Facebook ads (currently known as Meta ads) are a great way to reach your target audience and drive sales. But the biggest challenge with Meta ads is getting them to work. You’ve spent a lot of time and money creating an ad, but the results are underwhelming.
We want to help our customers get the most out of their ad spend by sharing some tips that we’ve learned along the way.
If this sounds like something that interests you, then read on, and we’ll show you the best practices and pro-tips we have learned so far.
But before that, we would strongly recommend you read another blog post where we share the important steps on how you can analyze your Facebook ads effectively for better optimization.
Jump to:
Tip #1: Set up your campaign based on funnel
Tip #2: Set up your negative audience list
Tip #3: Use the power of lookalike audiences
Tip #4: Set up your retention audience
Tip #5: Experimenting with Collection ad format
Tip #6: Setting budget at campaign level vs. ad set level
Tip #7: Set up automated rules
Tip #8: Avoid editing your ads too often
Tip #9: Avoid testing too many ad creatives at the same time
Tip #10: Experimenting with dynamic creative ads
Structure of Facebook Ad
Let us first understand the structure of the Facebook ad. A Facebook ad is a form of advertising that allows businesses to target a specific audience with custom ads. You can control the budget, target audiences, and messaging for your ad campaign.
Facebook Ad consists of 3 primary layers:
- Campaign: The foundation of your ad. You’ll always start with the campaign when you decide to run an ad.
- Ad Set: Ad set defines how your ad will run based on the audience, budget, schedule, and placements you set at the ad set level.
- Ad: Your ad is the creatives that show to your customers or audience, based on the creatives (image/video), copy, and format that you set.
Now that you have understood the basic structure of Facebook Ad, let’s go ahead and dive into these pro-tips now!
Tip #1: Set up your campaign based on funnel
The most common mistake people make when setting up their Facebook ad campaign is that they set it up based on their offer or promotion. However, this isn’t the most effective way. When you set up your campaign in this way, you will have many campaigns created on Facebook Ad Manager, and when the promotion ends, you will turn it off and create another campaign for a new offer. What’s worse, your ad budget will be fragmented across multiple campaigns, making it difficult for the Facebook algorithm to spend your budget efficiently and better optimize the performance.
A better way to do things is to set up your campaign based on your funnel, which allows you to understand better the performance of your campaigns at different funnel stages. Most importantly, you can set multiple offers at the ad level for a single campaign, which lets Facebook algorithm decide which offer (ad) can resonate well with your audiences to get better results.
You may use a funnel structure to design your Facebook Ad Campaigns, with three stages: Acquisition, Retargeting, and Retention. The following are the best practices for setting up campaigns for each stage if you’re running retail business for both online and offline.
| Funnel | Acquisition | Retargeting | Retention |
| Goal | Reach out to new audiences to know your brand and products. | Reengage with the high intent web visitors to make a purchase. | Upsell or Cross-sell to existing customers responsive to offers, often interact with your brand, and enjoy making purchases. |
| Campaign Type | Conversion/ Catalog Sales/ Lead Generation/ Store Traffic | Catalog Sales | Conversion/ Catalog Sales |
| Naming Convention | <YYYYMMDD> – <Funnel> – <Type>, e.g.: 20220130 – Acquisition – Conversion | <YYYYMMDD> – <Funnel> – <Type>, e.g.: 20220130 – Retargeting – Catalog Sales | <YYYYMMDD> – <Funnel> – <Type>, e.g.: 20220130 – Retention – Conversion |
Using this structure allows you to better visualize and control the performance at different funnel stages.
Tip #2: Set up your negative audience list
It is essential to set up your negative audience list on Facebook Audiences, which will help to increase the relevance of your ad by excluding the specific audiences at different funnel stages. Below is the recommended negative audience list you may set up:
NA01: Existing Customers
You can choose to create this custom audience by uploading your existing customer data to Facebook or using the custom audience that has been auto-created by the eCommerce system you used, like Shopify.
To upload your customer list, follow the steps below:
- Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience
- Choose “Customer list” from the pop-up
- Upload your customer list in CSV format based on the template provided by Facebook
- Be sure to map the data correctly and upload.
NA02: Social Engagers
This audience mainly excludes those engaged with your Facebook Page or Instagram profile for the last 30 days.
To create social engagers on Facebook Page:
- Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience
- Choose “Facebook Page” from the pop-up
- At the “Events” section, choose “Everyone who engaged with your Page” and set the Retention as 30 days.
To create social engagers on Instagram Profile:
- Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience
- Choose “Instagram account” from the pop-up
- At the “Events” section, choose “Everyone who engaged with this professional account” and set the Retention as 30 days.
NA03: Website Visitors
This list is created to exclude those people who visited the website more than 3 times in the last 30 days.
- Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience
- Choose “Website” from the pop-up
- Change the “ANY of the following criteria” dropdown to “ALL of the following criteria.”
- At the “Events” section, choose “All website visitors” and set the Retention as 30 days.
- Click “Further Narrow” to add another criteria
- At the “Events” section, choose “ViewContent” and set the Retention as 30 days.
- Click “Refine by” and choose “Aggregated Value”.
- Set the “Frequency” is greater than or equal to “3”.
Once your negative audience list is ready, you may refer below to learn how to exclude the negative audiences at different funnel stages.
Tip #3: Use the power of lookalike audiences
Did you know that Facebook can create a new audience for your business based on your existing customers? It is called a Lookalike Audience, and it’s super helpful! You’ll be able to target people with the same interests as your existing customers. Pretty cool, right? You can create a lookalike audience based on the customer list you manually uploaded to Facebook or the customer list auto-created by the eCommerce system you used.
This is an amazing way of expanding your reach and attracting new potential customers. If you have enough customer base, we recommend uploading those loyal and promising customer lists and creating a lookalike audience based on this list. These are usually customers with high purchase frequency and AOV (Average Order Value). We had the experience that successfully improved the AOV for more than 40% by simply targeting this lookalike audience.
To create a Lookalike Audience:
- Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Lookalike Audience.
- Choose your lookalike source (either from Pixel or the customer list you uploaded).
- Set your audience size ranging from 1% to 10% (1% lookalike consists of the people most similar to your lookalike source. Increasing the percentage creates a bigger, broader audience.)
Tip #4: Set up your retention audience
Your current customers are your lifeblood – you should be doing everything you can to keep them happy! One way to do this is by setting up a retention audience. Creating a retention audience allows you to target people who purchased on your website in the last 180 days or between 60 to 180 days.
This is a great way to reengage with your current customers and ensure they don’t forget about you. You can use this audience to send them targeted Facebook ads, such as special offers or new arrivals.
To create Post Purchase for the last 180 days:
- Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience
- Choose “Website” from the pop-up
- At the “Events” section, choose “Purchase” and set the Retention as 180 days.
To create Post Purchase for the last 60-180 days:
- Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience.
- Choose “Website” from the pop-up.
- Change the “ANY of the following criteria” dropdown to “ALL of the following criteria.”
- At the “Events” section, choose “Purchase” and set the Retention as 180 days.
- Click the “Exclude People” button to add a new section, choose “Purchase” as the event, and set the Retention as 60 days.
Tip #5: Experimenting with Collection ad format
The collection ad format is a new ad type launched by Facebook, which allows your audiences to tap the ad to discover and browse your product catalog easily, all within a fast-loading experience.
If you have many products available for your customers to purchase, creating a collection format will benefit you. Based on what we learned so far, the collection ad format appears to outperform other ad formats in all funnel stages.
For more information about Collection ad format, you may learn more on Facebook with the step-by-step instructions to create ad for your campaigns.
Tip #6: Setting budget at campaign level vs. ad set level
When you start with Facebook Ads, knowing where to set your budget can be confusing. Do you set it at the campaign level or the ad set level?
The answer is – it depends on your objectives.
In most cases, roughly 70% of your ad budget will be more likely to be allocated for the acquisition funnel campaign, so your objective is definitely to maximize the ROAS as much as possible. Thus, instead of trying to outsmart the Facebook algorithm by telling it to spend how much for which audiences by setting the budget at ad set level, we would strongly recommend setting your budget at the campaign level for the acquisition campaign. Let the Facebook algorithm decide which audiences may give you the best possible results. Another thing to note is that try not to create more than 3 audiences (ad sets) for a single campaign, as it may lead to budget fragmentation, and it is even worse when your daily budget is too little.
However, setting your budget at ad set level is advisable if your objective is to test which audiences may give you the best results at Retention or Retargeting funnels. Doing so allows you to create A/B Test for the ad sets to experiment which audience may perform better.
For example, you may have created 2 retention audiences: “Post Purchase 180 days” and “Post Purchase 60-180 days”. So for you to find out which audience is the winner, you can create 2 ad sets in a single campaign and set the budget at the ad set level, then create them as an A/B test to run the experiment.
Tip #7: Set up automated rules
This is an underrated feature by many businesses when it comes to Facebook Ads. The ability to set up automated rules can save you a lot of time and headache when managing your Facebook Ads.
Some examples of what you can do with automated rules are:
- Pausing your campaigns during inactive hours (e.g., 3 am to 6 am)
- Adjusting budgets automatically based on the performance of the campaign or ad set.
- Stopping ads that are not performing well
For more advanced tips on setting up the automated rules, you may check out another blog post about Facebook’s Automated Rules.
Tip #8: Avoid editing your ads too often
Whenever we launched a new Facebook ad campaign or after making some major changes, be sure to let your ad run for at least 7 days if you can, to give Facebook’s algorithm enough time to find the people who are most likely to respond to your ad. Because based on our previous experience, too frequent edits and changes on the campaign, ad set, or ad will only make the performance worse.
So generally, we only do performance analysis and optimization once a week. Unless necessary, we will make adjustments or changes on the third or fourth day of the week. As shown in the figure below, any significant edits (starting of the yellow line) will force the ad set to re-enter the learning phase, and the ad performance tend to be unstable at this time. Thus, we must try to make the ad set out of the learning phase to get better and more stable results.
Below are the changes (we learned so far) which Facebook will consider as significant edits and cause the ad set to reenter the learning phase:
- Budget: Adjust more than 30% of budget changes within a week.
- Audience: Make any changes to your ad set’s audience targeting.
- Placement: Make any changes to the ad set’s placement targeting.
- Ad Creative: Add new creatives to the ad set or make any changes to the existing ad creatives.
Tip #9: Avoid testing too many ad creatives at the same time
We once had a case where one of our clients used to place 40 to 50 ad creatives in the same ad campaign at the same time, which resulted in severe budget fragmentation and led to extremely poor results. Its early CPL (Cost per Lead) even exceeds EUR300.
After we took over, we optimized and reduced the number of ad creatives being tested at the same time to two to three. After a month of continuous adjustment, testing and optimization, we were able to reduce the CPL by more than 80%.
So, the key learning from this is to avoid testing more than 3 ad creatives at the same time. But if you really have to, then no more than 6 ad creatives.
Tip #10: Experimenting with dynamic creative ads
Facebook Dynamic Creative is a new feature that allows advertisers to automatically create personalized creative variations for each person who views the ad, with results that are scalable. Basically, it uses machine learning to automatically test and select the best combination of ad elements, such as images, videos, text, headlines, link descriptions and CTA buttons, for each audience.
Based on our experience and learning so far, we found that dynamic creative ads tend to deliver at a lower CPM, which is about 30% lower CPM than other ad formats. Of course, we do understand that lower CPM does not mean better results.
Based on our observation so far, however, we found that in overall, dynamic creative ad somehow tends to perform better than other static ad formats. In short, it is a highly recommended tool to optimize your ad campaigns and get the most out of your advertising budgets.
Conclusion
Facebook Ads is a powerful marketing tool, and with the right pro-tips, you’ll be able to create effective ads that reach your target audience. Keep these tips in mind when creating your next Facebook ad campaign!
If you are not ready to outsource your Facebook ads optimization to agency, but want to do them yourself, here are some tips you might be interested in:
- 13 Things You Must Do Before Running Your Facebook Ads
- How to Setup Effective Audience Targeting on Facebook Ads?
- Facebook Automated Rules: What is It & How It Can Help Optimize Your Ads?
- 4 Key Steps to an Effective Facebook Ads Analysis & Optimization
Please let us know if you need any help optimizing your existing Facebook ads. Our team of experts is ready and waiting to partner with you to create a Facebook ad optimization plan that drives better results.
