Around 1.62 million people use Facebook every day. That gives you access to millions of potential customers for your business making Facebook ads one of the best ways to grow your business.
However, Facebook ads are only effective if you set up and optimize them properly.
If you don’t do this, your budget will be wasted because you’re competing with companies with massive budgets and whole teams or agencies dedicated to running, tracking, and tweaking campaigns.
Why Are Your Facebook Ads Not Working?
Understanding why your existing Facebook ads are not working is the first step to optimization.
Many people believe that Facebook advertising will work in the same way as any other advertising; you have a product or service, you post an ad, and you make sales. But that’s not the way Facebook works.
Facebook is predominantly a social platform so your potential customers are there to catch up with friends, they’re not actively looking for products and services in the same way as people who search on Google.
So, the following problems can occur with your ads which can mean they’re not as successful as they should be:
- You don’t know who your target audience is or how to reach them
- Facebook needs to learn more about your ideal customers
- Your ads are not interesting or creative enough to stand out
Top 6 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Ads
If you’re already running Facebook ads and they’re not working or you’re thinking of running ads but don’t know where to start, here are Logica Digital’s top tips for optimizing your Facebook ads.
1. Outline Your Campaign Goals
The first thing you need to do when you set up an ad on Facebook is to choose the goal for your campaign.
This is key to making sure that your ad is as successful as possible.
If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve through your ads, you’re not going to get the most from your budget and you will find running ads frustrating.
Facebook allows you to generate sales, leads, or traffic but they are not the same thing. Facebook organizes its campaign goals into three main types:
- Awareness – customers at this stage are just learning about your business and you want them to begin to build a relationship and recognize your brand.
- Consideration – at this stage, you will be beginning to acquire leads for your business in the form of driving web traffic or collecting your customer’s contact information.
- Conversion – this is when you want your potential customers to take an action such as buying a product. This is usually the main goal for small businesses.
2. Turn Your Most Engaging Posts Into Ads
When you post on Facebook, you’ll find that some posts get more likes, shares, and comments than others.
So, if you have an organic post that’s had plenty of engagement, you know that it has resonated with your target audience so will probably do well as an ad too.
All you need to do is boost the existing content to get it in front of even more people.
3. Research Your Competition
Looking at what your competitors are doing on social media can help to give you a good idea of the type of content that will resonate with your target audience. Logica Digital does not recommend completely copying your competitors but it can help to see what they’re doing and what’s working or not working.
Over the last few years, Facebook has made an effort to become more transparent about how data is used on the platform.
This means you can see why you have been targeted by a particular ad and find out how your competitors are targeting their ads.
You can also go to Facebook Ads Library and search for ads based on specific keywords or by advertiser name. So, you can put your competitors in here and see which ads they’re running – the longest running ads are usually a sign that these are the most effective.
4. Get Your Targeting Right
You can have the best ad creative and copy but if it’s being shown to the wrong people, it’s not going to provide the right return on investment for your business.
Facebook has a range of different ways to reach your target audience so it’s important to understand the options available, as well as your own audience to make sure you reach the right people in the right places.
Here are just some of the targeting options you can choose:
Demographic Targeting
- Location – you can target customers by country, region, or city. You can also choose to include or exclude locations to narrow the audience down, as well as people currently living in a location, people currently in the location, or those who are traveling to that location. This is great if you have a brick-and-mortar store because you want to target people in a specific area to drive footfall to your store.
- Age – choose which age group to show your ads to, whether they’re 18 or 65+.
- Gender – choose whether you want to target men or women, or both!
- Language – target customers based on the language they speak.
You can also filter your audience based on traits such as educational, financial, life events, relationships, and work, as well as interest-based targeting which allows you to look at your audience’s interests, recent activities, the pages they have liked, and the people they’re friends with.
Facebook gives you plenty of opportunities to narrow down your target audience to get the best results from your campaigns.
Once you find an audience that works, you can use it across a range of ads.
5. A/B Test EVERYTHING!
A/B testing means taking your ad, making a copy, and changing just one detail.
This allows you to experiment with your ads to learn more about what resonates with your target audience.
It’s important to change just one element of your ad each time otherwise you’ll never understand what works and what doesn’t.
Change elements within your ad such as:
- Images
- Header
- Placement
- Videos
- CTA button
- Copy
You can run multiple A/B tests at the same time to understand which ad is going to work best for your business.
6. Retarget Visitors
Facebook allows you to retarget either the people who have already clicked on your ads before or who have visited your website in the past.
These people already know of your brand and are starting to build a relationship with you so they’re more likely to convert from an ad.
This is a great way to keep your target audience engaged until they’re ready to buy from you.