How I Kept Track and Optimized My Ad Campaigns Performance
On December 13th, 2022 I ran a Facebook Ad campaign to promote Teens for Christ’s Pancake Breakfast fundraiser. Because this is only a local event I set the ads to run within 3 counties that were within a 30-mile radius of the Teens for Christ building where the event is being held (if you want to see the creation of the campaign click here).
The budget for these ads was $50 dollars and I had 2 ads that ran within 3 ad sets, one for each county. One of the ads was based on building excitement and hype for the event, and the other was based around promoting the event to families.
I thought that I would just run the campaign and let Facebook do its thing, but over the past 16 days I had to make a few major changes to the campaign and the ads to improve performance. You can view the final results at the bottom of the post, but if you want the proper context, keep reading to find out what happened between December 13th and December 28th.
Definitions:
Key Results: Desired results for our Campaign Objective, which is to get people to click on the link. So our Key Result would be every time that someone clicks the link on our ad(s).
Reach: Every new person that sees our ad(s).
Impressions: Every time our ad(s) was on someone’s screen.
Cost Per Result: The average of how much we spend every time someone clicks on the ad(s).
12/15/22, Two Days After Campaign Publication
I got a notification from Meta with a campaign recommendation. My ad sets were experiencing “Fragmentation”, which means that because I have 3 ad sets running for 3 counties it’s costing me more money and delaying the learning process for who they should show the ads to. Facebook recommended that I put my 3 ad sets into one ad set to decrease the cost and quicken the learning process.
I looked at recommendations from some esteemed Facebook Ads gurus (Ben Heath was one of my main sources of inspiration and information) and it was suggested that I don’t combine the ad sets for long-term advertising campaigns, otherwise, I’ll just get the average data from the campaign instead of detailed data. But over the short-term, 2 weeks to 2 months, it’s fine.
Since this campaign is experimental and will be finished by the 28th there’s no need to collect any more data for future ad campaigns so putting the ads into one ad set and advertising to a broad audience from one place will improve efficiency and lower cost.
I combined 2 ad sets into the best-performing ad set, which was the St. Croix County Ad Set (nearby the Teens for Christ building), and set the location of the ads to be within a 30-mile radius of the TFC building instead of just in 3 separate counties. This new combined ad set has a potential audience reach of 2,100,000 people.
So far my campaign had an average total of 21 Key Results, 533 Reaches, 620 Impressions, $0.25 cost per result, and a total of $5.23 Spent. Hopefully, in the coming days, that cost will decrease.
12/17/22 Four Days After Campaign Publication
I received a notification that the posts from the Teens for Christ reached over 1.2k people. So far the ads have had a total of 69 link clicks, reached 1,303 people, and had 1,713 impressions. The average cost per result is currently standing at $0.19
Combining the ad sets so that there was only one ad set was a fantastic move for my short-term campaign. It was still in the learning phase, but I had gained around 3x the results from my one combined ad set than the other ad sets.
Both of the ads that are still turned on were still in the learning phase, but it said that the Excitement Building Ad was doing much better than the Family Ad.
The Excitement Building Ad has 56 Key Results, 948 Reaches, 1,185 Impressions, $0.16 cost per result, and a total of $9.13 spent on this one ad alone.
The Family Ad has 2 Key Results, 49 Reaches, 59 Impressions, a $0.14 cost per result, and a total of $0.29 Spent.
The other ad sets that were turned off took care of the remaining price but had no effect on the current ad set.
12/21/22 Eight Days After Campaign Publication
We got a notification that we’ve hit $25.00 and will be billed accordingly.
I noticed that the Excitement Building Ad was outperforming the Family Ad even more than last time, reaching over 147 people. The learning phase must have been well over and done with considering that most of the budget has gone into the Excitement Building Ad.
I was considering turning off the Family Ad if there wasn’t going to be any boost in activity from there soon.
Excitement building: 147 results, 1510 reaches, 2182 impressions, an average of $.18 cost per click, and $25.53 spent
Family Ad: 3 Results, 129 Reaches, 178 impressions, an average of $.24 cost per click, and $.57 Spent.
12/24/22 Eleven Days After Campaign Publication
It was Christmas Eve so I wanted to keep this update brief. The key results for the Family ad barely changed so I decided to turn it off. There was no point in spending any more money on this ad if there are not going to be any real results from it.
If I were running a more complex campaign it probably would have cost us a lot more money if I had kept this running. I’ll make a note to cut out the ads that aren’t giving us results a lot quicker in the future.
The Excitement Building ad had been doing magnificently so far! It was sitting at 219 clicks, 3,434 reaches, 5,798 impressions, an average of $0.17 cost per click, and $36.22 Spent.
12/27/22 Fourteen Days After Campaign Publication
This was my final update on the performance of my ad/ad set. The Facebook campaign was going to be turned off the next day, and I assumed that the results wouldn’t be much different than how it is today.
This campaign exceeded my expectations beyond anything I would have guessed. The Excitement Building Ad had 261 Key Results, 4,052 Reaches, 6,955 Impressions, an average of $0.16 CPC, and $41.04 Spent on this one ad.
Video Tutorial on How to Read Meta Ads Manager
This video documentation shows how to read the basics of Meta Ads Manager and which analytics/stats I’ve been paying the closest attention to as my campaign has been running: here’s the video.
Final Results:
In concordance with the other ad sets and advertisements that I turned off as the campaign went on, the grand total of the campaign’s performance is 275 Results, 4,308 Reaches, 7,613 Impressions, an average of 0.17 CPC, and $45.42 Spent on this campaign:
The Setup of the Campaign:
The results of the campaign’s Delivery:
At the start of this campaign I made a prediction that senior citizens would be the most likely to click on our ads for two reasons: 1) older folks typically use Facebook more frequently than the younger demographics, and 2) pancake breakfasts are usually associated with being more old fashioned.
Turns out my predictions were right:
Around 58% of the results were men, most of which were over the age of 65. And older women fell close behind them with around 41% of the results.
In my opinion, this was a massive overachievement. If we weren’t just a small organization with limited resources that are running a small-scale pancake breakfast, the smartest way that we would go further with this ad campaign would be to upscale. We’d expand the reach of our ads from a 30-mile radius of the TFC center to a 60-mile radius, and we’d make at least 2–3 more ads with similar aesthetics/copy.
However, we currently don’t have the budget to expand our campaign, and since I’m essentially the only one running the event I need to start focusing on preparation for the event itself.
But beyond that, I’m thrilled with the results! Since the ads are only reaching out to a smaller area I know that it’s probably easier to get more people’s attention. But that doesn’t mean that fact shouldn’t be taken advantage of! I’m excited to see how this campaign will affect the event as a whole!
This blog post is only one in an entire series of posts that pertain to this pancake breakfast, so if this at all interests you, then please subscribe to my blog to stay updated!
You can find all the links to my other blog posts and video tutorials on my Project Landing Page here.
