Facebook Ads Manager is one of the best platforms for acquiring new customers, accounting for 18% of total digital advertising spend in 2023. With over 3 billion users worldwide, Facebook offers marketers a unique opportunity to engage their target audience across a portfolio of apps and services.
But as average Facebook Ads Manager costs have increased significantly since 2019, and as marketing budgets are becoming more scrutinized, it’s important for paid media marketers to make the most of their spend in the channel.
Here are four growth hacks you can use to optimize your Facebook ad campaigns.
Facebook Ads Manager is one of the most intuitive advertising platforms available, offering both guided and custom campaign set-up workflows. But with so many features available, it's easy to miss important steps. It’s important to nail your campaign set-up to ensure your campaign can achieve the best possible results.
Choose the right objective
The customer journey encompasses multiple stages, and different advertising programs are required to reach customers at each stage. While certain campaigns are designed to increase brand awareness at the beginning of the customer journey, others are designed to drive high-intent users to purchase at the end of the journey. When creating campaigns in Facebook Ad Manager, ensure you select the campaign “Objective” that aligns with your campaign goal. Facebook Ads Manager offers numerous objectives to choose from, such as “Awareness,” “Traffic,” and “Sales.” Once you’ve selected an objective, Facebook will optimize ad delivery to achieve that objective.
Choose the right audience
Facebook Ads Manager makes it possible to target users based on their interests and activity on the platform. Once the campaign audience is defined, Facebook will reach relevant users across its family of apps and services. As with selecting your campaign objective, it’s important to align your campaign audience to your campaign goals. An Awareness-focused campaign, for example, may target users who follow topics adjacent to your category, while a Sales-focused campaign may target users that have previously visited your website.
Choose the right ad placements
Facebook offers a range of apps, all with different user experiences and behavioral patterns. When creating your campaign, select the ad placements that best align with your campaign creative and objective. Campaigns with a strong visual offer will perform best on a primarily visual platform such as Instagram, and may be less engaging on a text-based platform such as Facebook Messenger. If you’re unsure of the best placement for your campaign, Facebook does provide an Automatic Placements option, which gives Facebook the flexibility to show ads in places they're likely to perform best.
Set a ROAS goal
It’s important to tell Facebook what success looks like for your campaign. ROAS goals, one of several bid strategy options offered in Facebook Ads manager, tell Facebook how much return you’re expecting to generate from a campaign. Once ROAS goal is set, Facebook will “try to deliver against that over the campaign's lifetime, dynamically bidding as high as needed to maximize results.” While Facebook does not guarantee that they will hit the ROAS goal specified, setting a ROAS goal in Facebook Ads Manager will give Facebook guidance on how to bid for your ad placements at auction, decreasing the chances of runaway campaign costs and wasted spend. See four tips for increasing Facebook ROAS here.
To maximize your return on investment, you need to deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time. There are numerous hacks you can use to refine your campaign targeting and get more out of your Facebook Ad programs.
Understand your audience with Audience Insights
Facebook Audience Insights provides aggregated demographic, interest, and lifestyle information about people connected to your Page. With this understanding, you can create content that resonates with your followers and easily find more people like the ones in your current audience. For example, Audience Insights might uncover that 75% of users that follow your brand also follow pages related to dogs, influencing you to incorporate dogs more in your campaign creative.
Increase flexibility with Custom Audiences
Facebook’s topic-based targeting makes it easy to reach users on their platform, but sometimes you want to power campaigns with your own data. This is where Custom Audiences come in. Custom Audiences allow you to use sources such as customer lists, first-party website or app data, or engagement from across Meta technologies to create audiences of people who already know your business. They're especially powerful when used for retargeting campaigns, which re-engage existing customers and drive them to make additional or repeat purchases. Custom Audiences can also be used as the basis for Lookalike Audiences, in which Facebook creates an expanded list of potential customers that resemble the existing customers in your Custom Audience.
Sharpen targeting with audience exclusions
Who you decide not to target with your Facebook Ad campaigns can be just as important as who you do target. Mis-targeted ads waste campaign budget, lowering ROAS and reducing the number of ads that can be shown to your ideal customers. Setting up audience exclusions allow you to prevent certain users from being included in your campaign, increasing campaign efficiency. Within Facebook Ads Manager, you can create audience exclusions based on interests, geographic, and demographics. For example, if you currently sell your products in the United States of America but aren’t currently able to ship to Canada, you can exclude advertisements from being shown to users in Canada.
Another great audience exclusion hack is to upload Custom Audiences and use them as custom exclusion on your campaigns. For example, you may upload a Custom Audience of customers that have made a purchase in the last 7 days, and exclude them from being shown ads promoting a new product offer.
Bonus: Use a real-time audience platform, such as WasteNot, to automatically update audience exclusion lists in real time. This makes it possible to remove customers from your advertising campaigns as soon as they’ve made a purchase, increasing return on ad spend and improving the customer experience.
Capturing your target customers’ attention with Facebook Ad campaigns is a great start, but for most businesses, clicks do not equal revenue. To optimize Facebook Ads, you must also invest in improving the post-click user experience.
Increase load speed
Recent Google research found that the chance of a user bouncing increases by 32% when page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds; and by 90% when page load time increases from 1 to 5 seconds. Investing in shaving seconds, or even milliseconds, off of your page load speed can reduce bounce rate and increase the likelihood that your target customers will sign-up or make a purchase.
Personalize the landing page experience
McKinsey & Co. reported that 71% of customers expect personalization, and 76% of customers actually get frustrated when their experiences with brands aren’t personalized. Align your landing pages to the copy and creative in your campaign to create a consistent customer experience, and leverage customer data to tailor the landing page experience to the user where possible.
As discussed in our article on lowering Customer Acquisition Costs, testing and optimizing your ad creative is critical for increasing the number of target users that engage with your campaign. Active Facebook users are served thousands of advertisements per day. By continually testing creative and copy, you can identify the ad variants that capture your target audience’s attention, and reallocate your budget accordingly.
A great way to get started is to use Facebook’s A/B testing capabilities, which allow you to compare two variants of an ad strategy by changing variables such as ad images, ad text, audience or placement. Once you’ve created and launched your A/B test, Facebook will serve each variant to a distinct segment of your target audience, then determine which variant performs best.
One of the benefits of leveraging Facebook’s A/B testing functionality, as opposed to creating two campaigns and comparing them manually, is that Facebook A/B testing helps ensure that your audiences will be evenly split and statistically comparable.
To learn more about how to run an A/B test on Facebook, you can read the set up instructions here.
John Joe Smith, founder and CEO of WasteNot, is hosted by Tom Triscari, founder of Quo Vadis, for a Q&A conversation on the future of audience suppression.
Many advertisers waste up to 40% of their ad budgets due to inefficient targeting, and they aren't even aware of it. In this article, we'll walk through how brands can use modern audience suppression strategies to improve advertising efficiency and performance.
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WasteNot is the only platform focused on allowing marketers to activate and optimize real time ad exclusions across all biddable media.