How to maximise your Facebook ad spend
Every advertising channel has its benefits and drawbacks, and in the industry’s history, it’s always been difficult to prove true effectiveness. With the improvements in technology and tracking abilities, one thing the industry is collectively improving on is finding out where your money is making an impact and where it’s not.
Facebook recommends using oCPM bidding.
At the end of the day, any advertising channel you use needs to prove its ROI for your business. Facebook is no different. Here are a few ways to ensure you make the most out of your Facebook ads and prevent wasting precious advertising dollars.
Be clear about your campaign goals
The first thing you need to do when starting a Facebook ad campaign is to decide on your campaign goal which will determine your bidding strategy. It is vital that you pick the right campaign goal which best fits your desired end result. If you want to increase sales and conversions on your website, it wouldn’t be cost effective to create a brand awareness campaign.
Facebook categorizes campaign objectives into three main types. It’s important that you pick the right type of campaign goal so that you can get the results desired.
Awareness
- Boost your posts
- Promote your page
- Reach people near your business
- Increase brand awareness
Consideration
- Send people to your website
- Get installs of your app
- Raise attendance at your event
- Get video views
- Collect leads for you business
Conversion
- Increase conversions on your website
- Increase engagement in your app
- Get people to claim your offer
- Promote a product catalogue
Essentially, these goals are associated with three types of bidding strategies:
CPM (Cost per mille): For awareness campaigns where all you care about is showing your ads to as many people as possible within your target audience.
CPC (Cost per click): For advertisers interested in driving link clicks such as clicks to website, clicks to install an app, clicks to view a video etc.
oCPM (Optimized CPM): This type of bidding allows Facebook to automatically optimizefor your campaign goal. Most advertisers would find this the best option for them.
Target the right people
Most of the time, less is more when it comes to creating a target audience group for your campaigns.
You’ll need to create a balance between reaching enough people for Facebook to be able to properly optimize your campaigns and an audience size that is targeted enough for your ads to be highly relevant.
Facebook’s extensive targeting options allow you to effectively create audience personas based on age, gender, geographical location, language and more detailed targeting like demographics, interests and behaviors.
One important thing to remember when you’re targeting different audiences is that they will most likely respond differently to your creatives. This is an important reason to develop several creative approaches to a single ad – so you can be specific and tailored for certain audiences, and so you can learn what works.
Maximize your creatives
Don’t make the mistake of creating just 1 or 2 ads. That’s just not how the world works anymore, at least not online. At any given time, you should be running multiple versions of your ad to see what’s performing well against your different target audiences.
Facebook recommends using oCPM bidding and maintaining 5 ads in each ad set at any time so that it can effectively optimize the campaign.
With some campaigns, that might mean a simple swap of image. For others, it might mean taking a look at a different line of copy or call to action. The point is that trying multiple approaches, and comparing them to each other once they’ve launched, is the best way to learn how your ads can be more effective.
Engage the experts
It’s not uncommon now for brands to leverage on the expertise and technology provided by third party platforms to achieve better ROI for their ad campaigns. These platforms have invested significant resources into creating features and services that can help advertisers do their work better, in less time while reducing costs.
For example, our award-winning platform has allowed enterprise level advertisers to improve their campaign performance with minimal effort on their part. Thanks to cutting edge AI technology, ad creatives are empowered with data driven intelligence so they perform better and advertisers enjoy better cost effectiveness.
Small and medium businesses can now also enjoy the same benefits from our new self-served platform.
Content by The Drum Network member:
ReFUEL4
Winner of Facebook's 2016 Innovator of the Year, ReFUEL4 is the world's leading online ad creative management platform.
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