What I learnt By running FB Ads for more than month for one of the largest media houses in the world ?
“Running FB ads is pretty easy”, yaaa that was my perception too, when I started by Ad campaign. But very soon I realized how much important, it is to give thought before, choosing each and every option you are provided.
We have so many things to choose and even a small mistake in choosing the Target Segment ( Interest, Behavior or Job Title ) or missing the one that might be best suitable for your campaign can drastically reduce your probability of achieving your goal ( Awareness / Consideration / Conversion).
In my case I was running a Lead generation campaign. When the whole world was coming to a stand still, businesses where shut, who can imagine running a lead generation campaign in Facebook ?. But those were the realities of life.
After thinking long and hard, I had many questions will it work? what kind of budgets should we allocate and so much more. But one thing that struck me and gave me confidence was that people are using Facebook more during this pandemic than ever and if I am going to find any leads it is from Facebook.
Without further delay here are my 10 learnings:
1.Set aside a small portion of your budget for Experimentation — Start Small
Don’t start with all your budget. To know what’s working and not, start with a portion of the budget equally distributed various strategies you want to test. Based on the results, allocate your budget on the campaigns which worked and satisfied your goals.
2.Allocate Lifetime Budget twice as your original budget — First Take off
One of the important parameters taken into consideration before your ad goes viral is the budget you have specified. What I have learned is the higher the amount, the lesser time it takes for the ad to start appearing on feed.
This because, Facebook aims to spend the entire amount and for that it has to start early. After it has taken off we can always reduce the budget to our original amount.
3.Unless your are pretty sure of Ad placements don’t go for manual placements.
Recommended placements of ads ensure that the algorithm find which is working and which is not working on that day for that particular ad. In some cases, from previous experience we know the locations that work well for our creatives.
4.Don’t have too many questions on the lead generation form.
Every question in the lead generation form is an additional layer for the customer to express their interest. Since it is also an ad there is psychological barrier to click on it and register. By throwing in unwanted questions we are raising the barriers higher.
5.Bidding Strategies
You can find the 1000s of articles on the internet about what strategy you should follow. But be sure to try the one which you think is suitable for you in the experiment had earlier and then go for the entire budget.
6.Make use of Facebook built in AI engine give it different Title text, Description and Images to find the best combination.
Given the option of adding extra title text, Description and Image for our ad, Facebook algorithms will automatically various combinations to find out which one works better. In some cases it has turned out to be much more profitable and rewarding.
7.Keep in mind it will take 24 hours for the review before your ads becomes active and another 24 hours for the optimization to kick-in to see visible results.
This is particular important for short-run campaigns. Only when the optimization has kicked in, you have expect the your tracking metrics to improve. Always keep a buffer period of 48 hours minimum before your start of the campaign and when you expect results to start showing.
8.Don’t fooled by the Audience Reach shown in the predictor.
When you are creating your ad based on the audience you have selected, the performance meter will show the audience that you can reach almost always, that number is not the actual number of people you can reach in our campaign.
And more over the same person can see the ad twice, a lose of impression for us if the person has already registered or not interested.
9.Never use same ads for Facebook and Instagram.
Most of us use the same ad for Facebook and Instagram. Even though we know the audience and expectation in both the platforms are very much different. The same person who is clicking the ad in Facebook may not be inclined to click it in Instagram, because of the simple reason, they are in different states in these two different platforms.
Instagram — much more leisure, lifestyle, fun place.
Facebook — social awareness, politics, news offers and everything else.
10.Last but the most important one is to use Facebook Automation Rules.
Whenever certain rules are met, like if the frequency of our campaign ( average number of times the person has seen your ad) is more than 3 you may want to stop the ad set, because it is going to the same person again and again. Explore and you can find so many such useful options.
I hope you don’t have re-invent the wheel again to run a successful campaign. Let me know your learnings in the comments.
