Tips to Improve Facebook Ad Performance

Not getting the results you want from your Facebook? Seeing lingering issues since that pesky iOS update? Fix those problems fast with these useful tips to improve your facebook Ad performance

Or perhaps you just want insights on how to bring your performance on Facebook to the level.

This article will go over the basic issues that a lot of people have run into along with expert tips on how to generally improve your Facebook Ad performance to scale your account without sacrificing on cost efficiencies.

Some Basics to Help You Troubleshoot General Issues

Here are the issues that people generally run into when they are running Facebook Ad campaigns along with solutions. If you’re looking for more advanced support, then please scroll down to our “Expert Tips” section or schedule a consultation with us here.

Issue – our ad isn’t running 

Solution – There are steps you can take in your Facebook account to see why your ad isn’t running. To start, make sure your ad, ad set, and campaign are all turned on. This sounds really basic, but if all three are not on, then your ad won’t deliver results.

You should also start by looking at the Delivery column under the Ads tab in your account. Below are a list of different icons that can show up and what they mean according to Facebook:

For rejected ads, Facebook will give an error message in specific ads if you click to edit them. From there you can make changes to your ads then appeal them with Facebook.

For more advanced issues, you should try to contact Facebook support directly by clicking the question mark on the bottom left side of your screen in the ads manager. A bar will appear on the left side of your screen where you can then contact support.

Issue – we’re not getting enough results

Solution – If you have a specific issue getting results, then we would be happy to help. Book a free consultation to get started. For now, here are the initial steps you should take to resolve this issue:

• If your ad is not receiving enough results but other ads or ad sets are, this is normal. Facebook’s ad delivery system will choose the ad or ad set it believes will generate the best results and sometimes give that ad or ad set more exposure. If you want an ad or ad set to get more traffic you can try to create an A/B test or separate your ad or ad set into a new campaign.

• The delivery of your ad or ad set is “learning limited”. The short is that Facebook needs around 50 optimization events in a week based upon what your campaign goals are and it’s not hitting that 50 event goal. Here’s what you can do to get more results:

• Combine ad sets/campaigns
• Expand your audience
• Raise your budget
• Change your bid strategy or cost control
• Change your optimization event or your campaign goals

• You’re  getting some results but Facebook isn’t hitting your budget, there are a few things you can do:

• If your ad set is bid or cost limited you can consider using a ‘highest volume bid strategy’ or raise your bid or cost cap.
• The frequency of your ads could be too high. This means that you either have a small audience that you could consider expanding or you need to develop new creative to reduce ad fatigue. 
• There’s a high auction overlap with your current ad sets. This can happen if you’re running multiple audiences that target the same people (ex. budget savers and Walmart shoppers). You can combine audiences to reduce overlap or negate audiences so there is less overlap.

Issue – our cost to get results (CPA) is way too high

Solution – There are a few things you should consider if your costs are way too high before you try to optimize your ad account:

• What is my CPA goal and how far off am I from this goal? 
• New campaigns will go through a learning phase where performance will be less stable. If you don’t have enough results to get out of this learning phase, you should get more to start with (see the prior issue).
• If you’ve had this problem for a long time, you might want to reconsider your account management strategy. We can help you with this if you book a call with us.

The Expert Tips section at the end of this article is focused around how you can improve your CPA to get more results out of your current budget.

Issue – our CTR or Conversion Rate is below the industry average.

Solution – The average CTR across all industries is 0.89% while the average conversion rate is 9.11%. This average varies by industry as you can see below:

You shouldn’t worry too much if your CTR or conversion rate are below average because there are a lot of ways you can improve. 

To improve your CTR – you should consider what audience you’re targeting and what message they’re receiving. CTR is an indicator of engagement to see if someone likes what they see enough to take the next step. Sometimes having a CTR can be good if you’re targeting a broader audience that is less likely to engage with you right away. Especially if you have an above average conversion rate or low CPCs. Though that’s probably not the answer you want to hear to improve. Here are some of the tips you should consider:

• See if there’s a particular audience that has a better CTR and put more budget towards that audience. For example, remarketing tends to have your highest CTR because they already know about you and have engaged with you in some manner in the past.

• Improve the quality of your audience. We’re going to get into that in the Expert Tips section. The key thing to remember is that you should try to go after people that you think your ad is most relevant for.

• It’s not what you said but how you said it. People might be interested in what you have to offer, but may need something else to entice them. We will also get into this topic more in the next section, but consider this….people going to Facebook or Instagram want to connect with their friends/family or browse their feed based upon content they enjoy. So when they see your ad, you should make sure that it’s appealing enough to entice them to learn more about what you have to offer.

Our Expert Tips to Improve Your Facebook Ad Performance

1. Supercharge Your Current Campaign Targeting – Hone in on your top performing demographics, locations, custom audiences, and interests based upon conversion rate. The idea behind this tactic is to put more of your budget towards people on Facebook that are more likely to convert. If your conversion rate is at 2% and you can bring it to 4% just by spending more on people that are more likely to convert, then you could double your results without spending another cent. Here are some different target segments for you to consider:

1. Age
2. Gender
3. Device
4. Location
5. Job Title
6. Life Events
7. Income (by zipcode)
8. Education
9. Relationships
10. Remarketing segment (time on site, page visited, videos viewed, action completed, and more!)
11. Cold interest audience (look at which audiences have a higher conversion rate)

2. Develop Highly Relevant Ad Creative – outline your key benefits, what makes you stand out vs alternatives (differentiators), and your top hooks to get people interested in what you’re offering. Combine these benefits, differentiators, and hooks to create draft ad copy. Then once you’re done, match up your ad copy to what your audience is interested in. Here’s one of the templates we’ve used to organized our creative:

3. Develop New Audiences –  to either expand your reach or improve your efficiencies. As you try to spend more on your current audiences inside your ad sets, you can saturate them to a point where they might not get you results as efficiently. Testing new audiences can be a great opportunity to find new means for getting results. We go into this topic in more detail in our article about Facebook audience research. Here are some quick tips below as well:

1. Use Facebook’s Audience Insight tool to find similar audiences to your current Facebook/Instagram following.
2. When you create your ad set, see what interests Facebook suggests that are similar to the interests you’re targeting.
3. Create different remarketing audiences for your website traffic, videos, and page/post engagement to name a few.
4. Create lookalike audiences off of your new remarketing audiences
5. Create new customer audiences and segment these audiences based upon what people bought, how much it was worth, and how recently they purchased. Then create lookalikes off these audiences.
6. Use your knowledge of what you’re offering to consider what your target audience is interested in to find new audiences.
7. Create competitor audiences based upon people that follow their content on Facebook/Instagram.

4. Use an 80/20 budget split – between going after performance & testing new campaigns. This will allow you to mitigate risk with your test efforts while also setting aside some budget to find your next top performer. Some people like to put more budget towards testing while others do less. The point of this split is to set aside a budget that you don’t necessarily expect results from right away. Then put most of your money towards campaigns that you know have performed well for you. Some accounts don’t have enough budget for a split to work, so it can also be good to elongate tests over multiple months, test during slower times of year, and run A/B tests with your current campaigns. The point is that if you make testing a priority, it can pay off.

5. Test ad creative using traffic or engagement campaigns. This won’t get you performance right away, but it will let you know what creative people are most engaged with so you can then focus more on that creative in your conversion campaigns to increase your revenue or generate revenue more efficiently. We like to take the following steps when doing this:
   1. Develop new ad creative based upon your current top performer. Try to have 3-4 text variations and 3-4 visuals.
   2. Use audiences that you know work well for you or audiences that you have a particular baseline for.
   3. Test 2-6 ad variations with 1 control based upon your top performing ad for the audience you chose to test.
   4. Swap around which ads are live to make sure each one gets 2000-5000 impressions.
   5. Pick the top 2 ads out of the group and use them in a new campaign optimizing for your main conversion objective. It’s worth noting that the CTR will be lower, though the idea is that this ad should be more engaging/enticing to get people to convert.
   6. Rinse & Repeat this process.

Final Thoughts on Facebook Ad Performance

There is a lot of trial and error involved with managing Facebook Ad campaigns. Taking each problem step by step can help you figure out how to get the results you want or further improve your Facebook Ad performance.

If you’re still having trouble getting the results you want or simply want to improve your Facebook Ad performance, then you should book a free consultation with us today. We can walk through the issues you’ve had with your account and what we can do to resolve them.