It is well known that Facebook is overcrowded by seasonal ads and this influences the costs of our ads and there are many tips how to adjust the ads before a holiday season on the internet. Let’s take a look of long-term campaigns, which run during the whole year. We put heads together and here is the conclusion of the best advice and tips which we also use in Business Factory.
1. Choose the right objective
This is a first key point because according to your objective, Facebook is going to optimize your whole campaign. Be aware if you sell something, collect the leads or just build a brand awareness. It is very individual and you need to realize, what is the main goal of your campaign and what you want to achieve.
Tip: If you want to drive big traffic to your website and you have a Facebook pixel installed, we recommend to choose Conversion instead of Traffic as an objective. This way you can use e.g. the Custom Conversion optimization – depending on what behaviour you are expecting from your visitors.
2. Use the automatic re-writing audiences
A relevant audience plays a crucial role in your success. When running a long-term campaign, try to use the audiences that are dynamically updated. When remarketing, those are e.g. a Website Custom Audience (generated based on website visitors thanks to your Facebook pixel) or audiences made from your Facebook Page interactions. When prospecting, that could be Lookalike audiences. We use also email databases thanks to the LeadHub tool which is able to re-write the emails dynamically to Facebook.
Tip 1: Exclude audiences in your campaigns. E.g if you have an eCommerce campaign, be aware that it is not likely that your customers will buy after a couple of days. Create more Website Custom Audiences and experiment with them.
Tip 2: Have a different remarketing and prospecting campaigns. Your campaigns will be better organised and you will better analyse them.
3. Check your results regularly
Considering ad formats, placements or anything else – if you run a long-term campaign, the results could be different after some time. Simply said – if something works during the summer that does not mean it will work during the winter. It is necessary to check your data, make analysis and go out of the “stereotypes” from time to time. Always check the changes in CPC, CTR or other metrics.
4. Proper budget optimization and bidding strategy
A right budget optimization of your campaigns, good bidding strategy and the event you optimize for is a kind of science. Basically, there is no universal formula or patent which we could use in each case. It is necessary to test more options and analyze the data. Invest your money into anything that works for you. We can give you an advice and tips what works for us while working for many clients:
- We usually start with a low budget and autobid. After we know the approx. prices, we choose manual bid and slowly get the budget higher.
- When using the manual bid, we start with a low value. We set up the daily budget much higher than we expect it will spend in reality. Facebook in most cases does not spend the whole budget. But ensure your you won’t exceed budget with the use of automatic rules!
- We have a special focus on the optimization event. If we want to optimize for Purchase and it does not have at least 50 conversions per week, we optimize for one of the previous “steps”/events (e.g. AddToCart or ViewContent).
- When working with a big audience (1 million or more users) we use the lick clink / link click strategy (link click optimization with link click billing).
- When working with an audience of 1 million and less users we use the link click / impression strategy.
- When working with a small audience (100-500 users) we use the impression / impression strategy .
5. Change and test your creatives and copy on a regular basis
Try to change your creatives and copy on a regular basis. Use your own style of communication with your customers and keep it this way. Make an analysis of the creatives and find the best performing ones. Create and use this type.
You can check the results of the your ads in Creative Reporting, which you can find under the section “Account Overview”.
Tip: When choosing the best performing creatives and copy, you can use dynamic creative. This type of ad is available in the Conversion, Install app or Traffic objective. The purpose is to choose more options of creatives and copies to your ad and Facebook will test all of them and provide you with data on the best performing ad copy and creative combination. You can check the results with BreakDown (“By Dynamic Creative Asset”) in your Ad manager.
6. Duplicate you Ad sets time to time
Do not use the same Ad sets forever. Duplicate them from time-to-time or add new ads to them. New ads usually will not perform as good as the ones running at the moment. By duplicating the Ad sets you can also increase the performance of those ads which have been running for a long time and through time they might have lost their CTR or impressions.
