5 Facebook Advertising Tips I Wish I Had Known

I’ve been working on Facebook Ads for a few years now. Looking back I wish someone had provided me with a few tips to make the learning process a little easier and my ads more profitable. Here are 5 tips I would have found the most useful.

1. Stale Content Gets Expensive
   

   Imagine you create an awesome ad. The image is beautiful and the ad is bringing in new traffic to your site and increasing your likes. Kudos. Eventually, however, you will notice your cost per action creep up as reach decreases. Why? Well, Facebook users may have loved your ad originally but now they’ve seen it and they’re over it. As less people interact with your ad Facebook will charge you more to show it and actually decrease its visibility. After all, they want to make money.

   So, what can you do? The quickest solution is to change your targeting so new people see your ad. If your ad is set to target website visitors only then set up a lookalike audience so new people will interact with your ad. The other obvious solution is to change the ad itself. A new image can draw in people that didn’t respond to the original ad. The key here is experiment! The great thing about Facebook is you don’t have to check it every day but check in at least weekly to keep an eye on your costs.

2. Put Facebook’s Pixel On Your Site ASAP
   

   I think everyone can agree that Facebook’s greatest feature is it’s ability to target specific users. The most important target and “lowest hanging fruit” is people that have been to your website. I made the mistake of waiting until I was ready to start my first Facebook campaign to place the pixel on my site. Placing the pixel on your site is free – Facebook does not charge you until it starts showing your ads. The pixel is great for 2 reasons: 1. It lets Facebook find the people that have been on your site, and 2. you can use this to create a lookalike audience. Lookalike audience is by far my favorite feature because it allows Facebook to find people similar to users that have been to your website, visited certain pages on your site, and converted on your site. Amazing. Simply amazing.

   The great news if you can place the pixel on your site using Google Tag Manager.

3. Upload Your Newsletter Subscribers
   

   I was thrilled when I learned about this feature. If you have a large newsletter subscriber list then it is worth the effort to export all those email addresses into a csv file and upload them into Facebook. You can create wonderful ads specifically tailored to your subscribers to promote special VIP promotions or simply to remind users that there is value in opening your newsletters.

   Bonus: After you’ve uploaded your newsletter subscribers you can create a lookalike audience to find potential new subscribers! Again, the targeting on Facebook is wonderful.

4. The Wonder of Power Editor
   

   When local awareness ads first came out I was super excited and quickly created an ad targeting Facebook users within 50 miles of a business I was working on. The problem I quickly realized was that I could only target users by location and nothing else. Ads Manager let’s you use OR targeting but no AND targeting. For instance, you can target users that are either within a 50 mile radius OR users that were interested in your product space. Lame. With power editor, however, you can use AND targeting. Once I figured this out (sometime later) I was able to adjust my local awareness ad in power editor to target users that were within 50 miles of the business location and interested in my product category. Suddenly my ads were now reaching a smaller but more qualified audience than before. If only I had known sooner *doh*.

   Key takeaway: Everyone should take the time to play in Facebook’s Power Editor. Sure, it doesn’t have the prettiest UI and can be a little intimidating but the features in Power Editor can bring your ads to the next level.

5. Put UTM Parameters on everything!
   

   This last one goes out to any newbies to Google Analytics. UTM parameters should be placed on any links you have pointing to your website both on your ads and page. This will let your Marketing Analyst see the amount of traffic that was brought in by a particular ad you created and do some ROI analyses. You can use the URL builder to create a link with UTM parameters for you.

Have any tips you would like to share? Please feel free to comment below.

CPC Tips to Handling “Limited by Budget” – Part 2

So you’ve set up your campaigns and your ad is performing well – then you gasp as you see this warning “Limited by Budget”. What does this mean? What do you do? This is the second installment of tips to deal with a limited budget. Part 1 can be found here.

In part two of this budget-stretching series I will discuss some optimization techniques centered around ad scheduling so you can take control of when your ad shows.

Do you want to show your ads as much as possible? Of course, but are you willing to do this at the risk of burning through your entire budget so your ads only show up until a certain time of day? Go into your Adwords account, click into a limited budget campaign and then click on Settings. Scroll down to where it says “Delivery Method” and you will see that your campaign is either set to standard or accelerated.

Adwords recommends Standard delivery which means your ad will show the entire day but won’t show up for every search query. You will notice this happens if you use the Ad Preview and diagnosis tool or try searching yourself on Google’s search engine and your ad doesn’t show up. The other option, Accelerated makes it so your ad shows up every time possible but the downside is once you’ve meet your daily cap then your ad won’t show again until tomorrow. So which do you choose?

Well if your campaign has been set to accelerated then I suggest getting further insight by going to the Dimensions tab. Once there, click on the View button and select Time > Hour of Day. Click on the Hour of Day column to sort by descending order. From here you can see if your ad made it the whole day or ran out of budget at 4pm for example. If your hour of day goes all the way to 23 then your ad is showing at all hours even with the accelerated method. Great!

If your campaign has been set to standard or you want to optimize your accelerated method then stay on this Hour of Day report and look at the other data in this report. You can see which time of day is resulting the highest Click-through rates (CTRs) and Conversions. Next, click on the View: hour of Day button and click on Time > Day. Now you can see which days of the week are most successful and least successful. Both these Hour and Day reports can be utilized to stretch your budget by telling Google you only want your ads to show when it’s the most beneficial for your business.

Let’s say the Hour of Day report shows high CTRs on Friday between 10pm and midnight but with no conversions. Well, those clicks cost you a pretty penny and lead to no revenue on your website. So let’s tell Google to not show our ads between 10pm and midnight on Fridays. You can do this by going back to the Settings tab and clicking on the “Ad Schedule” button. Below the line chart hit the red “+Ad Schedule” button. From here, you can select the day(s) and times you don’t want your ad to show. So in this example we would select Friday 10pm to 12am.

Now the Friday 10pm to 12am will appear in the table below. Click on the “–” in the Bid Adj. column and put Decrease by 100%. This tells Google that you do not want the ads from this campaign to appear on Friday between 10pm and 12am. Be sure to hit the Save button. Now you will save yourself the money on all those clicks that historically lead to no conversions.

Now let’s say the hour and day reports also showed that Wednesday 8am to 1pm had a great CTR and a high conversion rate. Well, you can follow the same steps as above but here you would change the bid adjustment to increase by whatever percentage you want. 10% is usually a safe place to start and then of course check the data later on and see if you want to increase this percentage even more. This tells Google that you want your ads to show Wednesday from 8am to 1pm more frequently than at other times. This way your ads in this campaign are gaining more exposure at the most profitable times.

Stay tuned for Part 3 in this budget stretching series. If you missed Part 1 you can find it here.

CPC Tips to Handling “Limited by Budget” – Part 1

So you’ve set up your campaigns and your ad is performing well – then you gasp as you see this warning “Limited by Budget”. What does this mean? What do you do?

When building a new campaign a lot of effort is put into finding keywords to get your ads to show up and drive clicks. If you hit your daily budget, however, then your ads will stop showing until the next day (or hour depending on how your campaign is set up). In part one of this budget-stretching series I will discuss negative keywords. Hint: This post will be useful for both text ads and PLAs.

Aside from knowing how many impressions and clicks your ad is receiving it’s good to know what search terms people are using that gets your ad to appear. You can do this by clicking on the “Dimensions” tab and then hitting the “View” button and select “Search terms”. Make sure your time frame is set to a long enough period to account for any anomalies – I usually look at a time frame of 3 months.

Here, you will see all the search terms people used where your text ad or PLA appeared. If you sort by impressions you will probably find search terms that are unrelated to your product or site.

example:
Your site sells custom eye glass frames. The search term report shows your ad appears when people are searching for things like “glasses”, “glasses frames”, “custom glasses”, etc. which is great. Then you notice your ad is also showing when people search for “ABC glasses store hours” and “ABC glasses promo code”. Not only that but people using these ABC related search terms have actually clicked on your ad incorrectly – you know this because there have been no conversions and Google Analytics tells you these users have a 100% bounce rate. Meanwhile, you’ve spent $3 for each person that incorrectly clicked on your ad. 

This is where the beauty of negative keywords comes into play. You can adjust your campaign so that your ad will not show up when people use certain search terms. Click on the “Keywords” tab and then click on “Negative Keywords”. From here, you can hit the “+Keyword” box under Campaign level.

Continuing the example above you could enter “ABC glasses” as a negative keyword. This way when a person search for “ABC glasses store hours” your ad will not show up – saving people from clicking on the wrong ad and more importantly saving you the money on that incorrect click.

The money you save from incorrect clicks can now help stretch your budget so you can reach the traffic you want to reach.

Part 2 of this series can be found here.

It’s Contagious

Working in the start-up sector sort of came upon me by chance. I fell head over heels within a week of living the start-up life and can’t stop myself from getting excited whenever I overhear the mere mention of the word start-up. Is this normal? I hope so. If you have a new business venture out there I hope you’re shouting it from the rooftops. We’re all listening.

Don’t just use Google Analytics…

If you have access to a website’s Google Analytics (GA) then make sure to have the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) also setup. While GA does provide powerful insights it’s lacking when it comes to figuring our what search terms are leading your web traffic as it tells you the most popular search term is “not provided”. GWT fills this void by providing all the search terms that led to your website popping up as a result. Not only that but it tells you which search terms are generating more traffic and which have never lead to any traffic. This is particularly insightful as it lets you rethink your paid advertisements to draw more people into your website. 

To better demonstrate my point let’s say you own a bakery that also carries some vegan goodies. Your GA looks great but when you take a look at GWT you notice your website popped up in 100 searches that used the term “vegan bakery” but none of those lead to anyone clicking on your website. As a result you decide to include an extra few words on your paid advertisement stating you carry vegan items as well. Some time later you recheck your GWT and notice half the people that searched for “vegan bakery” now clicked on your website and that your GA is also up. 

In sum, more traffic = more $$$

What Can You Learn with Web Analytics?

• How people found your website
  – Facebook? Google? Paid ads?
  – Which paid ads are leading to the most visitors
• What people did on your website
  – Did they leave right away?
  – Which pages did they visit?
  – When did they leave and where?
• Who your visitors were
  – Which cities/states/countries they came from
  – Age, gender, interests
  – Is your target demographic being reached?
• Which search terms lead to the most visitors
  – Are you using these terms in your paid ads?
• How many returning visitors your site has
• Play around with site design and see which leads to the best conversion rate

The list goes on and on.

In Conclusion: Practically everything.