When you put money into Facebook ads, chances are you already know of the opportunities inherent on the platform. But what if you don’t get the results that you expected? It could be that you are not optimizing your Facebook ads as you ought to.
Facebook is high on the list of social media platforms that bring the most conversions. With over 2 billion active users worldwide, it is a goldmine of leads for virtually all categories of businesses.
7 Easy Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Ads
In this post, I’ll walk you through how I optimize my Facebook Ads which you can also use to optimize yours for maximum results.
1. Optimize Your Likes and Shares
Your Facebook likes and shares are bankable ways to tell whether or not your audiences are engaging with your content. Posts that gather a large number of likes and shares mean your audience finds them interesting. Such posts can be exploited to optimize your Facebook ads for maximum reach.
When creating Facebook ads, you get the options to “create a new campaign” or “use an existing post”.
This Facebook ad optimization hack requires that you use an existing post you have made that is already gathering massive likes and shares. Doing this will help you reach both new and existing audiences.
You can also use the same post to create multiple ad campaigns and also publish promotional posts on your Facebook page. All you need do is select the same post each time you want to create a new ad campaign.
2. Perform an A/B Test
The goal of every Facebook ad campaign is to increase both click-through and conversion rates. One way to optimize your Facebook ads and get website traffic from Facebook is to run a Facebook A/B test to discover what elements of your ad will bring the highest click-throughs and conversions.
Available add elements to run your A/B test against include:
- Ad copy (especially the headline)
- Ad design
- Ad placement
- Bidding methods
- Call-to-action buttons
- Campaign objectives
- Your unique value offer
If you are going to run different versions of the same ad, you can use a UTM parameter to track what versions bring maximal results. UTM parameters are tags you can add to the tail end of your URLs to enable you to track the reach or outcomes of your marketing campaigns.
UTM.io helps you create UTM links from your details such as your campaign name, medium, and source. It also helps you to keep track of all tagged links in one place.
3. Optimize Your Target Audience Preferences
Another way to optimize your Facebook ads for maximum reach is to optimize your target audience preferences.
When creating your ad campaigns, it is important to identify the relevant and most profitable audience for your campaign. For instance, it makes no sense to select all sex when creating a Facebook ad for a female-only product.
In optimizing your target audience, you should make sure to select the right sex, age bracket, and location. You can also track the performance of your selected target audience under Facebook Ads Manager > Reports. Tracking the individual performance of your ad campaign according to age bracket or gender helps you gain valuable insights for future campaigns.
4. Leverage on Influencer Networks
Social media influencers have their place in successful Facebook campaigns. Given that influencers usually have large social media followings; posts made by them have wider reach. Influencers are celebrities and everything they do are of interest to their followers.
There’s a reason using influencer networks to optimize your Facebook ad campaigns is such a great idea. Influencer-generated contents capture attention of potential customers.
Working with a relevant industry influencer can help you generate more traffic, boost your engagement rate and even earn you a lot more likes, shares and followers.
5. Use Facebook Pixels to Reach New Audience
Facebook Pixel analytical tool can help you track conversions from your Facebook ads. With Facebook pixel, you can find out what your website visitors look at when they visit your website.
Facebook pixel is a small line of code that can be paste into your website header section. It allows you to track any action taken on your website and also helps you to track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
Facebook Pixel allows you to find new audiences by detailed targeting of pre-sort audience who have similar demographics, interests and behaviors. You can view your Facebook pixel page in Events Manager where you can also see the actions that your customers take. You’ll also have options to reach those customers again through future ad campaigns.
To create a Pixel, simply look under your Facebook Ads Manager. See this helpful video tutorial on how to create a Pixel.
6. Consider Influencer Whitelisting
Some brands have unfettered access to use their influencers’ social media accounts for their marketing campaigns. When you run ads in your influencer’s name without having to directly involve them, this is called whitelisting.
Although running influencer-generated campaigns with your brand’s Facebook page can be very effective, doing it directly from your influencer’s account can be twice as effective. The reason for this is really understandable. Influencers are who they are – influencers! They are popular, have more social media followings and they influence social trends.
Apart from being able to reach a larger pool of potential customers in your influencer’s network, whitelisting helps you stay in control of your brand’s image. It is said that no one knows your brand better than you do.
7. Select the Right Bidding Option
Selecting the right bidding option is another great way to optimize your Facebook ads for maximum results. When creating your ads, you get options to select what type of results you want to achieve with your campaign.
Available Facebook bidding options include:
- Page views
- Clicks
- Conversions
- Engagement
For example, if you are running an ad campaign for an eCommerce site, it would make more sense to select the conversion bidding option.
If you are running an ad for a blog, engagement is a more ideal option as your overall goal would be to get your audience to engage more with your content.
The usefulness of Facebook ads in marketing cannot be overlooked. Facebook ads when utilized correctly can bring a lot of conversions and as a result more profit. However, you need to know how to optimize your Facebook ads to achieve maximum results.