7 Expert Tips You Need to Optimize Facebook Ads

Setting up Facebook ads might be a little intimidating for you. Are they working for you? Do you know how to reach your audience? Maybe you need to figure out how to get a better ROI from your Facebook ads. The trick is to optimize Facebook ads!

Try these 7 expert tips to help you optimize your ads and get a better return ?

Check Out Your Facebook Audience Insights!

Even though some things have changed with Facebook’s audience insights, it’s still a good place to gather some valuable data.

You can gather some great data for saved audiences ?

First, you decide if you want to look at a saved audience made up of all users on Facebook or just profile everyone connected to your page. Facebook needs no fewer than 10,000 followers to provide accurate insights. If you have less than 10,000 followers there will be certain insights unavailable to view.

Here are 2 places that reveal the most about your audience.

Page Likes

Go to the Page Likes tab.

Here’s where you find what your selected audience is most likely to engage with. For example, if they like restaurants it shows which ones they like the most. Or if they like jewelry, it will show where they go to search for the jewelry they like the most.

It also shows which Facebook pages your audience likes to visit most frequently compared to other pages.

You can use these insights to research the other pages your audience visits. Use those insights to give you inspiration for creative ideas, ad examples, and content ideas. It’s a great way to collect lots of information your audience is interested in.

Activity

Under the Activity tab, the dark blue shows how likely your audience is going to perform a certain activity.

And the light gray represents what the dark blue is compared with. It compares the average number of times everyone on Facebook performs the same activity your audience does over 30 days.

You can use this type of information to see how likely an audience will respond to Facebook ads. Great insight! ?

Adjust Your Budget Based On Performance

With a Facebook ad campaign, you will test 2 or 3 ad sets with several ads within each ad set. You’ll want to figure out which is the winning ad. In order to do that you watch the cost and other important metrics that you’ve defined by your campaign goal.

Then you will keep the best performing ad set running and pause the remaining ads. Now is the time to increase the budget by 15 – 20% on your best performing ad. Repeat this every 24 hours until it’s performance declines.

Before making any big changes to your campaign, give Facebook about 24 hours to stabilize the performance of your campaigns.

Keep Desktop And Mobile Ads Separate

It’s important to keep your mobile and desktop ad sets separate. You want to be able to optimize your ads, bids, and conversions based on each device used.

CTAs and ads will perform differently on each device. So if you want to know how your ads are performing on each device, then you should keep them separate.

You can select the device targeting in the Power Editor.

Use The Facebook Test And Learn Tool To Optimize Facebook Ads

In order to know how your ads are performing and if you’re getting the best ROI, you need to do some split testing. This helps you optimize your ads and make changes to help them work better for you.

There are certainly several moving parts in Facebook ads, so sometimes it’s difficult to know what to test and how to understand the results.

The Facebook Test and Learn tool can help you define your testing with a series of standard split tests. Then Facebook will give you the results of the test and offer recommendations for your future campaigns.

You don’t have to pay to use this tool, but you do need to run active campaigns to have access to this feature.

Below are some tests you can do with this tool.

Conversion Lift

Conversion lift lets you know if your Facebook ads are converting and you will find out whether or not those conversions are resulting in sales ?

This could be the most important metric you can track with Test and Learn. This test measures the actual impact of your marketing efforts. You’re able to assess your cost per conversion instead of focusing on vague metrics like clicks.

Brand Lift

Brand lift is finding out about your brand awareness campaigns. Test and Learn lets you poll your audience to see what they recalled about a recent campaign. This survey will show you whether your ads are memorable to your audience and how they feel about your ads in general ?

You can choose the survey questions based on your business goals.

You can survey your audience to see:

How much they’ve noticed your ads.
Whether they like your brand or not.
If they are aware of your brand.
Whether they have your brand top of mind over others.

Campaign Optimization

This test compares 2 active Facebook campaigns. It will show which one is driving the most conversions or the cheaper conversions.

Choose campaigns that have one significant difference in them. It can be design related, content or even layout.

These tests will show the overall effectiveness of your campaigns. Your ads will run for a short test period where Facebook will measure and compare the conversion rates.

Test and Learn can help you learn what’s working, what’s not and what you need to do to get a better ROI from Facebook ?

Optimize News Feed And Right-Column Ads Separately

You want to set up highly segmented ads. It’s so important to know how they are performing individually.

You need to optimize campaigns by device, placement and any other targeting options. That’s why you want to separate desktop news feed and right column ads. This will help you maximize your performance.

Use Split Testing

You can build a split test when you set up an ad campaign with these objectives:

Traffic
App Installs
Lead Generation
Conversions
Video Views
Catalog Sales
Reach
Engagement
Messages
Brand Awareness

Within those objectives, you can test audience, delivery optimization, placements, creative and product sets as variables.

Facebook will randomly split your audience to ensure there’s no overlap.

Then Facebook will test which variable performs best over a set period of time ⏰ Usually you would choose between 1 and 30 days. But it’s recommended that you run a split test for at least 4 days.

You’ll receive the results either in Ads Manager or an email.

Test Out Different Images

Images are the first thing that will catch the eye of people scrolling Facebook. They are actually the number one factor for someone to decide whether or not to click on your post.

So with images being the most important element of your ad, you want to test several images to see which ones are the most eye-catching ? This shows up in your CTRs (click-through-rates) and your conversions.

Through your testing identify the best images. The ones that performed the best are the style of images you want to use more of. But keep testing and keep looking for the winners!

Images can make a huge difference to your campaigns.

Optimize Your Budget!

If you want your budget spent in the best performing ad set to reach your goal, allow Facebook to do that for you with their Campaign Budget Optimization setting. It’s actually not an option anymore. It’s now the default setting. Which is good! Facebook knows where to spend ? your budget to get better results.

Facebook knows better where the opportunities are for your ad sets. It doesn’t declare a winner with campaign budget optimization like it does with split testing. It will continually update and optimize your campaign spend across ad sets. This is how you’ll get the best results based on your objective and bid strategy ?

Use these tools and tips to get the most out of your Facebook ads. You will find useful data to improve your campaigns which will help you optimize them for best performance. Never quit testing your ads! So many things can change in a few months in social media alone. But you will also notice how fast trends and audiences change too. Keep practicing, testing and growing your business!