Advertising on Facebook has proven to be efficient. Over the years , the social media giant collected a lot of demographic data. Because of big investments in the platforms, it successfully managed to transform the demographic data into an interesting advertising platform for online marketers. As online marketers, we are constantly searching to improve the online performance of our ads. Improving the performance on Facebook advertising is still rather new to a lot of online advertisers. Besides some best practices on how to create visuals, Facebook does not have extensive resources on how to optimise your ads on Facebook. To guide you in your search on how to optimise Facebook campaigns, we provided 6 tips that can help you increase your performance.
1. It’s all about targeting
It may sound like a cliché, but one of the most important ways to increase your performance is choosing the appropriate audience. It is by far the online channel with the most targeting possibilities, which makes it very interesting to target extremely specific. Before defining your targeting settings in Facebook, try to get some insights on who your audience is, and what they are interested about.
First, think about basic demographic data like age, gender, parental status, geographic region, language, etc.
Next to the demographic targeting, think about including your current fans, friends of fans or custom audiences. These users already have an affinity with your business, so they might be interested in your products, latest news and promotions.
On top of the demographic targeting and fans, think about more out-of-the-box interest categories. E.g. if you are promoting a music festival, target fans of the artists on your festival. If you are promoting a hotel in Switzerland, target fans who love to ski, snowboard, but also mountain bikers, hikers and mountaineers. Maybe your audience will even be interested in Swiss cheese, Swiss cow bells or Alpine horn music.
2. Understand the Facebook Relevance score
In February 2015 Facebook announced the introduction of a new metric: Relevance score. The relevance score is a number between 1 and 10 that defines how relevant your ad is to your audience. The score is calculated based on the positive and negative feedback on your ad (only available after at least 500 impressions). The higher your score, the more relevant your ad is. It may not be a surprise that more relevant ads will have a higher CTR, and will eventually have lower CPM and lower average CPC.
Adapting your targeting settings to more precise audiences could increase your relevance score. If your Relevance score remains too low, you can pause your low relevant ads, and shift your budgets to more relevant ads.
3. Pick the right bid settings
Facebook has an automatic bidding optimisation algorithm included to the platform. It allows you to choose on what you want to optimise your budget. Depending on your campaign objectives, you can optimise on post engagements, website conversions, app installs, etc.
Besides optimizing on your campaign objective, you can also choose to optimise for Impressions. If selected, Facebook will show your ads as much as possible to people in your targeting. Note that this will also increase your frequency. If CTR is more important to your campaigns, Optimise for clicks would be more recommended. In this scenario, Facebook will show your ads more often to people who are more likely to click on your ad.
If your ads are running for a long time, you could try to start with the optimise for impressions, when enough data is generated, you could switch to optimise for clicks, and eventually, when Facebook knows what visitors are more likely to meet your campaign objectives, you can choose to optimise on your campaign objective.
A Special optimisation setting is the “optimise for Daily unique reach”. This is advised when you don’t want to show your ads too often, or if your budgets are very limited. Visitors will be shown your ad up to a maximum of once a day.
After choosing the desired optimisation settings, you can choose to enter a bid, or you can leave it up to Facebook. Unless you have a specific strategy, or good understanding in Facebook, it is advised to leave the bidding up to Facebook.
4. Define the right Placement
Know where your ads perform best! Facebook has several places where it shows your ads: Mobile news feed, Desktop News feed, Desktop Right Hand Side and Audience Network.
The difference between placements may not be underestimated.
Our own experience showed that, due to the increased visibility in the news feed, CTR is a lot higher compared to RHS ads.
The way the placements are perceived may probably have an impact on the performance of both placements: RHS ads may be perceived as an actual ad, so visitors know that they can expect promotions or relevant products. News feed ads are more perceived as a fun post, or article, so visitors might be interested, but may not be ready to convert or may not spend a lot of time on your site.
To optimise your campaigns, think about where you want your ad to be displayed. If you hope for a quick interaction with your visitors, like a post engagement, an event attendance or a page like, the news feed might be the best option. If you’re more focussed on conversions, or app installs, a mix between RHS and news feed placements might be better.
Note that for e-commerce, desktop placements (RHS + news feed) tend to perform better since visitors are more at ease to convert on a desktop rather than mobile.
Ads targeted on the audience network will be displayed in the news feed and Facebook partner websites. The main focus for this placement is app installs or app engagement. It is advised to only use this placement for campaigns with an app install or app engagement objective.
5. Call to action buttons
A rather quick win on Facebook, which immediately improves your campaign performance, is the inclusion of a call to action button on your ads.
These buttons make it more clear to visitors what they can expect or do after they clicked your ad.
Research showed the CTR is higher for ads that have a CTA button included.
Currently, Facebook has 5 pre-defined call to action buttons that you can insert on your ads:
- Shop now: suggested for e-commerce
- Book now: suggested for travel industry (or horeca?)
- Learn more: could be used for every business
- Sign up: suggested to attract new leads
- Download: suggested for app promotion
6. Include Custom audiences
As mentioned above, targeting and relevance are key elements in Facebook.
A good way to increase your relevance score, and your targeting are the custom audiences.
Custom audiences are pre-defined lists of Facebook users. This could be a list of people who already visited your website (Remarketing) or a list of e-mail addresses or phone numbers in your customer dataset.
These users already showed interest in your business and are thus more likely to have interest in your Facebook promotions.
These customers are more likely to have a positive reaction to your ads. This will increase the relevance score, increase the CTR and reduce the CPM and average CPC.
Note that, according to privacy regulations, you need an opt-in approval from your customer to use custom audiences!
Author : Bart Van Nieuwenhuyse
