Facebook Advertising Guide!

If your issue is that your ads aren't serving, it's important to first quickly check to make sure that the following non-performance issues aren't preventing your ads from serving:

· The ad was not approved.

Pause your ad.

Reaching the spending limit.

Scheduling.

If none of the above issues occur, we recommend that you adjust your bidding strategy, target audience, or creative.

There are two general ways you can categorize performance issues:

· Not spending enough on your ad group or campaign.

· It costs too much.

1. Changes you can make to improve ad performance

There are three main areas where you can make changes to improve your ad performance:

Bidding strategy

Audience targeting.

Advertising creativity.

Note: Ad groups optimized for conversions can also sometimes underperform because they may not collect enough optimization events to evenly distribute ads and spend. You can check out Facebook’s series of best practices guides for specific advice on improving the performance of your conversions campaigns. However, the advice in this guide still applies to conversions campaigns.

1. Bidding strategies that increase spending

If you don't win the auction, Facebook won't show your ad. Increasing your bid isn't the only way to make your ads more competitive, but it is one way you have direct control and can be very effective. You can do this in three ways:

Switch to the lowest cost bidding strategy, but do not set a bid cap.

Increase the bidding limit.

Change the target cost.

Although unlikely, it’s also possible that a target cost that’s too high could cause performance issues (Facebook wouldn’t be able to find results at such a high cost). In this case, lowering your target cost may actually improve ad delivery.

2. Bidding strategies to reduce costs

If the cost of a single optimization event is too high and you are using the minimum cost bidding strategy but have not set a bid cap, you can add a bid cap or switch to the target cost bidding strategy. This allows for better control over the cost of a single optimization event. If you're using a bid cap or target cost and costs are still too high, lower the bid cap or target cost. Keep in mind that setting a bid cap that is too low, or a target cost that is too low or too high, can result in underdelivery.

Whether you want to increase or decrease your fees, be sure to monitor the effectiveness of your adjustments and make adjustments as needed. If an adjustment causes the machine learning phase to restart, it is recommended that you wait until the learning phase is complete before making adjustments.

3. The target audience is too narrow or not relevant enough

If you want to improve your ad performance by adjusting your target audience, you have two common targeting strategies:

Improve audience quality

Expand your audience

These two strategies are not necessarily mutually exclusive, so it is recommended to try both and find a balance between the two.

1) Improve audience quality

Improving the quality of your target audience will make it easier for Facebook to find results and increase ad relevance, making your ads more competitive in the auction. If you want to improve the quality of your audience using demographic criteria, ask yourself the following questions:

Where is the audience?

For example, if you're a regional business or you only deliver to certain locations, don't target an entire country. Instead, target a local area or an area within your delivery range.

What are the characteristics of the customers?

Think about what basic characteristics your customers share. Are they likely to be older or younger? What gender might they be? Where might they live?

What languages ​​do your customers speak? 

Facebook won’t translate your ad copy into other languages, so make sure you select the appropriate language targeting options so your ad is understandable to your target audience.

What kind of target audience do I know better about than Facebook?

It’s not easy to come to a definitive conclusion from all the factors, but if you think you have an advantage in information, be sure to pass that information to Facebook through targeting settings to help Facebook find the most appropriate audience and serve your ads to them.

If you don’t think you know more than Facebook does, then you shouldn’t add that information to your targeting. You should remember that no matter how broad your targeting is, the Facebook ad delivery system will try to deliver your ads to the target audience that is most likely to complete the event you are optimizing for. Understand that poor targeting choices can limit Facebook’s delivery system and ultimately may not only not help your ad performance, but actually hinder it.

Am I also strategically excluding audiences? 

Adding additional targeting criteria is useful, but excluding certain audiences can have a huge impact. Doing this will help Facebook find the right audience more quickly.

Am I drawing on audience analysis to make decisions? If you really can't determine your target audience and don't want to rely solely on Facebook's delivery system for optimization, you can use audience analysis. This tool can be used to learn more about your target audience, helping you adjust your target audience and advertising creatives.

If you want to use customer information to improve the quality of your audience:

Create Custom Audiences . With Custom Audiences, Facebook can serve ads to people who have interacted with your business. You can add people who have interacted with your content across Facebook's apps and services, visited your website or used your mobile app, or are in your customer lists to your Custom Audiences.

Create lookalike audiences. If you've run ad sets targeting custom audiences but they're not performing well, it means that the audience may have reached saturation (people in the audience are no longer responding to your ads). To successfully reuse this audience, consider using it as a source to create a lookalike audience, marketing to users who are similar to the source audience.

2) Expand your audience

No matter how large your audience is, Facebook will always show your ads to the people you predict are most likely to take the action your ad set is optimized for. Therefore, it's generally best not to restrict targeting unless you have a good reason (see above). If you’re not entirely sure which audience to target and can’t use Custom Audiences, you can start with broad targeting to see which audiences respond to your ads, then refine your audience based on what you learn and monitor your ad performance to further adjust your audience.

Note: Remember that any adjustments you make to your target audience will cause the machine learning phase to start over again. It is recommended to wait until the machine learning phase is over before judging whether the adjustment is effective or making further adjustments.

If you want to expand your audience:

· Make sure to target all the areas where your product or service can be delivered/available.

Use location extensions.

· Consolidate ad groups to increase the size of each ad group’s audience.

Be sure to check Delivery Insights (more on that below) to see if performance issues are caused by auction overlap, or use the Audience Overlap tool to see how much audience overlap there is in advance.

Use automatic placement.

· You can place your ads on Facebook apps and services. We recommend that you make full use of this feature. This feature allows Facebook to find your target audience on more platforms, helping your ad sets achieve more (and potentially better) results. When you select Automatic Placements when you create your ad set, Facebook will run your ad on all available placements to get you the best results across them. This helps increase delivery frequency and control costs.

Remove unnecessary targeting restrictions.

If you selected the Narrow Audience or Narrow Audience Further option in the Detailed Targeting section of the ad set creation process, consider moving these interests into the general "Include" section. This means that a user only needs to meet one of the criteria to be added to the audience, but not all of them.

If you have set unnecessary exclusion conditions, you can also delete the corresponding restrictions.

If you are using Custom Audiences or Lookalike Audiences, we recommend that you do not use any other targeting criteria in addition to them.

If you can, at least try to expand your age or gender targeting. For example: Let's say you only target users under 30 because you think this age group is most likely to be interested in your product. But if this is just a guess and your ads aren’t performing well, then I’d recommend expanding the age range you’re targeting. Even if most of the users interested in your product are under 30, Facebook may be able to tap into a large number of users in the over 30 age group.

2. Creativity cannot resonate with the audience

Since Facebook considers user value in addition to advertiser value when deciding which ads to show, whether the ad creative resonates with the target audience is an important aspect of ad performance.

Facebook offers two products to help you optimize your ad creatives:

Dynamic materials.

· Customization of layout materials.

3. Reasons for performance fluctuations or non-expectation

Sometimes, your ad performance may change even if you haven't made any changes to your ad. In this section, Facebook discusses why this happens and directs you to tools that can help diagnose the specific cause.

When your ad performance fluctuates or doesn’t meet expectations, it’s important to remember:

Ads are placed in a dynamic marketplace where many advertisers compete to show their ads to the same audience.

When you start running ads for the first time or after a major adjustment, you can expect fluctuations in ad performance.

No ad can maintain excellent performance forever.

The more control you choose to have, the more you need to monitor your ad performance so you can make adjustments accordingly.

Facebook provides two tools to help you understand when performance is fluctuating or not meeting expectations:

· Analysis of advertising effectiveness

Machine Learning Stage

1. Analysis of advertising effectiveness

With delivery insights, you can understand if your target audience has become "fatigued," if some ad groups are competing against each other because they are targeting similar audiences, or if the auction intensity has increased. While these issues aren't under your control like the ones mentioned above, they are related and can be addressed using the same strategies.

2. Machine Learning Stage

The machine learning phase lets you know how long it will take for the system to gather enough data to start delivering ads and balancing spend consistently. You can check this in the Delivery section of Ads Manager. We recommend that you avoid making drastic changes to your ads during this phase of their delivery.

In other words, if you are not satisfied with your ad performance during the machine learning phase, it is recommended not to adopt any of the strategies mentioned above at this stage. Wait until the learning phase is over (either because the ad group received around 50 conversion events or it just didn't receive enough conversion events) to judiciously evaluate the performance of your ads and adjust them as needed.

Author: Feishu Interactive

Source: Feishu Interactive