Let’s Talk Targeting…
When it comes to advertising on Facebook, having a good ad is just half the battle.
Last week, I explored the factors behind a winning Facebook Ad creative. But the ad itself is only part of the story! This week, I got the basic rundown about the Facebook Ads Manager and Facebook campaign targeting techniques from Powtoon’s very own PPC Pro, David Shapira.
David showed me the most important things to consider when setting up a Facebook Ad campaign. He also made me promise to note that this is by no means an exhaustive look at PPC ad targeting. But if you’re new to the paid advertising game, or you’ve never run a Facebook Ad campaign before, these are the basic areas you’ll want to explore.
Running & Assessing Your Ad
Once you’ve created the ad you like, honed your message, and packaged it up nicely, it’s time to start running your ad and assessing your metrics. My expertise lies on the content side of things, but I sat down with Powtoon’s PPC manager, David Shapira, to get a basic checklist of things to consider when running and assessing a Facebook ad. We came up with this list of the most important things to consider when running and assessing your ad:
1. Set your goal
It’s not all about your creative, you need to have solid targeting too. The first thing you will need to define is your goal. Do you want to achieve more sales? More leads? More signups or registrations? This is important because it has a direct impact on how quickly and correctly Facebook can get your ad in front of the right people. Optimizing for leads (much easier to get than purchases), your campaign will generate more “signals” more quickly, and that will bring your campaign faster results.
2. Choose a bidding method
Fully Automatic Bidding (optimized for lowest cost) — Using automatic bidding is a way to set your total advertising budget and your goal. Facebook will then bid automatically to win the maximum toward your goal within your budget. The benefit to this approach is you don’t need to work all day to optimize your campaign, Facebook will do it for you. The drawback to this approach is that if you have a weak day with less activity, Facebook will still spend your budget until it’s gone. So those weak days with fewer results will make each result more expensive.
Automatic Bidding with Bid Cap — Another way to control the automatic bidding is to include a bid cap. This means that, while the algorithm is optimizing to get you the highest number of results at the lowest cost, you can also cap the maximum bid for any one ad impression, which will prevent those slow days from burning your budget unnecessarily.
Semi-Automatic Bidding: Target Cost — This is David’s favorite bidding method. Here, you set a target cost for each bid. This lets you increase and decrease a campaign’s budget at will (say for an awesome campaign you want to scale up) without raising your average cost per conversion. For a dynamic industry, or anything that requires quick changes and optimization, this is the most flexible approach. This method might not bring you the lowest-cost impressions, because you won’t out optimize the algorithm. If you’re working with a budget, though, this is the easiest method to plan around.
A quick note on delivery type: Facebook will offer to spend your money as fast as possible via the “accelerated delivery” method. This is designed to get you fast results, but it is costly! Standard delivery should work for most campaigns.
3. Placement
Placement is how you define the networks on which your ad will display (Facebook, Instagram, the Audience Network, and Messenger). It’s especially important to have a specific creative for these networks, because their formats and audiences differ. For instance, an Instagram story needs to be in vertical aspect ratio. Different platforms have different length requirements, etc. Here’s also where you can specify what kind of devices to target (desktop computers, iOS, Android). Beware of your placement!
4. Running your ad
Once you have defined your goal, your bidding method, and your placement, it’s time to actually run your ad. You will want to name your ad, choose your thumbnail (remember to scroll up to see if Facebook accepted your thumbnail!), add your headline and ad text (appears above and below your video), add a link description and define the CTA that Facebook will serve below your ad. Hit publish and you’re live!
5. Assessing your results
These are the most important KPIs to track in the Facebook Ads Manager system:
Unique outbound CTR — the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. (that wonderful click-through rate we discussed earlier)
Cost per click — Your total spend divided by the total clicks.
Cost per result — the total spend divided by your results (for instance, if you optimized for conversions, this will tell you what each conversion cost you, on average).
Relevance score — a rating from 1–10 that estimates how well your target audience is responding to your ad. The relevance score has a direct impact on your reach. If you are marked as more highly relevant, you will reach more people on a daily basis. The best way to improve your relevance score is to tinker with your creative or your audience targeting (or both!). Serving the right content to the right audience will help Facebook prioritize your ad delivery moving forward.
Frequency — how often a specific ad shows to an individual user. If you have, for example, 1.5 frequency, it means that half of your users saw the ad twice. Keep an eye on this. You don’t want to pay twice for one user. And you don’t want to become repetitive (how many times will someone watch the same old ad without getting annoyed?).
6. Pro Tip: Advanced metrics
Our fearless PPC manager, David, was sure to tell me that you can’t just rely on the metrics Facebook provides. As an example, he said everyone should also be assessing their conversion rate from reach to result!
Conversion rate from reach to result — Number of conversions divided by your total reach. While a traditional conversion rate would be calculated based on your impressions, the total reach will help provide a clearer picture of your overall conversion rate. Impressions can be served to a single person more than once, but reach is an overall number of the unique individuals who were exposed to your ads.
Conclusion
They say life is a journey, not a destination. Ads are both a journey AND a destination. You need beautiful, engaging, humourous, or eye-catching ad creatives in order to succeed (the destination). But you also need a path that exposes the right people to your ad (your journey).
Many many thanks to David Shapira for his help compiling this post. Follow him on LinkedIn here!
Are you a Facebook Ads pioneer? Let me know which metrics are the most important to you for defining success in the comments below!
