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Tips & Tricks to Optimize Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are definitely effective at increasing the sales of your products and services. The trouble is: you’ve got to understand how to use it.

Facebook provides way too many options for customization. And while this gives you greater control over your ads, it’s a double-edged sword as it also increases your chances of failing.

optimize Facebook ads

That’s why we’ve put together this guide for you. It covers all the aspects that you need to consider while optimizing your Facebook ads.
Here’s a broad overview of what we’ll cover.

This blog will present a list of techniques that you should be enforcing into your strategy.

Table of Contents

To be clear: Facebook does help advertisers get the most out of their ads and you can always rely on the platform to give you results. However, it’s important to remember that Facebook also has to make money for itself. Therefore, it is smarter for you to take control of FB ad optimization. For that, here’s what you need to know

If you want to make the most of your Facebook ads, you need to have your basic marketing grounds covered. You need to:

Create a client persona

The success of your Facebook ads depends on how effectively you can target your audience. Creating and understanding your client persona will definitely help you understand the interests and behaviors of your target audience. It’ll help you show your ads to the people with the greatest purchase intent, who are most likely to convert. Be as visual and descriptive as you can while creating your client persona.

fb ad optimization

Set clear goals

Your goals may broadly fall into one of these three categories.

Ad Optimization

Marketing objectives on Facebook

Choose the objective that makes most sense for the stage that your business is in. For instance, if you’re a new company that’s just starting out, your goal has to be to create awareness. It’s going to be very difficult to get conversions without your customers even knowing about you.

However, if you have a sizable portion of your audience that is aware of you, you could run conversion ads aimed at that population while aiming to still acquire new customers with awareness campaigns that are targeted at a different group. Whatever your goals may be, it’s important to be clearly aware of them.

Once you’ve got these two marketing essentials in place, you’ll be ready to optimize Facebook ads effectively. Let’s see how.

Optimizing your Facebook ads begins with refining your target audience. You can use the detailed targeting option under the audience section to determine whom your ads are shown to.

Detailed targeting

The detailed targeting option lets you go beyond demographic (age and gender) and location targeting by letting you target people by interests, behaviors, and other categories.

For instance, if you're advertising gaming merchandise, you can pick games as an interest to refine your audience.

Ad Optimization

Likewise, if you sell organic foods, you can target users by purchase behaviour and select an audience that has purchased “naturals” and “organics” in the past.

“More categories” includes other groups of people like teachers or nail care professionals, etc.

Targeting strategy

When it comes to choosing your target audience, it’s always a good idea to start with a broad audience and then narrow down to a more precise one. This is, of course, if you don’t already know who your target audience is on Facebook.

Create a lookalike audience

Once you’ve got your high value customers figured out, you can use it to reach new customers using Facebook’s lookalike audience option.

Experiment with lookalike audiences

Facebook’s lookalike audience gives you the ability to further experiment with your high value customers. Play around with the lookalike settings to make the most of Facebook’s artificial intelligence capabilities to increase your sales.

Source

Go hyperlocal if you have to

If you’re advertising a location-specific product or service, go local or hyperlocal with your campaigns. Use pin codes or radius targeting to advertise only to people around your store or outlet to increase the efficiency of your campaigns.

Choose relevance over frequency

There are two ad metrics that are often underestimated by marketers: frequency and relevancy. It’s important to pay attention to both of these metrics.

Frequency is the number of times your customer sees your ads or ads similar to it.

Relevancy of your ads is determined by Facebook using indicators of positive and negative engagement on your ads.

It’s important to cap the frequency of your ads so that your target audience is not annoyed by your ads and doesn’t negatively engage with it by blocking it or by any other means.

A rule of thumb is to cap the frequency at 3. If your ad is seen more than 3 times by the same person, they’re likely to be put off by it.

On the other hand, aim for as high a relevance score as you can. A relevance score of 8 would be great. This may even help you reduce your overall CPC.

Schedule your ads

It’s unlikely that your ads get the same level of engagement 24*7. Use data from previous campaigns to identify the times when your audience is most active on Facebook to run more ads in those periods.

If you don’t have this data, you could decide when to schedule your ads by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. For instance, if your target audience usually works from 9-5 on the weekdays, it’s best not to advertise during those hours as they’d most likely be busy at work.

If Facebook’s taking longer than 48 hours to review your ads, here’s why. Alternatively, if your Facebook ads are getting rejected, here's how you can fix that problem.

Use ad placements

If you have the data to establish whether your ads are being viewed more on mobiles or desktops, or if Facebook news feed ads receive more engagement than Messenger ads, then use this data to improve the efficiency of your campaigns.

Optimize Facebook ads bidding

First and foremost, it’s important to be clear on what sort of campaign you’re running. Is it a conversion campaign or a website traffic campaign or something else?

If you know this, you’ll know how to best optimize Facebook ads bidding. For instance, conversion campaigns require a higher budget as it takes longer for Facebook to optimize your campaigns. If you run a conversion campaign on a shoestring budget, you may or may not get results. However, the chances of you getting results increases with a higher budget as Facebook’s algorithms would then have the time to learn from the behavior of your target audience.

Secondly, if you know exactly how much you can afford to spend on your Facebook ads, you can set an upper limit on your bids. This will act as a preventive measure to ensure that you’re always within your budget even if your Facebook ads aren’t working for you.

Lastly, if you’re willing to pay a higher price for better quality leads, you can switch from the lowest cost option to the target cost option. This will not only help you stabilize your costs but over time get your more accurate and better quality leads for your product or service.

Use tracking pixels

Tracking pixels are useful for many, many reasons. It not only helps you personalize your ads but also helps you achieve your macro goals of increasing conversions and overall returns from ad spend.

Facebook Pixel helps you track customer behavior across devices, optimize Facebook ads, and ultimately do more with your ads by letting you curate custom audiences and learning about your website traffic. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can install Facebook Pixel. If your Facebook data doesn’t match Google Analytics data, here’s why.

Retargeting

Retargeting campaigns help you remind your audience of your product or service. This is to say, once you’re certain they know about your brand, you can target them with more advanced campaigns.

Pixel lets you run remarketing campaigns as it tracks your customers across devices. It knows exactly when your customer has visited your website or a certain URL, or has taken an action like starting a free trial or abandoning their cart. You can use this information on Pixel to specifically target those users with either a remarketing ad or through some other channel.

Remarketing ads generally tend to have higher conversion rates as they’re aimed at high purchase intent audiences. According to eMarketer, conversion rates were as high as 20% for remarketing emails that were sent to customers who abandoned their carts in the purchase journey.

How retargeting works

Optimize your landing page

Although the landing page is not directly a part of your Facebook ad, it has a significant role to play in increasing conversions. Too often marketers fail to realize this and they never take any action to rectify the flaws of their landing page, which leaves them with campaigns that underperform perpetually.

The key to optimizing your landing page is consistency. Make sure the content of your landing page is consistent both visually and in language to your ads. Your landing pages must provide your customers with a sense of continuity and purpose for them to finish the action that they began by clicking on your ad. If you fail to create a seamless experience because of your landing page, your ads are most certainly destined to underperform.

Source: A step-by-step guide to Facebook Business Manager

Measure performance

Remember, we began by setting goals. But goals are useless if you don’t actually track your progress and measure your performance. FB ad optimization is a continuous process. It begins with the setting of goals and goes on till you achieve them. Then, it begins again with a fresh set of objectives that you can track to measure your progress.

Optimizing Facebook ads content

Your ad content should stand out from the clutter. It should be compelling and action-oriented. Here are a few tips to help you optimize Facebook ads content.

Test multiple versions

A/B test several versions of your ads but always remember not to change more than one factor or parameter. Let’s say you change everything - the post copy, the ad copy, the headline, and the CTA - you won’t be able to tell why the better performing ad outperformed the others.

While A/B testing ads, it’s okay to have several (2-3 or even more) versions of your ads as long as you’re testing only one parameter like the creative copy, for instance. This way, you’ll be able to determine which creative copy works best for your campaign and can choose to set a higher budget for that copy.

Use engagement data

Facebook allows you to use an existing post as your ad. You can take advantage of this facility by using the posts that received maximum engagement as ads. It’ll act like a page boost but with a clear call-to-action and business interest.

Alternatively, you could just use the shares and likes on your posts as indicators to determine what content best works with your audience. Use this information to create ads that resonate and are relevant to them.

Choose high-quality images

Images account for 75%-90% of an ad’s success, so high-quality product photography is crucial. Choose images that are warm and radiant. If possible, use images that show people using your products. Images that have an emotional appeal also increase the CTR.

Image ad specs

Leverage the power of video

82% of mobile traffic already comes from video. Given the efficacy of videos, it makes sense to run video ads. After all, video ads are more dynamic and engaging. They allow you to demonstrate your product or service and tell your brand’s story most effectively. Use video ads if you can afford to make them. Keep your videos short. Facebook users generally love to watch shorter videos that are approximately 20 seconds long.

Video ad specs

Create content for mobile phones

As smartphones become more popular, it’s important to ensure your ads are clearly visible on mobile devices. If your copy is not legible when users see them on their mobile phones, then your campaign is bound to fail. Make sure your ads are mobile friendly to increase their efficiency.

We know that Facebook’s Product Ads are magical. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need to be optimized. There are several steps you can take to optimize Facebook Product Ads. Let’s take a look.

Keep ads fresh

Apart from testing your ad copies, change your ad copies from time to time so that they appear fresh to your customers.

Show availability

Don’t mark products that you plan to restock as out of stock as Facebook automatically assumes this product will not be available in the future. Instead, you can mark these products as available for order.

Include price

Make sure the price of your products is visible upfront and that it matches any landing page that you may have so that your customer is not confused by the information that they receive and forced into delaying their purchase decision.

Create labels

Labels help you classify products into groups like best sellers or promotions, etc. You can use these labels to create ad groups and sell either related products or more of what customers are looking for.

Eliminate unprofitable products

Take a stock of your inventory from time to time. To increase your ROAS, advertise only those products that are most likely to sell more.

Time frame for remarketing campaigns

It’s important to get your time frame for remarketing campaigns right. If you set too short a time frame, chances are your ads will be shown multiple times even before the customer has made a decision. You run the risk of expending all of your budget even before the customer is ready to make a purchase. Giving your customers space and time to come around could increase your conversions in such cases.

Setting the time frame for remarketing ads

Tailor your ads per customer behavior

A customer who’s just viewed your product is not the same as a customer who abandoned their cart. It doesn’t make sense to target them with the same ad. Create different remarketing ads for different events such as these using Pixel.

Create and promote different catalogs

Catalogs are a great way to not only display your products but also to curate them. You can create theme-based catalogs or catalogs for a certain occasion. Add contextual details of your products to capture the interest of your customers.

For instance, you can create a catalog of Halloween costumes for kids and add a headline that reads: Your kids will love you for making them popular. This ensures that your messaging fits the context you’re advertising in, while allowing you to display more than one of your products without being intrusive.

Catalogs help your customers find related products that they may anyway be interested in and help you drive sales in general.

Localize language and pricing

As an advertiser, it’s your job to create a connection with your audience. Sometimes that could mean speaking in their language. At other times, it could mean being competitive in their markets. If you’re going local, don’t forget to localize your ads. A global ad may be entirely irrelevant in a local context. When advertising in Rome, advertise as the Romans do.

Add overlays

Finally, add overlays on your ads with important information. One way to do this is by including your price in a way that’s interactive so that when your customer hovers over your ad they can see it. Another way is to speak the social media language visually by adding emojis or stickers to your ads. Get creative to break the clutter with your ads and to make them more effective.

Optimize your Facebook ads with Mediaqart

That brings us to the end of this guide for Facebook ads optimization. We hope you found it useful. Please share it with others if you do. If you’d like a partner to manage your Facebook ads for you, get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to help you achieve your business goals with our automated performance advertising platform.

Recommended Reading

The Ultimate Facebook Advertising Guide for Beginners in 2022
Why Marketing Campaigns Underperform & How to Fix Them?
ROAS vs ROI and How to Improve ROAS for Online Ads

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