In the past year or so, FB ads have become pretty expensive (especially for digital products) and unless you’re promoting a high ticket offer or have a really high converting low ticket offer – its pretty easy to lose a big chunk of your budget.
Is there a way around all this competition? YES!
In today’s “15-Minute Sprint”, I explained some core concepts of Facebook Ad Targeting that can help formulate a winning campaign and then edited our video creative, created a brand new Facebook ad campaign, and multiple ad sets with varied targeting
Facebook Advertising Strategies
2017 has been a pretty rough year for digital products and offers – because a LOT of people have joined the Facebook ads bandwagon and it’s become a smosh fest of webinar promos, book funnels, coaching and consulting ads, and a lot more.
There IS some respite though.
To create a winning Facebook Ads campaign in 2017, you need to first understand the following:
PERFORMANCE of your ad matters
Since Facebook is a bidding platform where advertisers bid on demographics and interest targeting – if a lot of advertisers are bidding for the same interests in the same location – when you come in with your ad, if it doesn’t PERFORM well then it will fall off and not get any impressions.
Or WORSE – Facebook will charge your account for mind-boggling CPMs in the range of $30-$70 (Yes, that high!)
There are a few important metrics to consider here:
CTR. (Click Through Rate) And not just ‘link clicks’ – but other clicks on/off Facebook.
Engagement. If a higher percentage of people engage with your ad (react, share and/or comment) – Facebook will reward you with lower CPMs
Relevance Score. FB assigns a relevance score (out of 10) to your ad after it has accrued more than 500 impressions. You want to be 3+.
Negative Feedback. You can see if you have a HIGH negative feedback or not on your ads.
Here’s the thing though.
In my experiments – some of the best ads I’ve run for a long time had a HIGH negative feedback with a relevance score of 2 or 3.
It was still PROFITABLE for me.
If I were you, I would just consider mainly the CTR of your ads.
CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE matters
There has been so much debate on which campaign metric is the best for offsite conversions and frankly – anyone who says there’s just ONE metric you should stick with – is full of crap.
So how do you know which one to use?
I’m considering only optin funnels in this case – but here are the campaign metrics I will be testing:
- CONVERSIONS
- LINK CLICKS
Since all of them are capturing lead data via the FB pixel – we’ll soon find out which is the best metric to run with.
You should also test ‘VIDEO VIEWS’ and ‘POST ENGAGEMENT’ if your creatives are all videos…
.. and you have TIME. Since we don’t have time to play around with multiple objectives – I’m sticking to only two.
TARGETING of your ad matters
There are multiple targeting options and what I recommend is trying out each in a new ad set.
These are the ad targeting options you should play with:
Interests. Either brand names or generic.
Gender. Male or Female.
Location. US is pretty expensive. I’d recommend starting with Canada and ‘Emerging Markets’.
TIME of your ad matters
Based off of a video chart I’d seen a few days ago – what seemed pretty prevalent was that:
Tier-1 Countries have the MOST number of advertisers bidding for prime spots in the News Feed between the hours of 12 AM and 3 PM.
This makes sense because the ad account’s daily budget gets refreshed at 12 AM local time. And then the next day’s budget starts getting spent.
So I recommend advertising between the hours of 4 PM and 11 PM.
Video Ad Sneaky Trick
This is something we’ve playing with only recently – but has shown promising results.
Rather than a 16:9 aspect ration of a video – use a 1:1 aspect ratio of your video creative for the ad.
There will be top and bottom black bars.
We fill those bars with text in “Arial Black” font and some emojis.
If possible – an arrow or two.
I noticed 1:1 videos doing better than 16:9 in organic scenario only because:
1:1 videos take up more SCREEN REAL ESTATE.
This is especially true for mobile phones.
2017 STRATEGY: Split Ad Sets
Keep budgets of $5 per day when you’re first launching an ad.
You need to create MULTIPLE ad sets.
Here’s what we’ll be splitting up our ad sets with:
Campaign Metric: Conversions, Link Clicks
Country Targeting: Canada, Emerging Markets
Bidding: Automatic, Manual
Interests: Brand Names, Generic (Digital Marketing)
All permutations included…
We’ll basically have to create a total EIGHTEEN ad sets.
We were able to create 4 ad sets today. We’ll be creating more in Day #18.
We might also put in images in these ad sets along with a video just to see if images do better in this case.
Each situation and ad is different – and there are NO GUESSES with Facebook Ads. Don’t estimate and only let the NUMBERS tell you what’s working and what’s not. Simply shut down all ad sets that are not working.
I look forward to reading and replying to your comments below:
