My key learnings while running paid social for some of UK's fastest growing consumer brands

Facebook ads are extremely powerful to reach a broad audience base. Direct to Consumer brands benefit from the wide reach that Facebook offers. This is because Facebook's ad manager combines the reach of Facebook and Instagram through the various placements on these sites. Many brands use Facebook as a medium to validate their assumptions of their Ideal Customer Avatar, before defining the positioning of the brand. Once they have statistically significant test results, they then lock down the positioning and use it in all their outreach channels - online and offline.

So is Facebook's ad manager the best way to exponentially increase your customer base for direct to consumer brands? It is, if done well. Generally many start-ups tend to heavily rely on one channel to get their customer acquisition to the desired numbers, before going on and replicating their success on other channels. Many brands prefer Paid Search over Paid Social. Many would rather experiment with YouTube over display ads. So when does one use Facebook's network? I would have a very simple criteria- If your product is not very niche and appeals to a wide audience, then the Facebook Ad manager is a safe place to start.

Hence lets get down to my key learnings on running and optimising paid social spends through the Facebook Ad Manager. Auto advanced Matching is a great way to start. With auto advanced matching, you can send Facebook your hashed customer identifiers along with event identifiers on your website. This helps you target specific customer behaviours on the website. To enable auto advanced matching, you first need to insert Facebook's pixel on your website. There are simple ways to do so, either directly through your development team or through Google Tag Manager. Once the facebook pixel is integrated, every time a visitor lands on your website through facebook, the pixel includes additional fields to identify the person. They could be a past customer, a new visitor or a repeat visitor. You can include or exclude these personas depending on your goal. Here are my key learnings by implementing Auto Advanced Matching:

• Target new visitors by running lead generation campaigns and give them a free carrot such as a free trial product, a free download or a free style guide
• Retarget visitors and past customers by offering them paid offerings.

Simplified account structure is the next powerful concept. Its counter productive to have multiple ad sets target the same customer base. With a complex structure, it is humanly impossible to remember the target audiences inserted in various campaigns and ad sets. Hence have one or two campaigns in the ad account running at one time. In each campaign have around 3 ad sets and each of the ad sets have around 3-4 ads. Here are my key learnings by implementing a simplified account structure:

• Have two campaigns at any given time on your ad account- Prospecting and Retargeting.
• Prospecting campaigns customer acquisition costs would always be higher compared to retargeting campaigns customer acquisition costs (for identical product ads).

Campaign Budget Optimisation is the next powerful feature. When defining the campaign objectives, you can enable CBO, that will transfer the optimisation reins to Facebook's efficient algorithm. Hence instead of constantly monitoring various ad sets and then switching off and switching on ad sets, Facebook will serve more of the best performing ads. Facebook judges the best performing ads based on the objective that you define. Here are my key learnings of implementing CBO:

• CBO can be implemented with a daily budget and a lifetime budget.
• Think of your entire marketing budget for facebook for a month and set that as a lifetime budget with the campaign duration of a month. It works better, as Facebook spends the budget on those days that tend to get the maximum results.

Automatic Placements is the next powerful feature. Gone are those days, where we needed to manually test what placements give the best results. By placements we mean the ad properties such as facebook feed, instagram stories, facebook marketplace and so on. Instead of testing various placements and then deriving which work, its best to turn on automatic placements in the ad sets.

Dynamic Ads is the next powerful concept. If a visitor on the website, has seen shoes in an apparel online store, but not bought, there is a higher probability that she will convert the next time she is shown the same pair of shoes when retargeted by an ad. To be able to do so, you need to have Facebook's pixel integrated on the website to carry the customer information. The next step is also to create your product catalogue in Business Manager such that you can show the right product to the right customer. Here are my key learnings of implementing Dynamic Ads:

• Dynamic Ads can significantly lower your retargeting ad spends.
• Dynamic ads is different from Dynamic Ad creative. Dynamic Ads help in targeting a more relevant target persona with a relevant product. On the other hand, Dynamic Ad creative allows us to have multiple ad creatives, copies and call to actions. Facebook then creatives multiple combinations and tests which one performs the best and serves only the top performing combination.
• It is great to have Dynamic Ads and Dynamic Ad creative on as then we are using Facebook's complex machine learning algorithm to optimise our ad spends.

By implementing the above principles, I have seen customer acquisition costs come down by atleast 30%. Running ads on facebook can become an addiction and optimising them can soon become a guilty pleasure.

For more details about me, visit divanji.com.