Alexa joined Marin Software in 2015, and is a Social Media Consultant in our Dublin office. She’s responsible for a portfolio of high-intensity accounts, for whom she creates and helps implement innovative strategies that deliver growth and improved results on social and/or cross-channel. Alexa loves to go for walks in the Wicklow Mountains, and watch the lively Dublin City and the bay lying at its feet.
This is the third and final part of a series that explores all the things social marketers should do when setting up their social ad campaigns. In our previous posts, we discussed account structure and creative, and targeting and bidding.
Without conversion measurement and continual improvement, your Facebook campaigns won’t realize their highest potential. Read these tips to make sure your Facebook ad campaigns are working their hardest for your bottom line.
The Facebook Pixel tracks conversions, automatically bids for conversions, and enables remarketing. Be sure to implement the pageview event of the Facebook Pixel on all the pages of your website so that you can populate your Custom Audiences and Custom Conversions. You’ll also need the Facebook Pixel to implement each standard event on a single page of your website.
To double-check that the pixel is firing properly, use the Facebook Pixel Helper.
Lastly, follow the user’s journey down the conversion funnel. This will help you identify exactly where your customers are dropping off in the journey.
Marin Tip
For an extra layer of reporting in Google Analytics, apply dynamic tags at the Media Plan level.
As a Facebook best practice, you should optimize your campaigns daily, but no more than two times a day. For oCPM bidding, it's even recommended to optimize only once a day, as the algorithm needs stability to learn from and to find conversions for you.
To understand the optimization that’s working best for your campaigns, do one at a time and assess the results.
Another rule of thumb—avoid making any drastic changes to bids, since reducing your bid by more than 5% could damage the delivery. If you change the bid type of your campaign due to bad performance, duplicate the campaign so that the algorithm refreshes.
Be sure to refresh your creative every few weeks to fight audience fatigue and ad blindness.
Marin Tip
Use the Refresh button so that the campaign can start from scratch with the new bid type. Set up Rules to automate daily optimizations. For example, you could set a rule that if your CPA is greater than $10, or the frequency is greater than four, or the CTR is lower than 0.4%, then pause the ad.
Facebook wants to make sure the paid advertising campaigns that appear on its platform don’t damage the user experience. To that end, it has the Relevance Score.
The Relevance Score is an algorithmic calculation that takes into account your targeting’s relevancy and your ads’ engagement. The important metrics to look at here are CTR, engagements, feedback, and conversions.
When your audience begins showing less interest, your Relevance Score will decrease. As a result, Facebook lets your ad participate in fewer auctions. Moreover, if your Relevance Score is lower than the other advertisers competing on the exact same targeting, they’ll win the auction, no matter how high your bid is. Consequently, your reach and impressions will drop.
To fight against a bad Relevance Score:
Social advertising isn’t quite rocket science, but it’s indeed an art. But, with a strong foundation that takes advantage of all the great and evolving features Facebook has to offer, you can maximize positive user experiences and see positive results for the KPIs that matter most to your organization. As always, if you’d like to find out how Marin Software can help with all of the above, just reach out.
This is a three-part series that explores all the things social marketers should do when setting up their social ad campaigns. In our second post, we look at best practices to target effectively and bid for the greatest ROI. For the first three tips see our previous article on account structure and creative.
One of the main goals of the social marketer is to consistently target wider and more precise audience segments, while making smart bids based on a solid bidding model. Follow these best practices to ensure your social advertising campaigns are fine-tuned for the highest performance possible.
When it comes right down to it, Facebook is mass media, and its algorithm performs better with large audiences. A best practice is to keep the target size above 100,000, especially for your prospecting campaigns. A few other rules of thumb:
You may also want to use split targeting, depending on:
Marin Tip
Thanks to Marin's Lookalike feature, you can create high-intent lookalike audiences based on conversions from your best performing campaigns or ad sets.
The conversion window tells Facebook how far back in time to look at conversion data, so that it can optimize appropriately and find the right people to deliver your ad to.
You can use the conversion window for Website Conversions, App Installs, and App Events objectives. You can break them into 1-day, 7-day, and 28-day post-click windows.
In order for Facebook’s algorithm to have enough conversion data to learn from, set up your conversion window to get at least 15-25 conversions per ad set and per week. If you use the longest conversion window but don't get enough conversions, change the promoted object to a step higher in the conversion funnel (for example, add-to-cart rather than purchase).
When the target size is above 100,000, bid oCPM. This’ll allow the algorithm to look for the users more likely to convert. Optimize for clicks and pay for impressions when your audience is between 80,000 and 100,000. For target sizes below 80,000, use the CPC bidding type.
On small and highly qualified audiences—for example, Website Custom Audiences of lower-funnel stages—you can even bid CPM (optimize and pay for impressions), since your aim here is to make sure that everyone in your audience sees your ads.
Marin Tip
Bid as granular as possible at the ad level in order to push the best performing ads within an ad set. Change bids across ad sets and campaigns in two clicks by clicking the Selected or All buttons.
This is a three-part series that explores all the things social marketers should do when setting up their ad campaigns. In this post, we focus on making sure your account structure is solid and how to get the most from your creative.
Setting up a social advertising campaign can be a bit daunting. With so many things to consider in reaching your goals, strategy and tactics become crucial.
We’ve developed nine best practices—presented over a series of three articles—to ensure you have a strong foundation for social advertising success. If you’re a Marin customer, we’ve added Marin Tips tailored just for you.
A/B testing is important, because it helps you understand why some variables trigger user reactions and others don’t. From there, you can take action accordingly.
Consider each campaign as a test, where you refine based on lessons learned from each test. We recommend including the following in your A/B test:
Marin Tip
The Split button allows you to A/B test audiences in a single click.
Above all else—be different. Every business has its own identity, so use yours to find your tonality and compose smart ad copy. Here are a few more tips to stand out, get noticed, and stay current.
Marin Tip
For brand awareness, use Marin’s Reach & Frequency sequencing feature to control the order in which your ads are delivered—this is great for storytelling! Follow this link for more tips.
We all know video’s hot and only getting hotter. Make sure you’re creating killer videos and keeping people entertained, educated, and informed. In addition:
Marin Tip
Use Carousel Ads, mixing videos and images and adding different CTAs.