So you might have just got your first campaign going using Facebook Ads. Or you might be a seasoned Facebook entrepreneur who has been making ads since the beginning.
Either way, this overview will not only explain, step by step, how to run and scale a successful Facebook campaign, but it will also show you how to be a successful marketer.
But, if you’re like most people, you probably setup the ads incorrectly.
Yes, there is a proper way to setup ads and more or less guarantee results, and there is an improper way that guarantee convoluted and sloppy data.
Let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start discussing some science. Advertising is based on the scientific method. Yes, there is an art form here too, but by and large this is not art, this is science and data.
Assuming you followed the instructions on my previous post detailing how to make a winning Facebook Ad, let’s start with the basic fundamentals. If you haven’t created your ad yet, go back and do that first. Additionally, you want to have your Facebook columns setup properly before continuing to read this.
Also, be cognizant that if you’re new to Facebook Ads, you will have to have some history before you can open a lot of new accounts.
1. Blended Primary Metric Averages
I don’t want to belabor this point, but it’s a very important point to consider.
Changes and fluctuations in your ad account will happen during the course of the optimization window. Don’t worry or freak out over a bad day or bad couple days. In fact, don’t freak out and change anything about your ads especially when you’re having a bad day. It’s fine to follow the optimization procedure outlined on a bad day, but it’s not fine to do so all frantic and discombobulated. Just relax.
Everything in advertising is based on averages. Average CTRs, CACs, etc. Everything.
So you should always look at your average spread over a period. This gives us an accurate readout on performance.
Your average is determined by your optimization window you put forth during ad set setup. We have several options for this that I go over in setup. I prefer 1 Day Click attribution and I go over this in one of my lessons in the course. I like to start with the most conservative and consistent one. It’s 7 Days Click or 1 Day View. Therefore, we give our ads a more balanced chance to optimize.
The other options deserve a test in your account once you know your baseline acquisition cost.
On that note, nearly all your ads should have some sort of a goal set. Whether it be conversions, engagement, whatever. We should have a goal for the creatives so we can measure the results against a different timeframe. This gives us the average.
In the example below, I’ll be discussing a subscription box eCommerce store. Our goal is purchase conversion events. Therefore, we have a direct revenue attributor.
The average cost fo the event you’re after will dictate your decisions on whether to keep or remove ad sets, variables or whatever you are trying to test.
2. How to Properly Name Your Facebook Ads
So your ads should follow your naming convention that is as follows:
“Image/Video Name | Copy”. That reads Image slash video name BAR Copy. This is to start. You can add more variables as you determine the winner. In other words, the bar separates a variable that you are testing. And since Facebook is machine learning, it will find and place the best performing ad in front of as many eyeballs as possible. And it will know when, what and where to place this.
Every variable’s performance can therefore be determined when you’re actually optimizing…more on this later.
Anyway, the bar is a nice organized way to look at the ads when you’re determining the winner.
Each and every ad should follow the identical naming convention. Any new variables must be tested against the existing controls to have a proper split test.
Let’s now consider each creative a variant. Just like email service providers (ESPs) allow us to split test subject lines and content, the creative itself is just another test.
If you’re still confused on how to properly name your ads. I go over ad naming and everything that’s required in my Ads Growth Blueprint Tutorial.
How many ads do I need to create?
Well, that is completely dependent on your budget. My rule is this: Each ad should spend 4-5x the budget of the average cost per acquisition inside of the account. So, if your CAC is $25, then I would be comfortable making a decision to keep or remove the variant after about $100 spend. So if I make 12 ad variants, I would want to spend at least $1200 for all the variants I’m testing. But, there’s a huge caveat to this. Facebook won’t spend the budget equally across all ads. Remember what I said about the Machine Learning above. Facebook will determine the best performer and allocate your spend based on the best performer. This is also true of Ad sets inside of a CBO campaign.
Anyway, you may get your results much sooner than your actual realized spend because you might just have enough room to optimize an ad without having to spend all your budget evenly. Your best performing variants might just reveal themselves much sooner.
This also lets the platform do the heavy lifting for me.
So, how many ads should you create? The real question is, how much do you want to spend to determine to find a winner. You can create up to 50 variants (now) inside of an ad set. So this is something to consider as well when you are deciding.
3. How to Optimize Your Facebook Creatives
Because we setup our ads properly, the actual optimization part is going to be super easy. What we are looking for is a trend. We aren’t looking for individual ads that win inside of a particular ad set. Why? Because we want to make sure that the ad works across broader audiences as well as our control. We are looking for what variables and combination of variables produce the absolute lowest average purchase.
I’m not necessarily looking for the best performing ad per se. I am looking for the two variables, when combined, produce the best results. This gives me insight into a TON of things. First, what image/video colors, content and angles work. Second, which copy performs best. And third, which copy angle performs the best. Knowing the copy is great, but more importantly, why are user’s buying from this particular ad.
Is it a promotion or price incentive? Is it a value stack? It it scarcity?
The only way to truly know is to test all the variables simultaneously against a variety of audiences to establish a blended performance. Once the variables work across more than one ad set, then we know we have found something truly special and scalable. These are the ads you are looking for. Something that you know what angle and creative will work to attract the highest number of users.
Remember, above we discussed blended averages and blended account performance based on the average metric you are optimizing for. Well, it will really come into play here.
What time period should I look like?
Well, this one is really up to you. You can look at today’s metrics as an idea of how performance is of that day. It’s really not important, however. The most important time frame to look at is the last 14 days. This gives the campaign 14 days to optimize any possibly performing ads, and it’s would average out any bad performing days or even weeks. It’s just a better representation than 7 days or 30 days.
Of course, this can vary. Different time periods are useful for identifying trends during, well, different times. A month will give me my monthly average and make the daily CAC less meaningful in comparison to the monthly average. For example, let’s say that the monthly average is $25. And today’s CAC was in the $40s.
If the spend remains the same, then I would really just brush it off as a bad performing day and assume the next couple days may be better.
They may not, but that would indicate a different issue.
The general rule of thumb here is past 14 days. Though I do daily, 3 day, 7 day, 14 day and 30 day optimizations as well. During each period I am observing the data to see where to migrate the top performing ads/creatives and determine if they are going to scale.
Keep in mind, this is not trended data, but rather a flattened data sets. Flattened data can be useful, but it’s not as useful as trended data that is graphed and easy to understand.
Flattened data can be very misleading sometimes, especially if the performance was really good out of the gates and started to slow down later on. You won’t know your increase in CPA until it starts dipping into a negative ROAS situation. So, trending is always preferred.
I go over trending in my Facebook Ads Growth Blueprint, The Essentials and Scaling Course
How to look at the variable data
So now we know our account and campaign average. We need to see where the variables fall in relation to the average cost per acquisition.
The process is like this. You will filter the ads out based on the variables defined in the ad creation process. You should keep your ad sets deselected and only your campaign selected.
Each time your filter if your ad name contains certain characters, you are filtering to see the average performance of the variable you selected.
Each time you search for something, you are searching for one of the variables that are being tested across ALL the ads.
So one variable could be the image or video. The other variable could be the copy. Another could be the headliner. Another could be the button. Each are separated by a “|” (bar).
Here’s a step by step.
- Navigate to your ads manager dashboard.
- Click on the filters icon and enter the name of one of your images
- Check the campaign that you are currently working on
- Navigate to the ads section
- Look at the blended performance for that variable at the bottom.
- See the performance of that variable and determine how far the variable is from your average.
- Keep or remove this variable.
- Repeat steps 1-7 for any additional variables.
- Test more variables until your average CAC doesn’t change or the majority of the budget is allocated to the winning variable combination.
The rule for all ad testing is to TEST ONE VARIABLE AT A TIME. Do not try to test 2 variables in an ad.
If you do, you will fail and your data may be contaminated with misinformation. You can test more than one variable inside of an ad set, but don’t do it inside of one creative. Your results could be influenced and skewed based on a variable that is contaminating the dataset and thus yield inaccurate results. One of the combinations you are dismissing could be the winner and you just removed it because another variable actually brought the performance down.
Or, the opposite. You keep a bad performing ad because you thought it was a winner based on the data you collected. When in reality, it was a loser this whole time.
Have a clean account and set yourself up for success.
**Update for 2022**
As of recently I’ve been scaling in a manual bid campaign as outlined in this strategy. I’m still isolating variables, but I’m keeping things a lot more concise when I test them.
4. How do I scale Facebook Ad Campaigns?
If you’ve made it this far in your account, you’ve reached a point that few will ever appreciate. Few will ever have the opportunity to experience what it’s like to actually scale a campaign and do it gracefully. It’s really important to keep your scaling campaign separate from your testing campaign at this point. It’s fine to test new audiences in the scaling campaign as it will be easy to knock out losers. But you really want to have a dedicated CBO budget set for scaling and testing.
So all your tests can stay within the testing campaign and all your scaling can stay within your scaling campaign.
It’s really that simple. Once you separate them out, you want to add about 25% of the scaling campaign’s budget back in on itself. You can do this every 24 hours or I’ve seen good performance out of doing it every 48 hours too. Giving it a day to stabilize and then increasing the following day.
Set your budgets before the end of the day on the timezone. IE don’t do it abruptly mid day because you’re having a great day in performance. That gravy train may not continue and you may actually disrupt the optimization process. Big changes like budgets, will affect the performance of the scaling campaign. I go over how to avoid budget disruptions and what time you should be doing this in my full Facebook ad scaling course.
The formula is (Current Budget)*.25+ Current Budget = New Budget.
As you scale up your campaigns it becomes ever important to have proper retargeting in place as well.
If you want to learn more about how to scale a successful Facebook Campaign, check out the full Facebook Ads Scaling Guide here.
5. How Do I Setup Facebook Ads Retargeting?
I’ve gone over the Advanced Facebook Retargeting Strategy in another post. The audiences that need to be created remain the same, but I’ve updated the general strategy after extensive testing. This new method, incorporating a lot of the same methodologies as before, produces more consistent and superior results.
This is because this particular strategy is not based on assumptions of offers users might want. It’s based on the actual data of what the users actually want. It’s based on acquisition data that’s generated by the ads themselves.
Before you begin, it’s important to have your audiences setup. If you haven’t done that, go ahead and do this.
Once we have the audiences created, we want to create ads and offers with the process above. The coupon tiers will be tested the same way we would test other variables. All the language in the ad about the coupon is to remain consistent from ad to ad. This means that the only thing that changes it the % off or the $ amount off.
Per the account I’m working on, oddly enough 5% off performs better than 10% off from preliminary data. % offs perform much better than a monetary ($) off value.
Once we have our setup correct, we need to segment our audiences as described in the previous strategy. Let the ads run and determine the best winner.
I also recommend that you optimize your email flows before starting to scale. Having good email systems in place while scaling allows you to recoup lost revenue and bring that CAC down.
Where are you struggling? How can I help? Comment below!
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