Every day more than 1.5 billion people log onto Facebook, with over 2.4 billion people logging in monthly. If you’re not advertising on Facebook, you could be missing out on a huge chunk of potential new customers for your business. If you are advertising on Facebook, it’s important to make sure you’re setting up your campaigns properly and utilizing best practices in order to reach that audience most effectively.
Whether you’re a seasoned Facebook advertiser or a paid social newb, let’s chat about a few things you should be doing in order to maximize results and make the most of your Facebook campaigns, shall we?
Facebook Tracking
Properly Set-up & Utilize the Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code you place on your site that allows you to track on-site actions of users and the results of your Facebook campaigns.
By not properly utilizing the Facebook pixel, you’ll be unable to track the results of your campaign efforts and tie it back to your business goals. This will also limit you in being able to optimize your campaigns based on user behavior.
Start utilizing Facebook pixel helper to double-check your pixel is active.
Facebook Pixel Helper is a tool that allows you to troubleshoot your pixel and ensure that it is working correctly. You can download it here!
Set aside time to QA the pixel periodically within the active campaigns to ensure it’s firing correctly.
Set up custom events to optimize your campaigns towards and to track different actions people are taking on your site.
Tracking different events helps set you up for having a full-funnel campaign strategy – Retarget to users who completed a higher funnel action to bring them back to your site to complete a lower funnel action.
Tip: Facebook recently rolled out their event set up tool which allows you to set up events without installing code.
Audience Targeting
Define Your Audience and Segment Your Campaigns & Messaging Out Accordingly
By targeting too broadly and with very general messaging, you run the risk of low ad engagement & a high cost-per-click by delivering ads to people who are not interested in your product or service.
Start using Facebook’s Audience Insights Tool to build your ideal audience. Check out our blog on finding your paid social audience persona to help get started in building your ideal audience!
Segment out your campaigns or ad sets by audience. This allows you to optimize your campaigns for each audience’s specific needs and goals and make the most of your budget.
Don’t forget to tailor messaging and creative to that specific audience as different creative can resonate with different audiences.
Avoid Audience Overlap
Audience overlap occurs when members of one audience also exist in another. This can lead to your ad sets going up against each other in the same auction, ultimately driving up your spend and leading to ad fatigue.
Start using the Audience Overlap Tool that you can access within your Audience Asset Library to check overlap when building new audiences.
Exclude your custom audiences from campaigns that aren’t targeted to them. For example, exclude your bottom of the funnel audiences from your top of funnel campaigns to streamline your targeting.
Tip: Exclude past converters from your campaigns to avoid spending budget on people who have already seen your ad and converted.
Campaign Objectives and Goals
Choose Appropriate Campaign Objectives and Optimization for Ad Delivery Settings
Choosing the correct objective and optimization settings is pivotal to who Facebook chooses to show your ads to and achieving your campaign goals.
Start thinking about your overall business goals and how your campaign is contributing to them. If you want to encourage people to take a specific action on your site, optimize for Conversions. If you want to have your ad shown to as many people as possible, optimize for Reach. Learn more about Facebook’s campaign objectives here.
Tip: For traffic campaigns, choose to optimize towards Landing Page Views as opposed to Link Clicks.
According to Facebook, Landing Page views deliver ads to people who are more likely to click on the ad’s link and load the website, rather than link clicks, which are the number of clicks on links anywhere within the ad. This means that someone may click to your Facebook profile page and never visit your website, that’s still counted as a link click.
Tip: Additionally, you can choose a ‘Conversion’ objective and instead of optimizing towards a lower-funnel end goal, optimize towards a mid-funnel point instead. For example, you can optimize towards a Form Open instead of a Form Complete.
Creative
Ensure You’re Using Multiple Ad Variations in an Ad Set
Using too few ad variations in an ad set can lead to ad fatigue, high frequency numbers and ultimately low CTR’s.
Seer recommends using at least 4 ad variations in an ad set in order to maximize performance and prevent ad fatigue as mentioned above.
Be sure to monitor your frequency numbers and CTR. If your frequency gets too high or your CTR starts to dip, it may be time to refresh your creative or add in additional variations.
Want to add more engaging image variations to your campaigns but not sure where to start? Check out our Spicing Up your Paid Social Imagery blog post.
Utilize Optimized Imagery & Placement-Specific Image Sizes
By not using optimized image sizes, you are missing out on valuable real estate in certain placements. It’s also important to avoid your images appearing blurry or distorted.
Start utilizing Facebook’s recommended image sizes when creating new imagery. When building out your ads, Facebook gives you the option to select different images for different placements. Here are the sizes we recommend:
- 1080 x 1080 (can be used in Feed placements)
- 1080 x 1920 (can be used for Story placements)
Looking for more help with Facebook advertising outside of these tips? Find out how Seer can help!
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