Smartly.io: Three Steps to Give Your Campaigns Some TLC

The perfect match - just like any successful relationship - requires some TLC. You can make campaign success that much sweeter (and fight that dreaded ad fatigue) by focusing heavily on these factors. We’ve done the legwork by  indicating on a dial from Low to High, which optimization levers you should dedicate more effort (High) versus ones where it’s okay to be a little lax (Low).

Optimization Goal

When considering anything optimization related, you should ask yourself:

• What is your true goal - for example, is it driving more sales to your store, more installs to your app or awareness of your brand?

• What are the actual metrics you will use to evaluate performance? Sometimes this may be with Facebook data, for others the metrics lie elsewhere e.g. Google Analytics data, Mobile Measurement Partner data or in your companies internal measurement system.

Setting up your optimization goal is where you have a lot to say - communicating to Facebook what the true goal of what you are trying to achieve with the campaign is essential in achieving results.

The best practice is to always optimize towards your end goal. As long as you are able to reach 50 weekly conversions per adset for that  goal, you are fueling the campaign and driving conversions. If you are struggling to reach enough weekly conversions, this might mean your audience is too specific and you should consider expanding it.

Bids and Budgets

When it comes to optimization, most of the time less is more. You need to be mindful of adjusting your bids and budgets throughout the day. Intra-day changes distract the Facebook pacing that aims to deliver your budget optimally during the day. This is why making a lot of changes doesn’t usually benefit your performance - setting Facebook with limits is the best thing you can do for your campaigns.  

What if you want to get the most out of your campaign bids and budgets? Algorithmic optimization is the way to go. Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization lets you allocate your budget to the best performing ad sets in real time without affecting the Facebook pacing in a negative way. Smartly.io.io budget pools let you expand the budget allocation across multiple campaigns, for example pool together your prospecting campaigns and find the best efficiencies that will drive new users to your funnel. If your source of truth is data outside Facebook, you can also use Smartly.io Predictive Budget Allocation to optimize to your true goal with third party data.

Ads

You should put a lot of focus on the ad level as an advertiser. Fighting for consumers’ attention still happens on the creative level to create ads that are thumb-stopping, personalized, engaging, interesting and organic. You want to give Facebook room to find the right people, but you should also give it options of what type of messages and formats to deliver.

The key is to have both your ad count and ad mix on point. Having multiple ads per ad set allows Facebook to optimize which ad works best for each individual. However, having too many creatives is wasteful, since the Facebook delivery algorithm decides which ads it prefers to show relatively fast. We have seen best success with four to eight ads per ad set live at a time.

According to our tests, increasing your creative mix has a positive impact on performance, for example videos in your ad mix alongside with your image enables you to also reach users who have a higher probability of interacting with video than static ads. Producing video assets can be a handful, which is why templated videos can really be your rescue. With Smartly.io video templates, you can create on-brand videos easily with scale.

Furthermore, Facebook Dynamic Ads can help you take your ad relevance to the next level. Using pixel data, Facebook is able to show the products viewed and make recommendations of similar products in the ads. Instead of creating each ad individually, Facebook creates the ads dynamically based on individual users’ behavior. Enhancing your Dynamic Ads with Smartly.io Image Templates also allows you to build engaging creatives dynamically and display product specific information in a scalable way. Dynamic Ads were originally launched for retargeting purposes, but have proven to be extremely valuable in driving new users to your funnel by utilizing broad audience targeting. You really get the best of both - running ads to a broad audience (optimal for Facebook delivery) while showing your audience specific, personal ads.  

Being smart about what you control and how you control it is the key to success in Facebook advertising. Even though it can be hard to sit back and give Facebook space, it is worth putting your resources into things that truly drive impact for your results, analyzing the performance and testing systematically.

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