Despite the growing popularity of Instagram, Facebook is still considered as the most used application worldwide.
We all know how effective Facebook Ad performance can be: how it can increase traffic, improve CTR and conversion rate in a very short term. However, sometimes despite all our efforts in choosing the right keywords and best visuals, working hours on tailoring the Ad content, reading thousands of articles about the right timing for posts, we can surprisingly get poor Facebook ad performance that is far below our expectations.
As a result, instead of bringing more leads and engagement, it brings nothing but frustration.
But why does it happen? How to make sure that all your efforts were not a huge waste of time.
In this article, we will share with you 10 steps on how to improve your Facebook Ad Performance.
10 Easy Steps for Improving Facebook Ad Performance
1. Define the clear goal of your campaign
Before starting to work on the first draft of your brilliant Facebook Ad idea define the main goal of this campaign. What do you want to achieve by setting it?
- Do you want to increase awareness by bringing traffic to your website?
- Are you willing to increase the engagement of your audience?
- Do you want to get more leads and increase conversions?
The more specific goal you set the better chances you have in succeeding in achieving this goal.
Therefore, first of all, define the right goal and main KPIs for each campaign.
2. Define Target audience
Understanding who your ideal customer is the key to successful Facebook Ad Performance.
The more information you know about your audience, the more effective Facebook Ad performance will be.
Facebook Ad has a great amount of targeting options for your Ads.
You can find your audience by using the following filters:
- Demographics (location, languages, gender, age, education, etc.)
- Interests (hobbies and activities, entertainment, food and drink, etc.)
- Behaviors (mobile device user, travel, purchase behavior, job role, etc.)
- Connections (fan page, app, event, etc.)
- Custom audiences
However, it should be noticed that if you do not yet have enough information about your audience it is better to start with the broader search in order to reach more people. After the launch of every new campaign, you will get to know more information about your customers. As a result, your targeting will be improved every time.
The more you understand your customer’s behavior the more personalized content you can provide and more clicks you get, accordingly.
3. Define Ad Placement
To improve Facebook Ad Performance you need to go where your target audience is.
After you researched who your ideal customer is it is time to find a perfect placement that could be easily reached by your target audience.
Facebook provides 4 platforms for placement:
- Messenger
- Audience Network
As a result, there are around 20 placements available on Facebook where you could place your ad. However, you should remember that some of those placements could be not possible for specific ad formats.
Generally, there are two ways of defining placement on Facebook: automatic and manual.
In most cases, automatic placement suggested by Facebook is considered as the most efficient one, since it enables you to get the best results available from across all default placements with minimum costs.
4. Make sure that your content is relevant for your audience
One of the crucial rules for improving your Facebook Ad Performance is to make sure that your Ad content is relevant for your ideal customer.
It is not a secret that people prefer to see the ads that resonate with them. Therefore, the more relevant for your audience Facebook ad is the more likely they will click on it.
To achieve the goal of your campaign make sure that your Facebook Ad is relevant to the stage of the customer journey.
“Build your strategy around the customer journey”
Nicolas Glauser, Consultant Performance Marketing & SEO bei Farner Consulting AG
Therefore, try to understand at what stage your target audience is by asking yourself the following questions:
- Does your audience know about your company?
- Are they interested in the product or service you provide?
- Are they ready to buy it?
As you can imagine the content will vary depending on the campaign’s goal and the audience you are targeting. Facebook now provides Ad relevance diagnostics that can help you to analyze how relevant your ad is to the audience you reached.
5. Be different
I am sure you have seen and criticized many ads in your life. The fact is that some of them are fresh and catchy and some of them are irrelevant and unremarkable at all.
That is why you need to make sure that your ad will resonate with your audience even before they read the text of the ad.
In other words, in order to boost your Facebook Ad Performance, you must stand out of the competition!
Pay attention to the image you choose – like it or not it plays a significant role. Nowadays, there are plenty of image creator tools that can help you to design your own visuals. If you have time and budget for creating your own product video, don’t hesitate and try it out! Video ads are considered as one of the most effective types of ads since it usually attracts the most attention.
Don’t forget about various Social Media Marketing tools that can help you be more efficient and more aware of best-selling content at the moment.
6. Be specific
We all know how verbose we can be, especially when it comes to advertising the surveys or product we really like and want to promote. Suddenly we want to mention every single detail of a new service to show how great it is!
However, we forget that today people are informationally “overdosed”. Imagine: in 1 month, modern media produce as much information as a resident of the XVII century has learned in his entire life.
As a matter of fact every day we process a large amount of information.
Which is why it is getting harder and harder to catch people’s attention.
Indeed, nowadays you only get 8 seconds to grab your audience’s attention. And don’t forget that your brilliant Facebook ad is competing with Whatsapp, news feed and other social media.
Thus, in order to boost your Facebook Ad Performance make the text of your ad as simple as possible.
7. Define your bid strategy
Facebook defines two types of performance issues that can be caused by inefficient bid strategy:
- An uncompetitive bid strategy: your campaign isn’t spending enough.
- An overly flexible bid strategy: your costs are too high.
Therefore, there are two types of bid strategies for handling these problems:
- Bid strategies to increase spend:
- Switch to the lowest cost bid strategy without using a bid cap.
- Increase the bid cap, if you want to continue using it.
- Change your cost target.
- Bid strategies to reduce costs:
- You can add a bid cap (if you haven’t done it yet) or switch to target cost if you are using the lowest cost bid strategy.
- If using a bid cap or cost target doesn’t help you to improve costs, try to lower it down.
Remember to monitor the results of the change and adjust again as needed.
8. Use clear CTA
Don’t forget that CTA is the cherry on top!
It is your chance to convince people to take action.
Make sure you use a CTA that is aligned with your customer journey and the main objective you defined in the first step.
Depending on the goal you set at the very beginning you need to chose which CTA will resonate the most, for example:
- Awareness: learn more, see menu, watch more
- Engagement: interested, download, learn more
- Conversion: buy now, shop now, sign up
9. A/B testing
If you are struggling to choose between two placements for your ad or want to try out two images to see which one will attract more people, A/B testing is what you need. It can quickly compare two strategies and determine which one of them works better.
It is crucial that to get a valid result you can change only 1 variable using the A/B testing technique: for example, it can be your Ad’s visual, headline, audience or placement.
After you choose the variable you want to test, Facebook will divide your budget into two equal parts and distribute it for each version of your ad.
While you are running both versions A/B testing measures the performance of each strategy and helps you to define the best one.
A/B testing is a great way to improve your future Facebook Ad Performance.
10. Learn on your own mistakes
Last but not least, remember to reflect on the results of your Facebook Ad Performance.
Analysis of the data you have collected can help you to better understand your audience’s behavior in the future.
Therefore, it is important to ask yourself the following questions:
- What went wrong?
- What works?
- How did the audience react?
- How it can be organized better next time?
Regular analysis and work on your own mistakes will help you to boost your Facebook Ad Performance.
In this article, we discussed how you can improve your Facebook Ad Performance.
Read more about Performance Marketing and the importance of Social media and Google Ads in our next articles!
Read more and download our free ebook to learn the fundamentals of data-drivenness with 17 marketing KPIs!
