Facebook marketing is proving to be one of the biggest channels for ecommerce.
If you manage it correctly, it can drive a huge amount of traffic to your site.
Optimising your Facebook campaigns, however, can be tricky. So here’s a few tips for making the most of this channel.
1. Budget effectively
Facebook recommends that you use oCPM (optimised cost per impression) bidding for all your Facebook advertising. When you select oCPM bidding, Facebook’s system automatically optimises delivery of advert impressions to users who best align with the advertising objective you select.
The suggested bid range that Facebook will present is based on how many other advertisers are competing for the audience you are targeting. You do not have to bid within that range but, the higher your bid, the more likely your audience is to engage with your advert.
Facebook will charge you only the minimum amount required to win the conversion you’ve set. As such, it is recommended that you bid at the higher end of the suggested bid range to ensure your adverts remain competitive.
2. Create separate campaigns for each of your objectives
It is important to segment your objectives and create separate campaigns so that each of them are individually quantifiable.
One campaign could be to increase the number of likes to your Facebook page and another to drive sales of a new product or brand.
Within these campaigns you can have multiple adverts that are grouped together in advert sets.
Although you do not control the budget or audience of your adverts at the campaign level, you can organise all of your advert sets with the same objective into the same campaign.
3. Organise advert sets by audience segment
All of the adverts within a single advert set will target the same audience. However, within a campaign, you can have multiple advert sets targeting different audiences with the same campaign objective.
You can also set different budgets for different advert sets within one campaign. For example, one advert set could target London and another Manchester but you would use a larger budget for London as there are more potential customers to be won there.
It is very important to monitor the performance of your different advert sets to see where your audiences are most responsive to your adverts.
4. Test responses to adverts in the same advert set
It’s strongly advisable to create multiple adverts within the same advert set, testing out the response to different images, texts, links and so forth.
Over time, you’ll begin to notice which of the adverts are more successful.
Facebook’s system has an algorithm in place to optimise the performance of your strongest adverts. This, alongside your own monitoring and optimisation of your adverts, should help you improve the performance of your adverts over time.
5. Use three to six adverts in each advert set
Optimally, you should use between three and six adverts in each advert set to allow you to test adverts against each other and to let Facebook optimise the performance of your adverts.
Using more than six adverts may cause lesser-performing adverts to receive less exposure. It’s advisable to pause adverts that aren’t doing as well so that you can concentrate your budget on adverts that are performing more successfully.
6. Set a maximum lifetime of two weeks on each advert
Set a lifetime limit of no more than two weeks on each advert. This is because Facebook uses a pacing system to make sure that your adverts are evenly displayed throughout the entire course of your campaign.
This can lead to a decline in conversions for campaigns after a fortnight or so when campaigns are run on an undefined or ongoing basis.
It is also important to monitor the frequency with which your campaign is displayed to your target audience. You do not want this frequency to go above 1.5 otherwise you are wasting money showing the same people the same advert multiple times without gaining any conversions.
Conclusion
Facebook marketing can be a great tool to reach the right audience for your business. To be successful however, you need to make sure that you optimise your campaigns.
Budget well. Organise your campaigns around your audience and your objectives. Monitor the responses to your adverts. Select the right number of adverts for each set. Don’t use any advert for more than two weeks.
By following these tips you’ll be in a strong position to drive up the sales on your website.
