Formerly Facebook Ads, Meta Ads are an unavoidable part of the digital marketing landscape now, whether you’re on the receiving end as an individual user or on the marketer side. Because of that, as a marketer, it’s easy to waste a bunch of money and do little other than annoy disinterested users if you don’t approach it right.

So, to avoid that, we’ve taken a look at the importance of regularly adapting your ads and campaigns and a checklist for the elements to optimize.

The Importance of Checking on Your Facebook Account and Optimizing It Accordingly

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The basis for this is that the ecosystem in which you’re running ads — and in which you have an organic presence — is ever-changing. This is true of both Meta’s algorithms and the evolving preferences, tastes, and behaviors of people online, which naturally are heavily intertwined.

So, because this environment isn’t static, you can’t be either. Businesses who “set it and forget it” will almost never see results improve over time — and in fact, they’ll usually be lucky to have results stay the same.

This means you should be testing regularly. At the same time, every time you run an ad series you should go into it with an idea of what you’re expecting to learn from their performance.

And, although Meta is moving towards trying to automate and homogenize optimizations for everybody, that means:

A) all else held constant you won’t have any marginal advantage over any competitors

B) these automated optimizations aren’t perfectly reliable anyway.

Both these mean that the most successful advertising on Facebook and Instagram will still be the result of human-powered critical thinking and creative problem-solving about how to get the right messaging in front of the right people.

With that in mind, here’s a checklist to help make sure your Facebook and Instagram advertising can be as relevant as possible to the people who see them and as helpful to you as possible.

The Facebook Ads Checklist

From the top, here are things to take care of when creating and maintaining your Facebook ads:

Audience Optimization

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You shouldn’t neglect any of these steps, but you especially shouldn’t neglect this — if you’re a ski shop in Seattle, you’re wasting views and money by showing ads to football coaches in Miami.

It doesn’t matter how perfect your ads are if they’re being wasted on irrelevant internet users. To focus your ads on people likely to be interested in your service, products, or brand, make sure to…

• Refine custom audiences: Analyze the performance of current custom audiences and make controlled amendments accordingly.
• Update lookalike audiences: Create updated lookalike audiences based on what you’re learning from existing customer behavior.
• Exclude certain audiences, if applicable: If you find ads are being wasted on a chunk of audiences who aren’t relevant, create exclusion audiences to avoid targeting certain people based on preferences, behavior, etc. — this could be people who aren’t ever going to convert, or for example, it could be people who recently converted and aren’t likely to again soon depending on the nature of your product.

Ad Creative & Format Enhancements

Format and creative assets can have a disproportionate impact on both ads and organic content, particularly as people become “fatigued” by certain ad tropes, formats, and other characteristics.

Pay attention to which assets and qualities perform best and rotate in new designs to combat this. Test different creative elements — for example, colors, images, video-versus-static, etc. — to identify what’s most resonant.

Ad Copy Optimization

Similar to the visual creative assets, you should be reviewing your ad copy and its performance and from there refining it to make it as relevant and engaging as possible.

This includes different headlines, CTAs, and ad copy descriptions to figure out the most effective combinations.

Utilization of Dynamic Creative Assets

Once again, this is related to the above couple of checklist items. Depending on what type of Meta ads you’re using, you’ll likely have the option of making them dynamic creative ads instead of static, set ones. Dynamic Facebook ads automatically optimize different creative elements based on what they expect to be most relevant to and attention-piquing to any given user.

Budget & Bidding Adjustments

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Depending on which Meta ads are performing better or worse, you’ll usually want to reallocate your budget to reflect that. More of your budget can be shifted to higher-performing ads and campaigns so you’re sinking less money into less efficient ones and using your budget more efficiently.

At the same time, it may be the right move to completely pause underperforming ads to maximize your return while getting them fixed.

Bidding Strategies Optimization

You also might find certain explicit bidding strategies — for example, lowest cost, bid cap, etc. — work better than others for your needs. Test different ones to get a better idea of the most cost-effective approach. From there, adjust your bid amounts based on resulting performance and competition levels.

Ad Placement Optimizations & Testing New Placements

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How are your ads being affected by their placement? Review and analyze their performance by placement to identify top-performing placements versus less effective ones. From there, adjust your placement settings to focus on the most effective channels — consider asking: how does a Facebook News Feed ad’s performance differ from the same ad shown on Instagram Stories?

You might also find, during your testing, that different placements offer new or more effective opportunities for users to engage. Consider that in your testing and analysis as well.

Leveraging Advanced Targeting Options

Detailed targeting expansion for Meta ads can be a helpful tool — test it out to see if it can help you reach a broader audience without sacrificing relevance, a common trade-off.

You’ll also have options for layering your targeting to combine different characteristics like demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. This will help you reach both a broader but more precise audience.

Monitoring & Analytics

In general, you should be regularly reviewing the performance of your Facebook ads to identify trends — both positive ones that you can emphasize and negative ones that signal areas for improvement.

Of course, “regularly” can mean something different to everyone, so we advise once a week for budgets of $5,000 a month or under, twice a week for between $5,000 and $10,000, and three times a week if you have a budget between $10,000 to $25,000 per month. Any budget that exceeds $25,000 to $30,000 should be checked daily.

Ad performance data here can imply which elements are driving success and inform your decisions going forward.

A/B testing and continuous improvement

Lastly, is a related element and the thing we always harp on at Fujisan: Test your advertising through A/B testing and make improvements based on what you find.

Continuously run A/B tests on different ad elements to identify the best-performing variations, iterate based on results, and make incremental changes from there.

Also, document your learnings from these tests! The future you, will thank you.

In the end, this all comes back to the fact that optimizing your Facebook ads isn’t something you’re ever truly “finished” with. Regularly checking in, learning, and making appropriate changes is an ongoing process that will make sure you’re showing your best work to the best people for you.