An Overview To Running A Successful Facebook Ads Campaign [Video]
An Overview To Running A Successful Facebook Ads Campaign [Video]

An Overview To Running A Successful Facebook Ads Campaign [Video]

In this video we’re going to focus on Facebook Advertising and we’ll be looking at:

Video Transcript

Hi everyone and welcome to another video in the series where we show you ways to drive growth and competitive advantage using the world’s most powerful digital marketing channels at each stage of the customer journey.

In this video we’re going to focus on Facebook Advertising and we’ll be looking at:

  • How to determine if a campaign is commercially viable
  • Setup fundamentals
  • Audience targeting
  • And finally, a strategic approach to help you achieve the best performance from your campaigns

Is your Facebook ad campaign commercially viable?

Before you go near the interface, always run the numbers to get an idea of the economics and commercial viability of your campaign.

By running the numbers at outset, you will have an idea as to the potential of your funnel and what the key metrics need to be in order for the campaign to be a success. 

The key metrics being cost per click, number of clicks, conversion rate, spend and return.

Below this video is a link to a free Google sheet to help you with these calculations.

Now you have an idea of the numbers required to meet the target and generate a return, let’s set up the fundamentals.

Facebook Ads Setup Fundamentals

To get the most out of Facebook Ads, you need to feed the algorithm with data. 

This is done via the tracking pixel but setting it up to track page views and your main conversion type is the least you can do.

Take this a step further and set up event tracking for user behaviours and actions further up the funnel. I’m talking things like:

  • Video view rate
  • Scroll depth (check this is possible)
  • Time on page
  • Specific pages viewed
  • Downloads
  • Link clicks

Also, set up retargeting audiences. You might consider creating:

  • Web traffic:
    • 7 days
    • 14 days
    • 30 days
    • 60 days
    • 90 days
  • Audiences for any event tracking you setup
  • Custom audiences
    • Leads
    • Customer lists
  • Engagement audiences
    • Engaged with you on social
    • Video views
    • Opened form but didn’t submit

Basically track everything you can throughout the customer conversion journey. 

There are two main reasons for this:

  1. You give Facebook more data to work with which will help with optimisation and performance
  2. You are now set up to optimise towards a lot more data points and audiences. This could serve you well for future testing, building conversion funnels and running targeted campaigns to specific audiences.

By setting this up at outset, data starts collecting from day 1 which gives you more to work with… and that’s a good thing when it comes to campaign performance.

Audience Targeting

Depending on your objective and what data you have available, it’s often a good idea to start with audiences based on data.

I’m talking about customer match and retargeting which could be from web traffic, events or engagement.

You could run offers directly to these audiences but assuming you want to reach new prospects with this campaign, you might want to create lookalike audiences.

Lookalike audiences are where you instruct Facebook to create an audience for you based on the data you feed it, mainly from matching email addresses (such as your customer list) to people in its user base.

You can create lookalike audiences from retargeting lists of people who have visited your website or fans of your page and instruct Facebook to create a lookalike audience that is similar to these groups of people.

You can set the relevance of the lookalike audience from relevant to broad on a percentage scale. Personally I prefer to keep the percentage quite low and add demographics and potentially interest targeting to further tighten the audience.

If you don’t want to create lookalike audiences or you don’t have the data to do so, you can look at demographic and interest-based audiences.

You should have a good idea of your target audience demographics, either from company research, Google Analytics or your CRM data… so start here.

Next, identify a handful of similar interests to attach to the demographics and you have an audience. 

It’s important to group similar interests together in the one audience to prevent overlap so no single interest per ad set (unless they are significantly different).

Use the audience insights tool for further insights and inspiration.

If you’re in B2B… I hear you! It’s more challenging. 

Perhaps try targeting competitors, tools and software, industry events and publications, influencers or well known non-competitor brands in their world that they might follow.

Aim for about 4-5 audiences (ad sets) and 3 ads per audience. These numbers should give you enough data to get you well on your way to finding winning combinations.

Best practice approach to drive the highest performance from your campaigns

There was a significant update to Facebook Ads not too long ago that you need to be aware of and that was Campaign Budget Optimisation.

The key difference with this update was that budgets were set at the campaign level instead of the ad set (audience) level. 

Facebook then automatically pushes budget at the highest performing ad set.

The problem with this is it destroyed your ability to test things yourself. You are 100% relying on Facebook. Not good.

Furthermore, Facebook is pushing budget towards the best performing ad set based on the campaign objective… but your campaign objective might not have been your true objective.

For example, a clicks campaign can outperform a conversion campaign…. But this won’t be clear to Facebook under the campaign budget optimisation setting.

So what do you do?

Use the split test option from outset.

The split test feature will allow you to send budget equally to different ad sets so you can identify a winner.

Test either ads or audiences. 

So if you’re testing ads, run several ads to one audience and if you’re testing audiences, run several audiences to a winning ad.

When you have identified a winning combination of audience and ad, move this into a Campaign Budget Optimisation campaign so Facebook can help scale it via the algorithm.

Continue repeating this cycle of testing audiences and creative and moving winners to the campaign budget optimisation campaign to scale performance.

Bonus Tips

  • A high CTR will usually result in a lower CPM meaning greater performance and higher return from your campaign.
  • Make sure your ad copy and creative speak to the audience interests and the desired end result. Resist the urge to talk about you and your brand and make it all about them. They are the hero in the story and you are the guide.
  • Test different campaign objectives. If you have a high converting funnel or audience and ad combination, chances are it will convert with a clicks objective rather than a conversion objective but the CPM might be cheaper meaning a higher return
  • Look at placements and devices for further optimisation opportunities as you often see significant differences in performance across these segments.
  • Improving the conversion rate can yield far greater gains in performance than any optimisation efforts so always consider this in everything you do

And that wraps up this video. If you have any questions feel free to send them in and if you’d like to see us cover a particular topic in a future video, please let us know as we’re always open to suggestions.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to be notified of when the next video is available.

Enjoy the rest of your day!

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