Facebook advertising optimization tips!

For many businesses, peak season performance may determine their entire year's performance, especially during holiday seasons such as Black Friday and Valentine's Day, when sales may increase dramatically.

The key to increasing sales is finding and connecting with the right customers, and Facebook is one of the main marketing channels you can use to achieve this. In this article, we’ll walk you through how to use Facebook to run ads for your peak sales season.

1. Optimize your website and product landing pages

Before you drive top-of-funnel traffic with a Facebook ad campaign, you need to make sure your website has strong converting capabilities. A marketing funnel with strong conversion capabilities can help you get more revenue from each visitor, thereby improving the efficiency of your marketing spend. You need to focus on conversions in key channels, such as add to cart rate and purchase rate.

Google Optimize is a free tool that you can use to optimize your website in preparation for seasonal Facebook ad campaigns. It allows you to run A/B tests and multivariate tests on your website’s product pages and checkout pages to help you increase conversions.

You can test a variety of elements on your website and landing pages, including:

Images and videos;

Titles and subtitles;

· Product Description;

The color and size of your call-to-action (CTA) button.

First, you need to visit the Google Optimize website to sign up and install the Chrome extension.

In the Create Experience window, enter a name for your test, paste the URL of the webpage you want to test, and select the type of experience you want to set up. In this example, an A/B test is set up.

On the next page, click on the “Add Variant” option.

Next, choose how you want Google Optimize to distribute traffic to your pages (the default is 50/50).

Then, click the Edit button for the variation you want to test and make your edits. For example, in the image below, we are editing to increase the size and color of the "Buy It Now" button. Click Save when you are done.

Next, connect to Google Analytics and select your goal (e.g., Bounce Rate or Revenue).

Then you’re set, and once you’ve directed traffic to your page, Google Optimize will let you know which of the two variations performed better. Here, variation 1 (larger CTA button) performs significantly better.

With Google Optimize, you can test multiple variations at once. You need to start testing early and gain insights from it so that you can generate more sales with your seasonal campaigns.

2. Use Google Analytics to analyze your website’s traffic last year

Analyzing last year's traffic is especially important for existing businesses. If you’re creating a seasonal or holiday campaign for the first time, you can still use the steps below to gather relevant information for future years.

Review historical website data from the previous year and find answers to the following questions:

When was the peak traffic volume last year? When does holiday traffic start to increase?

When will revenue peak? Does it arrive synchronously with the traffic peak?

Google Analytics provides all the data you need to answer these questions. On the Google Analytics homepage, you can view metrics such as users, revenue, conversion rates, and user visits over time.

In the graph below, the blue line represents sales. By looking at this trend over the previous year, you can see that sales were higher in November compared to December. Sales peaked during Black Friday (indicated by the green circle) and then slowly declined. With this information, businesses can allocate more advertising budget in November to increase revenue.

Another very useful Google Analytics feature is the landing page report. You can access this page in Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. This report shows you which pages are getting the most traffic, sales, and revenue, which is especially useful if you're selling the same products as in previous years.

While trends may change, the above data provides insights into when and where to focus marketing resources.

3. Promote articles and videos to Facebook audiences

Combining Facebook ads with content (such as blog posts, articles, and videos) is a great way to lower your CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Users are more likely to engage with your content than with ads promoting your product, which can also help bring in new potential customers, especially if you’re selling a high-value product or service.

Here are two brands that combine content with paid advertising: Native and Harry’s.

Native sells a natural deodorant, and their challenge is to prove that their deodorant formula is actually effective. To overcome this, they ran Facebook ads that directed users to a third-party article titled “5 Best Deodorants for Women.”

When users click on the ad, they will be redirected to an article that showcases why they should choose Native deodorant, explains why natural deodorant works, and enables users to click on a link to make a purchase.

You can use similar marketing strategies to promote your blog posts or articles promoting your products. This strategy often helps build trust with potential customers, which can reduce advertising costs.

Brand Harry uses content throughout the advertising funnel. They run Facebook ads that showcase their products with videos. Video ads, on the other hand, can increase engagement (compared to images), which can help reduce advertising costs.

Users who click on the ad will be taken to a landing page with an article titled "7 Reasons People Love Harry's Razors."

Once users understand why this brand of razors is useful, they will see the CTA tagline "Try Harry's Today" at the bottom of the page.

Consider incorporating the content into your own Facebook ads. By promoting a blog post or video, you can stand out in a crowded holiday advertising market.

Optimizing Facebook Ad Elements to Improve ROAS

Running Facebook ads during holidays like Christmas or Hanukkah can be very expensive, as many advertisers are competing for consumers’ attention, driving up CPMs.

The way to combat high advertising costs is to test your audience, creatives, and ad copy. It’s about showing the right message (ad copy and creative) to the right customer at the right time.

Here’s how to optimize these elements.

1. Test Facebook audiences

Although you may already have a target audience on Facebook, it’s always a good idea to test new audiences for your holiday campaigns whenever possible.

First you need to do some research on your ideal client. To do this, open Facebook Ads Manager and navigate to Audience Insights.

You can use Audience Insights to understand data about users who visit your Facebook page or research related interests. For example, data such as age range, gender, education level, pages liked (interests), location, etc.

Research for this example shows that the core audience is women aged 25-34 and are interested in cosmetics brands like Birchbox and Sephora.

Now you can use this information to create a new Facebook audience. To do this, you’ll need to navigate to the Audiences panel in Ads Manager. Then click Create Audience and select Saved Audience from the drop-down menu.

Fill this in with the demographic and interest data you collected from Audience Insights.

Repeat this process to develop new audiences for ad testing.

2. Test Facebook ad creatives

To test your Facebook ad creative, you’ll need to go to Facebook Ads Manager and follow the steps below to create an ad set using your new audience.

In an ad group, create an ad to test different creatives and placements.

Note: This method of testing is much faster than creating multiple identical ads, each with separate creatives. Facebook will also optimize the creatives with better performance to further reduce your advertising costs.

3. Test Facebook ad copy

Once you’ve selected your creatives, it’s time to test your ad copy. You can try conveying your message from different angles to see how your copy resonates with new audiences.

If you’re promoting a personal care product, you could try messaging about the natural ingredients in the formula (no parabens or sulfates) and then compare that to copy about not contributing to plastic waste.

Identifying the most effective audiences, creatives, and ad copy will help you lower your advertising costs when attracting new Facebook users.

Run more Facebook ad campaigns

After running optimized ads, how can you increase your advertising budget while ensuring effective spend?

Here are some ways.

1. Run effective ad groups and make fine-tuning

One way to run more Facebook ad campaigns is to select an existing ad set that’s performing well (for example, one with a low cost per conversion), then duplicate the ad set and make small changes to the targeting, creatives, or ad copy.

Tip: Narrow your audience further and segment your audience so you can find targeted users who are more likely to convert.

2. Repeat the effective ad groups and increase the budget

Another approach is to duplicate a high-performing ad set and set a higher budget.

Let’s say you run an ad set with a daily budget of $11 and a low CPA. You can then run the same ad set and set the budget to 2 to 8 times the original amount. If within 1-2 days, the new ad performs well, you can repeat the process again.

3. Add more budget to the ad groups with good performance

Find a Facebook ad set that’s performing well, increase its daily budget by 2–8x, and track the results. If the ad group is still performing well, you can increase the budget again after 1-2 days. If the opposite is true, try reducing your daily budget until your CPA is within your acceptable range.

4. Run the same ad set with the same budget

Often, you can replicate the same Facebook ad set over and over again with the same budget. Create 8-10 copies of the same ad group and run them. Keep the ad groups with the lowest CPAs and turn off the rest. Repeat this process every few days.

5. Adjust your ads

After completing the above steps, you will still need to make small adjustments. You’ll need to track metrics like purchases, website visits, and ad spend.

You can easily monitor these metrics in your Facebook ad account overview. Although you will find that the data will fluctuate from day to day, you should pay attention to the more obvious trends. For example, is the cost per customer acquisition increasing over time? Are there spikes in advertising costs on certain dates?

You’ll also want to look at your audience demographics to understand which ones frequently convert to purchases.

You’ll need to break down your Facebook ads at the campaign, ad set, and ad level. Try launching more high-performing ad copy and creatives, or adding new content to your ad mix.

You’ll also want to make sure you check your ads every few days, but don’t make drastic adjustments every day, and keep an eye out for weekly or monthly trends.

Author: Hugo.com Chen Jie

Source: Hugo.com Chen Jie