11 Facebook Ads Questions You Should Ask Yourself (or Your Agency)
When it comes to Facebook advertising, the difference between poor, mediocre and great performance is large. How do you know where your company stands? Start by asking yourself (or your agency) these 11 questions.
1. Is there a Facebook pixel installed on our website/app? If there is, are we tracking all relevant conversions with standard events or custom conversions?
Not having a Facebook pixel and events installed makes it impossible to advertise effectively. Why? With a pixel you can 1) segment and retarget your website visitors, 2) use conversion campaigns to optimize for the results you actually want, and 3) understand the ROI of your advertising and how to correctly attribute it.
2. How often are we updating the copy and creative of our ads?
The ad creative is the most important variable in achieving advertising success, and it’s something you want to be testing constantly. Not doing so means running the risk of ad fatigue and leaving money on the table.
Depending on the budget and audience, you should refresh the ad creatives anywhere from every day to once every two weeks. Anything less is unlikely to be optimal.
3. Do we document the performance of past ad creative and copy?
Testing is of little value if you don’t do it in a structured way. You should have a spreadsheet or document where you write down all the tests you’re doing, their corresponding results and learnings. This will allow you to pick out patterns in the performance and further optimize your ads.
4. Are we utilizing all creative formats?
Facebook offers more creative freedom than any other ad platform in the world, and you should definitely take advantage of it. Experimenting with different formats like image, slideshow, video, and carousel usually leads to huge improvements in performance.
Ideally, you want to be running at least one video and one image ad for each of your campaigns. And with Facebook’s slideshow tool and Video Creation Kit, there is no excuse not to!
5. How often are we testing other key variables?
Though the ad creative is the most important variable, you should also be testing other things. By experimenting with audiences, placements, and bidding, you are usually able to significantly lower your costs. Furthermore, Facebook’s ad platform is changing fast, and what worked yesterday might not work today (and vice versa!).
6. Are we taking full advantage of Facebook’s powerful targeting options?
Facebook’s ad platform offers the best targeting capabilities in the world, and you should be taking full advantage. For instance, instead of just running retargeting ads, you can segment your website visitors based on their behavior and recency. You can also get very granular when targeting engaged users and video viewers, and experiment with lookalike audiences with different source audiences (e.g. customer file or website converters) and sizes (1–10%).
7. What kind of campaign objectives are we using and why?
Understanding how objectives work and choosing the right objective is crucial for the success of your campaigns. Facebook has grouped people into “pockets” based on previous behavior like clicking on an ad, watching a video or making a purchase, and will show ads to people most likely to take a certain action. This means that two campaigns with the same targeting but different objectives will often reach totally different people.
For example, running reach campaigns to a cold audience is usually not a good idea. Since Facebook will optimize for the lowest cost, your ads will be shown to people that are less competed for and therefore less likely to convert.
8. Have we set up an advertising funnel that segments cold and warm audiences?
Retargeting is absolutely key and without it you’re leaving money on the table. Ideally you want to create a funnel that segments people based on their stage in the purchasing process (top, middle and bottom of funnel). This allows you to tailor the messages to each audience and allocate your ad budget effectively.
9. Which advertising KPIs are we tracking and why?
Should we be tracking impressions or CPMs? What frequency are we aiming for? What is our target CPC, CTR and CPA? Which conversion event should we optimize for?
Facebook gives you the option to track some 200 metrics. Understanding what each metric is telling you and which ones that matter, is necessary for making the correct optimization decisions.
10. What is the ROI of our advertising?
Ideally, your advertising should be directly connected to your business objectives, like generating leads or driving sales. This makes it fairly straightforward to calculate the ROI or ROAS. But even if you’re running brand advertising or optimizing for events further up the funnel, you should be able to come up with a reasonable estimate.
11. What major changes have we made to our advertising strategy in the last six months?
Digital advertising is a fast-moving industry with a constant influx of new product features and ever-changing best practices and trends.
If you’re not making significant changes to your advertising strategy at least twice a year, chances are that you’re not staying up to date with the rest of the industry and/or not learning enough from your past performance.
If all 11 questions seemed obvious and straightforward, chances are you’re running an effective advertising operation. But if these were questions you hadn’t yet considered, there is probably room for improvement.
If you want to know more, contact us for a free consultation or account audit: https://rhoplusone.com/contact/
