You’ve just launched your first Facebook campaign. You figure the hard part is done and that leads will start pouring in. Then comes the cold shower: results aren’t taking off, and your goals are nowhere in sight. Running a campaign is like crossing an ocean. You need good gear, but that’s no guarantee of success. You need to understand the environment you’re sailing through and know how to handle headwinds. That means keeping an eye on your performance numbers, reading them correctly, and making adjustments, big or small, to stay on course.
Here are 5 tips from our social advertising specialist, Florian Bonnet!
1. Customize Your Dashboard
Once your campaign is created, make sure the data is easy to access and easy to read. The Ads Manager is your dashboard, so don’t skip setting it up properly. Doing so gives you a clearer view of your account and makes tracking results much simpler.
Facebook offers default setups for organizing your data in Ads Manager. To make your results easier to read, you can also add or remove columns as you see fit. Remove any columns that don’t help you analyze your ads, and add the metrics tied to your strategy. This will help you make sense of all those numbers and spot ways to improve your campaigns more easily.
Personally, this is the first thing I do after launching a campaign, and the boost in productivity is noticeable. Once you’re happy with how your dashboard looks, you can save that setup. Ideally, you’ll end up with a saved layout for each type of goal, which makes tracking much easier over time.
2. Make the Most of Bidding Strategies
Bids determine how much you’re willing to spend to reach your campaign goal. The most common strategy is highest volume, which gives Facebook full flexibility to help you stay competitive in the bidding.
That said, you can also set spending caps to get more out of your budget. With this strategy, Facebook adjusts how your ads are shown based on the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per lead. In other words, you’re telling Facebook’s algorithm to spend your money as long as it thinks it can hit your target cost per result, within the limit you set.
Just be careful not to set your caps too low. If you do, your ads might stop showing altogether, which would hurt your chances of standing out from the competition.
3. Remember to Exclude Certain Audiences
Targeting plays a big role in building a social advertising strategy. Finding the right audience is a big part of making your campaign work. Just as you can target a specific audience, you can also exclude certain groups.
Excluding audiences can be useful, and sometimes necessary, in several situations:
- Excluding interest-based audiences lets you remove a specific group of users from your targeting. For example, if you’re trying to reach people without children, you can exclude parent audiences from your ad set.
- To avoid overlap, meaning making sure two ad sets aren’t targeting the same people. For example, if you’ve set up an ad set for retargeting website visitors, you could exclude that audience from your other ad sets meant to reach “cold traffic.”
- To avoid showing ads to people who just converted on your site. You can exclude a custom audience based on purchase activity, and even set a time window, for example: people who made a purchase in the last 60 days.
To do this, go to the audience menu, click “exclude,” and add the groups you want. You can find more details on Facebook and Instagram audiences on our social advertising page.
4. Watch How Often Your Ads Repeat
If your ads show up too often in your audience’s feed, people will get tired of seeing them, and your performance will suffer. It’s a simple truth every digital marketer eventually runs into.
Say you’re driving to work, and on Monday you hear the same radio ad three times. That’s not so bad, and the ad might even stick with you in a good way until your first meeting. But then it happens again Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday… What started as brand awareness quickly turns into overexposure, and your brand’s image starts to suffer.
That’s why it’s so important to keep track of how often your ads repeat. There’s no hard rule for how many times an ad should be seen. Just keep in mind that if your campaign isn’t producing results once frequency hits around 3, it’s probably time to make some changes.
On the other hand, if your campaign is doing well but frequency is high, the fix should be refreshing your content, not expanding your audience. It also helps to understand that with retargeting, your budget needs to match the size of your audience. The goal is to re-engage a “warm” audience without wearing it out, or you risk losing those leads for good. Using more visuals can help keep your audience from getting bored.
5. Polish Your Content
After all the work of building a campaign, the only thing your audience actually sees is the content. That’s why it deserves real attention.
Throughout your campaign, some ads will simply do better than others. That’s normal, and it’s up to you to figure out which parts of the content make the difference (main text, visual, description, CTA). To figure this out ahead of time, you can run A/B tests. This works well, letting you use a small budget (no more than 20% of your total budget) to find the best combinations to show your audience based on results from a sample group.
Once your campaign is live, some of the combinations you picked might not perform well or might not get shown much. Don’t worry, just duplicate the ones that are working and try tweaking one thing at a time. The goal is to figure out what really resonates with your audience.
Final Thoughts
Social advertising can be a powerful tool for your business. Used well, it can pay off big time. But if you don’t manage your campaign carefully, things can go sideways fast, and you’ll lose control over your results.
Don’t skip the data analysis. It’s what lets you keep improving your results and stay on track toward your goals.
One last tip: don’t be afraid to pause campaigns that aren’t performing. Sometimes it’s better to try a new direction than to keep heading straight into a storm.
Ready to set sail? Reach out to our specialists to build a strategy tailored to your business goals!
