Does your CMO know how to use Ad Rules to Optimize Your Facebook Ad Campaigns?

In today’s Marketing Mercenary Tactics, we offer pro tips on how to automate tasks using Facebook Ad Rules so that you can be smarter than your CMO.

If you are challenged to keep up with the day-to-day fluctuations of your Facebook ad campaigns, we know that it can be time-consuming, especially when multiple team members work on them at the same time.  Here is where Facebook’s Ad Optimization Rules can help. Creating rules automates the process of checking your campaign performance, adjusting bid levels, watching for ad fatigue, and more.

When you set up Facebook Ad Rules, you define the actions you want to monitor and set up automatic responses depending on how those actions play out. You are telling Facebook, “If this happens, then do this.”  It’s your Alexa for FB.

Setting up optimization rules is simple and straightforward. When you open the main view of Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll see the Create Rule button. Because you can apply rules to campaigns, ad sets, and ads, this button is available from each of these tabs. Before you go any further think about whether you want the rules to apply to the overall Campaign, the Ad Set or specific Ads that your brand is running on FB.

Next, pick an action for Facebook to initiate if the ad isn’t performing. Your options are Pause Campaign, Send Notification, Adjust the budget, or adjust the bid strategy.

For example, your can select a cost per click (CPC) lower than a certain dollar amount as a trigger to increase your daily budget. Be sure to name each of your rules and preview before launching them.

Facebook ad campaigns are surprisingly nuanced, so be sure to let your Ads run for a few days before the results will start to average out and give you good Ad Performance Data.

Here are some Marketing Mercenary ProTips:

• Watch the money. If certain core pay-per-click (PPC) metrics start to slide (like cost per lead), you want to catch them before blowing through your budget.
• Don’t stop or pull ads too early before Facebook has a chance to do their magic.
• Remember the big picture. Campaign performance could be dipping for reasons beyond your control. It took six months for Spearmint Love co-founder John Lott to realize that his customers’ life stage, not his ad campaigns, was the reason for stagnating results.

Ad fatigue is real,  but external factors, like your customers literally outgrowing you, will ultimately have a bigger impact on your bottom line. The same holds true if your business is cyclical. You might look like a genius no matter what you do over the holiday Ad season, and then look like a failure when demand slackens in the the Spring & Summer.

Here are the key Marketing Mercenary Tactics we use at Target Optimized:

#1: Manage Ad Spend

As Marketers, we know we can only afford to spend so much to acquire a customer, at least most CFOs tell us this. That could be defined as a specific cost per acquisition (CPA) or, based on your Ad Performance, you have defined an acceptable CPC range that maximizes your Ad Spending. Be sure to define those limits, before your CFO defines them for your team.  For instance, if your product or service costs $100 and the CPA jumps above $50, you can pause the ad so your campaign profitability doesn’t suddenly flip upside down.

You can do the same thing on a cost per click (CPC) level, such as if the CPC rises above a threshold that you have deemed too expensive, like $0.30.

The great thing about these rules is that Facebook campaigns will self-optimize, so don’t create these settings based on a single day’s results - use an average of the last week’s data.

This will help ensure you don’t pull the plug on campaigns too early. Once campaign results do start to improve, you can be more aggressive to maximize conversions.

If your campaign CPC or CPA are decreasing, meaning it is cheaper to buy more customers, you might want to raise bids to capitalize on these positive trends.  You can do this by using a percentage of the average cost of a few days to purposefully increase your bids.

By establishing these Rules, you have just defined a bunch of campaign limits:

• how much you’re comfortable spending
• acceptable CPC & CPA maximums based on your profitability margins on each sale
• the best-case scenario of how high you can push bids before eroding margins on the other side.

You’ve limited the upside and managed the risk on the downside - and you’ve earned the Fiscally Responsible Marketer badge.  Now your campaign can virtually run on autopilot with Facebook’s optimization rules doing the tweaking for you. As marketers, we don’t have to be brilliant, just be thoughtful and set some realistic parameters and then let Facebook optimize your Campaign.

#2: Prevent Ad Fatigue

Google’s AdWords text-based search ads are evergreen - meaning that they always work on the keywords that are most important to your business, product or area of specialization.   Once you identify a winning combination of search word variables, you can let them ride. Performance might fluctuate a little over a few weeks or months but you won’t see drastic declines overnight.

Facebook Ads are different. New ads may work wonders over the first week or so, and then you can expect that Ad Performance will slowly start to decline.  Ad Fatigue is the most common culprit. Your ad creative might seem super-clever the first time users see it, but not the tenth time.

That’s where a frequency cap comes in. We have found that you start risking ad fatigue when your frequency creeps into the over-5x views range to a specific targeted audience. To avoid this, create an optimization rule that automatically pauses your campaign when it hits a certain frequency threshold.

Stopping the campaign before Ad Fatigue sets in is just the first action, but you can’t just let campaigns remain paused once they hit that frequency cap every few days.

When you set up the Rule, choose the option to email a notification that explains what just happened and what to do next.  We recommend that our clients update the ad creative and restart the campaign. To turn on email alerts, select the Email checkbox in the Notification section when you create a rule.

#3: Allocate Your Budget Based on Individual Ad Response

In our recent experience, many marketers are short-sighted in their Paid per Click (PPC) tactics. We think that your PPC objective is to make money, not save money.

Yes, cost per lead is an important metric to monitor, but maximizing the amount of money you make per sale is important too. In today’s paid social advertising environment, you can’t economize a successful Ad Campaign. Cost per click matters, but you should feel confident about bidding up CPCs if it means making more sales each day.

Jon Loomer uses a trick to increase the budget on what’s working and quickly draw back on what’s not. He will set up multiple rules that work together to increase his budget by 50% if the CPC is under $0.15, lower it by 50% if it’s over $0.25 and stop it if it’s over $0.30.

To use this tactic for your Facebook campaigns, create three rules that, when combined, will enhance the good, weed out the bad, and put a halt to the really, really bad.

The best way to incentivize your audience to join the top of the sales funnel as a lead is to offer them freemiums like an ebook, newsletter, or webinar where you repurpose your best content.  These freemiums are an excellent investment in your brand that will pay off when prospects do make a purchase from you.

Once again, CPC matters, but not as much as your CPA.

If your marketing team values a new email address at $2, based on the historical average of your conversions from email,  you can create another optimization rule that disregards CPC to instead focus on the maximum CPA you are willing to spend to get that email address.

If you are willing to bid $1 for that email address, that lead strategy yields a 50% CPA gross margin.

For low-margin businesses, that might be much too high. For high-margin emerging brands, it can be the silver bullet for customer acquisition.

Many high-growth companies will spend up to 100% of an initial sale (effectively breaking even) to maximize the number of customers acquired in a Campaign.   We call this tactic the ALL IN and the plan is to eventually make up that cost on the back end in customer retention or in multiple repurchases.

The point is that at this stage, CPC becomes irrelevant. A $2 CPC vs. a $1 CPC literally doesn’t matter. There’s no hard and fast rule here and it depends entirely on your business model.

Marketing Mercenary Take Aways

Social media marketers optimize all sorts of things such as Landing pages, Audiences, and Ad Creative, but not day-to-day campaign management. That’s where Facebook’s ad optimization rules come in.

You can set up rules to raise bids when things are going well, lower them when they’re not, and even pause them when things look ugly. Ad Rules can help limit your downside risk while allowing you to maximize the upside. You can also use them to keep track of all of the small, tactical stuff so you can focus on the big picture: making the most money possible.

To learn more about how to Optimize Your Facebook Ad Campaigns so that you know more than your CMO, check out our BLOG @TargetOptimized.com

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I’m Richard Tomkins, your Marketing Mercenary with Target Optimized