Hey everyone, u/digitaladguide here. I keep seeing the same questions in here over and over so I figured i’d share some practical facebook ads tips that you can try out next year. Please note that this post represents my opinions through my experience running a lot of ads on Facebook.
Yes, you should use Ads Manager. Yes, you need a pixel. Do yourself a favor and use Ads Manager instead of boosting posts. You get way more visibility and control over your ads. If you intend to run Sales or Leads campaigns it is best that you have a properly installed pixel. Bonus points if you set up conversion API as this gathers extra data that may have otherwise been lost post iOS14.5. These days, setting up a pixel and Conversion API is very easy. Usually it can be accomplished through a partner integration (like Shopify, Pixelmysite, etc) If it cannot, tons of software development freelancers on Upwork or Fiverr can help you do it for pretty cheap. Test that it is working with the Chrome extension called Meta Pixel helper, or Facebooks Event Setup tool and Test Events feature. Make sure you get this part right!
What campaign type should I use? Traffic? Awareness? Sales?
I recommend using the Sales objective if you are selling a physical or digital product. The Leads objective is great for local businesses and service based businesses like real estate, roofing, etc. Traffic campaigns usually give you just that, traffic. It is usually low quality and generally does not translate to Sales. Awareness is basically useless. Awareness is an upsell that Facebook offers to less experienced people. Should I do traffic campaigns first to train my pixel and then do sales? No, I think you should go right to Sales. I have not seen a tangible benefit to this strategy and I believe you should start training your pixel from day 1 to find what you want – sales.
Daily or Lifetime budgets?
Daily. It gives you way more control over your spend and allows you to scale. When to start new campaigns I usually recommend starting new campaigns around 6AM local time the following day. This starts the campaign right when people are logging on and also gives it enough time to spend the budget. I tend to start campaigns on Tuesday-Thursday as I have found the weekends to be more volatile for optimizing a new campaign. I will start campaigns on Mondays and Friday’s if I have to. How should I structure my ads? There is no right or wrong way to structure your ads in my opinion. What is important is that you have a clear labeling taxonomy and keep your ad account organized. You should label things so that it is clear, at a glance, what is happening in each campaign, ad set, and ad. In general I use a lot of CBOs and ASC+. More thoughts on this later.
How should I test?
I think I am going to make a separate post about this because it is kind of in depth. At the end of the day, you need to find a winning combination of creative, copy and targeting. Make sure that each campaign that you launch has a clear testing goal. Are you testing creative? interests? lookalikes? etc. It is important that when you are testing creatives, products, targeting, campaign types, etc – you need to keep everything else constant and just change 1 variable. This will give you insight into how that 1 variable change effects your overall performance. Example: if you are testing different targeting options in a Sales CBO campaign, make sure that the ads (creative, text, description, cta, everything) in each ad set are exactly the same. The only thing that would be different is the targeting/demographic selection at the ad set level.
What metrics should I care about?
These will depend on your business but generally the metrics that I look at are: Unique CTR, Unique CPC, Purchases, Purchase Roas, Cost per purchase, purchase conversion value, adds to cart, cost per add to cart, initiate checkouts, cost per initiate checkout, CPM, frequency.
I found something that works, now what?
Whatever you do, do not edit the ad. Not even a comma. I can’t tell you how many times I have learned this lesson the hard way. 9/10 when I would touch it to try to ‘improve it’, I would ruin it. If it is working, leave it alone. The only thing that you can/should do is start to scale it. Hope this helps. Feel free to ask questions. Good luck to everyone in 2024.
