How can You optimize your Facebook ad campaigns?

While ad platforms have become increasingly sophisticated in optimizing campaigns based on user behaviour, it is still worthwhile to optimize your ads yourself. 

Rather than blindly making changes and hoping for the best, a thoughtful and data-driven approach to optimizing your Facebook Ads can lead to significant improvements in campaign performance.

1.Campaign objective

Facebook defines each objective like this:

• Brand awareness: Show your ads to people who are most likely to remember them.

• Reach: Show your ads to the maximum number of people.

• Traffic: Send people to a destination, like a website, app, Facebook event, or Messenger conversation.

• Engagement: Get more page likes, event responses, post reactions, comments, or shares.

• Conversions: Show your ads to people most likely to take valuable actions, like making a purchase or adding payment info, on your website, app, or in Messenger.

Note: If you’re choosing conversions, you need to install the Facebook pixel on your website to keep track of user behaviour after leaving Facebook.

Next, you should decide which account you want to run ads on.

2. Page and account

Don’t forget that Facebook owns Instagram.  So, if you have an audience there too, this is the platform to use to run those ads.

You’ll want to split your campaigns by platform even if you want to run the same creative and audience. Otherwise, Facebook will optimize your budget for the platform performing the best as it sees it as just one of several ‘placements’.

• Schedule 

Then you get into the main ad settings. You can choose when Facebook shows your ad in the schedule section. You can probably run your campaigns continuously in most cases, but in B2B ads, you might want to limit your views to ‘working time’ in your target market.

• Audience

Selecting the right audience is crucial for the success of your Facebook ad campaign. While you want to keep your audience broad enough for Facebook to optimize user behaviour, it's essential to have a clear understanding of your ideal customer. 

You can refine your audience by selecting the location, age, gender, language, interests, behaviour, and connections, and even create custom audiences.

Tip: To optimize your Ads’ spending, consider excluding people who have already converted, unless your goal is retention or re-purchase. 

With the right audience targeting, you can maximize the effectiveness of your Facebook ad campaign.

3. Creative, format, and placement

When it comes to ad formats, there are numerous options available for both video and still images. However, it’s important to note that the placement of your ad will also affect the required size and format. 

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook’s Audience Network all have different specifications, so it’s crucial to review all the options before creating your ad content. Failing to do so may result in having to redo your ad or missing out on certain placements.

Pro-tip. Use dynamic creative and dynamic product ads to let Facebook optimize different ad sets for you using a combination of creative settings, like text, headline, image, etc.

4. Optimization and delivery

The final setting you need to decide on is optimization and delivery, which helps Facebook determine who to show your ads to. 

This includes factors such as who is most likely to click on your ad based on their past behaviour, location, and time of day. 

By optimizing and delivering your ads effectively, you can ensure that they reach the right audience at the right time, ultimately increasing the chances of achieving your campaign goals.

The Final Recap.

Optimizing your Facebook ads is important because it can significantly improve the performance and effectiveness of your ads. 

By optimizing your ads, you can reach your target audience more effectively and efficiently, resulting in better engagement, more conversions, and ultimately, a higher return on investment (ROI).

Additionally, optimizing your Facebook ads allows you to make data-driven decisions and refine your targeting, messaging, and creatives based on the actual user behavior and feedback. 

This will help you to continuously improve your ad campaigns and stay ahead of the competition. 

Without proper optimization, your Facebook ads may not be reaching the right people, or they may not be engaging enough to achieve your desired results.