Facebook ad campaigns need constant attention and improvements to make sure you hit your target audience and overtake your competitors. So, you may be wondering what the most important features are when it comes to optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns?
Luckily Ben Givon has seven quick and easy tips to ensure that you make the most of your Facebook ad campaigns.
Likes and shares are the social proof of Facebook ads
What is social proof? Humans are social creatures, meaning that the way we behave and think is directly affected and influenced by the people around us. So, the process a consumer goes through to purchase something online is often influenced by social proof. Put simply, social proofs are customer reviews and testimonies which go through the buying process and evaluate whether the product or service is a good purchase or not.
Social proof is generally more influential in comparison to promotional branding because it comes across as a genuine recommendation from people who have already gone through the buying process and have some experience of the product.
Here are a few interesting stats taken from oberlo.com:
- 61% of customers read online reviews before choosing to buy a product or service
- Consumerist found that nearly 70 percent of online consumers look at a product review before making a purchase
- 91% of 18-34-year-olds trust online social proof reviews as much as recommendations from someone close to them
- 100% of those aged between 18-29 said they “checked reviews prior to making a purchase” in a 2018 eMarketer survey
- 82% of Americans say they value endorsements from friends and family before buying a product
- 70% of Americans seek out opinions from independent review sites before making purchases.
- 63% of consumers indicated they are more likely to purchase from a website with product ratings and reviews
The more likes and shares that a Facebook ad gathers the more engagement and influencing power it has. During the Facebook ad campaign setup process, there are two options to choose from: ‘Create New Ad’ and ‘Use Existing Post’.
The ‘Use Existing Post’ option allows users to cluster all the ad campaign’s interactions including comments, likes and shares into a single advert.
Fast Take-Off (FTO) technique
Sometimes it can take at least 48 hours before your Facebook ad campaign gathers an adequate amount of results for you to be able to start the process of optimization.
What does the fast take-off technique involve?
- With the launch of an ad campaign you could select a Daily budget that surpasses your prospective budget.
- Avoid using the Accelerated Delivery option because Facebook will direct most of its attention to how quickly the ads are delivered to the target audience as opposed to the cost and quality.
- Once your ad campaign gathers over 9 thousand impressions, you can start working at stripping the elements which aren’t working as well and optimizing those that are receiving high engagement levels. A great way to find out what does and doesn’t work for your ad campaign is split testing.
- Finally, once the ad campaign has launched and is receiving enough interaction you could reduce the Daily budget so that it meets your prospective budget.
Furthermore, with every alteration you make to your Facebook ad campaign you should wait at least 48 hours before you start making any judgements so that you can give Facebook a chance to alter the performance of your ad campaigns.
Pay attention to the timing of your ad schedule
Ben Givon says a key element of Facebook ad campaign optimization is making sure you keep track of the ad schedule. Use the Facebook Ads Manager breakdown to find out which time is most optimal for scheduling your Facebook ads.
In addition, ad scheduling is a great way to avoid saturating the social platform and making users indifferent to your ad campaign. Indifference towards Facebook ads, commonly known as banner blindness cripples both the cost per conversion and cost per click of your campaign.
Avoid repetitive ads that saturate users’ news feeds
‘As soon as the brain starts to understand that there are banners in a specific position of a website or identifies a design as a banner, it filters it out, as if it never saw it. Ouch! That’s clearly bad for our Click-Through rate.’
‘As your frequency goes up, your audience is being more and more exposed to your design and Banner Blindness will kick in reducing the effectiveness of your campaign, lowering your Click-Through rate, and increasing your CPC and CPA.’
Taken from adespresso.com
Ben Givon’s advice for avoiding banner blindness:
- Generate and develop a diversity of adverts using a range of Facebook ad designs.
- Schedule different style ads to appear at different times and days of the week so that you do not saturate the news feeds with the same ads.
By doing this, Facebook users will not see the same ad repeated, which will therefore reduce the risk of banner blindness.
Importance of ad placements
The placement of Facebook ads is directly correlated with the overall cost of advertising on the social media platform. Depending on the placement of your ads the cost per click rate can vary by more than 500 percent; with Instagram placements being the most expensive followed closely by desktop newsfeed, then right column placements, mobile newsfeed and finally audience network placements.
Use the Facebook Ads Manager to discover which ad placements are driving the most interest and engagement. Once you have drawn conclusions regarding the optimal ad placements for your campaign you can begin the optimization process by raising the bids on the most effective ad placements and by filtering out the less effective ad placements.
Split testing of Facebook ad campaigns
Split testing is a crucial method of optimizing Facebook ads as it unveils what is and isn’t effective within the campaign.
Ben Givon outlines the most important elements that should be focused on when split testing:
- The design of the ad.
- The content including headlines, CTA (call-to-action) buttons.
- Placements of ads.
- Ad campaign targets and aims.
However, a common mistake that marketers make involves split testing too many variables at the same time. For the most accurate results, you should wait until each ad campaign that you wish to split test gathers a minimum of 100 clicks or leads prior to assessing what is and isn’t working.
Optimize your ad campaign with Facebook Automated Rules
Facebook Automated Rules is a free tool accessible to social media marketers which gives them the ability to set automated custom settings. These include sending notifications, increasing and decreasing both the bidding and budget. This is useful because it allows marketers to divert their time and effort into developing new ideas for future campaigns and optimizing existing ad campaigns based on the results from split testing.
Ben Givon’s final say on the topic of Facebook ad optimization
Optimizing Facebook ad campaigns does not happen overnight; it is a repetitious cycle of experimentation and research and development. However, by following Ben Givon’s 7 tips to help enhance your Facebook ad campaign’s capabilities you will undoubtedly improve the speed and quality of the development process.
