When Facebook ads don’t deliver stellar results quickly, businesses often conclude the platform isn’t for them. But this is rarely the case. Sadly, securing tangible results from ads isn’t as straightforward as choosing an image, drafting an ad, picking a few interests, and watching the money roll in.
You might get lucky, but usually it takes weeks, if not months, of testing to really optimise campaigns and to get the results you’re looking for, whether that’s sales, leads, donations, or something else.
So what’s the solution?
It’s a good idea to treat the first couple of months of any campaign as a data-gathering exercise: you’re getting valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t, and these can set you up for consistent returns in the future. As long as you have the Pixel correctly installed, the data you gather can also be used to build audiences that you can retarget in the future.
There are lots of different variables to test: copy, creatives, audiences, campaign objective, placements, the inclusion of call to action buttons, different headlines. Don’t do it all at once! It’s important to have a strategy so that you can disentangle how each variable affects the results.
How many audiences you can test comes down to your budget. With less budget, it will take you longer to get results. That’s fine, but it’s best not to spread the budget you do have too thinly across lots of different ad sets. It’s a better bet to test audiences concurrently and to draw conclusions that way.
A testing strategy
So what might a sensible testing strategy look like? Supposing you had a budget of £50 a day, you might want to test five audiences in five different ad sets. Within each of these, you could have three or four different ads. The crucial thing is to just change one thing at a time. So perhaps start by focusing on the creative - maybe testing a video, single image, and carousel - and keeping the copy, headline, and everything else exactly the same across all the ads.
Once you’ve gathered enough data, you can then optimise where you need to, switch off the ads and audiences that aren’t getting good results, field in more creatives, switch up the copy, or whatever else you decide to test next.
Analyse the results
Sometimes there’s a clear winner that gets great results across all ad sets, but often the results are surprising. Different creatives appeal to different audiences and sometimes what’s been a surefire success for one account, won’t necessarily translate well to a different sector or product. It’s only by trying things out and analysing the results in a strategic way that you can really optimise your online advertising campaigns.
Follow me on Instagram for more tips on how to get the most out of your Facebook Ads campaigns.
Article first published on whatsaytheexperts.com