5 Optimisations You Can Make To Your Facebook Campaigns Now

So you’ve set up your Facebook campaigns. You’ve waited 14 days to let Facebook gather data and dynamically optimise. Sounds like you’re ready to begin manually optimising your ads!

Below are 5 optimisations you can make right now to act on your learnings and improve performance, regardless of your goal.

Demographic Breakdown

After your ads have gathered enough data to act on, you should review your performance broken down by demographics. This will allow you to see performance against specific factors including (but not limited to): age, gender, platform & placement.

As you can imagine, being able to see how much of your budget is being spent on what age groups & what placements vs how those age groups and placements are performing against the campaign/ad set average gives you valuable opportunities to limit wasted spend in underperforming areas. Let’s say your primary KPI is a target CPA of £15 or under which most placements are reaching, but the ‘Facebook Stories’ placement is consistently delivering a CPA of £25+; in that case, manually excluding the ‘Facebook Stories’ placement from that ad set will help to drive down the CPA.

It’s also worth using this data for more than just optimisations you’re making in the here and now. If you notice a trend across all/most of your ad sets (such as the 18-24 age group having considerably lower engagement rates), you could exclude them from future ad sets you set up to ensure budget is being pushed into the highest performing areas from the jump.

Budget Changes

Really, the bread and butter of your optimisations are budget changes. Whether you’re decreasing or increasing budgets, there are a number of factors you should be considering. The first is your overall monthly ad spend budget – are you on track to spend over your monthly budget? A lot of the time this stops me from raising budgets but when it seems like increasing spend in a certain ad set will be a quick win to generate more sales, then I’ll explain to my client the utility in raising budgets and get approval to go over our agreed spend. Secondly, you should be paying close attention to the KPIs – if your target is to reach a 3 ROAS and an ad set has been consistently delivering a 3+ ROAS, then you should increase its daily budget to drive more performance from it. On the flip side of this, if a campaign/adset is consistently delivering below your target ROAS then consider decreasing its budget to mitigate wasted spend. At The Good Marketer, we stick to the 20% rule – which means when scaling a budget up or down we only change budgets by 20%, anything over this will be seen as a significant change and will send the ad set/campaign back into the learning phase.

Ad Review

If you’re following best practices, you should be running 3-5 ads in each ad set. After a campaign has been live for 14 days, check the individual ads’ performance. If one ad is performing significantly worse than other ads in the ad set, despite receiving considerable spend (considerable spend for me is when an ad has spent between 1x and 2x of your target CPA) then you can switch that ad off. This optimisation means more spend is flowing into the ads that are delivering conversions.

That is a quick win optimisation that ensures better results but while you’re reviewing your poorest performing ads, make sure to pay attention to your best performing ads. Are they video, image, carousel, slideshow? What parts of your brand’s value proposition are the creative & copy advertising? These are all really useful insights that should motivate future ad creatives and ad copy.

Duplicate Your Top Performers

As mentioned above, you should be raising budgets by 20% if an ad set is performing well. However, during key sales periods such as Black Friday or Pay Day, you may not have time to slowly scale up campaigns this way. This is where duplication comes in, if an ad set is performing far above your target and you’d like to quickly scale it up to maximise conversions, then you can duplicate it. This isn’t an ‘evergreen’ optimisation (read: don’t leave this active permanently) but it is useful during short lengths of time during high intent sales periods.

Day Breakdown

I’ve put this optimisation last in this list, but it’s certainly not the least. This optimisation requires more time to get relevant data because we’re going to be looking at the best performing days of the week. Consumer trends can sometimes be unpredictable, if you’re able to look at the previous 5-10 weeks of data and spot that Tuesdays and Fridays are consistently performing better than the other days of the week then you should consider raising budgets on those days and lowering budgets on other days of the week (to keep your monthly budget on track).

This can be done automatically through Facebook’s ‘rules’ or you can do it manually, either choosing to raise each budget individually or raising the overall account budget.

Conclusion

I hope that these optimisations have helped in showing you some immediate actions you can take to ensure your budget is being spent in the right areas, scale your campaigns and ultimately improve performance.

So, go grab a brew, sit yourself down and start optimising!