.1%), which translated to an 8-cent CPC.

    It led to our 4th highest app daily download and we only spent $137 that day.

    Dean…

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