How to Effectively Optimize Your FB Ads

What separates successful Facebook campaigns from unsuccessful Facebook ad campaigns is how much time and effort has been spent on Facebook optimization.

You see, the work required to set up a Facebook campaign doesn’t stop once all the FB ads are running. To really maximize your chances of experiencing a return on investment, you need to do some campaign optimization after your FB ads have been running for a few days.

 

 

There are many ways you can do some campaign optimization and different aspects of your FB ads you can look to improve but the key is to always optimize first based on your campaign objective. An FB ad campaign objective, is simply what you want people to do as a result of seeing your FB ad.

There are currently 11 FB ad campaign objectives you can choose from with Facebook advertising:

 

 

So when you’ve reached the stage where it’s time to do some campaign optimization, always have in mind what your objective is in the first place and look at the volume and cost per volume.

For example, should your objective be traffic, then always look at your Facebook campaign with traffic in mind and look at the volume of traffic you’re getting and the cost per click and ask yourself what changes you make will ensure you generate more traffic for less.

When performing campaign optimization, optimize in the following order:

• Audiences
• Creative
• Copy
• Placements
• Demographics

Optimizing Audiences

 

Let’s start by looking at optimizing audiences. When optimizing audiences, it’s important to have several ad sets for different segments of your audience to find out which audience performs best.

For example, should you be selling vitamins, create an ad set for men and another one for women. Or an ad set for people who have a specific interest such as muscle building and another ad set targeting people with another specific interest such as yoga.

When you create several ad sets for different segments of your Facebook targeting, it will be easy to do your Facebook optimization, because you’ll quickly see which segments perform best and which don’t. If there are a few clear winners with some audiences, switch off the under performing audiences.

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Optimizing Your Creative

 

The next step when optimizing your Facebook campaigns is optimizing your creative, in other words, the visuals you use in your ads.

At the ad level, look at all the creative you’ve used and see whether you’ve identified a pattern where some specific images tend to bring better results than other images.

For example, you might notice that images featuring real people tend to perform better than graphics. Or you might notice that images without text perform better than images with text. Once you’ve identified a pattern with images, pause the under performing ones.

 

Optimize Your Facebook Ad Copy

 

Once you’ve optimized your creative, it’s time to look at your Facebook ad copy. In other words, your headline and description.

Look at each ad individually, and see whether you can identify a pattern. Are ads that include a personal story in the Facebook ad copy performing better than ads with a direct sales approach? Or are the ads about benefit A performing better than ads about benefit B?

When you’ve identified a pattern, make the changes to your Facebook ad copy accordingly or pause the underperforming ads instead.

 

Optimize Placements

 

The next step is optimizing the placements. As you may already know, with Facebook advertising, you can display ads in different places such as the Facebook newsfeed, the Instagram newsfeed, desktop computers, mobile devices, Facebook’s right column, etc…

So to find out where your ads are performing the best, go to the ad set level of your Facebook campaign, click on the ad set you want to optimize and click on the graph.

Then, select placements to see where your ads are performing the best. If there are clear successful Facebook campaigns, edit your FB ad set and change the placements accordingly to redirect the budget you’re spending to where it’s performing the best.

 

Optimize Demographics

 

Lastly, optimize your demographics. Demographics are mainly the age, gender and location. To check which demographics are best performing, select your FB ad set, click on the graph and click on “demographics”.

If there’s a particular gender or age group that seems to be much more responsive, you might want to adapt your ads, to make them more appealing to that specific group of people.

For example, if you were advertising a chiropractic clinic, and you noticed that men over 40 were much more responsive, you might want to change your images to show men over 40 using the services of a chiropractor instead of showing women or younger people.

When making changes to optimize your Facebook ads, always allow 3 to 7 days to experience the difference it makes. Although FB ad campaign optimization should never stop, the first few weeks of running Facebook ads are when most of the Facebook optimization work is done.

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Should you have optimized as best you can and you don’t experience any significant improvements, then it’s time to troubleshoot the following:

 

Your offer

 

You can have the best Facebook targeting, the best copy and the best creative but if your offer is not good enough, then nothing you do will make a real difference.

If you believe that your offer is good, then move on to checking your impressions.

 

Impressions

 

Are you getting impressions? Are people seeing your ad? If people aren’t seeing them, your audience may be too small or the budget is too small. You have to have a decent amount of money to spend.

If your audience is too small, expand it, such as, instead of targeting 35+ year old people, target 25+ year old people. Remember, if your audience is too small or too refined, your ads might not show. If you’re getting enough impressions then check your clicks.

 

Clicks

 

Are you getting clicks? If not, your ad might not be appealing enough to make people want to follow your call to action. If that’s the case, fine tune your ads by changing your images, headlines and descriptions to make them more appealing to your target audience.

Should you be getting enough impressions and clicks but no conversions, it’s time to check your congruence.

 

Congruence

 

Congruence is when your ad matches your landing page. Are you using the same colours, text fonts, images and overall message on your landing page as you are on your ads? If you aren’t, you might experience a high bounce rate when people click your ads and go to your landing page.

The last element to troubleshoot is your landing page itself once you’ve made sure your ads are congruent with your landing pages.

 

Landing page

 

An effective landing page is a simple landing page.  Avoid cluttering your landing pages with testimonials and different calls to action. The more confusing your landing page is, the less likely it will convert.

There are of course other elements you can optimize and troubleshoot to run successful Facebook campaigns but the ones mentioned here are usually big needle movers.

Once you’ve optimized your campaigns and went through the troubleshooting process and made the necessary changes, remember to give your ads a few days, ideally 3 to seven days before judging and jumping to conclusions.

If you’d like to take your Facebook marketing to the next level, and increase the results you’re getting from your current Facebook marketing efforts by 10, click here to download my FREE Facebook marketing report. Simply enter your name and email and I’ll instantly send you the report.

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