When advertising on Facebook, your goal is simple: get a high-quality return on your marketing investment. Whether that’s getting leads or selling a product, the principle behind them is all unified back to that.
But, in order to actually achieve this, you can’t just setup an ad campaign, sit back, and relax. A good campaign requires you to be vigilant about its performance and learn from your advertising as it goes along. Then, you optimize.
Why Bother With Facebook Campaign Optimization?
There are multiple reasons to frequently optimize your ad campaigns on any platform. Facebook ads are no different.
For starters, you want to be aware of “Facebook ad fatigue” — and do everything you can to prevent that with your target audience. What we mean here is, if people keep seeing the same ads over and over and over, they’ll effectively stop noticing them. This makes sense considering the principle of diminishing marginal utility and how it’d apply to your advertising; every repeated time an individual sees your same ad, the magnitude of its effect on them decreases. That is, if someone sees your ad once, seeing it a second time makes a decently sized impression, but if someone’s seen your ad 100 times, seeing it for the 101st time won’t really matter.
When ad fatigue happens on a large scale, your ads stop registering in people’s minds, they stop interacting with them, and the subsequent cost of acquiring new customers will skyrocket. Part of the optimization process is ensuring this doesn’t happen.
A benefit of optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns is beating Facebook ad fatigue and controlling ad frequency. Ad frequency is exactly what it sounds like — how many times someone sees an ad — and because of the different factors of ad fatigue, limiting that number is very important.
Example Of Where To Find Ad Frequency
The benefit of having the right frequency is that it keeps your costs under control. Like we talked about with ad fatigue, having too high of an ad frequency will cost more, annoy the end user and increase your cost per acquisition (CPA).
When you optimize your campaign, you’re also ensuring it will reach not just a lot of people, but the right people. Reaching the right audience is obviously a big deal. It doesn’t matter if you reach a million people if they’re not going to be interested in you; if you’re a florist in Seattle, it won’t be worth reaching a million soccer fans in Milan.
Through optimization, we can increase your relevance score which improves the reach and CPA of your campaigns.
All of this to say: Optimize your Facebook campaigns. Trust us.
So, What Are The Steps To “Optimize”?
This is important to identify your concrete, operative steps that are a part of optimization.
The first step? Clearly identifying your objective.
Example Of Where To Find Campaign Objective
In most cases, doing this would just be an internal grounding method to guide your campaign — a concrete goal you and the team could refer back to for later steps in order to make the right calls. Facebook, though, now has a nifty tool where when creating a campaign, you can fill out your objective — for example, brand awareness, engagement, or conversions — and Facebook itself will then offer suggestions for which settings are optimal for you.
You’ll then want to optimize targeting. Facebook has some great tools that’ll help you dial in your target audience and from there get ads in front of the right people. That includes specifying by age range, interests, past visitation of your website (or lack thereof), what device they’re on, and a lot more. There are many options here; you can experiment to see what gets you the best results.
Example Of Where To Optimize Targeting
From here it’s important to optimize via bidding and budget. This can be confusing at times because there’s so many ways to optimize when considering bids. But all those options are where you get to dive into really getting the most out of each cent. For example, you can choose to be charged per 1,000 impressions, per click, per conversion, etc.
It would take a heck of a lot of words to go through each of your options here, but if you want to go more in-depth, AdEspresso has more info.
Then you’ll optimize through delivery and placements. While all the above settings should relate back to your objective that we talked about first, delivery and placements is particularly tied into that. An example for delivery methods is reach versus impressions; if you selected “reach,” your ads will be shown to the maximum amount of people, whereas choosing “impressions” would show your ads to people the maximum amount of times. As you can see, these settings’ value would vary depending on what your campaign objective was.
Lastly for now is optimizing through reporting and analysis. Essentially: it’s important to know what you’re looking at. It doesn’t matter much how the reports come back if you don’t know what it means. Learning how to read KPIs (key performance indicators) and other numbers is the key to improving your performance in the future. Without learning to interpret these figures, you really cap your ability to learn about your campaign itself and subsequently cap your ability to further improve your campaign’s future performance through creative problem solving.
By heeding these steps, you’re setting up a solid foundation for your Facebook ad campaigns’ future. Being able to interpret the data that comes back from these campaigns then gives you the opportunity to adapt, evolve, and improve, meaning your campaigns can always have a positive outlook.
