Facebook Ads Campaigns: 10 Great Ways to Improve

Facebook ads campaigns that leverage your brand’s content correctly, can reap some insane rewards. Including the highest conversion rates of any mainstream digital ad network.

The following is a list of ten things every Facebook advertiser needs to do in order to be successful on the platform.

1. Target Your Website Traffic
2. Split Test Everything with Power Editor
3. Keep it Fresh
4. Keep it Professional
5. Respond to Messages Immediately
6. Instagram Is No Joke
7. Take Advantage of Dark Posts
8. Give Something Away for Free
9. Offer Claims FTW!
10. Pay Close Attention to Ad Frequency

For more information about how to improve your Facebook campaigns, or to speak with one of our awesome team members about how TopMercury can take your business to the next level, give us a call today!

Target Your Website Traffic

No matter what you’re selling, this is the most basic thing you can do to increase your sales on Facebook.

Your website traffic (customers notwithstanding) is your best collection of leads.

This group of people know your company, your products and services, your story, etc., and for some reason or another have opted against paying you money.

To target your website visitors, you’ll need a Facebook pixel installed.

Once that’s out of the way, you’ll go to Create a Custom Audience and select Website Traffic from the list of options.

From here you’ll want to create at least two audiences: Website Visitors (14 Days) and Website Visitors (30 Days).

For Website Visitors (14 Days) will be the smaller of the two, but will probably make up the bulk of your online purchases.

This is a great audience to target finalist ads (offer claims, promotions, etc.), these are your best leads and you should push them to convert.

Website Visitors (30 Days) will be a larger audience, and is necessary for a different reason.

This is a great audience “middle of the funnel” audience. You can and should target videos, post engagements, and more to get your website visitors back to your site. From there, they will move back into the highly qualified stage and get those finalist ads.

Anyone who doesn’t visit your website after targeted these types of ads in 30 days is a lost cause.

I also recommend that you  be sure to create another custom audience out of your customer email list to exclude customers.

If you’re like most businesses your active customers are going to be a large portion of your website visitors.

Creating a list of these customers to exclude through MailChimp or your email provider will ensure that your longstanding customers don’t see the ads you created specifically for leads.

Split Test Everything with Power Editor

To shave your Facebook ad spend every month, you’ll need to split test your campaigns, and you need Power Editor to do that effectively.

I’ve written about Power Editor and Ads Manager in the past. While I do think Ads Manager has its advantages (especially after recent updates), assuming you are going to use Facebook to drive revenue, you’ll need to use Power Editor.

As a quick reminder, Power Editor is Facebook’s standalone tool to create, edit, and optimize campaigns.

Here’s a shot of the main portal.

It is meant for larger advertisers looking to create campaigns in bulk, but best shows its chops when it comes to split testing ads and ad sets.

Using Power Editor, it’s extremely easy to test dozens of separate ads. Below is an example of a split test done with two different images.

This is important: when split testing your Facebook ads campaigns, never test more than one thing at once.

Want to test copy? Great, test copy with the exact same images across several ads. Want to test images? Keep the copy the same and switch them up.

While Facebook itself inherently split tests your ads (it will always show the best ad you have in a set more than others because it’s in their interest to do so), split testing your ads is critical to a successful Facebook Ads strategy, especially if you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars (like many of our clients) over the course of a year.

If you’re still operating on Ads Manager, this is going to be a massive headache for you. When you can, take your talents to Power Editor.

Keep it Fresh – Recognize When Facebook Ads Campaigns Go Stale.

Facebook recommends you refresh the images and copy in your ads every two weeks. That’s a bit aggressive, but you’ll still need to continuously update your ads.

As I said from the beginning: Facebook wants you to play by its rules. And Facebook knows that its users don’t like stale content!

Think about the most viral content on Facebook.

Oftentimes, it’s new movie trailers. Remember the Star Wars Episode XII trailer? It was all over Facebook in less than an hour.

Here’s a trailer for Alien Covenant that came out just a day ago.

2.8m views in a day? WOW.

But this isn’t an accident! It’s what users want on Facebook.

Guess what would happen if Ridley & Co. stopped releasing trailers but just reposted this every other week?

People would stop paying attention. Facebook would stop giving it organic reach and only a small subset of die-hard Alien fans (page likes) would get the updated copy or timestamped content.

Apply this idea to your business. Do you think your potential customers are really OK with seeing the same ad a dozen times every month? Or should you record a new video to help generate buzz and enhance your CTR?

Keep It Clean

If you aren’t using exceptional images, videos, and copy on Facebook, you’re already in second place.

You cannot get away with subpar creative on Facebook ads campaigns. You just can’t.

Here’s a simplistic yet effective tool to understand the importance of image quality on Facebook.

Facebook is too competitive of a marketplace to show people standard definition videos and stock images.

And if the average consumer can’t even see what you’re showing them? Good luck.

More specifically, here’s what Facebook has to say about the matter

Pay close attention to that “high quality” bit. Facebook explicitly states to make sure your image “looks good everywhere it appears on Facebook.” Take that seriously.

Unlike AdWords, Facebook Ads relies on professional creative and images to work. If you don’t have any professional images, you shouldn’t running Facebook ads campaigns..

Take a look below at an example of an ad we think should be off Facebook.

And here’s an ad we think embodies professionalism on Facebook.

So start sourcing great images and creating slick copy and you’ll be good to go!

Respond to Messages Immediately

This may sound self-explanatory, but it’s really important that you respond immediately to messages your business receives on Facebook.

Sometimes business stares us right in the face and we do nothing about it. Yet we pine for more leads and customers.

Try your very best not to make this mistake on Facebook.

On the sidebar of every Facebook business page, you have the ability to “turn on” an icon that signifies that your business responds to customers expediently.

Do whatever you can to get this turn this icon on, even if that means switching up a few things in your sales and customer service departments.

Doing so will not only appease Facebook, which wants to do business with responsive businesses, but will also show customers that if they reach out to you, they’ll get a response.

Last question: if you were thinking about messaging a company about a product and you saw a big blue badge that said “business responds in 5 minutes,” would you contact them?

The odds of contact with Facebook’s quick response icon nearly quadruples. If you haven’t turned on your button because you aren’t answering people on Facebook, you may need to rethink why you’re using the network in the first place!

Take Advantage of Dark Posts Whenever Possible

Dark posts let you show the same ad to unlimited target demographics across campaigns, exponentially improving engagement.

Dark posts have single handedly pushed several business’ Facebook accounts that I’ve worked on over the top.

A dark post is created through Power Editor (Facebook is slowly rolling out the ability to do this via Ads Manager) that gives you the ability to advertise a single post across multiple campaigns, ad sets, and demographics.

Ever see an ad with millions of views and thousands of comments and wonder where they all came from? Meanwhile you get a couple likes on a dozen different Facebook ads campaigns you pushed out last week?

Let’s take another look at that Alien Covenant ad we discussed earlier.

2.8 million views? 60k reactions?

A dark post is the exact same as a post. They’re really nothing different from one another.

The only difference is that a dark post is created without actually posting to the page. Dark posts help you get the advantages of a post without actually going through the effort of posting to your page.

Why would you ever post something as an ad that would get thousands of likes but not to your page? Well, what about a promotion for first-time customers? Or an ad that you don’t think the people who like your page will approve?

The use cases for dark posts are out of this world. You just have to think in terms of the average Facebook user.

Give Something Away for Free in your Facebook Ads Campaigns

Unless you’re selling a revolutionary new product, Facebook users are going to expect some sort of deal or promotion to get them to your site.

This rings true not only with Facebook ads campaigns but with virtually any form of digital advertising.

Users are not going to sit back and simply buy your product. You need to entice them with an offer they can’t find anywhere else.

Unless you’re Tesla.

No, seriously, unless you are selling revolutionary vehicles that will change the way people look at transportation forever, you really need to be giving your leads something to chew on.

You can determine whether or not you need to offer a promotion (or how much that promotion needs to be) based on something I call “The Kickstarter Test.”

The Kickstarter Test is how I measure successful products. If a product can blow-up on Kickstarter at a high price, you know it may actually be good enough to succeed without a price cut.

Take a look at a few of Kickstarter’s best products over the last few years.

Pebble Time reinvented success on Kickstarter for the second time in 2015.

As did Grepper’s Coolest Cooler.

All very impressive, no doubt. But a tiny, micro speck of the products ever listed on Kickstarter.

What you don’t hear about, what no one hears about, are the Kickstarter projects that flopped…hard. All the tens of thousands of them.

If your product, like the vast majority of products, cannot change the game and explode on a platform like Kickstarter, you will need to work a discount into your give.

The example below is a company we worked with that baked a free pair of socks into their offering. When they started, they were making a 1.3 ROAS, and after the free socks promo, they upped their ROAS to 1.9. That’s a big jump that more than covered the cost of the socks.

That said, even if your product is revolutionary and people are doing whatever they can to get their hands on it, discounts and price manipulation will always help you push more product out into the hands of consumers. Always.

Offer Claims FTW in Your Facebook Campaigns!

Offer claims are a relatively new addition to Facebook’s ad types, and they may very well be their best one yet.

Have you seen Facebook Offer Claims ads?

Here’s an example that Facebook released internally after launching the new ad type last year.

As you can see, Offer Claims are a fantastic way to generate actionable conversions (specifically purchases) from your leads.

Stylistically, they’ve undergone some changes since being released, but the premise is the same: attach some sort of code or deal to a listing ad

The only issue I’ve found with Offer Claims is that they require constant updates.

Unlike most ad types on Facebook, you need to manually change the expiration date of your offer with a new ad set every time you want it updated.

That can be a pain to remember, but don’t mess around and forget. Again, with Power Editor this will take you less than a minute.

Just don’t forget if you bake into your campaigns. These ads are hands down the most effective at converting leads into buyers.

Pay Close Attention to Frequency with Facebook Ads Campaigns

If you don’t keep an eye on your Facebook ads campaigns frequency, you may alienate prospects or, worse, frustrate your best leads.

Ad frequency is one of those things that you just can’t put on autopilot. You’ve got to continue to monitor it as part of your daily optimization.

Here’s what ad frequency looks like in a custom report on Ads Manager for your Facebook Ads Campaigns.

As you can see in the “Fre..” column, we’re not doing too bad with this account.

However, this isn’t ideal. We really want to make sure that we’re reaching more people with those “Suspects” ads (right around 2-3 times) and slightly less people with those “Prospects” ads (right around 2-3 times).

Again, this account isn’t poor, but it could be better.

We want leads to see Facebook ads campaigns a couple of times.

If they haven’t clicked by the third, showing them more than could make them upset, so much so that they may block us.

On the other hand, if they haven’t seen your ad more than once, they may not even remember who you are and what you do!

At the end of the day, integrating frequency into your campaigns is most important, how you interpret and use the data is based on your business.

To be dominant on Facebook, you have to use the platform as best you can. Plain and simple. This means keeping your content fresh and awesome, offering great promotions, getting savvy with Power Editor and more.

But with persistence and a desire to learn from your mistakes, you’ll be well on your way to great advertising campaigns!