We all like likes. But the biggest mistake you can make is to equate likes, comments, and shares to social ad success. What’s better than likes? Tangible results. Of course, things get a lot less enjoyable when your ads aren’t converting.
The good news is that there are some tweaks, tips, and hacks that can make a real difference to your ad performance. Maybe you’re not using the optimal tools or maybe there’s a better way to use them. Here are our top tips to increase traffic to your sites, reach the right customers, reduce your cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and ultimately improve sales figures without spending more on your campaigns.
1. Consider your schedule
Chances are there’s a certain time of day and a certain time of the week that your customer is most likely to be online. By ensuring that your ads only run at such times you can get in front of the right eyeballs more often. See what times perform the best by analyzing your ads’ performance in the Facebook Ads Manager reports and the look at the breakdown by day under the “breakdown” menu. To work out the optimal time you will need to run multiple campaigns and watch trends.
2. Perfect your placement
Ad placement is a powerful factor and can cause a huge degree of variation in your cost-per-click (CPC). Consult Facebook Ads Manager to find your top-performing placement under the “breakdown” menu. Once you’ve identified which placements have done the best, double down on them by increasing your bids. Any under-performing ad placements can be removed altogether.
3. Optimize your creative
The overall quality of your ads as well as their relevance will impact not only how well they perform, but also how much they cost. Facebook rewards more relevant ads by subsidizing them in the ad auction to lower their cost and boost their performance. Keep in mind that ads with an original touch generally do better than overly polished, impersonal ads.
4. Choose the right objective
When you create a new campaign, it’s imperative that you make the right choice for your campaign objective. This is because Facebook’s algorithm needs to know what your campaign is aiming to do so that it can auto-optimize it accordingly.
5. Get geo-specific
Geo-targeting on Facebook neatly complements demographic targeting and is just as important. This way, you can focus your campaign on those in the physical area where your product or service is most relevant. From specific countries to a small area radius, carefully consider where your ideal customer is likely to be and avoid wasting money advertising where they aren’t.
6. Don’t duplicate
You want to hang on to the likes, shares, and audience interactions your campaigns accumulate. You earned that social proof, but fortunately, you don’t need to abandon it when you create a new advert. Instead of duplicating by choosing “Create new”, choose “Use existing post”. This will ensure all your previous engagements are carried over, adding credibility to your message and helping to drive further engagement.
7. Easy on the frequency
It’s one thing to remind a potential customer of an offer but pestering them is sure to be counter-productive. If your ads appear too frequently, they will irritate the people you’re trying to attract, harming your campaign’s performance and brand. Getting the balance right can be tricky and you need to consider placement, as sidebar ads tend to be less visible, for instance. Rotating between multiple ad variations is an effective way to meet this challenge and avoid inflicting ad fatigue.
8. Exclude the already converted
Don’t preach to the choir – rather save your ad spend to reach new customers. Be sure to exclude already converted users by creating a custom audience of visitors to your landing page. When setting up a new campaign, under “new audience” choose “exclude” then set the parameters.
9. Keep an eye on the competition
Facebook has made it easy to keep abreast with what others in your space are doing. Try using Facebook’s Ad Library to get an overview of the ads currently running on the platform. Take a look at your competitors’ pages and select “page transparency” and “see more” to see all of their active campaigns. Here you can compare their tone, use of imagery, etc, and see how effective it was.
10. Use the FTO approach
You can’t fine-tune a campaign until you have some data on how performance. To get that data more quickly, marketers use the Fast Take Off (FTO) method. This entails starting a new campaign with a much higher budget than planned to get the first 10 000 impressions – enough to be able to see whether something is or isn’t working.
No matter the nature of your business or the size of your ad budget, these tips will help you make the most of it and get results with Facebook advertising. See what more you can learn about digital marketing here.
