As I have found out the hard way, Facebook ad production is extremely labour-intensive. Therefore it is imperative that you incorporate an effective ad production workflow to best utilise your time. Here are eleven tips I’ve been able to come up with over the past few months.
Understanding the account structure
In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Every account is associated with a specific user’s Facebook account. Campaigns are the second tier that sit under the account level. Unlike in Google Adwords where ads are held within ad groups, campaigns hold ads within Facebook. It’s at the campaign level that daily budgets are assigned. Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creative, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it’s best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads as it would make reporting and managing budgets so much easier.
Step 1 – get your target demographic right
Begin by making a list of demographic segments you want to target or make sure you are clear about who your client wants you to target. It’s always handy to ask your client to describe exactly who their target consumer is. This should be your first step in setting up your Facebook advertising campaign.
E.g. targeting list:
- Females, age 18-30, who like Kim Kardashian and live in Orlando.
- Males, age 25 and older, engaged or in a relationship, and interested in weddings or honeymooning.
Step 2: create your ads
Facebook has no process to save ads without submitting them for editorial approval. This is one of the greatest weaknesses to the user interface and the ad creation process and is a serious pain the rear. Therefore, it’s most efficient to submit one version of an ad for each social segment for approval at the time of research. It would be a complete waste of time if all your ad variants didn’t pass editorial scrutiny. Once the draft ads are approved, you’ll be able to tweak, duplicate and build ad variations and resubmit.
Step 3: designate the landing page
If the landing page has not already been determined, designate or create a page that is relevant to the draft copy. It’s extremely important to make sure the landing page is relevant for two reasons:
1) Facebook editorial might reject ads that take users to pages that aren’t relevant.
2) You would see a very high bounce rate, which means your time, effort, and money will be wasted.
Therefore, I cannot stress enough the importance of a great landing page. It’s often best to create specific landing pages solely for PPC campaigns. Trust me, the investment in development time will yield higher return on investment and provide a more effective PPC campaign.
Step 4: create your ad copy
The ad title, image, and body need to be reasonably related to pass editorial review. Again, choosing relevant images and writing compelling ad copy are critical to receiving higher click through rates.
Step 5: define your customer
This is the fun part. Use all the targeting attributes to fully target your social demographic segment.
Step 6: select your campaign
If you’re creating your ads on the web interface, click on “create a new campaign” and make sure you either change your budget to “lifetime budget” or change your daily budget to £1.00. This will ensure you don’t overspend your budget mistakenly. I’ve had to keep stressing myself to make these changes as I have had to endure some painful lessons in the past.
Step 7: set your bid and place your order
Once the demographic targeting is done, set your bid to £0.01. You set the bid so low because there’s no way to pause ads until after you’ve placed your order. Placing your bid at £0.01 will almost guarantee your ads won’t display and spend your valuable budget.
Step 8: repeat above steps
Once you’ve completed the above steps, find the little green button at the top right hand corner of the page that reads “create an ad” and click it. Go through the above steps until you have a paused campaign with an ad for each segment in it. Hopefully none of your ads will be rejected. If they do, all you need to do is make the recommended changes and resubmit them.
Getting the account structure right
Now that you’ve got a basic structure in place, let’s discuss best practice campaign lay-out. Most clients want to test more than one ad’s creative to the same target audience. While it’s tempting to dump a lot of ads targeting various segments in one campaign bucket, the result can be a big mess. Unfortunately Facebook does not currently allow you to sort results by demographic group. So you can’t isolate performance of ads by gender, education, interest or other criteria with a few clicks. This needs to be done manually, so setting things up with a bit of foresight goes a long way.
Example 1: messy structure
- Baseball campaign:
- baseball bat ad
- baseball ad
- baseball glove ad
- baseball glove ad 2
- baseball shirt ad
- baseball shirt ad 2
- Basketball campaign:
- basketball ad
- basketball ad 2
- basketball trainers ad
- basketball trainers ad 2
- Football campaign:
- football boots ad
- football boots ad 2
- football ad
The problem with the above structure is that Facebook’s algorithm decides which ads in your campaign are served. I suspect the algorithm is more optimised for Facebook to maximise its profits than for you to get coverage across all your ads equally. Because Facebook automatically rotates through each active ad in a campaign, it’s really important that the algorithm is comparing apples to apples.
Example 2 : better structure
- Baseball bat campaign -
- baseball bat ad
- baseball bat ad 2
- Baseball campaign -
- baseball ad
- baseball ad 2
- Baseball glove campaign -
- baseball glove ad
- baseball glove ad 2
- Baseball shirt campaign -
- baseball shirt ad
- baseball shirt ad 2
- Basketball campaign -
- basketball ad
- basketball ad 2
- Basketball trainers campaign -
- basketball trainers ad
- basketball trainers ad 2
- Football campaign -
- football ad
- football ad 2
- Football boots campaign -
- football boots ad
- football boots ad
You could go even more granular:
- Baseball bat campaign (age 18-24)
- baseball bat ad
- baseball bat ad 2
- Baseball bat campaign (age 25-35)
- baseball bat ad
- baseball bat ad 2
- Baseball campaign (age 18-24)
- baseball ad
- baseball ad 2
- Baseball campaign (age 25-35)
- - baseball ad
- - baseball ad 2
- Baseball glove campaign (age 18-24)
- baseball glove ad
- baseball glove ad 2
- Baseball glove campaign (age 25-35)
- baseball glove ad
- baseball glove ad 2
- Baseball shirt campaign (age 18-24)
- baseball shirt ad
- baseball shirt ad 2
- Baseball shirt campaign (age 25-35)
- baseball shirt ad
- baseball shirt ad 2
- Basketball campaign (age 18-24)
- basketball ad
- basketball ad 2
- Basketball campaign (age 25-35)
- basketball ad
- basketball ad 2
- Basketball trainers campaign (age 18-24)
- basketball trainers ad
- basketball trainers ad 2
- Basketball trainers campaign (age 25-35)
- basketball trainers ad
- basketball trainers ad 2
- Football campaign (age 18-24)
- football ad
- football ad 2
- Football campaign (age 25-35)
- football ad
- football ad 2
- Football boots campaign (age 18-24)
- football boots ad
- football boots ad 2
- Football boots campaign (age 25-35)
- football boots ad
- football boots ad 2
The above structure will be very handy when you need to monitor performance and also to make sure your end of month reporting is fairly straightforward.
A/B Testing
I love what one of my previous bosses told me during an internship programme I was completing some time ago. He said in my role I am not allowed to hold an opinion. If I need to push something forward, I’d need to substantiate it with tangible facts. I find A/B testing a great way to substantiate my proposals and recommendations, such as which campaigns to allocate more budget to, what type of images do I want, what type of message tone works with users, which type of call-to-actions work best, what colours are users more receptive to etc. By using A/B testing, you can obtain actual numbers, which can help you in your decision-making process.
Therefore, it is extremely important that you test different headlines, switching body copy, testing different images etc. It’s important to test at least a couple of ads per campaign. But don’t overdo it with loads of ads at the same time. As mentioned above, Facebook’s not going to give each ad a true chance to perform at its best even in rotation but will skew toward an ad the algorithm perceives as successful.
What’s in a name?
The last tip is to make sure you name your campaigns logically. The last time I checked, Facebook’s web interface allows a user to sort campaigns by most columns, while power editor does not support sorting. The ‘all campaigns’ page defaults to an alphabetical sort by campaign name every single time the user returns back to ‘all campaigns’, even after another sorting column was chosen previously. This can be extremely frustrating, so planning your naming standard early on will save your heart from increased blood pressure.
There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to naming conventions, but make sure they make sense to you when sorted alphabetically and that it also makes sense to someone who will work on the account in your absence. I generally use the following format as a guide -
[promotion name]-[product name]-[duration]-[special targeting metric]
e.g. Christmas deals – Trainers – 01 Dec/05 Dec 12 – males
Conclusion
The most essential take-away from this post is to plan ahead and be organised. Unless you use an in-house account management tool or you use a third party account management tool, managing Facebook campaigns can be fairly exhaustive. Hopefully the above tips will keep you in good stead. I’m sure you have some nuggets of wisdom to share too, so please feel free to leave your comments below.
Postscript
I received some constructive feedback after having published the above post and was notified by Leyla Arsan (@leyla_a) via twitter that I didn’t address a very important part of the whole campaign set-up process, namely URL tagging for conversion tracking. I also didn’t mention targeting ads to your existing Facebook fans and their friends, which I thought I should include too. So here are my #12 and #13 tips for a better Facebook campaign:
Tip #12: Conversion tracking
As with any PPC campaign, it is imperative that you set up conversion tracking in order to better gauge the success or failure of the campaigns you run. Like many PPC advertisers, I use Google Analytics in order to gain greater insight about the traffic I send via Facebook ads. The only problem is that Google Analytics can’t differentiate between referral and paid traffic sent via Facebook unless you tag your URLs with tracking codes. Google have very generously provided a URL builder that help you generate the tracking code to your landing page URLs. The only limitation with this tool is that it would be extremely time consuming if you have a large number of ads and landing page URLs. For this reason, I use our very own Daniel Bianchini’s Google docs spread sheet which lets you scale what the Google’s URL builder offer. This spread sheet has saved me loads of precious time, so I do urge you to use it. Here’s where you could find the spread sheet: http://goo.gl/jI1Wd
If you want more guidance on using the spread sheet click here to get to the original post.
Tip#13: Don’t forget your existing fans
With Facebook’s ‘premium ads and featured stories’ you can feature page posts on your brand pages as ads. This means that you can promote and advertise your content you post on your brand pages. This is quite a powerful channel to reach out and engage with your fans and their friends. The significance of this method of advertising is that you would be able to provide your target audience with an ad that is more engaging and less sale-sy. Also, you get to use not only text, but rich media such as images and videos. However, the key points to remember when setting campaigns that target your fans are:
1. The objective of the ‘premium ads’ campaign is to create brand awareness and increase the number of fans – or your fan rate. So you should avoid a sales approach in your core messaging.
2. If you are posting an image, make sure your page posts are up to 90 characters or less so they could be featured in its entirety on your ad. If it’s a page post with no rich media, then you can post up to 150 characters.
3. Since your target audience are fans and their friends, you might limit your reach (especially if you target sub-groups). However, it is still important to have a targeted audience with a decent enough number as Facebook wouldn’t display your ads if the target audience is too small.
4. Use your ‘page insights’ data to find what best geo locations to target your ads, and also to find which demographic segment are most receptive to your posts. This data should guide you when writing content for page posts.
5. Anecdotal evidence has shown that questions do tend to gain a fair amount of engagement: this also tends to work well when targeting those who are not already your fans.
Image credit: marcopako
Though I haven’t started with the ads on Facebook, But I have accessed the Demographics on the Ads page and trust me it is one of the finest feature to test & find the targeted and niche based, age group wise info on traffic. Great article, Thank you for posting!
Thanks for the comment Jeff. If Facebook (at least after their IPO) are able to refine and improve their advertising UI, I foresee FB being used more aggressively than any other platform (maybe barring search) for advertising and marketing purposes (including and not limited to market research). Never has a marketer received this level of detail about their target audience.
Shaad, it’s always nice to have a read that gets down to the nitty-gritty, core yet simple, clear how-to’s.
Question: I’ve read similar recommendations about starting at the minimum bid price during testing. However, I’ve also read recommendations to start at a high bid then go low as need be because the bid price is a factor in Facebook’s determining/favoring of ad positioning. Thoughts?
Second question: Can I ask what your source is for the information in this article?
Hi Angela,
In answer to your first question: I do agree that bid price is a very strong factor with regards to where your ads will appear and it’s frequency. Setting your bid price high is great if you are on top of, and in control of the campaign. In my experience, especially when handling very large campaigns with various different budgets to keep tabs on, I find the above method suiting me better.
With regards to your second question; I should have given a list of references within the post really, but at the moment I refer to Facebook’s guide (https://www.facebook.com/business/ads/) and Marty Weintraub’s ‘Killer Facebook Ads’ book.
Good stuff Shaad. Thanks.
Three things:
1) This is brilliant.
“Therefore, I cannot stress enough the importance of a great landing page. It’s often best to create specific landing pages solely for PPC campaigns. Trust me, the investment in development time will yield higher return on investment and provide a more effective PPC campaign.”
Sadly, you don’t offer a solution for unreasonable clients and “Ugly Baby Syndrome”.
2) I think it should be noted that the paragraph just mentioned plays well to “Getting the account structure right”. That is, be specific, be targeted. The more granular your structure the easier it’s going to be to manage, measure and maximize. Obviously, this applies to AdWords efforts as well.
3) I’d like to recommend you add a Step 12 – Be Willing to Experiment.
Hi Mark,
Many thanks for your input.
With regards to point #1: I agree, I didn’t cover the topic in more detail. Think it’s a topic on it’s own really. But the gist of it is to bring your client’s attention to the lost ROI due to poor landing pages. I quite like this post by Salar Salahshoor regarding PPC landing page optimisation: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-essential-ppc-landing-page-optimizations
and the book, ‘Landing page optimization’ by Tim Ash provides a more extensive and in-depth analysis on improving landing pages.
#2: Agreed.
#3: In addition to experimenting, I must also mention that as Leyla Arsan (@leyla_a) brought to my attention on twitter that I should have included subtopics which include conversion tracking and targeting ads to existing fans on FB fan pages, as well. So I intend on adding a ‘postscript’ to the above post and will keep you posted :)
Thanks so much again.
It’s great information. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Now I am managing ad-campaign efficiently. Thanks for posting.
Thnaks so much for the shoutout!!
Great read, there are so many ways to work with Facebook ads and PPC ads. A lot of it is trial/error with targeting, ad copy, creative, etc. If you have the time, it can be loads of fun!
@Leyla_A — on twitter.
And many thanks to you, for pointing out my oversight. Always appreciate great feedback. Thanks again guys!
What are your thoughts on Facebook landing pages vs. website landing pages? I’ve seen some research that indicates a couple things:
(1) Ads that take users to a landing page within Facebook have a higher CTR than ads that take them to a company’s website;
(2) Ads that link to a Facebook landing page have lower CPC/CPM costs than those that link out (even for the same keywords and demographics). So it seems Facebook is favoring those who keep people on the site.
Have you noticed anything like this, and what are your thoughts on it?
Hi Amy,
Thanks for your query; that’s quite an interesting argument. Unfortunately I don’t have any facts and figures in order to provide you with any meaningful and insightful analysis. However, I am not entirely surprised by the findings of the research you mention. I find a lot of marketing executives spending considerable amounts of time and resources into optimising their Facebook landing pages as opposed to their website landing pages. Also, ads that are aimed at increasing fans generally take a softer approach which goes down well with the Facebook audience. Having said that, there are some Facebook marketing ninjas who use clever ad copy and demographic/geographic targeting in order to drive higher CTRs regardless of whether users are taken to an external link or to a Facebook page.
The good news is Facebook will decrease your CPC depending on the effectiveness of your ad. Example: My initial CPC was over $2. After running the ad for a few days it dropped to less than 50 cents. The only problem is, every time I tweaked the ad, Facebook reset the CPC to the highest amount. Is there any way to make small changes and still keep the lower CPC?
Hi Tony,
I agree that CPCs do drop with higher CTRs, Facebook does reward ads that are useful to users. Conversely, if an ad receives a high number of ‘hides’, Facebook will stop serving your ads completely.
With regards to making small ad changes and maintaining bid levels, as of this writing, unfortunately it isn’t possible (unless someone could shed some light on how this could be done). Each time you make a change to the ad copy or the targeting audience the ad goes into review, therefore it does reset bid amounts. I generally use Facebook Power editor to duplicate ads and make changes to them and not tweak live ads. Hope this was useful.
I definitely agree with the idea that google chooses to serve ads within a campaign which they make the most money on (and don’t blame them).
What I really don’t like is how much of an emphasis they’ll put on one ad over another almost immediately. This makes it really hard to test one ad vs. another and I’ve found now that I often just end up making separate campaigns for each ad.
Another thing I wish they’d change is that there’s no average position number, instead just the frequency. I’ve found that with an increase in bid (often to above the top recommended bid) that the ctr increases even though the frequency is forced higher (or maybe that contributes to it?). I’m guessing this is because the add is being shown in a higher position but there’s no data to support it.
How many ad’s do you recommend for one campaign? And in which rate does Facebook rotate those ad’s? In some campaigns I have 4 ad’s with same adcopy, but different image. One ad receive all the impressions and the other 3 receive none. How is that possible?
Hi Stefan,
I completely agree with Peter above; Facebook almost instantly chooses which ad to push forward. Therefore, make sure to target the exact same geographic location, interest groups, demographics and bids. The moment one ad has a larger reach than the other, Facebook pushes those ads ahead.
If your objective is to perform A/B testing, then I would recommend not more than 2 ads per campaign. However, if each ad targets a different geographic location then holding any number of ads within one campaign is fine. But you wouldn’t be able to test ads efficiently this way. Hope this answers your question :)
Really liked the article. More so, your replies to all the queries. Really appreciate it! :)
We have a Jewellery client based in South India. They don’t have online shopping. Though very traditional, they are interested in exploring the Social Media space.
You think it would make sense if we give this a try?! I need to target, very specifically, ONLY the people of South India, women preferably.
Could you explain a bit about the landing page, with regards to what could be beneficial for my client.
Once again. Thanks a lot.
Really Appreciate! :)
Hi Rughuveer,
Many thanks for getting in touch and for your query. When I initially wrote this post, I don’t think many marketers really understood the purpose or the effectiveness of Facebook advertising. But now, I think there is a lot more clarity in where Facebook want to monetise their ecosystem. So, my advice to you would be, first identify what your client wants to achieve out of Facebook advertising (is it brand building, direct response, building a fan base? etc). Jewellery is extremely seasonal and is a high involvement product which require multiple interactions with customers. Facebook helps you get in touch with your customers at each of these buying stages.
Therefore, set up a Facebook fan page with a lot of information about their company on their timeline. When were they established (most jewellers have been trading for over 50-75 years). Take the time to include all the important events. Also it would be really cool if you could get your loyal and old customers to include their pictures (at least images of the jewellery they wore and the dates they got married etc.). This helps get your customers involved too.
Based on your geographic locations, target ads toward people from the big cities in Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Like you say, you could target only women and get women to like your Facebook page. Also target people who like big jewellery brands. Also target people based around festivals and ceremonies, such as coming of age ceremonies (target your ads to women, who have children between the ages of x-y). Run competitions, promotions and offers. Entice people with image related posts and promote them through Facebook advertising.
Based on these targeting and your ad messaging make sure your landing pages are consistent as well. Make sure users can find your address and telephone numbers easily. Make sure you build specific landing pages for each ad messaging theme. If it’s weddings, make sure you build a landing page aimed at weddings. Same with engagements and other ceremonies. Invest in a professional photographer and make sure your products are displayed with some high quality images. include a short video about the products and get some of your customers to say nice things about your client’s products and services etc.
Apologies for this long reply, but I hope you found it useful.
Hey Shaad – is the suggestion about creating special links for each ad still relevant now that there is the feature of “conversion tracking pixels” available on FB?
Thanks a bunch!