10 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Ads

In this article I will explain about the 10 ways to optimize your ads and ensure a successful campaign and strategy.

This is not a closed list and each parameter has endless other parameters that need to get noticed and addressed. I see Ads as living constantly changing mechanism that has a life cycle and a life span, grows, changes, reacts, gets sick and eventually dies and sometimes reincarnate.

These are my 10 important factors to ensure successfully optimized Facebook campaigns and Ad strategies:

1. Targeting

A great ad is worthless if it is targeted to the wrong audience. So fine-tuning and focusing on the specific traits of your targeted buyer persona is most important. Most brands just set the location, some demographic factors and think it is enough.

It is not! This is what you need to do:

• Break your entire potential audience into smaller segments;
• Create different segmentation to each group of your persona;
• Segment audiences into ad sets; make specific ads for each segment, this way you can match your copy and creative to each micro segment;
• Then run simultaneous Ads for each Target Audience to see which one converts best.
• Create different segmentation to each group.

Make sure your targeted audiences don’t overlap, which results in showing your ads undesirably, multiple times and be perceived by your audience as spammy.

2. Frequency

The Ad Frequency is the number of times your ad is shown to each person to control over exposure and spam.

Why Frequency is important?

According to ampush, over the years, and across campaigns in many different verticals, they have noted that a certain degree of Frequency correlates to, if not directly causes, improvements in CTR and decreases in CPC (and ultimately CPA). However too low or too high of Frequency can cause just the opposite: low CTR and increased costs.

Frequency is an important metric!

If your frequency is too low, under 1, it means you are not taking full potential of your targeted audience, and it means you need a higher budget to reach them.

On the other hand higher Frequency (between 3 to 9 depending on your Product and campaign) then this might mean banner blindness so you need to fine-tune it to your needs. A higher Frequency means you are paying too much for your ad or your ad has been running too long, try to change the images or change a factor in the targeted audience.

3. Check and analyze ad performance constantly

Facebook analytics is great as a reference base, but you need more indications to cross reference your ad performance, always include utms and be keen to check Google analytics as well when analyzing your data, to decide on budgets and performances etc,.

4. Decide on the best Ad format

Facebook provides a considerable number of formats for your ads so make sure you pick the best format that resonates with your ad goals and targeted audience and fits with the product you are promoting.

For example:

If you have multiple products to sell then a carousel format is the best

If you are looking for branding first then Canvas ads, video ads and slide show can be very effective.

If you are looking for retargeting, then Dynamic Product Ads are very useful especially for cross selling.

5. Invest in the copy and creative

Remember it is all about visuals!

Invest in the copy and creative but don’t forget to KISS (Keep It Short and Simple), your ad needs to get noticed in a sea of ads so make your ad stand out by studying what others in your domain are doing and doing something different than them.

Make sure that your ad visually gives a good image of what to expect if you click on it.

Use an eye-catching image, that is bright even when viewed in a small size

Avoid images that have many details in the photo and avoid too much text.

Preferably the ad needs to include an inciting value proposition, and has a clear call to action!

6. Retargeting

Retargeting is one of the most effective tools to drive conversions and sales. Here you are targeting people who are already familiar with your brand and product so they have a high chance to convert.

Be sure to use all the tools provided by Facebook for retargeting. It goes without saying installing the Pixel, yet lots of marketers underestimate the power of the pixel, creating the relevant events to track your desired conversions and collecting leads. Then take your time to create your custom audiences using the information you collected.

As I wrote above, creating custom audiences using the pixel and the events from the pixel is highly effective for retargeting and in some cases lookalike audiences might be useful depending on the product, another very important and effective tool is creating custom audience from your email list retargeting your subscribers who visited a certain page in your website.

Dynamic Product Ads, lead Generations and standard retargeting campaigns ensure a big increase in conversions.

7. Landing Pages

Landing pages are often forgotten in the Facebook Ad process. A landing page is the factor that will determine if people who click your Ad actually convert, book or buy your products or services.

If you have the right audience and creative, but it’s not converting, then you need to check whether your landing page is optimized.

I prefer to use landing pages specifically created for my Facebook Ads, or optimize an existing landing page for my Ad purposes and usually try to match the look, feel and tone as closely as possible.

8. A/B testing

A/B testing requires you to create multiple versions of your Ad to test against each other. In each variation you make only one variable of the Ad different.

So it is a method you find out which ad headline, copy, images, call to actions, or the combination of the above work best for your audience.

I recommend testing two Ad variations at once. This will make it as fast (and cheap) as possible to see which variation converts the best.

The Most Important Variables to A/B Test:

Headline: The most effective persuasive element of your Ad to convince people to click. Here people make the decision whether to stop their scrolling down and click. The description text can help, bit the majority of people make their decision before they read it.

Image: The image’s job is to get your Ad noticed in a flood of Ads and posts. If you have a good eye catching image, it will draw people’s attention, to stop for a fraction of a second and check your headline.

Landing Page: It’s the factor that will determine if people who click your Ad actually convert. In an experiment we conducted at Batuta.com we found out that designated landing pages designed for a specific campaigns improves the conversion rate considerably. Always try to check different landing pages or change variables in landing pages like CTA buttons, images, and positioning.

9. Monitor the right performance Metric

The one metric you need to focus on is your average-value-per-customer minus Cost-Per-Customer. You can monitor your CPC, CPM and CTR to make sure they aren’t out of whack, but at the end of the day you should only make changes and tweaks to your Facebook Advertising campaigns based on that one metric, not on anything else.

Look at your cost per conversion, cost per click, and click-through rate. If you have the new pixel, you can get a CPA (cost per acquisition).

10. Rotate your Ad

I have pointed out “banner blindness” above, which is a phenomenon whereby Internet users ignore banner ads simply because they are constantly being bombarded by them.

This “blindness” may be compounded when you show the same ad again and again.

The solution is to rotate your Facebook ads to increase the chances your audience will actually notice your ad in their newsfeed, this is best done through Power Editor!