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Renu is Director of Digital Media at Vovia and is responsible for the complete execution of digital campaigns, which includes strategy, planning, execution, and optimization. When she is not working on the plans you can find her exploring the city and watching Bollywood movies.

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4 Strategies to Run an Effective Facebook Campaign

Facebook is one of the go-to advertising platforms for businesses of all types and sizes, and in this post, we’ll look at four key areas that will help you make the most of your investment on the channel.

1. Understand the importance of the learning phase

The learning phase is the period when the delivery system still has information to learn about an ad set. During the learning phase, the delivery system explores the best way to deliver your ad set by actively trying different audiences, placements, and more. Performance stabilizes typically after an ad set receives around 50 optimization events within a 7-day period. At this point, the ad set will exit the learning phase. So, when choosing your campaign conversions, make sure you check the number of conversion events over the last seven days to confirm you’re over the threshold of 50 to ensure that the system has enough data to learn from. You may examine how much of your budget was spent in the learning phase in the last 7 days by going to the account overview section of the platform.

There are a few things to keep in mind to help campaigns exit their learning stage earlier:

  •  Avoid having too many ad sets – When an advertiser runs too many ad sets at the same time, each one receives fewer clicks. As a result, fewer ad sets exit the learning phase and more budget is spent before the delivery system has fully optimized performance.
  • Have enough budget – Ad sets should have enough money to allow for roughly 50 optimization events in a 7-day period to exit the learning phase.
  • Avoid making frequent changes The learning phase resets every time you make a change to an ad, ad set, or campaign. If you have a lot of edits to make, batching them all at once means that learning only needs to be reset once.

While it’s crucial to avoid behaviours that prevent ad sets from exiting the learning phase, you shouldn’t strive to avoid it entirely. Being able to test new creative and marketing strategies is critical to increasing your performance over time, and the learning phase is required to assist the delivery system in optimizing your new ads.

2. Customize ad creative for placement

Customize ad creative for various platforms and placements, such as Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, Messenger, and others, to boost ad relevance and campaign effectiveness.

For example, you may have a single image for a campaign that has to be run on Facebook Newsfeed and Stories. However, the best image for feed is a 1:1 square ratio of 1080×1080 pixels, but Facebook/Instagram stories are 9:16.

Facebook has simplified this process over the last couple of years. While creating or editing an ad you can simply go to the “edit” placement creative section and customize it for individual placement. There are multiple elements of the ad which you can customize for each placement such as Image/video, primary text, destination URL etc.

3. Use robust audience targeting

It is crucial to test multiple audiences in order to see what works best to achieve your goals. This will include core audiences (based on location, demographics, behavior, connections, and interest), custom audiences (site visitors or any other first-party data), and look-alikes. Here are some ideas for improving audience targeting:

  •  Refine audiences using “and “ and “or” functionality – You can think of “Include/Exclude” > “Narrow Audience” > “Narrow Further” as targeting tiers. You can add multiple criteria to each tier to give yourself some flexibility, since only one parameter from each will be required for inclusion/exclusion.
  •  Add cross-negatives. If you have separate ad sets for interest, look-alike, and remarketing audiences, you can exclude your look-a-like and remarketing audiences as negative under interest ad set for more efficiency.
  • With the recent iOS 14.5 update, retargeting audience lists will drop in size as platforms will only be able to include those who’ve opted in. This means we can’t rely as much on website retargeting tactics and should focus on first party data acquisition and leverage those for targeting

Although it is good to refine your audience for precise targeting, it is important not to get overly specific. This can lead to an audience that’s too small to be effective.

4. Leverage the Facebook Inspect Tool

The Facebook inspect tool gives direct access to delivery insights data at the ad set level. It provides advertisers with information on how their bidding strategy affects the performance of their ad set, as well as information on whether their target audience has been saturated and any changes in the auction that may result in high ad costs. The inspect tool can be used to investigate four different items.

  • Bid Management – Helps to understand the relationship between your ad set’s bid strategy and cost.
  • Auction Competition – Helps to understand whether increases in costs are the result of increased competition. Your ad set’s costs can rise or fall because of other advertisers competing in the ad auction.
  • Auction Overlap – Helps to understand whether ad set performance is impacted by auction overlap. If performance is declining and auction overlap has increased over time, consider combining ad sets to improve performance.
  •  Audience Saturation – Helps to understand whether increases in costs are the result of audience saturation. If performance is declining and audience saturation is high, consider expanding your audience or trying new creative.

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