26 Oct Proven Facebook Ads Optimization Framework
Let’s talk about Facebook ads optimization. Start running ads on Facebook is the easiest because as long as you have a Facebook profile and a credit card, you can start a Facebook page, a Facebook ads account and immediately start running ads.
You might get some tractions, then the next question you’ll be asking yourself will be: how can I do better? So this article is really about answering this question. How can you do better with your Facebook ads campaigns?
How can I get more sales and leads with Facebook advertising or the campaign that I’m actually currently running? How can I make more money out of it? How can I increase the budget and see proportionate growth in revenue? And how do I make the whole campaign works better for my business? So in terms of Facebook ads optimization, every seasoned Facebook advertises definitely have their own set of optimization framework.
What I’m going to share with you here are facebook ads Optimization methods after working with hundreds of clients from all around the world. This is a framework that I’ve fine tuned to the perfection to help you understand what is Facebook ads optimization and how can you really apply this in your business.
If you’re already running facebook ads and already seeing some traction, you want to improve campaign performance, like make more money and get more sales or leads from the campaign. this is a training for you.
Defining Facebook Ads Optimization
So first thing first, I want to get this off the hook. A lot of people will think that Facebook ads optimization is all about scaling. For example you spend a hundred dollars and make a thousand dollars, you just need to spend two hundred dollars and you might make two thousand dollars.
Everybody who runs ads knows this is actually not the case at all. The moment you double your ad spend, everything is going to go haywire because this is what Facebook do like as it will shake up the learning algorithm.
So what is really Facebook optimization, Facebook ads optimization in my opinion is a process of identifying opportunities, building hypothesis and prove them right or wrong, one at a time.
So it’s a process. First thing first you need to know what are the opportunities you have in your campaign. For example if you are already making good results with your Facebook ads campaign my question to you is, why is it working? What is working?
Is it the creative that’s working? Or is it the landing page? If you’re not sure what’s working, how can you monitor your campaign when you scale?
Even if you have a slightly lower CTR at about 0.8%, but your conversion from landing page to sales is actually 30%, then you know your landing page is fantastic and if you are able to bring up your CTR, your campaign will thrive as the landing page will do its job.
The whole idea of understanding and identifying opportunities, means we make decision based on data. It’s all about analytics. These are all science. These are all facts. This is not really something that we pluck from the air. We don’t make decision based on our gut feelings.
Once you have identified a series of opportunities, then you build hypotheses.
Let say you identified that the creative is not performing. Let’s build a hypothesis where if I’m able to improve the CTR, for example, I’m able to improve the overall results coming in.
Then you go on and build multiple hypotheses, and we will then build a plan to prove the hypotheses right or wrong one step at a time. You don’t implement everything at one shot.
You implement one thing at a time, especially those contradicting factors or variables. For example, if you’re testing your creative, we don’t test the audience at the same time because these are all significant factors or variables. When you test both, you do not know which one is working or you do not know which one is not working.
So Facebook ads optimization is a process of identifying opportunities, building hypotheses, and prove them right or wrong.
For example, if you’re getting good results with a campaign that has CTR (all) at 1% and CTR (link click through) at 0.41%. Thou the metrics are below average, the campaign is getting you good results, good leads, and good sales at good costs that you are very happy about, and you see this kind of number, what does that mean?
That means you can potentially. implement different creative or ad placement or ad formats to potentially improve your CTR, that might result in overall results improvement.
Say if you can get a creative that improves your CTR link from 0.41% to 1.01%. That means you increase the performance by more than 120%. Assuming all the numbers remains unchanged, you might get 120% more sales or leads.
So by tweaking a little bit things here and there, if done right they will make very huge impact. The key is to know what to tweak, what are the hypothesis that we are trying to prove. That’s why Facebook ads optimizaation is about identifying opportunities, building hypothesis and prove them right or wrong one step at a time.
There are basically two types of Facebook Ads optimizations. The first type is what we call the on-ads optimization. For on-ads optimization, we look into variables we can tweak on the ad side.
I’d like to stress again that Facebook ads optimization isn’t just about scaling. Even if we do, we don’t double down. What I’m advocating is we can actually improve overall campaign performance without increasing budget. We will then start increasing budget (a.k.a. scale) when we reached optimization level.
That’s usually how I would like to approach Facebook ads optimization. But of course, it’s nothing wrong to set scaling as the first goal when we have a profitable campaign. Otherwise, we can always find optimization opportunities in a working campaign. The idea is to be able to see the campaign from bird’s eye view.
So that’s the whole idea that I want to help more advertisers understand. If you have not tried this before, I really want you to start looking into the possibilities of doing so. So when it comes to on -ads optimization, there are a few things that we are actually looking into.
On-Ad Optimization
Among on-ad optimization possiblities, one of the first things we might look into is Facebook ads objectives. For example, if you have been running traffic campaign and your sales is good, you can actually consider switching sales conversion objective and see whether it gives you better results.
But of course, when you switch to different objective, you will see a different CPM coming in. Sometimes we do not really worry too much about CPM as long as the result is good. Or in another situation, switching objective might bring down the CPM, which means we’re able to reach more people with the same budget and hopefully more sales.
Say for example, one of my ecommerce clients was running a sales campaign with CPM around $35. When we tested with traffic objective, the CPM went down to $6. That’s about 5 times lower, pretty significant difference.
Having said that, we will still have to monitor the sales an conversions because rubbish in rubbish out. If lower CPM brings in the wrong audience, it will affect the funnels down the road including our retargeting campaigns.
That is why striking a balance important. We shouldn’t be skewed towards a single metric and forgot the main objective, which is to optimize for conversions or sales.
Another Facebook ads optimization point we usually look at is audience targeting. Is there a specific location that’s contributing to the conversion and sales? What if we build an ad set zooming in with a different budget?
Another question I get lot is, how to get back to the result that I was getting three months ago? For example the cost per lead was $7 three months ago and now it is standing at $21. What can be done?
For situation like this we might look into rebuilding the campaign structure and probably redesign from the advertising habits. For example, we would like to keep the campaign running as long as possible to retain the learning, instead of keep creating new campaigns every month.
When you create new campaign every month, It doesn’t carry the historical data. Which is why you will feel very frustrated because you don’t have the certainty and stability in your Facebook ads campaign. If that’s you, we can redesign a new campaign structure for your business.
Another possibility to test, is ad placement. Let say you validated that most of your conversions happen on Instagram, maybe we can single out an ad set for Instagram placement only.
And of course, the ad creative and copyrighting, that’s the normal one. But this can be the most tricky one because the experiments must be planned carefully to avoid missing the validation points for the hypotheses built.
That’s why when it comes to Facebook ads optimization, it’s very important that you actually look at the right metrics, combining multiple metrics to validate our hypotheses instead of zooming into one single metric.
For example one client came to me saying the CTR was very bad for his Facebook ads campaign. But when we dived deeper, we realized the results was good. That means the campaign is performing but we have room for improvement.
Then we will look at the off ads optimization. I have met so many people that always believe that it’s really the ad that is making the impact. No, in my opinion, we need to look at the wholesale process, the customer journey. Starting from the ad involved the ad, then the closure, it also involves your leap follow-up process, your landing page, your add to cart process, your checkout process, and every other things that follow.
Off-Ad Optimization
So off-ad optimization also plays a very significant role in terms of the Facebook ads optimization process. So when it comes to off-ads optimization, what are the things that we’ll be looking into?
First of course, the website loading time. If you have a very high gap from outbound clicks to landing page views, then probably you should look into your website loading time.
Then the landing pages, of course. A simple tweak like changing the color, might make a very big difference. SO when we’re optimizing Facebook ads campaigns, we look into these things as well. I hope you see the whole picture now as we’re not just looking at the Facebook ads side but the entire journey.
We are looking into the entire business process. So optimization is actually diving into all these angles that we can possibly cover.
For example when we analyze an ecommerce Facebook ads campaign, we realized the gap between add to cart to checkout was huge. We tested the process and realized the checkout process can be improve. We also recommended abandoned cart email automation which in turn lifted the sales instantly.
Some of cases we would look into the selling process as well. If you can’t sell the bundle, maybe you want to actually rebundle the whole thing, or you want to test different combination or different pricing point and all that.
When we dive into the Facebook ads campaign metrics we can actually uncover a lot of opportunities. And then we have to implement one thing at a time. So the implementation is really the key. That’s why I wanted to talk to you about the process right now.
Facebook Ads Optimizaton Process
So when it comes to Facebook Ads Optimization Process, once we have identified the opportunities from on-ads and off-ads sides, then we would actually build a plan. So this is the process.
First thing first, the whole process involves the first thing is about goal setting. So the goal setting is not really setting a goal, plug the number from the sky and whatnot. It must be based on some facts.
Like the other day I spoke to a client who is in e-commerce. They want to increase the revenue by 20% in the next quarter, which is totally doable because they are already profitable. Then we build a plan to move towards that in 3 months time.
Remember, it is not as simple as scaling the ads budget by 20% and you’ll get 20% increase in revenue. Not as simple as that.
First, we probably test the ad creative, if we have opportunities on the CTR side. Second, we test the different combo, we test different sales strategy. And then when it comes to a point that we feel that we are comfortable, as in reaching an optimized point, then we will work on the budget side. You might not need to increase your budget to achieve improvement in sales.
So these are the things that we actually build a plan for. The goal is really the most important things to start. Then we identify the opportunities. We dive into the numbers, we look at what’s really working and what’s not working, what are the opportunities and we list them down into a plan.
Next is execution. Knowing what to do first and next is important, we don’t implement everything at one shot because we won’t know what’s working. It is about one step at a time and keep on experimenting and recalibrating.
The whole process might take awhile, but you’ll get theres. We typically work with clients for 1-2 months. On top of achieving better results for the Facebook ads campaign, our clients will also benefit from the learning process as well.
Once you have gone through the whole process, the moment you understand the whole framework and you build your mind in that way, you’ll be looking at Facebook advertising in an entirely different way. You’ll learn how to see your Facebook ads campaign from bird’s eye view.
So, if you’re looking to generate more leads and sales with your Facebook ads campaign by taking it to the next level, we can start with a Facebook ads campaign review.
We will spend 30 minutes via Zoom to dive into your current campaigns to find out what’s working and what’s not, and I’ll be drawing you an action plan with 3-5 potential optimization points for you to start working on Facebook ads optimization.
If you’re ready to take your Facebook ads campaign to the next level, click here to start.
This article is edited from Jason’s video about Facebook ads optimiztion. If you need help with your Facebook ads campaign, check out Jason’s Facebook advertising services on Fiverr.