How Hard Can Facebook Ads Be?
The Scenario:
Your company wants to leverage its social media presence in order to increase awareness of the brand and drive traffic to its website. Since it’s a smaller business, you take it upon yourself to run a few Facebook ad campaigns. Though you’ve never done it before, you think “how hard can it really be?” So you build an audience based on your best customer and create a couple ads with a catchy photo and headline.
A month or two later you see that there hasn’t been a significant increase in page engagement or traffic to your website. There’s also a lot of data provided about the campaign but you’re not sure what a lot of it means or how you can improve results. On top of all that, you don’t really know what exactly you achieved.
At this point you’re probably wondering if your time and money were just wasted. You might even be thinking that Facebook ads “just aren’t for me.”
Creating Variables Within Your Facebook Ads
The Problem:
When businesses come to us who have already tried running ad campaigns, almost for certain, their mistake was to assume they had it right the first time. Generally, they ran with the minimal amount of ad sets and ads and watched to see what would happen.
However, there’s no way to predict the success of an ad campaign.
This kind of approach is like running blind. By not testing or making modifications throughout the campaign, there’s no way to tell whether it could have performed better, or what specific criteria would have made it better.
If you’re trying to drive real business-oriented results in a specific amount of time, this approach is not going to cut it.
There needs to be a way to determine if, or how successful a campaign is on every level. Therefore, you need to be able to respond and adapt to the performance of the campaign throughout its duration.
You do this by creating variables within the ad sets and ads.
Testing Your Facebook Ads
The Solution:
Creating variables allows you to see what is working and what is failing. Therefore, you can quickly make decisions about how to respond. If an ad is doing poorly, you can simply turn it off. If one is doing well, then you can continue to run it and put more money into it.
Create variables by building multiple ad sets and duplicating ads in order to run a/b tests against different audiences and types of ads.
1. Start by looking at your pre-existing audience.
Consider whether or not it can be broken down into another ad set based upon:
- Location
- Interests
- Demographics
- Customer lists
- Lookalikes
By splitting the ad sets, you can see specifically what audience is performing the best and then allocate more of the budget to target those people.
Furthermore, when you’re ready to move on to more expensive campaigns, like conversions, your audience will be optimized for better results.
Even if your audience is already clearly defined, it’s a good idea to consider other possible audiences that you haven’t before. You’ll never know if there are other types of potential leads until you test out different ad sets.
2. Conduct further testing at the ad level.
Try duplicating the ad you already made and start switching things up. There are so many different variables to play with:
- Carousels vs static images vs videos
- Canvas vs original
- Headlines and text
- Images
- Both headlines and text
- Thumbnails on videos
- Buttons
Within a few days, a clear winner amongst the ads will emerge. Simply turn off the ones that aren’t converting into the results that you want.
This will undoubtedly lower your cost per click because it ensures that you’re only showing ads that resonate with your audience.
Though this undoubtedly takes more time and planning upfront than it would otherwise, it will save you a lot of time and money overall.
