Looking for information on how to optimize your Facebook ads? You’re in the right place. 

First things first, please make sure your ads are set up correctly. Remember that more straightforward campaigns do better, so divide your cold and warm audiences and use 4-6 ads per ad set to help Facebook’s algorithm optimize for conversions.

Very important! Once you’ve activated your campaigns, let them gather data. Don’t adjust your ads during the learning phase, as the changes you’ll make might reset the learning phase indefinitely. 

Have you gathered at least 50 events per ad set and exited the learning phase for some (if not all) of your audiences? Then, we can follow these 5 steps to analyze and optimize your results. 

Step 1

Prepare your key performance indicators (KPIs) based on the business’s goals. You will use these to estimate if your campaign has been successful. If you choose ROI, include other expenses with your product to get a realistic view of your Facebook ROAS (return on ad spend). 

Step 2

Check key metrics at the campaign level with your business goals in mind. You want a CTR (click-through rate) of 1% or above, a low CPA (cost per action), and ROAS (return on ad spend) greater than 1. CPM (cost/1000 impressions) should also be low and will tell you how your ads perform. There is a lot of debate on what the perfect CPM should be for different industries. As a general rule, if your CPM is higher than $42, that is a clear indicator that Facebook doesn’t like something about your ads, and you should re-analyze your ad copy, imagery, and landing page experience. 

Step 3

Check frequency at the ad set level, especially for retargeting campaigns. This will tell you if the audience has been saturated and if you should add new audiences or change creatives.

For example, a frequency of 10 or more is a red flag. 

If the frequency is low and the ad sets are not performing well, consider shortening the retargeting windows. If the opposite happens and frequency is high and performance has dropped, add new, broader audiences to keep your customers engaged with your product. 

Step 4

At the ad set level, l monitor Ad Relevance Score, as this metric will show how Facebook rates your ad quality. A good score is anything 8 or above. Once you have enough data, consider stopping ads with scores in the bottom 25% and no conversions.

Also, look at CPC (cost per click) for your ads. High impressions, high CPC, no conversions, or low ROAS indicate a low-performing ad.  

If your ads are not performing well, go back to testing. Change the copy and imagery of your ads, try different formats, and even reutilize Facebook posts with high engagement to keep your social proof. Remember to run one experiment at a time; you’ll be sure what works and what does not.

Step 5

Once you’ve finished all your ad levels, look beyond Facebook by checking the landing page to which you’re sending traffic. The metric you want to check this, is landing page conversion rate.  

This varies across all sorts of industries, so make sure to research your industry’s benchmark.

For example, the average landing page conversion rate for an e-commerce website or a specific sales web page is between 1-3%. In contrast, for a lead generation landing page that advertises a free online course, the conversion rate can easily go up to 40%.  

To calculate the landing page conversion rate, divide the number of people who converted by the number of total visitors and multiply the result by 100.

If your numbers are lower than your industry’s benchmark, test landing page optimizations to improve conversion rate. You can look at page loading speed, image quality, navigation to product page, exiting the shop, and the checkout process. 

So now you see that the Facebook ads optimization techniques everyone talks about are not really super secret recipes to fix everything in one go. They’re more of a test and learning process that always starts with choosing the right strategist, continues with lots of patience and ends with excellent results.