Social media advertising is a powerful way to communicate your brands products, key messages and services to a wider audience. It can allow you to target people with a genuine interest in what you can offer and will in turn, lead to increased engagement rates. Facebook is a platform used by many people and is a great place to start if you’re looking to advertise on social media.
The crucial factor when setting up ads on the platform is to ensure that they are optimised correctly and monitored regularly. If they’re not, the campaign won’t be as successful as you’d hoped for and you may find it doesn’t quite reach your objectives. With that in mind, here are our top tips to help you optimise you Facebook ads campaign:
Ensure your assets are visually engaging
It’s vital to use engaging and visually enticing assets to give your campaign the best chance of being successful, no matter what the objective is. It is highly recommended by Facebook to use video assets where possible as it’s proven that are popular with audiences and tend to increase engagement levels. The statistics speak for themselves, with research showing that Facebook users watch close to 3 billion hours of video every day.
The official recommendation from Facebook is to use videos with subtitles so audiences can watch without sound, which the majority of users do, and for them to be 5-15 seconds in length. Once the video assets have been up and running for a few weeks, you can then create audiences such as ‘video viewers’ and ‘lookalikes of videos viewers’ which can be very beneficial to the campaign.
Detailed Targeting is crucial for a successful ads campaign
You can be as specific as you like when it comes to who you serve your ads to and it’s really important that you are to ensure a successful campaign. Virtually any interest, location, demographic or behaviour can be targeted. So to get the best results, its advised that you are as detailed as possible – whilst still making sure you cast a wide enough net in terms of your audience size. This detailed targeting is of importance as people will only engage with your content if it is of interest to them in one way or another, so it’s key that you don’t essentially waste budget on people who are unlikely to engage.
To achieve this, the first step is to ensure you have a comprehensive understanding of who you need to serve the ads too. Then split them up into sizeable audiences to create your ad sets. The more detailed the better! Try to cover everything in the particular area of interest you’re targeting. This will allow for a wider audience to capture, but one that will be genuinely interested in your content.
Try to use as many placements as possible
Facebook recommends using as many different placements for your ads as possible. However, it’s important to keep an eye on how they are performing across different platforms. In a recent link click campaign we did for a client, we served the ads to all placement options available but the results were much lower than expected. When we investigated further, we were able to see that although the ads were being served on Instagram (and spending a significant chunk of the budget) they were virtually getting no results.
In light of this, we then made several changes to the campaign to ensure we got better results. One of them was turning off placements that were getting little to no results and since then, we have seen a significant improvement in link clicks. This is why it’s crucial to ensure you have as many placements as possible, so that you can adjust them if needed to achieve the best results for the campaign.
Freshen up the text and imagery in your ads
If you’re running a campaign for an extended period of time, more than four weeks, you’ll more than likely see some of the ads decline or slowdown in terms of results. This is because of the tricky algorithm that comes with social media platforms. Facebook simply won’t keep serving the same content to it’s users.
By simply freshening up the text and imagery and making minor tweaks, you’ll find that you’re able to get the campaign running again. This will allow you to still convey the message you’re pushing out, but just in a slightly different way that you might find resonates better with your audience. It’s important to be proactive to ensure this is done successfully and constantly keep an eye on the campaign, as you won’t always be notified if it’s not performing as well as you expect.
Make sure you monitor your social media advertising campaign
Once a campaign is underway, it’s important to monitor it from start to finish to get the desired results and to ensure that anything that isn’t spending well, is turned off. The best way to measure this for any objective is the cost per result metric. Keeping this as low as possible should be the main aim of any campaign.
Obviously, there are variables within that, for example, if you’re running a page likes campaign you should be looking at a matter of a few pence per like. But, if you’re running a conversions campaign, the cost per result just needs to be lower than the product you’re selling. Keeping an consistent eye on the campaigns performance can be the difference between a successful campaign and an unsuccessful campaign, so it really is crucial.
At Prohibition, we work with a variety of brands on their social media marketing, compiling advertising strategies that deliver real ROI. For more information and to find out how we could work with you, drop us an email on: hello@prohibitionpr.co.uk
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