facebook advertising strategy

Facebook Advertising Strategy Optimization

Looking to optimize your Facebook advertising strategy? Here’s a few quick tips on how to make 2019 your best year yet in Facebook Advertising!

CHOOSE THE RIGHT TARGET AUDIENCE

What does this mean? Facebook’s ad platform comes down to your audience’s demographics; data points such as age, location, job, and interests assure you’re reaching the right prospects.

TEST DIFFERENT FACEBOOK AD TYPES
  • Looking to drive app downloads?
  • Need to show off products and offers?
  • Want to advertise your latest webinar or case study?

Play around with some Facebook ad types to drive traffic. Long gone are the days when single image ads were all you had to go off. Dip your toes into the creative ocean of Facebook advertising!

  • Carousel Ads
  • Video Ads
  • Lead Ads
  • Canvas Ads
  • Product Catalogue Ads
  • Slideshow ads
  • Dynamic Ads
TAP INTO THE POWER OF FACEBOOK RETARGETING
  • People who have previously visited your website
  • People who have made a purchase on your site in the past
  • People on your email list
  • Lookalike audience can introduce you to totally new users who are likely to engage with your content.
RUNNING BUDGET-FRIENDLY FACEBOOK ADVERTISING STRATEGY

Testing your ads

  • Ad types
  • Images
  • Ad Copy
  • Calls-to-action
  • Audiences
  • Offers, incentives, and lead magnets
  • Campaign Budget Optimization

USING CAMPAIGN BUDGET OPTIMIZATION


What is CBO?

Campaign budget optimization is a way of optimizing the distribution of a campaign budget across your campaign’s ad sets. So this means Facebook automatically and continuously finds the best available opportunities for results across your ad sets and distributes your campaign budget in real time to get those results. It can be a lot more effective in finding winners while reducing costs on under performing ads.

Facebook will be making CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) mandatory for all accounts in September 2019 so it’s good practice to start implementing this in your overall Facebook advertising strategy and A/B test one campaign with CBO vs. without CBO.

Use these tips and tricks to crush your Facebook ad goals for 2019!


Are you struggling to get sales or more leads, clients or customers? Contact us today and book a free strategy call with our Vancouver Facebook Ads expert. 

Facebook Ads Results

Split Testing: Facebook Ad Expanded Interests vs Normal Targeting?

Today we’re going to look at some split testing data and find out what works better…Facebook ad expanded interests or normal targeting?

SHOULD YOU USE IT OR NOT?

We recently ran a split test to see if Facebook ads expanded interests targeting feature increased our bottom line or not vs. normal targeting.

WHAT IS IT?

The expanded interests feature is where you essentially allow FB to go outside of the bounds of your normal targeting to try and find even more people that may be relevant to your offer.

For example, if you’re targeting “Dog Lovers” and have an audience size of 1million, selecting the expanded interest checkbox will allow you to go after 10million.

When the feature first came out about a year ago, the first test we ran came back with less than impressive results. Scrap that – it was a hot mess and us marketers soon learned to steer away from it.

But – if there’s one truth in FB Marketing is that the platform changes faster than changing underwear.

What worked one week, can bomb the next – and vice versa.

So we recently ran the test again to see if the feature had improved at all.

HYPOTHESIS

By choosing “expand interests when it may increase conversions at a lower cost per conversion” our average cost per opt-in will decrease.

TESTING BUDGET 

We used $2,300 over a two week period to test the feature against a control ad set.

CONSIDERATIONS 

It’s highly likely that the results of this test depend on the size and quality of the targeting audience. For example, if the targeting is very broad, then selecting expand interests likely won’t have much effect at all. But if the targeting is more narrow, then it’s a bit more interesting to see how expanded interests perform.

One possible use case for expanded interests is when you know you have a really good audience but it’s small and so you can’t scale it very much. If you can’t find any other good audiences and you can’t scale the original high-quality audience then it might be a good time to try expanded interests.

TESTING STRUCTURE

Standard Facebook “Split test” with the audience as testing variable.

RESULTS 

Test 1 Results:

Expanded Interests:
Total Spend: $500
Cost Per Opt-in: $8.15
CPC (Link): $0.99
CPM: $14.05

Normal Targeting:
Total Spend: $500
Cost Per Opt-in:$8.28
CPC (Link): $1.09
CPM: $14.18

Test 2 Results:

Expanded Interests:
Total Spend: $650
Cost Per Opt-In: $7.22
CPC (Link): $1.69
CPM: $28.69

Normal Targeting:
Total Spend: $650
Cost Per Opt-In: $7.93
CPC (Link): $1.80
CPM: $24.83

CONCLUSIONS 

So expanded interests won by a small fraction – but not big enough to make it a huge deal. I think more testing is needed for definitive results but in our experiences overall expanded interests does see a significant boost in our conversions so I would argue it’s always best to split test campaigns – one with expanded interests and one without and let the data guide your strategy.

However, granted that the last time we ran this test it was a landslide fail, this is extremely promising and we have now ourselves started to use the expanded interests feature across our campaigns.

Are you a business owner struggling with leads, conversions and sales? Contact us today and book your free strategy call with our Vancouver Facebook Ad Experts.