Winter is coming up fast, but even though it's cooling down outside there's no reason that you can't be heating up your Facebook marketing efforts.
Here are 3 steps that you can take this winter to rock your Facebook ad campaigns:
Start with a solid plan - Advertisers often think that planning their campaigns, setting goals, and wrangling budgets is a mysterious process, but the reality is that there is a lot you can do before your campaign begins to ensure that it is a success.
What steps can you take before you start building your campaign to help it succeed?
- Start with a specific goal in mind. Know what you want to accomplish with your ads (drive traffic, downloads, etc), a deadline for when you need to meet your goal (this is very important for campaign budgeting), and what success will look like for your campaign (how many conversions or new customers do you expect to gain?).
- Know who you will target. You'll want to know some general demographics, interests, and behaviors of the group you want to target. Once you have this information, you can work with it to find the right combination of traits to build your ad audience.
- Have a budget. You can estimate how much your audience will cost per action/1,000 impressions based off of the recommended bid that Facebook provides when you're creating your ad set. You can then use this information to understand how much you need to spend to reach your goal.
Know what to measure and how to improve your results - Understanding which metrics matter most and how to analyze your results for clues on how to improve them in your next campaign is a key part of building successful Facebook ad campaigns.
What do you need to know?:
- Conversions are king. It's important to know how well your ads are driving traffic to your landing page, but you also need to know the conversion rate for visitors to your website in order to have the full picture and to understand how well your landing page is converting visitors into leads or sales.
- Benchmark your campaigns. Measure against your own past results and any industry benchmarks you can find online. If you have a useful comparison then you don't just have to report your metrics, you can put them into context and understand whether or not your campaign did well and how it measured up to your other campaigns and campaigns run by similar businesses.
- Iterate on and improve your audience targeting. Better Facebook ad audience targeting will mean a higher relevance score, which leads to a lower cost per click for your ads. You'll be able to optimize not just your results, but also get more bang for your buck.
Manage your campaigns while they're active - One of the worst things you can do is start a campaign, walk away, and return at the end of the campaign to collect your results.
What can you do to influence your campaign results while your Facebook ad campaign is still running?
- Create new variations. The more variations you have, the more useful data you'll have at the end of your campaign and the more opportunities you have to learn more about your target persona.
- Kill low performing ads. If you notice ads that are getting lots of impressions or engagements but aren't meeting your primary goal (clicks, conversions, etc) turn those ads off to save your budget for other ads that might convert better. Wait until an ad has at least 500 impressions to give it enough exposure to determine how well it will likely perform long-term.
- Check your campaign demographics. You can zero in on specific information like ages, genders, age + gender, device type, and more to understand who is meeting your ad goals the most, and you can adjust your targeting to focus on the highest performer or exclude the weakest parts of your audience that are pulling your campaign results (and available budget) down.
