If you want to maximize results with your Facebook ads especially during the holiday season implement these quick and easy tips.
First maximizing results with Facebook ads is really about 3 things...
1. 'Scaling ad spend' as much as you can while maintaining ROAS.
2. Increasing 'ROAS' as much as you can while maintaining costs.
3. Decreasing 'cost per result' as much as you can without lowering ROAS.
STEP #1: BUILD YOUR FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGN FOUNDATION.
If you want to maximize your potential ad spend on a newish Facebook ad account, there are four vital things to know...
Your ad account spending limit starts at $50 a day if you connect it to your bank. And if you connect it to a card it will start at $750 a day.
This is not something that is initially obvious to most people, and getting it raised can be a pain.
This is where having a Facebook rep or contacting support is critical.
Generally speaking, you will be assigned a rep when you reach a certain level of spend, but having an agency partner that has a permanent rep can expedite the process.
Especially over the holidays, we recommend putting these requests in weeks ahead of when you plan to scale.
Create multiple ad accounts (we created two).
You can use one ad account for testing new ads so if a mass disapproval happens it won't shut down your primary ad account where all your main ads are running.
This is a redundancy that protects against running into any ad spend issues on peak buying days.
The last thing you want is to have ad delivery issues or suspended accounts when you’re planning on spending over $1,000's of dollars.
Ensure your credit limit is set high enough to support your rapidly scaling spend.
Don’t count on your ability to keep up with frequent payments on your credit card (to stay below the limit) while the campaign is going on, as you’ll get stuck waiting on payments to process on weekends and/or holidays.
Check that the website won’t break under the weight of all that traffic.
You'll want fast website load speeds to begin with so you can win more bids.
If you’re on Shopify or have a dev team who manages the site this should never be an issue, but for all other providers run some projected numbers on anticipated concurrent website sessions and load test your site.
STEP #2: FIND YOUR LOWEST COST AD CREATIVE.
If you're going to rapidly scale on Facebook during the holidays, you'll need massive reach at the top of the funnel in a very crowded and competitive buying environment.
To achieve this, enter that landscape with a piece of creative that you KNOW will drive massive engagement (shares = free impressions) and is already pre-loaded with validation.
This is the only time I would recommend this is, for the holiday season.
For us, we created over a 1,000 ad variations during to find our #1 ad creative.
• We test images.
• We test videos.
• We test copy.
• We test headlines.
• We test ad formats.
• We test sub-headlines.
• We test it all.
Going live with BRAND NEW creative on peak days just a few days before Christmas is one of the biggest mistakes we see people make.
You want to use your absolute best piece of prospecting creative to drive the cheapest possible clicks and allow your site to communicate the close.
It's about allocating a testing budget you can afford, and finding your best ad relative to all the ones you are testing.
Dropping an ad that’s loaded with engagement/perfect creative into auctions against terribly boring “20% Off Sitewide” text ads is like bringing a gun to a knife fight.
While you may not hit 3,500 likes, comments and shares on your winning ad creative you should still have a solid level of validation for your ad that will help drive high relevance scores, broader reach and lower frequencies during the holiday bid war.
STEP #3: FIND YOUR LOWEST COST AUDIENCE AND COMBINE IT WITH YOUR LOWEST COST AD CREATIVE.
Now you’ve found your number one ad creative that gets the lowest cost results and it's loaded with a ton of likes, comments, and shares, who should you target when trying to scale?
The answer is everyone. Or at least anyone you have reason to believe might be interested.
Start with what you know: Lookalikes based on all stages of your funnel, then move to custom audiences on large pools of visitors, prime interests, behaviors and then get wacky with it.
The key to scaling is always, always agility.
By that, I mean the ability to create options for yourself.
The more ad sets you can come up with at the start, the higher the likelihood of finding something that works.
In the beginning, you want to have as many ad sets as your little fingers will allow you to create.
For us, we create over 100 ad sets for testing.
• Lookalike audiences
• Custom audiences
• Interest audiences
• Behavioral audiences
Start with reasonable daily budgets on each campaign, then be prepared to kill off underperforming ad sets quickly!
But give yourself options.
Trying to predict the right audience campaign and applying a massive budget to it is a fool's errand, unless you have loads of historical data.
This is especially true on peak buying days when consumer intent is sky-high. Having loads of ad sets will give you lots of flexibility in where and how you scale.
P.S. Make sure to include a few super-broad audiences — even try a default “open” audience. (It’s the secret weapon)
P.S.S When using CBO campaign move your best audiences and creatives into one CBO campaign.
P.S.S.S Never test audiences in a CBO campaign that has winning ad sets and creatives already running.
STEP #4: DECIDE WHEN TO KILL OR SCALE YOUR AD SETS & ADS
In poker, great players say that there are only two decisions you need to know how to make in order to win: when to raise, and when to fold.
The same is true of Facebook ad buying.
Your job as a media buyer trying to rapidly scale is to determine what information you need to decide to kill or raise an ad set, and how fast can you get that data.
As soon as we got 4-5 results, we made a call on whether to kill or scale an ad set. If it was too close (within 10% of our target on either side) to call we would wait to see the result move out of range.
Don't worry too much about statistical significance early on – it's OK if leading indicators aren't 100% accurate every time.
If you've created enough ad sets, this should help you hone in on the winning ad sets pretty quickly.
Then combine those winners in a CBO campaign and let er rip.
STEP #5: MOVE THE WINNERS INTO A CBO CAMPAIGN.
Once you begin to see winning ad sets emerging, it's time to start milking those audiences for everything they're worth!
While we recommend starting with tons of ad sets and killing them based on leading indicators, we would recommend allowing yourself to see those ad sets reach your target cost per result with a meaningful number of results (minimum 10-20) before deciding to move them into a winning CBO campaign and scale the spend.
But once you do, it's go time.
So the second we have a winning ad set, we immediately duplicate the ad set into our winner CBO campaign and add a higher budget using the same low-cost bid strategy.
This strategy will allow you to get the absolute most out of every single winning creative/ad set combination and will allow Facebook to move large budgets in the right directions when available.
I hope this motivates you to go get some awesome results for your clients or yourself for this holiday season!
Want to get consistent Facebook Ad Results...
Schedule a 1-on-1 coaching session with Chase here.
Or...
Get started with the Facebook Ads Expert Mastery Class.
To your success.
- Chase
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