Tips from a Facebook Expert on Facebook Advertising

Tips from a Facebook expert on Facebook Advertising is thanks to Khalid Hamadeh who teaches an online course for FB ads. Click here for the link.  His short seminar on Facebook Advertising was fabulous.  You can view the entire seminar here.  Below is a quick summary of my learnings.  (He worked at Facebook so he should be the expert that you want to learn from!)

Understand how the Ad Auction Works

Facebook advertising, as you might know, is based on computer science and algorithms.  Facebook is a MACHINE LEARNING company.  Their ad system is set up to maximize advertiser value, maximize value for the people who come to Facebook, and maximize exposure for advertisers who have the highest bid on appropriate ads.  Translated that means:

1: Your Bid – How much are you willing to bid for a click to your ad
2: What’s the likelihood action will occur – your conversion rate of clicks; your ad is  rewarded for higher conversation and penalized for lower conversation
3:  How interesting a person will find the ad – Targeting the right people with good creative

• Choosing the right target
• Engaging for  your user – likes, clicks, watch

All Facebook Advertising requires

• Perpetual testing – to understand what works
• Creative is King – have great creative that engages your target — that they are interested in
• Mobile First Ads – most people are looking at your ad on a phone and your graphic design needs to accommodate that.

What you need to know

1:   Ad relevance diagnostics in Ad Manager:   Analytics in your ad manager now include  Quality Ranking, Engagement Rate Ranking, and  Conversation Rate Ranking.  This will help you optimize your ad and understand how you can improve your cost per conversion.

2:   Feed more data into facebook’s delivery system to help them predict and optimize This includes adding a Facebook pixel to your website correctly and sending t signal volume to Facebook.  As it understands it optimizes better and knows how to predict. The more sales (conversions) you get the more it understands how to serve your ad.

3:   Ad Set Level: Aim to have 50 or more conversions per week to help Facebook learn your needs.  Every time you change your ad set, it has to start relearning and so you start from the beginning.  While it’s not possible to eliminate this completely,  make changes all at once, and only once a month.  For example:

• Any change to targeting
• Any change to ad creative
• Optimizing event
• Adding new ad sets
• Pausing an ad set for 7+ days
• Changing a bid strategy
• Budget changes exceeding 45%
• Bid Changes exceeding 30%

4: Fewer ad sets and campaigns will enable your ad to be better optimized, but must have scale and a large enough audience

5: Retargeting: Meaningful targeted audience that has scale.

Why are look-a-likes so powerful? You tell Facebook about your “seed” audience — those that convert (50,000 impressions) You then tell Facebook to find audiences that are similar to your successful audience. FB is going to find audiences that look like that person i.e, age, gender, job, interests. This is driven by machine learning and there are 10,000’s characteristics that are machine-learned.

6: Signal Health: Having a FB pixel that passes back high-quality information.

Your FB Pixel fires when someone visits your website AFTER they’ve seen your ads. It let’s you measure add to cart (i.e. donation). It also lets you build look-alikes audiences, and lets you optimize towards actions on your site (registration, donations, purchases.)

• Need to use standard events – FB provides them for example, add to cart, purchase, donate
• Make sure that every page has the pixel
• Make sure that FB represents the action
• Parameter passback – the value (i.e. donation amount)
• Volume – (Yup that means increased ad spend)

7: Creative is king. Create ads that are mobile optimized and are “thumb-stopping.”

• Attracts attention quickly-(thumb-stopping) Designed for sound off.
• Vertical canvas
• Play with formats
• Leverage moving images (cinemagraphs)
• Test variations on the same concept

I hope that helps you!  To learn more, join our FB marketing group or follow us on We Are Immediate