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facebook a/b testing

Facebook account management best practices

Account Structure introduction

Facebook advertising is still more labour intensive than search advertising due to its limited platform functionality and interface. Therefore, it is imperative that ‘account structure best practice’ is adhered to in order to maintain control, improve efficiencies, increase ad effectiveness, and make sure anyone who takes over the account can get a grasp of the account hierarchy quickly and easily.

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Campaigns are the second tier that sits under the ‘account’ level. It’s at the campaign level that ads are held and daily budgets are assigned.

Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creatives, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it is best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads, as it makes reporting, analysis and managing budgets much easier.

facebook account structure

If you are anywhere near as busy as we were in the SEOptimise office during May, it can be difficult to keep up with all the great blog posts that were published. I thought I’d ask the office to see the ones which they thought were worth a read. So, in no particular order, here is our top 6 posts from around the web…

It has also been a busy month on our blog, with May achieving the highest traffic figures of the year so far. So in case you missed any of them, here are our 5 most popular posts of the month…

For those readers who are unaware, procurement in the marketing industry is a services profiling and selection process that many larger organisations must go through when considering new suppliers. There are professionals out there whose job it is to develop processes that create the greatest chance of selecting the most suitable supplier for the company.

In my experience, it will usually consist of:

  • An initial questionnaire, which attempts to immediately identify tell-tale signs of the qualities the company is looking for in an agency/supplier. If you get through this stage,
  • The pitch: a face-to-face response to a brief, usually by way of presentation. And then,
  • Negotiations, if you’re lucky enough to get this far.

The difficult thing for suppliers throughout this process (speaking from personal experience once again) is that it is usually very closed-off. By this I mean that you aren’t really allowed any direct communication with anyone involved on the company side. Those in charge of procurement have to be very careful to make sure that this process is as fair as possible, and spending time speaking to a particular supplier could be perceived as giving them an unfair advantage. Needless to say, in some instances when procurement teams are looking at upwards of 40 suppliers for a single service, it would also be very difficult to spend time speaking to everyone. There are usually Q&A windows throughout the earlier stages in which you can submit written questions, but I believe that written questions and responses can sometimes be misunderstood (as I have found through email on a number of occasions).

Taking all this into consideration, I thought it would be useful if we could make contact with some people in the procurement industry and, bearing in mind that these conversations happened outside any procurement process, I asked them to contribute some advice. I believe that these people, having to deal with supplier selection on a day-to-day basis, would have the most experience in appointing suppliers, and therefore be able to contribute advice that would help me/us be successful in any selection process, whatever the size of the organisation.

I asked a number of people the same question: “What is the one piece of advice you would give to an individual/agency to give them the best chance of success when you are looking at them as a potential supplier?”

I intentionally left this as open as possible because I wanted people to respond with what they believed to be the most important aspects of the selection process.

To illustrate how closed procurement can be, I spoke to roughly 16 organisations, the majority of which were either unwilling or unable to respond. But three individuals have kindly submitted their responses.

We’ve had a great couple of days at SMX London – here’s what we learnt from the Paid Search track from day 1 and the SMX Advanced track from day 2!

Day 1 – Paid Search Track

Amazing Paid Search Tactics & Tools

Ann Stanley, Co-Founder and MD of Anicca Digital (@annstanley)

Ecommerce advertising has changed quite a bit recently: Google Shopping transitioned from free to paid last month in the UK, and Google have just announced that they’re getting rid of product extensions. That means having product listing ads is more important for ecommerce.

Having a PLA ad group set for ‘all products’ with a really low bid has got them good results – it can be a good way to turn up in searches no one else is appearing on.

There doesn’t seem to be a true quality score for PLAs, but CTR is a factor to whether they get seen or not. Improve CTR with negative keywords. Also check your feed – you may be using low quality information.

A few months ago Google announced Enhanced Campaigns. One of the major changes this brings is that segmenting Search Network campaigns by device is impossible. Tablet is now lumped together with desktop. Bids for mobile can be altered (as a campaign level bid adjustment), and you can turn off mobile advertising all together, but you can’t turn off desktop targeting to have a mobile-only campaign.

Your options are campaigns that target desktop and tablets, or campaigns that target desktop, tablet and mobile (with adjusted bids). This means that if you had different versions of campaigns for different devices, when you upgrade you can only keep one active. But if you’ve had separate campaigns they are likely to have grown apart, even if they started as simple duplicates.

So, let’s say you’ve decided to keep the desktop campaign but you have tablet and mobile campaigns you want to merge into it. You need to check for differences, then judge whether anything that was only in the mobile or tablet campaigns should be copied into the desktop campaign. But how?

From the title you may have guessed: I suggest using Excel.

 

AdWords has changed a bit over the years. The interface changes, functions come and go, new settings appear…

The problem is that not everything changes at the same time, meaning AdWords Help might not immediately reflect shiny new features. The AdWords exams – and the Exam Study Learning Center – are always behind on something.

It’s possible that some things are left out for simplicity. For example, it’s possible they left out some of the many and varied targeting methods for the Display network in the Fundamentals sections to avoid over-complicating things. But some things are just plain wrong.

If you use AdWords quite a lot but are just studying for the AdWords exams, it’s useful to know what the exam thinks is the case and what actually is the case. Or if you’re using the Learning Center to teach yourself about AdWords, you may be wondering why what you’re reading doesn’t match the real thing. Here’s a rough guide to where the Learning Center and exams are behind.

Following reports over Limited Run’s Facebook ad tests and their need to spend a minimum advertising budget of $2,000 a month in order to change their Facebook page name from Limited Pressing to Limited Run, we’ve been getting many inquiries from our clients.

We contacted Facebook and a spokesperson for the social network responded with the following:

Google’s made some exciting announcements about remarketing.

  1. You can use one AdWords remarketing tag on all pages of your site, and then create as many remarketing audiences as you like from it. The audiences are then defined according to the URL of visited pages.
  2. You can (after “a small edit”) use a Google Analytics tag to make remarketing audiences for a linked AdWords account. This is being rolled out “in waves by the end of the summer”, so keep an eye on your Analytics account for the remarketing option!

Why is this exciting?

Last February I gave you some handy Excel tips – here’s some more! Today I’m talking about array formulae.

{ heart }

Recently we were a little stumped with gclid and the Google Analytics cookie that’s placed on user’s computers. We were asked:

“I went to my website through an ad, and the Analytics cookie set on my computer says: utmgclid=StrangeGibberishHere456|utmccn=(not%20set)|utmcmd=(not%20set) )|utmctr=my%20search%20term – why are the medium and campaign not set?”

So we did a little digging around to figure out why ‘utmccn’ was ‘not set’ and thought it was appropriate that we share it with all of you too. So here’s the low down on what we’ve learnt:

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