If you're new to running Facebook ad campaigns, or just a veteran advertiser who still has gaps in their knowledge, you may be under the impression that once you've created your ads, your campaign is running, and your ads are being served, that your job is done until the campaign is over.
This couldn't be more wrong though. What should you be doing while your campaign is running to optimize your results and learn more about your audience?
Check for Ads that Get Impressions but Don't Meet Objectives
If you're being charged for impressions rather than results, it's important to watch for ads that are getting impressions but not meeting your campaign objectives.
The best metric to track to keep an eye out for these ads is [Insert Objective] Rate. If you're running website click ads, this would be click-through rate. Find a current industry benchmark or set a benchmark using the past results from your own campaigns. Any ads that have gotten more than 100 impressions (you may want to go for 500 impressions if you have a large budget) but are below this rate should be paused.
Why should I care?
If your ads are under performing but still being displayed then this is driving your Cost-Per-[Insert Objective] up (because you're paying for more impressions and fewer clicks), it's eating up your campaign budget without getting you the same results as your better performing ads, and it's also driving down your overall [Insert Objective] Rate for the campaign.
This means you're paying more for fewer results and letting a few bad apples drag down what could be a great campaign if you just pay attention and tweak your ads as necessary.
Create More Ad Variations
Don't stop at creating an ad or two and launching your campaign. Even if you made several ad variations for each of your ad sets, you can still keep building out your campaign.
The more variations you create, the more likely you are to find the right mix of text and imagery that will best appeal to the audience you're trying to reach, and the more you'll be able to learn about each of your target personas when you're examining the results of your campaign.
You can also try mixing in different ad types, like carousel ads, carousel slide shows, video ads, offers, etc.
WHY SHOULD I CARE?
Placing more ads within an ad set will never hurt you, Facebook will do some optimization of its own to ensure the best performing ads always get the most exposure and it won't cost you any more money since budgets are at the ad set level, not individual ads.
However, the more you experiment, the more likely you are to hit on a useful insight that makes for both a great campaign now and ads that better suit your persona in the future as you learn more about their preferences.
Dig Into Your Campaign Demographics
This is another opportunity to not just learn more about your personas after your campaign, but also to help you optimize the cost and performance of your campaign while it's still running.
In the demographics and placements for your ads you can find out which individual groups within your ad targeting parameters are seeing the most impressions, meeting your campaign objective most often, and how much each sub-group is costing you.
This is best explained by an example:
This graph is from an example campaign I created for my guide and video series, Creating a Facebook Ad Campaign. Here you can see the demographics of the people who were reached, and who clicked on the ad within my target persona.
WHY SHOULD I CARE?
Looking at this graph in the campaign demographics, you can see that the 35-44 age group is a complete drain on the campaign, getting reach with almost no campaign objectives met. Meanwhile, you can also see that the 18-24 age group is outperforming everyone else.
If you wanted to improve the results of this website clicks campaign by increasing your Click-Through Rate and decreasing your Cost-Per-Click you could remove the age groups 25 - 44 from the ad set targeting to spend more of your budget reaching the people who are most likely to click on your ad.
As you can see, there's no reason to stop working on your campaign just because you've published your ads. You have many opportunities to tweak your campaign for better results and better lessons. If you put this extra bit of effort into managing your campaigns not only will you be pleased with the results, but the additional insights will help you understand how to improve your future campaign results too.
This blog post is based off of content from our guide to Creating a Facebook Ad Campaign. It's a premium, step-by-step guide that makes building successful Facebook ad campaigns easy! If you'd like to learn more about building campaigns, the various options and settings, and learn from our tips and in-depth explanations along the way, purchase the guide!
It includes the PDF guide, a full set of walkthrough videos, and an Excel spreadsheet full of tools that will help you build better campaigns faster and with more consistency.
