As many of you know, there has been a fair amount of facebook ads volatility this month due to last weeks outage, lunar new year, valentines day, etc, especially with newer/smaller accounts. I want to share some of my thoughts and hear yours.
Some of you may be tempted to pause your ads and re-enter the auction at a later time but in my experience if your business can sustain it, it often is better in the long run to ride out these bad periods. Keep in mind, this applies to campaigns that were historically doing well and are now doing bad. There is a decent chance they will recover over the long term. This does not necessarily apply to campaigns that started off bad and are doing worse. Of course if your business is losing a significant amount of money daily and you can’t sustain it, then the obvious move it to turn off the ads.
The thing is during volatile/bad periods like this sometimes nothing you do really works. So pausing your ads and relaunching isn’t necessarily the best move because the new campaign will likely do poorly as well. The old campaign (that was previously doing well) at least has conversion data and an established cpm and when things get better it will likely out perform the new campaign with less data and a potentially higher cpm. It is really important to look at average results over periods of time, and not just daily results. You may be losing money over the last 3 days, but are you profitable for the last 30? Keep this in mind when making decisions to close or not.
My point is that you can’t really time the market. If you have a campaign that worked well in the past there is a decent chance it will return to the average and do well eventually. You can think of it in terms of stocks. See slide 4 – https://www.invesco.com/us-rest/contentdetail?contentId=022984ddcac1e610VgnVCM1000006e36b50aRCRD Basically it shows that if you pulled your money out of the S&P 500 and missed just the best 10 days in the market over the last 25 years you would have made significantly less returns than if you would have just stayed fully invested. Facebook also has days like this where everything works, results are amazing. If you pause your ads and miss these days, there is a chance you could significantly set your business back. It’s about time in market (and gathering a lot of conversion data), not timing the market.
This is also why I prefer to have various campaigns instead of the ‘1 campaign structure’ some people advocate. Just like stocks, I like to have a diversified ‘portfolio’ of campaigns where I spread my risk among campaigns. If I only have 1 campaign and its doing poorly, I am pretty much out of luck until Facebook recovers. Since I employ various strategies across accounts (asc+, broad, interests, lookalikes, mofo, bofo, etc) not everything is down all at once. And if I do decide its time to close a campaign, I have optionality to close some things and not others.
Anyways, I hope this gives you some ideas about riding out some of this volatility or the volatility we are sure to have later this year (US election year). Keep in mind that every ad account and every business situation is different so there is no 1 size fits all solution to this so be smart about what you decide to do. For what it’s worth I look across several accounts in different niches/industries and I am seeing many of them recover. If you have questions or thoughts, i’d love to hear them. Oh and this is not investment advice. 🙂
