Optimizing Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

Follow the steps below so you don’t overthink things and make bad decisions when optimizing your FB ads.

Reverse engineer your competitors and come up with a standard model

If you have a personal account, find your competitors and like their pages. Before you know it, you will start seeing ads either from your competitors themselves or from businesses that are very similar to your competitors. Pay close attention to these ads.

Reverse engineer them to find the standard model for these ads. In other words, go through as many of these ads as possible and get a clear understanding of what kind of pictures, headlines, and text they use. Also, if they are mostly promoting posts, pay attention to that.

Whatever the case may be look at what they’re doing and see common patterns. Focus on the most commonly used strategies because this gives you the industry standard model.

Don’t get sidetracked by ads that seem so different, so new or so innovative because if they are so different from the industry standard model, they’re outliers. There’s a high chance that those ads do not convert.

Come up with your own version and test with a low budget

Test with a low budget. You don’t want to burn through a tremendous amount of cash during the testing process. There will be a time and a place for you to get crazy with the budget, but now is not the time.

Create variations and test

Now that you have come up with your own version of the standard model, create variations of it and then run low-budget tests. Do not do this randomly.

Do not do this based on your feelings or impulses, instead you have to follow certain rules on how to create variations; otherwise, you wouldn’t know which part of the ad accounts for its greater success.

I’ve seen this happen many times. In fact, I’ve committed this mistake before. I would take an ad and test it. I would notice that it’s not getting that many clicks so I change half of the ad.

Maybe I change the picture and then the headline or I would change the heading and the description. Whatever the case may be I would change half of the ad, and sure enough, it would improve but when I try to improve things again by changing the other half of the ad, it falls apart.

You want to establish a way of effectively tracking which changes accounted for which improvement. By using this method, you can optimize parts that work to reach peak convertibility and then work on the other elements of the ad that could use some improvement.

However, you have to do this in a systematic way. I’ve described this in the section below.

Pick the winner and make further variations

Now that you have made variations of the original and you ran a test, there will be at least one winner-it gets the most clicks and conversions. Make variations of it and you run the test again.

Keep testing until you find the ad that delivers the best return on investment

The end of this process is pretty straightforward. You keep making variations and you keep testing on the cheap until you find an ad that delivers the best ROI. In other words, it delivers the most conversions while costing very little money. I know it sounds like a fantasy at this point, but it is doable with testing.

Scale up

Increase your ad budget to your winning ad to pump a massive amount of traffic to it. You should only do this when you are dead sure that you have a winning ad on your hands.

In other words, you have tested it rigorously and have optimized it to the point that it cannot improve its conversion rate any further, that’s when it’s ready to go big time.

Make sure you optimize on an elemental level

The big problem with the ad optimization method I described above is how do you know which part of the ad to change up? How do you know which part of the ad to optimize?

Wholesale variations do not work.

You can’t just take an ad, see that it doesn’t work, replace it with a completely different ad, see that it doesn’t work and then repeat that process.

Even if you’re spending very little money, it still burns a tremendous amount of time, effort and opportunities. You need to have a better way to turbocharge your results.

Vary on an element-by-element basis

I would take an ad, and I would restrict my optimization to a specific element of that ad. Every ad actually has many elements. There is the graphics, the heading, the description, the link. I would start with one element, and I will come up with different versions.

The most obvious part is the picture. So, I’d play around with the different pictures, and see which gets the most clicks. I would then come up with a variation of that picture and see if I can improve my click-through rate.

Again, I’m spending very little money here. I just want to see an improvement in click-through rate for that element that I am varying.

Once I have reached a plateau, and I can’t improve anymore on that element, I would then switch to another element. For example, if I’m running a campaign for dog food, and I noticed that my best performing picture after a series of variations is a picture of a Chihuahua that seems to be smiling,

I will keep that picture but then I will then switch to the next element of the ad, which is the headline. I would then keep varying the headline to see if I can improve the conversion rate of that ad.

Once I’ve reached the ceiling or a plateau for improvements in conversions due to headline changes, I then move to the description. Do you see how this works?

You know that you have to vary an element if you keep picking the winning variation. You do this with small tests until the whole ad is optimized.

After all elements have been optimized, scale up your ad buy.

Once I’ve gotten an ad that converts much better than its original form, and I’ve gone through all the elements, now is the time to scale up. This is where I pour quite a large amount of cash into my Facebook ad campaign to boost traffic.

Facebook marketing is a lot of fun because there are a lot of things to discover, but it can also get very expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing. Follow the promotion methods covered in the Social Media Marketing series so you can start your Facebook promotion campaign on a solid path to success.