• Kill Ad Sets When Spend is 2x More Than Your Target Cost per Purchase
• Pause Your Least Performing Ads
• Kill Ad Sets with Negative ROAS
• Decrease Budget for Specific Days of the Week/ Specific Hours of the Day
• Pause High-Frequency Ads

Automated Rule 1: Kill Ad Sets When Spend is 2x More Than Your Target Cost per Purchase

Scenario: Your ad sets have been running for more than 3 days, the spend is more than 2x your Cost per Purchase (CPP) but there is no sale.

What action should you take? This is a typical scenario which indicates that your ad sets are underperforming and you need to take control of your ad spend. Why? Because 3 days is enough time for an advertiser to make a decision about ad performance while the spend is enough for Facebook to optimize the performance. So if you make no sales after these conditions are met, just kill the underperforming ad sets.

Let’s suppose your estimated product Cost per Purchase is $10. Therefore, if the spend exceeds $20 after 3 days, you tell Facebook to shut off the ad set. Here’s what  this rule will look like in Adscook:

Pause (Adset) if 
Spend Last 3 days > 2x Cost Per Purchase Last 3 days
And
Purchase Last 3 days  < 1     

Note that you need to switch to Dynamic function to implement this comparison metric on Adscook. This is just another standout feature in Adscook that will allow you to set conditions not only against fixed prices but also based on the trends.

Eager to test it out? Sign up now for a 30-day Adscook free trial and automate your smartest strategies.

Automated Rule 2: Pause Your Least Performing Ads

Scenario: You’re running a Facebook birthday discount campaign for your Ecom store. You target all people in New York with upcoming birthdays and test out 3 offers: “Buy one, get One Free” vs “Get 25% Discount” vs “Get a Product with free shipping”. If you’re also testing out different creatives for each offer, it can become messy and time-consuming to identify which of your ads are throwing your money down the drain. If you identify your losers on time, there is either a room for improvement or a chance to cut down expenses.

What action should you take? Good news is that you can set Facebook Automated Rules to check the performance of your ad variations 24/7. The rule then identifies the losers and takes automated action – for example, pauses them on schedule or decreases bid . On Adscook we’ve developed a unique Ranking condition based on relative metrics. It allows you to apply the rule to a portion of bottom performers. 

To apply this rule, select the action Pause or Decrease Bid By on the ad level. While defining conditions, switch to Relative function and set ROAS (last 3 days) is within 20 % Lowest. What does it mean? If you’re running, say, 5 ad variations, the condition calculates and ranks 1 ad out of 5 as the lowest performer (20% of 5) and pauses it automatically.

Here’s what this rule will look like in Adscook:

Pause (Ad) if 
ROAS 3 days is within 20 Lowest % 
And
Purchase Last 3 days  < 1     

Automated Rule 3: Kill Ad Sets with Negative ROAS

Scenario: Your retail store Facebook ads are running for 3 days already. While monitoring your ads you see that your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) isn’t breaking even or, worse still, is falling below the acceptable ROAS for 3 days in a row. You might be generating some sales, but what’s the point if you’re not generating revenue and are therefore draining your budget?

What action should you take? Before even taking any action, you should first define what the acceptable ROAS is for your product, in other words what’s your negative ROAS.

The formula for calculating ROAS is quite simple: Revenue / Cost = ROAS. Let’s assume your Facebook advertising spend is $1000/month. You decide that you will hit your acceptable ROAS only if you gain twice as much as you spend. In this case, your revenue should be at least $2000 to reach your goal and continue running the ad. This means your acceptable ROAS is 2000/1000 = 2 or 1:2, which means that for every dollar spent, you gain 2 dollars.

Now that you know what your acceptable ROAS is, it’s easier to take control of your ad spend. Before taking extreme measures and shutting off your ad sets, you can still take some steps to optimize your ROAS. For example, you can adjust your targeting strategy, improve your conversion landing page, or test other creatives.

However, if you’re still not hitting your acceptable ROAS, simply pause the underperforming  ad sets. We’ve integrated this proven strategy right into the Adscook rule creation process. With a few simple steps you can connect your ad account(s), select campaigns and assign this ready-made rule right away. Sign up for a free Adscook trial and try it for yourself.

 Pause (Adset) if
 Spend Last 3 days > 50 Last 3 days
 And
 ROAS Last 3 days  < 2    

Automated Rule 4: Decrease Budget for Specific Days of the Week/ Specific Hours of the Day

Scenario: Say you’re running a lunch delivery service and your ads are likely to drop in performance on weekends. You would like to keep them running on weekends just for some exceptional cases while also ensuring you don’t drain your budget.

What action should you take? The best action is to decrease your daily budget by a certain percentage every Saturday at 10am, then reset every Monday 10am. This action can successfully  be automated, thus eliminating the manual work you would otherwise have to do every Friday.

To automate this workflow on Adscook, you should choose the action Decrease Budget by, for example by 20%. If you want the rule to apply to a specific ad set, define the condition by ad set name. If you’d like to apply it to all running ad sets, set the condition Spend (Last 7 days) > 1 or Impressions (Last 7 days) > 1000 – anything that’s likely to apply to any of your ad sets, that’s up to you.

Go ahead and in the Schedule section enable Custom rule checking. Select Saturday 10AM and that’s it.

Now the rule will automatically decrease the daily budget of your ad sets by 20% every Saturday morning while you can enjoy your weekend without needing to worry about your ad performance.

Now to reboot your ad sets on Monday, you should create another rule. This time apply the reverse action Increase Budget by 20% and setting a custom schedule Monday 10 AM.

In the same way, you can take control of your ad spend for specific hours of the day when your ads are underperforming.

Pro tip: In case of decreasing budget or pausing ads for specific hours every day, there’s an option in Adscook to auto-reset right in the same rule.

Automated Rule 5: Pause High-Frequency Ads

Scenario: You are running multiple ads and it’s becoming time-consuming to manually check the frequency score of each ad and take relevant actions

What action should you take? Ideally you would like to keep your ad frequency as low as possible to maintain a high conversion rate. As you know, ad frequency metric shows the average number of times each unique user sees your advert. As the frequency increases, the CTR decreases and the CPA increases accordingly, which leads to underperforming ad sets.

For example, if your ad frequency is 3, this means that a unique user has seen your ad 3 times on average and still has not taken any action. So they are either not interested in your offer or are really annoyed with seeing the same ad so many times. In such cases you should always be ready to act when frequency increases in order for your ads to not blow your budget.

A study by SocialMediaToday shows that the recommended frequency is 1.8 – 4 for optimum ad performance. A frequency greater than 4 is therefore a warning sign that your ad performance may be decreasing.

You can combat ad fatigue in many ways, for example by refreshing creatives, expanding target audiences or varying the wording. So you might consider pausing your high-frequency ads to readjust them later. Luckily you can automate this action and control your ad frequency 24/7.

To apply this rule in Adscook, select the action Pause and set the condition Frequency to be greater than 3. But with frequency metric alone, you can’t be sure your ads are underperforming as the ideal frequency differs from business to business. That’s why we’ll combine this metric with the Cost per Purchase metric. If your target CPP increases along with frequency, this is a clear sign that frequency is leading to underperformance.

Here’s what that rule will look like in Adscook:

Pause (Ad) if 
Impressions Last 3 days > 8000
And
Frequency Last 3 days > 3
And
Cost Per Purchase Last 3 Days > $10  

Now It’s Your Turn … 

Facebook ads are not set and forget! You should always keep your finger on the pulse to identify when your budget is blown and reduce your costs.

As a human being you can’t do it 24/7. Instead you can set up smart Facebook Automated Rules to do it for you. We’re not claiming that once you apply automated rules you’re free from checking your ads daily. You still need to scale your ads, regularly refresh your creatives, etc.. However you’ll be at peace that you’re not spending your budget on ads that don’t work.

The strategies we’ve shared above are just a few ways you can manage your ad spend. We welcome you to create your own Facebook automated rules today right in Adscook. Get started for free today!

The post 5 Facebook Automated Rules to Control Your Ad Spend 24/7 appeared first on Adscook Blog.

Case in point, if you’re a local book shop that used to spend GBP 50 to get 5 sales, it might now only get you 2 because of the lack of data to personalize the ads.

Yes. That’s a 250% increase in ad spend to get the same number of sales. And that really hurts.

Why did this happen?

“Only 13% of users let applications track their activity”. This is the result of the first two weeks of App Tracking Transparency according to Flurry Analytics.

Because of this, Custom Audience sizes are shrinking and the budget you used to allot for Facebook retargeting will no longer give you the same results.

It’s not reasonable for you to keep adjusting your budget for Facebook retargeting ads after iOS 14. Nor is it sustainable to spend thousands more because Apple brought down the hammer.

The good news is that Facebook ads retargeting is not dead. You can adjust your retargeting strategies to lessen the iOS 14 impact on your business.

Here are 7 adjustments you should make for your retargeting ads to perform as close as possible to pre-iOS 14 levels.

• #1. Make Website-Based Custom Audiences Larger and Broader
• #2. Create Custom Audiences Based on Facebook Sources
• #3. ​​Consolidate Your Retargeting into One or Two Ad Sets
• #4. Use Facebook Conversion API
• #5. Start Testing with Objectives Other Than Conversions
• #6. Run More Lead Magnet Campaigns To Collect First-Party Data
• #7. Retarget on Other Platforms and Channels

#1. Make Website-Based Custom Audiences Larger and Broader

You most likely relied on page-specific Facebook retargeting and a 2 to 4-week retention window prior to iOS 14. If you do this today, iOS 14 will most likely direct it to fewer people because: 1) specific pages usually have fewer visits (your homepage receives 50% of your traffic), and 2) a lot of your visitors may have opted out of being tracked.

What you can do now is widen the scope of your audience by retargeting people who have visited any of your website pages. Plus, extend the retention window to track all website visitors over 180 days instead of 14 or 30 days that was best performing in the past.

For now, a broader custom audience with a larger retention window should give better results as with larger audience pool Facebook now finds more opportunities. This does not completely fix the damage iOS 14 has caused, but it can improve your chances of reaching more people who have interacted with your business before.

Another downside is this. It might feel like you’re advertising in a Bird Box universe where you’re now trying to appeal to a broader and more generic audience. Don’t worry, you can make your messaging more inclusive (we’ll talk about this in detail later in this post).

#2. Create Custom Audiences Based on Facebook Sources

The custom audiences created from website visitors and app activities were the best performing before the iOS 14 update. However, marketers can no longer completely rely on custom audiences created from these sources as the pixel is becoming more and more unreliable. 

So what should you do? 

Keep using these custom audience sources as they are warm and they are the most likely to buy your product or service.  

But you also need to start using audiences that are generated “in-app”. This means targeting people based on the actions they’ve performed inside the Facebook app or the Facebook website, inside Instagram or WhatsApp. 

Although some of these sources are not that warm, they’re not dependable on the pixel and that makes them precious in this post-iOS 14 world.

Here are some effective ones that are worth testing:

• Video View Custom Audiences 
• Lead Form Custom Audiences 
• Instagram Account Custom Audiences 
• Facebook Page Custom Audience 
• Instant Experience Custom Audiences
• Shopping Custom Audiences

Let’s look at them separately!

Video Engagement Custom Audiences

If you’re running video ads and already have a successful video ad campaign, you can use your video engagement as a source for a custom audience. 

There are many windows to peek through here, but these are the smartest to target because they have the most optimal engagement: 

• People who have watched 25% of your video (if your video is longer, say more than 5 minutes)
• People who have watched 50% of your video (if your video is shorter, 2-5 minutes)
• People who have watched 75% of your video (if your video is under 1 minute)

Do take note that the long time frame with the higher time spent on the videos seems to be a sweet spot, so pick your retention for 365 days.

Lead Form Custom Audiences

If you are running lead generation campaigns directly on Facebook, that’s a great opportunity to create a custom audience from people who’ve interacted with your lead form. 

This source only records audiences who engaged with your Facebook Lead Ad for the past 90 days.

If you have a large-sized audience that has interacted with your form, you have the choice to segment them into:

• Anyone who opened this form

This audience is a broad one, so you can’t really customize your ads to be hyper-specific. However, in most cases, it’s the most optimal to choose, since it generates the largest audience for Facebook to work with. So make sure you’re launching a benefit-driven ad that can hook those who come across it. 

• People who opened but didn’t submit forms

Look at this in an online shopping context. This audience are similar to people who have abandoned their cart. So, appeal to them in a way that draws them to make that lead form submission. Create a more specific ad to filter out others who submitted and opened the form. 

• People who opened and submitted forms

This setting already involves the hottest leads. Use it to close the deal. Create an ad that will lead them towards the sale.

Segmenting your ads can greatly appeal to your specific audience more accurately. But it is still best to choose the “Anyone who opened the form” segment as it will give you a larger audience to work with.

Instagram Account Custom Audiences

Did you know that an estimated 71% of U.S businesses claim to use Instagram for Business because, well, Instagram helps 80% of users decide whether to buy a product or service.

So if you also have an active Instagram business account with a decent follower base and engagement rate, you can create a custom audience using this source and retarget them with the bottom of the funnel ads.

To tap these Instagram users, select the correct option to target. 
The best route to go is “Everyone who engaged with your professional account.” That way, you can hook all those who visited your account, liked a post, commented on a post, or saved at least one of your posts.

Facebook Page Custom Audience

If your Facebook page has a good number of followers and your posts are regularly getting engagements, you can use that audience for retargeting campaigns.

You can choose from:

• Everyone who engaged with your Page
• Anyone who visited your Page
• People who engaged with any post or ad

These 3 ways provide you the opportunity to specifically cater according to people’s preferences, even when the audience is still pretty wide.

Now, given those options, you may want to choose “Everyone who engaged with your Page” as it results in a larger audience, whereas segmenting will result in a narrower audience pool.

Instant Experience Custom Audiences

Some ad formats like Instant Experience ads (which were previously underrated) can now steal the scene post iOS 14 update. 

We can look at Instant Experiences as a built-in landing page inside the Facebook platform. It appears as a regular image ad, but when a user taps on it, a mini landing page pops up with different varieties of images, videos, carousel ads, and the likes. 

This ad format drives lots of engagement, especially for eCommerce businesses. There are tons of interactions people can take on these ads without ever leaving Facebook. They can swipe, click, pan, and more. Of course, you have the option to add a website link as well. 

This gives you a great chance to create a custom audience from these interactions and retarget them further down the funnel — and the iOS 14 update doesn’t affect this as you’re not reliant on the pixel data. 

The best option for a custom audience will be to choose “People who opened this Instant Experience” and set a retention window 365 days.

So if you haven’t included this ad format into your media mix, start exploring it. You may find some hidden gems especially if you are running an online shop.

Shopping Custom Audiences

Facebook introduced Shops in 2020 to give small business owners the option to run a full-featured online shop on its platform.

When you use Shops, you can build a custom audience for retargeting based on:

• People who viewed products
• People who viewed products and navigated to the website
• People who saved products
• People who viewed the Shops page
• People who viewed Shops collection

And if your country supports Checkout, you can use these as well:

• People who added any products to their cart
• People who initiated checkout for any products
• People who purchased any products

Choose “People who viewed products” to get the largest audience size possible and set retention to the maximum of 365 days.

#3. ​​Consolidate Your Retargeting into One or Two Ad Sets

Before iOS 14, segmenting out retargeting audiences was effective. You would usually sort your audience into: 

• those who visited your website,
• those who visited specific pages, 
• prospects who added to cart, 
• prospects who initiated a checkout 
• and more.

Why was this effective? Because before the iOS 14 update, every single user was being tracked, so every segment had a decent audience pool. This gave the advertisers an opportunity to craft separate offers for every segment with its own messaging and creatives.  

After iOS 14, Facebook ads have blurred this out — differentiating these segments now is a waste of time and effort. According to Facebook, running too many ad sets at this point poses the danger of reaching fewer people. 

Thus, it is best to reduce the number of your ad sets as the size of your target audiences is also reduced. Combine your audiences into fewer ad sets to increase your odds of having a higher reach.

So instead of giving too much thought to your retargeting audience structure and messaging, invest more in creative testing for the prospecting. That is unless you have a higher consideration product that needs more thoughtful messaging and targeting. 

#4. Use Facebook Conversion API

Pre-iOS 14, the Facebook Pixel alone was enough to track visitors, even if some browsers were using ad and cookie blockers. The Server Side API (now Conversion API) was always there to capture the data that browser tracking might have missed, but having it set up was not so critical in the past. Things are not the same anymore.

Apple has blocked tracking and cookies by default. On top of that, browsers like Firefox block cookies and tracking by default as well. It’s even rumored that Google Chrome may adopt this sometime soon. Either way, this means users have to disable this browser feature on their own if they want to be tracked.

That said, in this situation when the Facebook pixel is becoming less and less reliable, the best option now is to also make use of the Facebook Conversion API. This allows you to send your web events from your server directly to Facebook (as opposed to the pixel which relies on your browser).

Through it, you can track your customers’ actions directly from the ad server to Facebook, which will give you more accurate data. Plus, it ensures that more of your conversion events get matched by Facebook. So in the future when more browsers block tracking, you will be on the safer side.

If you are using an eCommerce platform like Shopify, WooCommerce, or another Facebook partner, setting up a Conversion API will be done through integrations.

But if you want to set up a direct integration with Conversion API to have full control over your server, you may need a developer.

Need any help to handle it? We are always here to assist. You can contact industry experts who will hear your custom needs and help you set up Conversion API for you. 

#5. Start Testing with Objectives Other Than Conversions

When we did retargeting campaigns for the bottom of the funnel pre-iOS 14, we’d run Facebook ads with a Conversion objective and optimize for purchase.

However, now that our retargeting audience is smaller, running a Facebook ad with a Conversion objective would only mean that your ads will stop delivering sooner than expected. Ironically, in spite of its name, this could potentially cause your conversion rates to decrease. 

So, instead of using the Conversion objective, choose the Reach objective and set the frequency to 1 impression per person per day, especially if you have a small audience to retarget. This will allow Facebook to deliver your ads to every person in your audience.

(In contrast, if you choose the Conversion objective, Facebook will select only those who are most likely to take a conversion event, which significantly cuts down the audience you can reach.)

Choosing the Reach objective helps you overcome some of the ad delivery issues associated with the Conversion objective. 

You may not instantly see sales, but you could probably see more comments, receive more messages, or get more people to opt in. Take it from there and do the extra work to move them towards the sale.

See which objective would tickle them best. There’s definitely additional work in between, but this is more worth it than wasting your budget on ineffective ads. 

Besides, you can always optimize the campaign once you tackle a larger audience set after finding the campaign objectives that work for you.

#6. Run More Lead Magnet Campaigns To Collect First-Party Data

Pre iOS 14, almost everyone relied on third-party data like data collected by Facebook pixel, Instagram, or whatever app that you don’t own. 

What is third-party data?

Third-party data is any information you gather but not own. For instance, you don’t own Facebook. Therefore, even though you’re using the data gathered by Facebook Pixels, it’s still considered third-party data.

Now, Apple restricts 3rd-party data collection. Plus, your customers have the power to deny your access to this info. So, relying on these 3rd party data is not as effective anymore. 

You have to start collecting first-party data to be safe.

First-party data is something that you fully own. For instance, when you put an opt-in page on your website, the names, email addresses, and other information you get there are yours. You collect that data directly from your own sources and that’s what makes them first-party data. 

So now after the iOS 14 update, running lead magnet campaigns has become way more valuable. Even if your leads have opted out of tracking, you can still upload their data back into Facebook, and Facebook will match them by their profiles. Customer list custom audience is a great source to build retargeting or lookalike audiences from. 

But take note that Facebook needs an audience of at least 500 people to do so.

You can upload your email list either manually or better yet, if you are using such Email Service Providers like ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp, they can automatically sync your lists directly to the Facebook Customer List custom audience. This way, you can quickly retarget leads as they opt into your email list.

Contrary to third-party data, first-party data is something that you fully own and can control, making it a more dependable method for retargeting.

#7. Retarget on Other Platforms and Channels

Facebook retargeting campaigns were a separate strategy pre iOS 14, largely independent of marketing on other platforms. 

Now, as a Facebook advertiser in the post iOS 14 era, you should start exploring other platforms and channels.

Remember, Facebook isn’t the only platform you can use to sell. Your audience is still enjoying other platforms—nudge them there too. 

Here are some other channels that are worth exploring to retarget your valuable users:

• Send them a reminder or nurture emails (yes, email is a good channel to stay in touch)
• Showcase your new products as Google Ads so they see it when they’re browsing web pages
• Retarget shoppers with personalized video ads on TikTok, Instagram, or Pinterest
• Post on your social media pages to reach your followers and their network
• Fire up chatbots on your website so you can talk to your prospects the next time they visit 

To Sum Up …

Nowadays, buyers are getting smarter. Retargeting that worked before no longer does now, especially when it comes to Facebook advertising. But we can adjust our ways to make the most of our campaigns. 

Again, here’s the summary:

Hopefully, these strategies would help you bounce back from all the new ad policies. You have to be creative, resourceful, and smarter so you can still make Facebook retargeting as profitable as you had in the past years.

The post Facebook Retargeting After iOS 14: How To Adjust Your Strategies appeared first on Adscook Blog.

Also known as App Tracking Transparency, Apple announced ATT framework in June 2020. However the rollout was delayed until April 2021 to give developers more time to prepare. Well, it’s already here and not as scary as you might think. 

ATT aims to protect Apple users from being tracked without their permission. In this regard, the Apple Store now requires all mobile apps to show prompts to the iOS 14 users. These prompts ask whether they want to opt in or opt out from tracking across apps and websites. 

Users can’t bypass or avoid the opt-in/opt-out prompt. So now, Facebook or other apps can track the iOS users’ behavior only if they opt in and express consent. This impacts apps like:

• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Amazon
• TikTok
• And more

“Only 12% of users let applications track their activity”. This is the result of the first two weeks of the App Tracking Transparency reported by Flurry Analytics.This means marketers lose access to the most users’ Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA). Instead, data groups together to hide individual identities. This has a direct impact on three main things:

1. Reporting conversions: Some conversions are no longer counted.
2. Optimization: It’s more difficult to identify people likely to complete the desired action.
3. Targeting: Marketers can’t target or exclude iOS 14 users who opted out.

And this is huge for Facebook advertisers because:

• 98% of active Facebook users across the globe are mobile users. And 81.8% of active Facebook users only use their mobile devices to access FB. They use the app, not the website
• 26% of mobile users are Apple iOS users. They use iPhones or iPads
• 83% of iOS users opt-out of tracking
• This means marketers lose close to 21% of conversion data

So let’s get into the details about how the iOS 14 update affected Facebook advertising. Plus, explore quick fixes advertisers should make to mitigate the impact.

1. iOS 14 and Facebook Ads: Reporting

• Tracking Pixel Events
• Breakdowns
• Reporting Delays
• Attribution windows

2. iOS 14 and Facebook Ads: Optimization

• Optimization events

3. iOS 14 and Facebook Ads: Targeting

• Custom audiences

iOS 14 and Facebook Ads: Reporting

Tracking Pixel events

What changed: iOS 14 Users

You  are now allowed to track up to 8 conversion events per domain as opposed to unlimited events in the past. This limitation is due to Aggregated Event Measurement, a new protocol that Facebook released as a response to Apple privacy update. The protocol aims to help advertisers still run effective campaigns while also complying to user privacy forced by Apple.

This means that if someone opts out of iOS 14 tracking, you can still collect some conversion data. But it’s aggregated and none of the data links to an individual user’s action. Instead, all the data groups together for privacy.

Facebook initially assigns these 8 events it believes matter most to your business based on the conversion data. But advertisers also have the option to:

• Select pixel events on their own
• Prioritize conversion events 
• Re-prioritize once every 72 hours

To do this, visit the Facebook Ads Manager >> Aggregated Event Management.

Why is this prioritization so important?  If an opted-out user takes multiple actions in one conversion window, Facebook only reports the “top” event. So when a user triggers more than one conversion event, you’ll see the one that’s highest on your priority list.

Here’s an example:

• Susan clicks on your Facebook ad for winter boots
• She then Adds to Cart
• And she purchases the boots as a result

Because Purchase trumps Add to Cart, you will only see the top event. In this case, it’d be Purchase.

In a different scenario, if the user doesn’t purchase, Facebook will report on the next most important conversion event in the ranking list. 

Keep in mind that in this regard, all of your other events may report numbers that are lower than anticipated. This is true even if they are within your top eight. So for this reason, expect to see inaccurate or incomplete data in Events Manager reporting.

This of course creates a huge gap in the buyer’s journey and may disrupt your advertising strategy overall. 

Pro Tip: If there’s big timing difference  between conversion events, you might still see each event.

When it comes to opt-in iOS 14 users, all 8 events will be returned regardless of the prioritization.

Whether or not an iOS 14 user is opted in or opted out, you can deliver optimized ads for one of your eight prioritized events.

But if you want to optimize your ads for a non-prioritized event, you’ll have limited delivery and limited reporting. These types of ads only deliver to users who opted-in to tracking.

Facebook also estimates “missing” iOS 14 web conversion events with statistical modeling. This means all the stats you would have had for iOS 14 users are now replaced with data projections.

If you run an iOS 14 app install campaign, you’re limited to whatever data Apple’s SKAdNetwork API provides. In other words, SKAdNetwork API reports aggregated campaign results to Facebook.

This means all data on the campaign level isn’t linked to an individual. And there are limits on possible insights. But, Facebook may use statistical modeling for app installs. It’s designed to fill in these missing iOS 14 data points.

Either way, now that fewer people opt-in to tracking, there’s not as much data to report. This impacts your ability to retarget, optimize, and customize — more on this in a minute.

What changed: Desktop Users / Non-iOS 14 Users

Nothing for app conversions. The iOS 14 update only impacts Apple devices with iOS 14 or later. So marketers can still access complete conversion data. But only for non-iOS 14 and traditional desktop devices. And there’s an unlimited number of trackable Pixel events.

But the way Facebook web conversion reporting works is different. Web conversion events now report based on the time each conversion takes place. This isn’t how it worked before — which was through associated ad impressions.

When it comes to app install campaigns, you can only choose the 1-day click and 1-day view option for Value or App Events. And some non-iOS 14 app install campaigns are only eligible for the 1-day click and 1-day view option, too.

Quick reference table

What you can do about it

• Use Facebook’s Conversion API (cAPI) to help fill some gaps in reporting. It’s not the end-all-be-all solution. It doesn’t restore tracking for iOS 14 opted-out users. But it helps marketers collect information through their website without using cookies
• Explore web and ad tracking strategies that don’t rely on the Facebook Pixel. Consider using UTM parameters on your site’s URLs. Or invest in third-party software like Wicket Reports, Hyros, and so on
• Clear out unused events and group similar conversion events together
• Keep an eye out for statistical modeling. Facebook may project data based on the “missing” iOS 14 users
• Explore first-party cookie options to track web conversion events
• Research App Tracking Transparency (ATT) rules and regulations about app install tracking. Explore compliant options that use first-party tracking solutions for new or existing apps

Breakdowns

What changed: iOS 14 users

Facebook no longer provides any reporting on delivery or action breakdowns. This means marketers are in the dark when it comes to data like:

• Age
• Gender
• Region
• Ad placement
• Device
• And more

Instead, you’ll only see data for eligible users (i.e. desktop non-iOS 14 users). And there’s a disclaimer stating the data excludes iOS 14 users.

Regardless of whether an iOS 14 user opted-in or opted-out of tracking, there’s no demographic data.

Pro Tip: Now’s the time to invest in cookies on your website that track Facebook data without leaning on the Pixel.

In other words, you can’t access any reporting on the delivery or action breakdowns.

What changed: Desktop Users / Non-iOS 14 Users

It’s business as usual since the iOS 14 update only applies to people who use an Apple mobile device. Other desktop and non-iOS 14 users are in the clear. This means you’ll be able to see things like age, gender, and ad placement.

But there’s a catch. If you want to access breakdowns, your ad sets should only target non-iOS 14 users. So if your ad set includes both iOS 14 and desktop users (or anyone who’s not on iOS 14), you can’t access breakdowns. But if your ad set only includes non-iOS 14 users, you’re good to go.

Quick reference table

What you can do about it

• Integrate with Google Analytics or other quality analytics platforms
• If you already use Google Analytics, make sure to keep it updated
• If you already have server-side tracking, report with this data on demographics instead
• Consider Facebook’s Conversion API (cAPI) for server-side or back-end tracking
• Invest in first-party data collection that’s independent of the Facebook Pixel

Reporting delays

What changed: iOS 14 users

Like desktop and non-iOS 14 reporting, iOS 14 data delays can last up to 3 days. And all data centers on the time of conversion, not the ad impression.

But, regardless of whether a user opted in or out, all the data comes from Apple’s SKAdNetwork API. This means the time conversions you see come from Apple, not Facebook.

What changed: Desktop Users / Non-iOS 14

Facebook no longer supports real-time reporting. Instead, data report delays can last up to 3 days. Also, conversion timestamps aren’t based on ad impressions. Now, reports show the time the conversion took place.

Quick reference table

What you can do about it

• Explore integrations with Apple’s SKAdNetwork API for better or faster reporting options
• Investigate Facebook’s Conversion API (cAPI) for server-side or back-end tracking solutions
• Identify first-party players who collect information without using the Facebook Pixel

Attribution windows

What changed: Desktop Users / Non-iOS 14, and iOS 14

Facebook’s attribution reporting changed across the board. FB merged windows on the account level and ad set level. Together they form a new ad set level attribution setting. You can find this under Optimization & Delivery.

All attribution windows are the same except Facebook scrapped:

• 28-day click
• 28-day view
• 7-day view

Pro Tip: If you have inactive ad sets, you should still be able to see all historical data. This applies even if you used the discontinued attribution window options above.

Here are the windows you can still choose from:

• 1-day click
• 7-day click
• 1-day click and 1-day view
• 7-day click and 1-day view

Note that the 7-day click and 1-day view was the original default setting. Now, the 7-day click option is the default.

There are some attribution window option exceptions. But they’re for app install campaigns. We’ll cover this in a minute.

Quick reference table

What you can do about it

• Keep a close eye on data before it’s cleared each week
• Explore first-party programs to pull data points that are independent of Facebook
• Use the Google Analytics multi-channel reporting tools for attribution
• Explore third-party tools that pull and compare data from several data sources
• Investigate eROAS and eCPA for better reporting

iOS 14 and Facebook Ads: Optimization

Optimization events

What changed: Desktop Users / Non-iOS 14, and iOS 14

As we already know, Facebook limits trackable events to 8 per domain. This is across the board, regardless of device ori OS. Facebook chooses these events for you. But you have the power to reprioritize each event as you see fit in the Ads Manager.

This means marketers have less ability to target users. And thus less ability to optimize per ad level. Here’s an example:

• You have an ad set with two separate events
• One event is Purchase for Product A
• The second event is Purchase for Product B

With the iOS 14 update, you can’t optimize each event above on its own because of the new limitations. Now, you have to pick and choose because there are fewer options.

Plus, the new attribution windows impact optimization, too. Marketers lost iOS 14 users, the 28-day click, and the 28-day view. So now there’s less information to make decisions about future ads.

Quick reference table

What you can do about it

• Track data in the Facebook Ads Manager for events you can’t optimize
• Use any data you can find in the Ads Manager to inform which events you put at the top of the list

iOS 14 and Facebook Ads: Targeting

Custom audiences

What changed: iOS 14 users

If iOS 14 users opted-in, marketers can still retarget them through Custom Audience. This is good news for FB marketers. But the bad news is that iOS 14 users who opted-out are off-limits. The same applies to lookalike audiences that are created from custom audiences.

This means Custom Audience sizes drop across the board as there are fewer people to retarget. In short, all iOS users on Facebook could have been a part of your Custom Audience before. But now, all iOS 14 users who don’t permit tracking aren’t included. Again, there’s less information to work off of. And fewer people to retarget.

What changed: Desktop Users / Non-iOS 14

The Facebook Ads Manager lets marketers create Custom Audience. These are highly defined groups of people on FB who already know your business. Think past customers, app users, or website visitors. And the Custom Audience tool in FB lets you:

Retarget audiences:

Connect with people who’ve converted in the past.

Create lookalike audiences:

Custom audiences serve as one of the sources to create a lookalike audience, a new audience that mimics the audience you already care about. 

Custom Audience is a powerful tool. And luckily it’s business as usual for marketers targeting desktop and non-iOS 14 users. There aren’t any limitations on Custom Audience – nothing’s new here.

Quick reference table

What you can do about it

• Offset Custom Audience shrinkage by making your retargeting audiences bigger
• If you collect email addresses, make use of Customer List custom audience option. Upload your email list to create a new Custom Audience
• Target cold audiences with ads based on interest

Facebook Retargeting After iOS 14: How To Adjust Your Strategies

Final thoughts on the Facebook and iOS 14 update

There’s no doubt the iOS 14 update impacts marketers and businesses. It conceals data, makes retargeting much more difficult, and limits optimization strategies. Here’s what you’ve learned:

• Facebook delays reporting data by up to 3 days
• Conversion and tracking data is either aggregated or completely inaccessible
• Facebook now reports some data pulled from Apple’s SKAdNetwork API
• Marketers and businesses have less access to demographics and breakdowns

It’s a tough transition. And marketers all over the world are scrambling to come up with new ways to target iOS 14 users. To succeed, all you need is the right tools, resources, and solutions.

The post iOS 14 and Facebook Ads: All Issues and Quick Fixes appeared first on Adscook Blog.

What if you could automate your ad management system while still maintaining a healthy ROI? Luckily, it’s possible with Automation Rules! 

In this article we’ll look at what’s essential when using automation rules in the first place. We’ll also show you how Adscook Automation Rules can help you get started or simply change the way you’re currently automating your campaigns. 

Here we go! 

• What are Automated Rules?
• How Automation Rules Will Fit into Your Business
• Get Started with Proven Automation Strategies
• Define Your Own Automation Strategy, Easily

What are Automated Rules?

Here are a few common use cases:

• If you manage multiple client accounts, you always risk draining some of your budget on non-performing ads. It simply happens because you can’t check all your ads 24/7 and stop them on time. Set up an automated rule to pause your ads if their CPA is too high or if ROAS is negative.

• If you have winning ads, you may consider scaling the budget. To ensure the scaling happens consistently and smoothly, set up a rule to increase your budget by certain percent, say 30%, if purchases are increasing or the ROAS is positive.

• If you run ads for a food delivery chain, for example, your audience is likely to purchase more at lunchtime. So to ensure you are not blowing your budget, use automation rules to start your ads before lunchtime and pause them after. 

How Automation Rules Will Fit into Your Business

It really is as amazing as it sounds – you can automate most of your ad management workflows. It saves lots of time and lets you focus more on creative matters. You’ll also save money, because you won’t need to hire additional resources. It also means you can scale more rapidly. All of this makes you a more powerful marketer. 

Although many marketers already apply automation rules to their ads management process, the level of utilization depends on how well they have done their homework. You can set a few rules to automate several simple routine tasks, like pause underperforming ads or set notifications on important changes. But you can go further and automate your whole ad buying strategy. To achieve that, you need a clear understanding of your marketing funnel and Facebook advertising strategy.

Let’s dive a bit deeper.

Define your Facebook ad funnel first

No matter what kind of business you are running, your customers go through a certain journey. The steps they take from visiting your website to purchasing your products, define your marketing funnel. Depending on your business, the number of steps and nature of the funnel are different.

To achieve a higher ROI, a marketer’s task is to optimize each step of the funnel to its maximum. So, we should focus on two main metrics – conversion costs and conversion rates at each funnel step.

Once you have those KPIs defined, it’s a great time to set your automation rules and translate your funnel strategy into a group of conditions.

Here is what you should have in place before automating your campaigns:

• Map out your buyer’s journey and the number of touchpoints that a potential customer interacts with, e.g. product page view – add to cart – purchase – upsell.

• Decide what you offer or communicate at each touchpoint.

• Measure the amount of time that takes the prospect to move up from one stage to the next in the funnel and to ultimately reach the final stage. 

• Define the Key Performance Indicators for each touchpoint, e.g. cost per product view, cost per add to wishlist, cost per add to cart, cost per purchase, cost per upsell/cross sell/re-sell.  

• Calculate the Key Performance Indicators for each milestone, e.g. you may calculate that your maximum cost per purchase is $30.

An example of a Facebook ad funnel for Ecommerce business:

Define your advertising strategy & tactics

Besides using a defined funnel and KPIs, each marketer has their own proven advertising strategy. 

• When do you increase your campaign/ad set budget? 
• How much is the optimal budget raise? 
• When should you consider campaigns as non-profitable? 
• What’s your attribution model?
• Do you increase your bid if your total daily spend is below a certain amount?
• Do you turn off a specific campaign every Friday?

The answers to these questions define your advertising strategy and thus help you automate your campaigns. It’s much smoother and more streamlined than if you start without a strategy in place.

Only after you have a well-established marketing funnel and advertising strategy, you are truly ready to adopt automation rules and run your campaigns on autopilot. 

Get Started with Proven Automation Strategies

If you haven’t run any automation rules so far, creating the first one may seem intimidating. It’s becoming much easier when you apply an already proven strategy and just adjust your KPIs.

Adscook has integrated the most useful set of strategies into the rule creation process. With a few simple steps you can plug your ad accounts, select campaigns and assign predefined rules which will start monitoring your campaigns and ensure your efficient ad spend. To see it in action, join the 30-day trial now.

Here is what you can do with Adscook proven strategies:

• Normalize Delivery for Low Bids
• Pause Negative ROAS
• Scale Best Performers
• Scale Aggressive but Safe
• Activate Late Conversions
• Pause Least Performers

Tip: Not only beginners, but expert advertisers can also find something new among these strategies that will fit into their specific needs.

If you want to learn more on when and how to use these automation strategies, get access to our free Facebook Ads Automation Cheat Sheet here.

Define Your Own Automation Strategy, Easily

While gaining more experience, every Facebook marketer develops their own secret sauce. The strategy may include some very tailored action sequences, like duplicate, increase budget, start before or after midnight etc.

To automate all of your actions, you need very robust automation rules. Adscook’s automation rules module is the most advanced in the market while also having a very simple interface. Start a 30-days free trial now and create your first rule with Adscook.

The rule structure is quite simple. You choose: 

• The campaign level (campaign, adset or ad) that you want your rule to apply to
• The action your rule will take, e.g. increase budget, pause, duplicate etc.
• Specific metrics/conditions that trigger the action, e.g. CPA is greater than $5
• Action frequency, e.g. the rule will check your metrics every 12 hours and take the action.  
• The channel you want to be notified by 

Facebook’s native automation tool, as powerful as it is, is not sophisticated enough to satisfy all business use cases. Besides, it’s not smoothly integrated into Ads Manager which may create some disruption and slow down the processes especially when you are managing tons of ads. 

At Adscook we have taken it upon ourselves to build the easiest interface for the most complex automation strategies and provide you with additional automation options.

Here’s what extra opportunities Adscook automation provides:

• Automate more actions
• Create more complex condition statements
• Act based on the trends
• Easily find winners and losers
• Check more frequently for more accuracy 
• Stay up to date with notifications 

Automate more actions

More actions equals more automation opportunities. Facebook’s native tool supports all the basic actions to turn common optimization strategies into automated rules, like increase/decrease budget or bid, turn off, send notifications, etc. 

But while working with dozens of clients we’ve noticed there are other repetitive actions taken manually to optimize ads or to simply manage workflows. 

Here are some of the additional actions Adscook supports:

Duplicate

There are two main reasons why you would like to duplicate your ad sets or ads – to reuse your successful assets in a new campaign or to scale your winning ad sets by increasing budget. 

On Facebook, you can only duplicate your ads manually by selecting the “Duplicate” option on campaign, ad set or ad level. If you have hundreds of ads, then manual duplication will clearly eat up your time. 

Successfully automate “duplicate” action in Adscook and specify some additional options, like keep your original item as is or pause, leave your original budget or set a new one.  

Delete

We have added the “Delete” action to give you full control over the quantity of your ads and to help you keep your account clean. 

Whether you have a number of non-performing ads that are outdated or you have just reached the maximum number of ads, either way deleting them one by one manually is time-consuming. Simply define the conditions and automatically delete unnecessary ads by bulk, using “Delete” action on Adscook. 

Set Budget

This action helps you manage your budget more effectively. Apart from increasing/decreasing your budget, you will also be able to set an exact amount. Whether you want to set different budgets for your separate ad sets or want all your ad sets to have the equal budget, this action will really come in handy. 

Remove Spending Limits

When you are just starting with CBO, it’s a safety net to set a max spending limit on your ad sets to prevent Facebook from spending more than a specific amount. But when your ad sets start showing great results, spending limits may turn from a safety net into a growth slowdown. On Adscook you can create a rule to remove spending limits automatically when the ad sets show great performance. 

Add to Name

Naming conventions of your campaigns do matter to stay organized and manage your rules more effectively. So, name your campaigns as descriptively as possible. You can easily automate this process by “Add to Name” action.

For example, to tag your best performing ads “Winners”, simply choose the “Add to Name” action, enter the name and set conditions that define your best performers. The rule will look like this: 

Action: Add to Name “Winners” 

Condition: 
Purchase last 3 days > 5 
AND
ROAS last 3 days > 2 

Create more complex condition statements

Here is the part where you get strategic. While defining your rule conditions, you specify the KPIs and metrics that matter most for your strategy. The more room for customization you have, the easier you will be able to automate the most complex strategies.  

As Facebook itself mentions, there is one major limit to its condition statements:

You can add more than one condition to your rule. However, your campaign, ad set or ad must meet all conditions to trigger the rule (supports only AND operator).

This means, that on Facebook:

• You can’t connect your conditions with the OR operator 
• You can’t easily automate your most complex strategies as you don’t have enough flexibility to group or nest your conditions

There is a more feasible and quicker solution. We know that some of the most advanced advertisers among you have faced this limitation on Facebook’s native tool, and this is precisely why we have decided to solve it on the Adscook platform. 

Now you have an option to connect your conditions with the OR operator within a single rule.

For example, you have defined 2 separate conditions that indicate ad sets are draining your budget and you want to pause them if even one of the conditions is met. 

Condition 1: 
Spend (last 3 days) > 50 
AND
Purchase (last 3 days) is 0
 
 OR 

 Condition 2: 
Spend (last 3 days) > 50
AND 
ROAS (last 3 days) < 1  

Instead of creating two separate conditions, then assigning them one by one to the asset, you can create multiple conditions within a single rule and assign to your object. Here is how it looks like on Adscook:

All in all, on Adscook you will have two options – (AND) or (AND), (OR) and (OR) which gives you enough flexibility to play around with any combination of conditions, group them, nest them or do whatever else bakes your cake. Join Adscook now to easily automate your most complex conditions. 

Act Based on the Trends

Analyzing data trends is crucial to optimize your Facebook ad campaigns and keep them healthy. If you don’t have benchmark metrics yet, you need to compare your metrics over time to determine if your KPIs are improving or declining, and only after that act.

Comparison adds context to your data and makes it more meaningful. For example, how do you know if you are having a good CPA this week if you are not comparing it to the CPA of last week?   

You may act differently based on the trends – scale your ads, decrease the budget or shut them off altogether. 

On Ads Manager, to identify trends you usually select the metric you want to compare, then choose the time period, enable the comparison toggle, look at data changes and act based on the results. As you see this may be tedious especially when you have so much on your plate. 

On Adscook you can set up a rule to compare your metrics automatically and take an action based on trends. We have added dynamic conditions to carry it out easily. 

Let’s say, you want to check and pause your adset if the ROAS has declined this month compared to the previous month. You just need to switch to Dynamic conditions, choose the pause action and set the comparison condition. Here is how it will look on Adscook:

Action - Pause
Condition: ROAS this month < 1x ROAS last 30 days
Function - Dynamic   

Easily Find Winners and Losers

If you run Facebook ads without constantly checking your best and worst performers, you are simply wasting your money and effort. 

If you identify your winners, there is even more opportunity to go profitable. If you identify your losers, there is either a room for improvement or a chance to cut down expenses. But finding your winners and losers among dozens of campaigns, ad sets and ads is not as simple. 

You would have to look at key metrics one by one, compare them and take actions accordingly. Facebook’s native automated rules can help you set conditions based on performance, however they lack ranking opportunity. 

On Adscook software you can easily do that by setting ranking conditions based on the relative metrics. It allows you to apply the rule to a portion of selected objects (either top or bottom performers).

Let’s look at an example: 

You have 5 ad sets within a campaign, each having different ROAS:

Ad set 1 - ROAS = 4
Ad set 2 - ROAS = 3
Ad set 3 - ROAS = 2
Ad set 4 - ROAS = 1
Ad set 5 - ROAS = 0

To automatically identify your best performing ad set and scale it, you just need to set up a rule on Adscook to increase the bid of the ad set with ROAS within the top 20%. What does this mean? The condition calculates and ranks 1 ad set out of 5 as the best performing (20% of 5) and increases its bid. Ad set one has the highest ROAS, so it’s your best performer.

What if you change the comparison within the top 40%. In this case the rule will rank Ad set 1 and Ad set 2 as best performers and increase their bids accordingly (40% of 5). 

The same applies to bottom performers. If you set up a rule to decrease the bid of the ad sets with ROAS within the bottom 40% , the rule will rank Ad set 3 and Ad set 4 as the least performers and take action on them. 

Note that if you enable “Include zeros”, Ad set 4 and Ad set 5 will be ranked as the least performers instead. 

Want to see it in action? Join Adscook free for 30 days.

Check More Frequently for More Accuracy

The frequency and schedule of the rule makes a world of difference. 

The more frequently you check your rule conditions, the less chance of missing even the smallest changes. On the other hand, checking and executing rules too frequently may ruin your campaigns. So, it all depends on your campaign type and your strategy. 

That’s why we make it possible on Adscook to check your rules from as little as 15 minutes to 72 hours or set a custom schedule for the rules to run on specific days and at specific times of day.

On Facebook’s native tool, you have an option to set a custom schedule but there are no flexible premade frequency intervals. You have two options: either check your rules continuously (rule runs as often as possible, usually every 30 minutes) or daily (at 12.00 am Pacific Time). 

Stay Up To Date with Notifications

To stay on top of things, you should get real-time notifications of your rule executions or errors. On Adscook you will have an option to get alerts either via email or slack channel. Simply choose the one that best suits you and your team. 

Now It’s Your Turn

Automation is a dream for any busy Facebook advertiser. There’s so much data to track, analyze and use to make meaningful decisions.

Using Adscook’s Automation tool allows you to automate even more of your strategies and workflows. This means less repetitive tasks, more organized work routine, maximized ad results and of course, peace of mind. 

Have you already tried automating your Facebook ad campaigns? What strategies are you using? What’s the automation tool that suits your team best? Feel free to share your experience and thoughts with us in the comments section below and let’s build a better advertising future together. 

The post How to Automate Your Facebook Ads Like a Pro appeared first on Adscook Blog.

Whether you work for an agency or ecommerce brand or run your own business, you constantly seek to improve every step of your Facebook advertising process – from creation to management, analysis and optimization. 

In this article, we will focus on the Facebook campaign creation process and reveal several key practices which will drastically level up the process for you.

Let’s get started! 

1. A/B test like a pro
2. Keep your assets organized
3. Name correctly
   

1. A/B test like a pro

There are two main reasons why you should not ignore A/B testing of your Facebook ads. First, A/B testing saves you money, and second, you gain invaluable knowledge after analyzing each test result. Both are key to becoming an advanced marketer. In addition, it’s almost free, given that you would have spent that budget anyway. 

A/B testing your Facebook ads is a crucial step in drawing meaningful insights and optimizing your campaigns for better performance. Without A/B testing you are flying blind – there is no certainty that the creative you have designed or the audience you have defined will result in higher ROI and resonate better with your offer. 

It’s crucial to differentiate what you are testing. Testing ad copy and testing conversion events are quite different things. Let’s group all possible testing variables under two main areas: Advertiser’s Offer and Facebook Algorithms. 

1. Advertiser’s Offer: by testing ad design, copy, audience age or interests you either test out which of your offered creatives resonates better with your audience or define different types of audiences that you think may work for your ads.   

2. Facebook Algorithms: By testing conversion events, delivery optimization or objectives, you test which Facebook optimization channel works best for your offer.  

Find out more about A/B testing basics in our blog post How to A/B Test Facebook Ads in the Right Way.

So, the main questions remain: how do you define your variants, and how many is the optimum number? You have two choices – either test one parameter at a time or do multivariate testing with multiple parameters. Both options can lead to better results, but there is a time and place for each one. 

Let’s dive deeper. 

A/B with a single variable

Testing one variable at a time is the most commonly used practice in A/B testing, and there is a good reason for this. 

Here are some most common scenarios:

• Creative – compare different creative components like image, media type, text or CTA
• Audience – compare how well your ads are resonating with different audience segments by demographics, interests, locations, etc.
• Delivery Optimization – compare campaign performance with CBO enabled/disabled
• Placements/Platforms – compare placement types when reaching your audience

While it’s worth testing almost every field, this would require unlimited funds. It’s therefore necessary to define the granularity level of the test and group similar variants in one.

By testing group variants against each other, you will identify the winning behavioral pattern rather than a single variable and will find your niche more effectively. A clear example of such a practice is when A/B testing detailed targeting options, i.e. demographics, interests and behaviors.

Let’s assume you have a new watch in your store and want to identify the niche. Your hypothesis is that “smartwatch owners” are more likely to purchase versus those who prefer more “traditional brands”. At this stage you don’t care about specific brands and of course, do not have an unlimited budget to test each item.

So, you want to group “Apple Watch”, “Android Wear” and “Galaxy Wear” etc. lovers and test them versus “Casio”, “Tissot”, “Fossil”, “Swatch” lovers as a second variant.

Ads Manager’s native A/B feature does not support this scenario and you need to create separate audiences/adsets. To facilitate and streamline the process, we have developed “Group and A/B Test” functionality and integrated it into the Adscook campaign creation wizard.  

With a few clicks you can create different groups. Plus you can add complex and/or conditions (not available in the Ads Manager) and include Custom Audiences in this filtering process as well. Join Adscook 30-day free trial to see this in action.

A/B with multiple variables

Test more than one variable at a time and identify the winning combination. While with standard A/B testing you can achieve this only after several successive tests, multivariate testing allows you to test more than one variable simultaneously and find the winning combination much faster. 

Let’s suppose you want to test a product in 4 locations and 5 interests with 2 creative images. In total, you need to create  4 x 5 x 2 = 40 ads (with 4 x 5 = 20 ad sets) and identify which combinations give a better ROAS.

While with Ads Manager you may spend hours to achieve this, you can use third-party Facebook advertising tools like Adscook and create it in a few minutes.

You just need to turn on the toggle “A/B test” for as many variables as you want to add versions either on an adset or ad level. You can control the number of variants to be published and even exclude some of them before publishing.

2. Keep your assets organized

Typically, creating and launching a single Facebook campaign from scratch takes around 10 minutes. If you do it once a month it’s not a big deal at all. But this is not the case with most marketing agencies or brands where hundreds of newer campaigns are published on a daily basis.

Although most advertisers have already set up a process that will automate the procedure, reduce the time spent and exclude human errors, almost all clients we have worked with still had lots of room for improvement.

The most common workflow we were facing was maintaining multilevel sheets for campaigns, adsets and ads. Creative/media assets were being held in Google Drive or other forms of cloud storage with linkage from the sheets. This is not a bad system, but it is far from efficient, especially when you work in a team.

The best way to make campaign creation much easier is by saving reusable components (audiences and creatives) in an organized manner. 

Most advertisers generally use the same audience and creatives over and over again. For example, for the prospecting stage, you may focus heavily on interest-based targeting, thus define several sub-segments in your niche and use the same creative to see which audience resonates best.

Retargeting campaigns mostly involve custom audiences like website visitors, abandoned carts, etc.; either way, you create exactly the same asset every time or modify it slightly.

If there is no asset library, you may rely on your memory or use supportive documents which are difficult to maintain. Facebook’s native Audience Manager, Creative Hub and Media Library together are not so useful. 

So, we have decided to ease the process of creating assets, organizing them and making them efficient. 

Here is what you can do with Adscook:

• Set categorized tags
• Keep assets handy
• Group audience/creative variants
• Save field presets
• Define campaign defaults

Set categorized tags

Set one or multiple tags for the audience/creative to find them easily later. The way you tag your assets mainly depends on your business process. Use several tags to define multiple verticals.

Let’s look at a few examples. 

Say you have created an audience and set 3 tags: “TOF”, “UK” and “Fashion Bags”.

As a result, you can later categorize your audiences by those 3 tags and find all “TOF” audiences or the ones which relate to bags. The possibilities are endless, just make sure to maintain your naming convention. 

Tip: Adscook will automatically suggest existing tags to make sure you don’t make duplicates.

The same applies to creatives. 

Keep assets handy

It’s one thing to successfully save all your significant assets, it’s another thing to access them easily when needed.

So keep your saved items handy. This sounds simple but if you spend more than a few minutes searching for an item, you may end up relying on your own memory and simply creating a new one from scratch. Even a small difference in audience or in ad may result in a drastically different CPA. 

In Adscook, we have integrated saved audiences and ads into the campaign creation process so that you can save and access the assets all from the same place without moving back and forth.

Group audience/creative variants

As well as saving single assets, you can save several variants as one grouped asset. This is especially useful if you are frequently doing A/B testing.  

For example, if you always test 3 versions of an ad copy for a given product, you can save them as a group asset and use it during the creation process. Adscook will automatically launch 3 different ads so you don’t spend more time adding them one by one.

The number on the badge indicates the number of variants saved within the asset.

Save field presets

Sometimes you may need to reuse only some segments of your audience, not the whole defined audience itself.

Spend even less time on the manual creation process by saving any of your field values like locations and interests. For example, if you’ve identified winning cities in the USA and target the same group in every new audience, save this group to reuse it in future campaigns.

Alternatively, copy/paste whole fields from one asset to another and avoid repetitive tasks. 

To save some parts of your audience, you just need to click on “Save as preset” above the field values. Now, every time you set your audience during the campaign creation process, just load, choose the saved preset and move on. 

3. Name Correctly

As a busy Facebook advertiser, you need to be organized. It should take you just a few seconds to glance at your campaigns and figure out how things are going. You should spend just a few more to find any needed campaign or create funnel reports by grouping campaigns in TOF, MOF or BOF.

It seems easy, but if you have lots of items with names like “New Campaign Purchases”, “New Adset” or “Ad1”, the task becomes complicated. You are likely to end up digging into each campaign to find which is where, moving back and forth and losing the thread of what you were looking for initially. 

The solution is simple. You need to apply a consistent naming system to your campaigns/adsets/ads. 

Staying organized is even more crucial when you work in a team. The time you take now will save you time later during task handovers, reporting analysis and campaign management.

Let’s check a few of the most common best practices for applying a consistent naming system across all levels of your Facebook ads – campaign, adset and ad.

Campaign Name

The ideal campaign name will include the following qualifiers:

• Client Name
• Page Name
• Campaign Objective
• Item Promoted
• Current date
• CBO (if you have enabled CBO)
• Funnel Stage  

You may choose one or a combination of 2-3 qualifiers depending on what factors are key at the moment in your strategy. 

The result will look something like this (you’d replace each qualifier with corresponding data): [Client Name] – [Page Name] – [Item Promoted] – [Objective]

Adset Name

You need to set more parameters on the adset level, so expect your adset naming to be longer and more descriptive. 

Parameters you can use at the adset level:

• Audience type – saved audience, custom audience or lookalike audience
• Audience targeting details
• Placement 
• Budget – daily/lifetime
• Bidding type
• Optimization 
• Pixel event 
• Pricing

An example would look something like this (you’d replace each qualifier):

 [Audience Targeted] – [Daily/Lifetime Budget] – [Placement] – [Optimization] – [Pricing] – [Other Variations]

Note that it’s not essential to use all the parameters when describing your ad sets if that parameter is not a key differentiating factor. For example, if you always run your campaigns on all placements, you don’t need to mention this parameter in the naming every time. 

Ad Name

The best qualifiers to effectively name your ads: 

• Existing post/new ad
• Ad type (image, video, collection, carousel)
• Ad copy/design details 
• CTA button

An example would look something like this (you’d replace each qualifier):

[Existing Post/New Ad] – [Ad Type] –  [Copy/Design Details] – [CTA Button] – [other variations]

Now that you know how to name your campaigns properly, let’s automate the naming process by using dynamic macros. You can do this directly in Facebook Ads Manager or, if you need more options and flexibility, give a try to Adscook.

Get more organized with Adscook Dynamic Macros

With Adscook, you can set any possible parameter for naming on a campaign, adset or ad level: this is more than Facebook provides. 

Plus you can set ad account level templating to differentiate campaign naming in different accounts. This is especially handy for agencies that work with different clients who already have established naming conventions. So, set an ad account level template and forget about time-consuming manual naming. Try it with Adscook now.

With Adscook macros, you can also generate campaign-specific tracking URLs and always have organized views in Google Analytics or other external analytics tools.  

When creating your campaign, you will have the option to automatically name your campaign/adset/ad. It’s as simple as that: just type # and choose from the variables suggested on each level. These variables will be converted to texts after publishing.

For example, if you set your campaign name as #objective #locations, it will be converted to “Conversions USA|AUS|UK|CA” after publishing. 

To set naming templates on the account level, you just need to select the ad account, click on settings and add the relevant variables on all three levels.

Now it’s your turn

I hope these tips were useful and have inspired you to improve your campaign creation process.

Start as you mean to go on: the right creation establishes a strong foundation for your ads which will later lead to easier management and faster scaling. If you want to make the most of these tips, sign up now and try Adscook free for 30 days. 

If you already have your effective campaign creation system in place, share your experience with us in the comments section below and let’s build a better advertising future together.

The post Create More Efficient Facebook Ad Campaigns in Less Time appeared first on Adscook Blog.

Facebook Ad Objectives define the actions you, as an advertiser, want people to take after they see your ad. For example, if your advertising objective is engagement, you literally tell Facebook that you expect people to engage with your ad, while if your objective is conversions, you let Facebook know that the ad is intended to generate sales or leads. 

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Depending on what objective you choose, your ad’s delivery optimization options and ad formats will change accordingly. 

As of now, Facebook offers 11 objectives. They are not created equal and are categorized according to the stages in the buyer journey. 

So, before you even go about choosing your objective, you should consider your business goals. Here are 3 broad business goals or stages in the buyer journey that advertising objectives fall under:

Awareness – objectives that spread the word about your business or brand, create interest among people, and attract them to your business. 

Consideration – objectives that get people to take an interest in your product or service and prompt them to find more information about it. 

Conversion – objectives that encourage the interested people to buy or use your product or service. 

Below you’ll find all the objectives categorized by Awareness, Consideration and Conversion business goals, what each one is meant for and what optimization options and ad formats are available for each objective. 

1. Brand Awareness
2. Reach
3. Traffic
4. Engagement
5. App Installs
6. Video Views
7. Lead Generation
8. Messages
9. Conversions
10. Catalogue Sales
11. Store Traffic

Awareness

Brand Awareness

Increase people’s awareness of your business, brand, or service.

When to use the Brand Awareness objective? The brand awareness Facebook ad objective is ideal when you want to introduce your brand to a broad audience, inform them and keep your brand in the forefront of people’s attention.

You don’t expect people to engage with your brand or take any action. Facebook will show your ads to people who are more likely to recall your brand if they are asked about it within two days of seeing your ad. This objective works better for big brands who want to make a name for themselves, so you’ll need broad audiences and a big budget.

Optimization for ad delivery  

• Ad recall lift

When you get charged 

• Impression

Available Ad Formats 

• Carousel
• Single image 
• Single video
• Slideshow
• Instant Experience

Reach

Show your ad to as many people as possible in your target audience.

When to use the Reach objective? You should choose this objective if you are wishing to reach the maximum number of people within your audience. You can primarily use the Reach objective to create brand awareness – in this case, you will require a big budget and broad audiences to reach as many people as possible. Also consider using this objective for small hot audiences where it’s essential to reach every single person within that small audience. 

Optimization for ad delivery

• Reach 
• Impressions 

When you get charged 

• Impression

Ad formats 

• Carousel
• Single image 
• Single video 
• Slideshow
• Instant Experience

Consideration

Traffic 

Drive people from Facebook to any URL you choose, such as your website’s landing page, a blog post, or app.

When to use the Traffic objective? Use the Traffic objective to send people from Facebook to your website, app, or Messenger and Whatsapp conversations. You’ll be prompted to select one of these destination options on the ad set level.

As the name suggests, this objective is suitable if you wish to increase your traffic to later run more targeted remarketing campaigns. It is therefore an ideal option to promote your blog posts, landing pages, and other educational content.

Optimization for ad delivery

• Landing page views 
• Link clicks 
• Daily unique reach 
• Impressions 

When you get charged 

• Impression
• Link Click (CPC)

Ad formats 

• Carousel
• Single image 
• Single video
• Slideshow
• Collection
• Instant Experience

Engagement

Get more people to see and engage with your post or page. Engagement can include comments, shares, likes, event responses, and offer claims.

When to use the Engagement objective? The Engagement objective has several subcategories. You will be prompted to choose the specific engagement type: 

• Post engagement
• Page likes
• Event responses

Use the Post Engagement objective to get likes, comments, and shares on your posts without sending people away from Facebook. 

Use the Page Likes objective to drive likes to your Facebook page. Remember, however, that if those people don’t then engage with your page posts, page likes becomes a vanity metric. 

Use the Event Responses objective to get people to know about your event and join it. 

Optimization for ad delivery

• Post engagement 
• Daily unique reach 
• Impressions
• Page Likes
• Event response

When you get charged 

• Impression
• Page Like

Ad formats 

• Single image 
• Single video 
• Slideshow
• Instant Experience

App Installs

Send people directly to the store where they can download your business’s app.

When to use the App Installs objective? Choose this Facebook ad objective if you have launched your mobile app and want to get as many app installs as possible. On the ad set level you’ll be prompted to choose the destination where you want to promote your app, such as Google Play, iTunes, or Amazon Appstore.

Optimization for ad delivery

• Value (if eligible)
• App Events
• App Installs
• Link Clicks

When you get charged 

• Impression
• App Install
• Link Click (CPC)

Ad formats 

• Carousel
• Single image 
• Single video 
• Slideshow
• Instant Experience

Video Views

Share videos of your business with people on Facebook who are most likely to watch it.

When to use the Video Views objective? The primary purpose of the Video Views objective is to get more people to watch your video content. If you want your video ads to generate clicks or drive conversions, this objective will not work, and you should instead select the Traffic or Conversions objective with the single video as the ad format. The Video Views objective will be useful if you later create a custom audience from video views and run remarketing campaigns. 

Optimization for ad delivery

• ThruPlay (new optimization option – Facebook will deliver your ads to help you get the most completed video plays if the video is 15 seconds or shorter)
• 2-second continuous video views

When you are charged

• Impression
• ThruPlay
• 2-second continuous video view

Ad formats 

• Single video 
• Slideshow
• Instant Experience
• Playable ads

Lead Generation

Collect lead information from people who are interested in your business.

When to use the Lead Generation objective? Select this Facebook ad objective if you wish to collect email addresses straight from Facebook, without driving people to your website. You can create an instant form in Ads manager on the ad level. This objective works best if you are promoting an ebook, guide, or anything else that’s downloadable, and it’s a very efficient way to collect your audience’s details, such as full name, email address, and phone number. 

Optimization for ad delivery

• Leads 

When you are charged

• Impression

Ad formats 

• Carousel
• Single image 
• Single video
• Slideshow

Messages

Get more people to have conversations with your business in Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram Direct to complete purchases, answer questions, or offer support.

When to use the Messages objective? Use the Messages objective to start conversations with your audience, answer their questions, solve issues, or promote new offers. You will be asked to choose the message destination – Messenger, Whatsapp, or Instagram Direct.

The click to Messenger ads will send people from the ad straight to Facebook Messenger, where you can strike up personalized conversations with them. Sponsored message ads work best if you have previously interacted with your audience and by sending sponsored offers and promotions you re-engage them and keep them warm. 

Optimization for ad delivery

• Conversations
• Leads
• Impression (in case of Sponsored message)

When you are charged

• Impression

Ad formats 

• Carousel
• Single image 
• Single video
• Slideshow

Conversions

Conversions

Encourage people to take valuable actions on your website, in your app, or in Messenger, such as adding payment information, downloading your app, registering for your site, or making a purchase.

When to use the Conversions objective? The Conversions objective is by far the most popular and most valuable objective type. Because after all, aren’t all advertisers aiming for conversions? Choose this objective when your audience is already at the bottom of the funnel and is ready to take a valuable action on your website, app, or messenger. Valuable actions may include sales, registrations, landing page views, add to carts, app installs, and more.

To be able to choose this objective and optimize for conversions, you need to have the right pixels installed on your website and Facebook should have received a minimum number of activities from your pixel. The destinations available are website, app, messenger, and WhatsApp. 

Optimization for ad delivery

• Value (if eligible)
• Conversions
• Landing page views
• App events (if destination selected is App)
• Conversations (if destination selected is Messenger)
• Link clicks

• Daily unique reach
• Impressions

When you are charged

• Impression
• Link clicks (CPC)

Ad formats 

• Carousel
• Single image 
• Single video
• Slideshow
• Collection
• Instant Experience

Catalogue Sales

Automatically show products from your ecommerce store’s catalogue to generate sales.

When to use the Catalogue Sales objective? Use the Catalogue Sales objective when you have an Ecommerce store selling multiple products. Set up your product catalogue and Facebook will dynamically deliver your multiple items to the target audience without any manual work required on your part. You can either target prospective customers who haven’t yet interacted with your products or retarget ads to people who have already interacted with your products on and off Facebook, up to running up-selling and cross-selling campaigns.

Optimization for ad delivery

• Conversion events
• Link clicks
• Impressions

When you are charged

• Impression 
• Link Click (CPC)

Ad formats 

• Carousel
• Single image
• Collection

Store Traffic

Promote your brick-and-mortar business locations to people that are nearby.

When to use the Store Traffic objective? Use the Store Traffic objective if you have a business with multiple physical locations and want to increase foot traffic and in-store sales accordingly by targeting people who are nearby.

To use this objective, you first need to add your physical location details in Ads Manager. You can add a map card to these ads to enable people to find your location easily. If your store has just one location, Facebook recommends that you use the Reach objective instead. 

Optimization for ad delivery

• Store visits 
• Impressions 
• Link Clicks 
• Daily Unique Reach

Ad formats 

• Single image 
• Single video 
• Carousel 
• Slideshow 
• Collection

The post Choosing the Right Facebook Ad Objective appeared first on Adscook Blog.

So how can you, as a brand, get noticed by your target audience on Facebook in the first place, and interest them to such an extent as to encourage them to make a purchase from you as a result?

By creating a Full-Funnel Facebook Advertising Strategy …

While one-time growth hacking campaigns are tempting and may bring quick results, it’s wise to avoid solely relying on them. You should have multiple touchpoints in place to move your cold audiences further down the funnel, nurture them, and eventually convert them into loyal customers. 

How CBO Fits into Funnel Advertising

With Facebook introducing its new Campaign Budget Optimization algorithm, many advertisers became really frustrated with the new playbook and started to wonder how they could adapt their already established strategies. So, if you already had a working Facebook advertising funnel with ad set budget optimizations, how can you adjust it with CBO?

If you are new to CBO, we have prepared an ultimate guide for you – Facebook Campaign Budget Optimization Guide: Facts, Tips, Strategies

Don’t think that Campaign Budget Optimization has come to upset your Facebook advertising funnel applecart. On the contrary, it is perfectly cut out for funnel advertising. Remember the number one CBO best practice?

For example, if you mix a cold interest-based audience with your website’s custom audience that is already familiar with your brand, Facebook will spend the budget where there are more people. As a result, you may end up seeing more of your budget being spent on a prospecting audience, when it might have actually been more valuable to your business to spend it on a remarketing audience. 

So, switching to CBO will ultimately be even more helpful when it comes to setting up your evergreen advertising funnel rather than ruin your plans. 

As a reminder, Facebook has recently abandoned the mandatory shift to Campaign Budget Optimization. CBO is now an option, not a requirement, though Facebook still believes that CBO provides more performance and value gains.

This means that you can stick with ABO with confidence if you are sure that your already established funnel strategy helps you achieve your advertising goals. But if you want to go the extra mile and maximize your ROAS, go ahead and switch to CBO. 

In the next sections, we’ll share with you our proven CBO campaign blueprints based on funnel stages. You’ll get ready-to-use CBO setup outlines for Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel and Bottom of the Funnel stages. Note that these blueprints will work best for Ecommerce businesses.

• CBO Blueprint for the Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

• CBO Blueprint for the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

• CBO Blueprint for the Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) 

CBO Blueprint for the Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

At the Top of the Funnel stage, your Facebook advertising goal is to attract new audiences. So, all your advertising components like advertising objectives, targeting strategies, ad formats, ad copies, offers, or CTAs should be grouped together in such a way as to interest complete strangers who have never heard of your brand or visited your website before.   

Here is how to structure your Facebook CBO campaign at the Top of the Funnel stage to get the best results.  

Top of the funnel CBO campaign objectives

Before you even enable Campaign Budget Optimization, your first step is to choose the advertising objective that best resonates with your business goal. By choosing the right objective, you literally tell Facebook what actions you want people to take after they see your ad. 

At the TOFU stage, your main goal is to increase brand awareness, reach as many people as possible, or attract more visitors to your website. See the objectives you can choose:

Top of the Funnel CBO Audience Targeting

Audience targeting is arguably the most significant part of the Campaign Budget Optimization setup as it actually determines the number and types of ad sets within a single CBO. To ensure your CBO works correctly for the prospecting stage, you should consider: 

• Size of audiences 
• Types of audiences
• High/Low value groupings

You should use the following types of Facebook Audiences to attract cold audiences:

• Saved audiences based on interests, demographics, and behaviors
• Lookalike audiences 

Here is how you can structure your CBO for the awareness stage. 

As you can see, ad sets or audiences within a single CBO are related to each other, whether in terms of size or value.

By structuring your CBOs in this way, you ensure that the Facebook algorithm will not distribute your budget towards a larger audience, and as a result, you’ll get accurate results for your prospecting campaign. 

Optimal Ad Formats for TOFU

As your TOFU audience are people who are not yet familiar with your brand, your number one goal at this funnel stage is to grab their attention. Your ad formats should be eye-catching with some kind of action and a story-telling aspect to them.

With your awareness stage ads you should be able to address users’ problems and offer them a solution, while also casually highlighting the benefits of your product.

It’s important to avoid taking a hard-sell approach and directly pushing your product features at this stage. The following are the best ad formats to use:

• Video ads
• Image ads 
• Collection ads 
• Instant Experience ads 

Best Offers at the Top of the Funnel Stage

At TOFU stage you can’t jump the gun and suggest that complete strangers purchase your product.

As such, avoid any discount ads, hard sales, or any promotion of your new product line; instead, grab users’ attention with a quick text about or video introduction to your brand concept or any kind of educational content/helping guide that’s indirectly connected with your product.

In short, your offer should be anything that doesn’t require the user to make any commitment. Here are some possible options:

• Read a blog post or guide 
• View an introductory video of your brand
• Visit your website
• Check out your product page 

Best CTAs at the TOFU Stage

• Learn More  
• Watch More 
• Listen Now 
• See Menu

CBO Blueprint for the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) 

At the middle of the funnel stage, your goal is to identify those people who have engaged with your offer to some degree at the previous funnel stage, nurture them further, and convert them into leads.

Your MOFU audience is already familiar with your brand, but is not yet ready to purchase from you – they are still evaluating, and need more information to make an informed decision.

It is at this stage that your prospects may add an item to their wishlist, subscribe to a newsletter, send a message, download an industry report in return for their email address, or request a free product sample. See below how to run a CBO campaign at the MOFU stage.   

Middle of the funnel CBO campaign objectives

At MOFU stage, your main goal is to engage and nurture your audience further, whether by driving traffic to a product page, offering downloadable content, or showing how your products can benefit your audience. Here are the objectives you can choose from: 

• Traffic 
• Lead Generation
• Messages
• Conversions

Middle of the Funnel CBO Audience Targeting

To target your middle of the funnel audience, you should already have Facebook pixels installed for your most important events. As such, the main audience type you should use at this stage is Custom Audiences. 

When setting up CBO campaigns for MOFU, the audience type/size rule becomes even more important. Your video viewers don’t have the same value as those who have provided their email addresses, even though both audiences are interested in your product.

So, to get accurate results, group audiences of a similar size and value under separate CBOs. See some possible CBO groupings for the middle of the funnel stage. 

Optimal Ad Formats for MOFU

Since your MOFU audiences already know about your brand, you don’t need any complex ad types here.

You should be focusing on what makes you different from your competition, what makes your products unique, and how to use them in real life. These ad formats have been proven to work best:

• Image ads
• Video Ads 
• Carousel Ads

Best Offers at the Middle of the Funnel Stage

Your MOFU offers should be more tangible, present the use cases of the products, offer free samples in exchange for an email address or phone number, and describe the features of your product as well as the benefits and advantages it offers over your competitors, whether through a video or a whitepaper.

In a nutshell, your mission is to prove to your potential customers that your product can effectively solve their problem better than others. 

Best offers at this stage:

• Product use case videos 
• Product Descriptions
• Downloadable ebooks, guides, whitepapers, etc.
• Free product samples 
• Free demos/free trials (in case you offer a SaaS product)

Best CTAs at the MOFU Stage

• Download
• Subscribe
• Sign Up
• Apply Now
• Book Now
• Get Offer
• Get Quote

CBO Blueprint for the Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) 

So, you have attracted complete strangers, got them interested in your product, and created a relationship with them. Now what? It’s time for direct selling.

At the bottom of the funnel stage, you are targeting those people who are literally just a step away from making a purchase from you. All you need to do is add the finishing touches and convert your most interested leads into paying customers.

People who have abandoned shopping carts, those who have tried your product free samples and left positive reviews, or those who regularly view your product pages and add items to their wish list are definitely your future customers. They just need an additional proof of trust to go ahead and purchase from you.

Bottom of the funnel CBO campaign objectives

Your main goal at the BOFU is to convert your leads into paying customers. That’s why campaign objectives should be related to direct sales.

• Conversions
• Catalogue Sales
• Store Traffic

Bottom of the Funnel CBO Audience Targeting

You should select the most valuable audiences from the previous two stages and retarget them by using custom audiences.

While grouping ad sets within CBOs, again try to find groupings that are somehow similar in size and value so that Facebook spends your budget fairly. This is the CBO structure we offer for the BOFU stage:

Optimal Ad Formats for BOFU

At BOFU stage, you are seeking to display your products and brand reputation in the best light. These are some optimal ad formats to choose from:

• Image Ads
• Video Ads
• Carousel Ads
• Dynamic Product Ads 

Best Offers at the Bottom of the Funnel Stage

So far you’ve been warming up your audience by educating and guiding them or providing them with free stuff to try before they buy. But now it’s time to push hard sales whether by offering prospects a discount or simply highlighting your product value proposition. 

Some of the best offers at BOFU:

• Discount Ads
• Special Deals
• New line of products
• Testimonial Videos
• Limited Time Offers
• Competitive Price Offers
• Ads accenting free delivery, money back guarantee, etc.

Best CTAs at the BOFU Stage

• Shop Now
• Sign Up
• Get Offer
• Get Quote 
• Subscribe

The post Facebook CBO Blueprints: Full-Funnel Strategy appeared first on Adscook Blog.

Facebook’s Interest targeting is the primary option to use to reach out to people who are not yet familiar with your business, have never heard of you before but who have expressed some interest in the industry your business operates in. Therefore, they might become your ideal customers. 

Facebook gives you access to multiple interest categories and subcategories from Business Industries to Hobbies & Activities and Shopping & Fashion and many more.

Of course, no one can deny the advantages of custom and lookalike audiences over interest-based ones. So, custom audiences have already engaged with your business in this or that way and lookalike audiences are very similar to the people who have already engaged with your business, while interest audiences, on the other hand, have had zero interaction with you.

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Still, without interest targeting you will not be able to move further down the funnel or run retargeting campaigns in the future. You will also miss the opportunity to appear in front of a newer audience every time. 

As simple as it might seem, Interest Targeting is not just typing in a couple of interests related to your business and letting Facebook do the rest for you. 

That’s why we’ve decided to write this guide to help you dig deeper into the art of FB Interest Targeting and create your ideal interest audiences. Here’s what we’re going to cover: 

• How Does Facebook Interest Targeting Work?
• What Interest Targeting Categories are Available on Facebook?
• 3 Ways to Research Your Audience’s Interests 
• 5 Strategies to Get the Most out of Interest-based Targeting 

Let’s get started!

How Facebook Interest Targeting Works

Interest targeting is the bread and butter of contextual advertising. Without interest targeting, you would just be delivering your ads to random people and keeping your fingers crossed that someone out there might be interested in what you’re offering and respond accordingly. Well, hats off to Facebook for making advertising more relevant! 

There are thousands of interest categories and subcategories advertisers can use for ad targeting. These interests are formed from users’ lifetime activities on Facebook and beyond. 

The fan pages you’ve liked, that comment you left under a fashion accessory post to ask its price or the real-life chat you had with a friend about a trip to Jamaica (yeah, Facebook might be snooping on you if you’ve given it access to your smartphone microphone) are just a few of the factors that shape your set of interests on Facebook.

If you want to know what Facebook thinks you’re interested in, just go to your ad preferences which you can access from Settings ⤍ Ads and have a look at your interests classified by category.

These are some of my interests. I regularly clean up my interest lists, so these are pretty relevant to the kind of ads I want to see on my feed. If you hover over one of the interests, you’ll see Facebook’s explanation as to why it’s in your interests. 

As you can see, Facebook makes it quite clear to you what interests advertisers can target you by. You can browse all your interests and decide which ones really do describe you and which ones are totally off the mark. Some of your interests might have changed over the years, or Facebook might have mistakenly associated an irrelevant one with your profile. After all, Facebook doesn’t know everything – so go ahead and remove the irrelevant ones. 

What Interest Targeting Categories Are Available on Facebook? 

To start with, it’s worth mentioning that very often by Interest Targeting advertisers mean the whole Detailed Targeting section while Detailed Targeting actually includes three categories – Demographics, Interests, Behaviours

In general, Facebook interests are broken down into:

• Browsable interests (that are visible on the interface and are default categories)
• Searchable interests (that only show up as suggestions or when you search for a specific interest)

Browsable Interests

To access browsable interests, just browse Interests from Detailed Targeting and Facebook will return a list of categories with their subcategories.

See the main categories below: 

• Business and industry
• Entertainment
• Family and relationships
• Fitness and wellness
• Food and drink
• Hobbies and interests
• Shopping and fashion
• Sports and outdoors
• Technology

Each of these categories has tons of subcategories, which in turn have their own subcategories to choose from and make your ad targeting more specific.

Click on the link below to download the up-to-date list of Facebook browsable interests.

But the problem with these interests is that they are too broad, each with a size of 100mm+, which means that you will end up with a high CPA and tons of irrelevant traffic. 

So the more specific you get, the better results you can expect. Note that specific doesn’t mean refining it too much and ending up with a small size audience. Try keeping audience size 500K – 1mm for better performance. 

Searchable Interests

Some specific interests are only available when you search for them or when you look at the suggestions that Facebook shows. 

So, let’s choose a broad “coffee” interest and see what additional interests Facebook suggests in response. 

As you can see, the suggestions become more specific, from ‘Coffee culture’ to ‘Arabic coffee’. If we scroll down we can even see the suggestion ‘Vietnamese iced coffee’. Note that for each keyword, the number of suggestions is usually limited to 25 for a simpler interface. 

Let’s now take one of these suggested interests and see how Facebook goes deeper into it. If we type ‘Coffee production’, here are the further suggestions we get: 

It goes even more specific, suggesting interests like ‘Coffee production in Colombia’, ‘Coffee production in Ethiopia’, or ‘Coffee production in Vietnam’. These interests are smaller in size and can therefore become the treasure trove of your targeting strategy. 

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In fact, you can endlessly explore these suggestions to find your ideal audience, but this would simply be a waste of time if you haven’t done comprehensive interest research beforehand.

Have you already identified your buyer personas? Do you know what websites they frequent? What books/magazines/blogs do they read? What tools do they use? These are just a few of the questions you should be able to answer before creating your interest-based audiences on Facebook. 

In the next section, we’re going to discuss how to conduct research for targeting interests and reach out to your ideal cold audience on Facebook.

Facebook Interest Targeting: 3 Ways to Research Your Audience’s Interests 

#1. Simple Google Search

A simple Google search can be the most effective way to find out your audience’s basic interests. You can use Google in several ways.

The first and most basic method is to search for lists of brands, tools, publications, events, or public figures that are related to your audience. 

For example, I might be searching for Facebook advertising/marketing tools. So I’ll look at different listicles, make a note of them, and then check each of them one by one on Facebook to find out if they are indexed interests. Some of them might be your direct competitors and if Facebook has indexed them as interests, bingo! – you’re one step away from your ideal audience.

The same goes for publications, public figures, or other categories. For example, if someone is interested in Jon Loomer or reads Social Media Examiner, I might guess that they are into Facebook advertising or social media marketing, and are therefore likely to be interested in my tool as well. 

You can also use Google to find some general interests. 

Remember how you do keyword research for your SEO strategy? Interest targeting research is a similar process. 

I usually type a keyword into Google and check out the “Searches related to” section at the bottom of the search results or look at Google’s suggestions. Here, Google literally tells us that these are keywords or topics that people usually search for.

To illustrate, let’s type the term “Facebook advertising” into Google and look at Google’s suggestions and more searches related to the topic. See below:

Next, type each of these keywords into Detailed targeting or, better still, into Facebook’s Audience Insights to check their availability and find newer related interests.

#2. Use Facebook’s Audience Insights Tools 

Facebook has its own audience research tool called Audience Insights. This tool is free and can give you deep insights into your potential audience’s interests and hobbies. 

The tool will give you information about two groups: 

• Everyone on Facebook
• People connected to your Page

So, if you’re going to reach out to cold audiences, you should start by choosing “Everyone on Facebook”.

Doing research in Audience Insights is truly entertaining and eye-opening. 

2. Then enter a general interest in the Interest field and go through all the categories. For example, I started with “Jon Loomer Digital”, as I know that the audience is large and interested in Facebook advertising in some way or other.

By browsing the categories, I can get tons of new insights into my audience’s interests, ranging from business consultant Mari Smith to advertising agency VaynerMedia to software tools like Moz, SEMrush, or ClickFunnels.

3. Now go ahead and add all these interests one by one in the Interest field. As a result, you’ll see that categories move around and change every time you add a new interest. Note that some of the suggestions might not be indexed as an interest; in this case, you won’t be able to add them. 

4. You can also scroll down and look at Page Likes. These are arranged according to Relevance and Affinity.

#3. Use Wikipedia’s Table of Contents

You know Wikipedia is an information giant. Whenever you want to get well-structured, clearly explained information quickly about any topic, you turn to Wikipedia. It goes without saying that you will get tons of suggestions from here when doing your Facebook interest research. Just search for your topic and look at the table of contents or other categories and topic areas at the bottom of the page. 

For example, let’s try the topic of “fishing”. The table of contents brings up such categories as “fishing vessels”, “traditional fishing”, “recreational fishing”, “fisheries management”, and so on. 

If we look at the bottom of the page, we will find even more ideas like “aquaculture”, “sustainable fishery”, “big-game fishing”, and “fishing net”. 

When you click on each of these categories, you will go deeper and deeper and access even more specific topics. Lastly, check them all in Facebook’s detailed targeting to confirm their availability and build your powerful interest-based audience. 

5 Strategies to Get the Most out of Facebook Interest Targeting 

So, you’ve already identified your potential audience’s main interests, grouped them and created a couple of audiences to check their potential reach. Now what? Here comes the most complex and strategic part of FB interest targeting. You need to determine what strategy you’ll be using to reach out to your precise audience and not drain your advertising budget on non-relevant audiences in the process. 

We’re now going to share some strategies and tricks you can use to get the most out of interest-based targeting. After all, interest targeting isn’t simply a matter of piling up all the interests and expecting to get results.

#1. Layer Interests on Top of Each Other 

When you add several different interests in Facebook’s detailed targeting section, by default this means that Facebook will show your ad to people who are interested in at least one of those interests, that is to say the interests are connected with the “Or” logical statement. The more interests you add, the broader and broader your audience becomes. 

Conversely, with the “Narrow audience” function, Facebook lets you use the “And” logical statement, which means that it will show your ad to people who have both this and that interest. The more interests you add in this case, the narrower and more specific your audience will become. 

Let’s say you want to identify a luxury audience to whom you can sell your luxury products. Narrowing down your audience and targeting people who have both “Rolex” and “Lamborghini” in their interests and are at the same time “Frequent travellers” will result in a more specific and targeted audience than if you group them together. 

#2: Combine FB Interests with Demographics and Behaviours 

This is a powerful targeting strategy that will allow you to pinpoint your audience with laser-like accuracy and get the best out of it. 

One effective combination is a broad interest narrowed down by “Life event” demographic data. For example, you are selling a birthday gift. Combining the interest “Online shopping” with “Close friends of people with birthdays in a month” will result in amazingly precise targeting.

You can also experiment with specific interests and Purchase behaviour. Let’s take the topic shoes, target different shoe brands and narrow down the audience by Engaged shoppers behaviour. The result? A super-targeted audience that is highly likely to convert.

Go ahead, mix and match and find even more powerful combinations. 

#3: Make Exclusions Using the “Exclude” function

That’s OK to exclude some people from your audience unless it’s not any kind of discrimination. You can find the “Exclude people” function in the Detailed targeting section.

If you are selling luxury goods, it would be logical to exclude people who have interest in discount coupons or discount shops. In the same way, if you’re advertising a fast food chain, go ahead and exclude people who are interested in a healthy diet. 

#4: Refine Your Custom Audience Based on Interests

Facebook gives advertisers the opportunity to create different types of custom audiences. You can retarget: 

• all your website visitors
• people who have visited specific webpages
• your customer list
• people who have interacted with your Facebook page
• people who have viewed your Facebook page videos, and so on. 

Custom audiences are your warm audiences who have already heard of you and interacted with you in some way or other. Therefore, they are your high-converting audience. Want to make them even more high-converting? Facebook makes it possible to refine custom audiences by specific interests.

Want to retarget only your website visitors who are interested in technology? Select your custom audience, then enter the corresponding interest to narrow down the audience and make it more specific. 

In the exact same way, you can refine any of your custom audiences, mix and match interests, behaviours, or demographics and get the most out of your retargeting ad campaigns. 

#5: A/B Test Your Interest-Based Audiences 

Facebook’s A/B Testing tool is an amazing way to run audience tests and let Facebook choose the winner. Not sure which interest resonates best with your audience? You can create up to 5 interest-based audiences at once and run them simultaneously with exactly the same ad creatives. Within a specific time frame, Facebook will determine the winner for you. 

To start using A/B testing, simply enable it after selecting your campaign objective and choose Audience as your testing variable.

As a simple example, I’m split testing different public figures who are into Facebook advertising – Amy Porterfield, Jon Loomer Digital, and Mari Smith. 

What’s more, you can even run more complex multivariate audience tests using Adscook’s A/B testing feature. Publish 100s of audience variations with a single click and get answers to your questions using data rather than guesswork. Join Adscook now and get 1 month’s free access to test drive the tool and learn how to get the best out of it. 

Now It’s Your Turn

What methods are you currently using to reach out to your cold audience? Does targeting your audience by their interests give you the results you expect? We hope this guide will help you fill in any gaps, equip you with new interest targeting strategies and take your Facebook advertising to new heights. 

Share your Facebook interest targeting experience with us in the comments section below and let’s strike up an entertaining discussion!

The post How to Use the Power of Facebook Interest Targeting appeared first on Adscook Blog.

CBO has changed the rules of the game for Facebook ad scaling strategies. In the past, when it came to ad set budget optimization, you would either incrementally increase the budget for ad sets that were performing well or duplicate them with an increased budget, while also keeping your fingers crossed that everything would work well. 

You should consider two things when it comes to scaling your CBO campaigns: 

1. How to use CBO to scale your previously successful ad sets 
2. (If you have already switched to CBO) How to scale your successful CBO campaigns

In this post we’ll cover the common ways of testing and scaling your CBO campaigns and explain why CBO scaling is an even better and safer solution. 

If you haven’t yet switched to CBO, here is a source to help you better understand the essence of Facebook’s new algorithmic change and adopt it more easily and smoothly.

Facebook CBO Guide: Facts, Tips, Strategies

Why Does CBO Provide More Scaling Opportunities?

Scaling on the ad set level has always been a major issue for advertisers. When increasing the budget for ad sets that are performing well, there is always a risk that this will cause the ad set to re-enter the learning phase and harm the results you’ve already achieved.

As yet, Facebook has not set out an exact rule about the percentage of increase that is safe and that will really scale your campaign rather than spoil it. As a result, we advertisers are constantly experimenting to find the right scaling formula. 

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Though the rulebook for CBO scaling is yet to be defined, there are a few things of which we can be certain: CBO provides more scaling opportunities, is less volatile, and can scale easier and faster while maintaining a sustainable ROAS. The old scaling methods still work, but with some adaptations made and a more strategic approach adopted. Let’s now take a look at some working strategies to scale your CBO campaigns successfully! 

CBO Scaling Strategy #1: Test New Audiences with ABO First, Then Scale with CBO

As long as CBO is optional and we still have the possibility of ad set budget optimization, why not use them in sync and harness more benefits as a result? One proven strategy is to start with ad sets outside of CBO and then push the winning ones into CBO. This strategy popularized by Depesh Mandalia, one of the leading experts in Facebook advertising, is called CBO Graduation Framework. Here’s the deal!

Testing Phase 

In this phase, you start several ad sets within a campaign, each targeting a new audience, and test them over a certain period to determine which ones perform best. With ad set budgeting, unlike CBO, you can rest assured that all of your ad sets will be given enough impressions and spend their whole budget regardless of performance, and no audience will be given an advantage over another.

For this testing phase, it’s best to start with a small spend, for example $5-10 per day, per ad set. 

Scaling Phase 

Once you identify your winning ad sets, duplicate them or graduate them into a CBO and let them compete against each other. The Facebook algorithm will now start finding the best active opportunities to get results across your best ad sets and identify the best of the best. Then, if you see some ad sets stop performing, you can simply kill them off without worrying that the CBO will re-enter the learning phase. 

To scale your winning ad sets, you can either increase your CBO budget or add new creatives within these ad sets. 

You can also implement this strategy with your previously successful ad sets, pushing them into a CBO and reviving them.

CBO Scaling Strategy #2: Duplicate Your Winning Ad Set 5 Times Within the Same CBO

When using this tactic, you should first test several interests or lookalike audiences within a CBO, then identify the winners and duplicate them. Here are the steps to take: 

1. Start a CBO campaign with a budget of $100 per day and create up to 5 ad sets with single interests or lookalike audiences of different percentages (LLA 1%, LLA 2%, LLA 5%, etc.).
2. Let the campaign run for at least 3 days and start to identify the best performers.
3. Take each winning ad set and duplicate it 5 times within a new CBO. Though the ad sets are exactly the same, with the same audience and creatives, they will perform differently. As the Facebook algorithm will target different pockets of the same audience every time, there’s no danger of audience overlap. 
4. Now keep the CBO campaigns running for 2-3 days and stop the underperforming ads once you identify them.
5. Only after that should you scale your CBO budget by 30% or even 50% and let CBO allocate the budget across the winning ads.

CBO Scaling Strategy #3: Duplicate Successful CBO and Increase Budget Aggressively by 30-50% Every 24 Hours

Do you have a successful CBO campaign that shows stable performance and a high ROAS? If your CBO provides stable delivery within 48-72 hours (the average length of a Facebook learning phase) and continues to show the same stable performance for a week or so, you are ready to scale and grow even further. 

What we recommend here is that you duplicate your whole CBO, increase the daily budget by 30-50% every 24 hours and pause any underperforming ad sets. 

With ad set budgeting we would increase the budget more carefully, so by making a 20% increase every 2-3 days. With CBO, however, you can scale more aggressively as the algorithm seems to stabilize things much faster.

The good news is that you can automate this process using Facebook’s automated rules tool. Define the condition that indicates your CBO is doing well, choose the action Increase Daily Budget by and set the variable in percentage terms. Finally, schedule the rule to be checked daily. And that’s it: your CBO is all set for automatic scaling.

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CBO Scaling Strategy #4: Scale the Best-Performing Ad Set Within a CBO by Turning off Other Ad Sets 

Do you have one particular ad set within your CBO that’s generating most sales and want Facebook to spend more budget on it? If so, you can turn off all the other ad sets and the budget will automatically be redirected to that particular audience. That way, your best-performing ad set and its creatives get more budget. 

From there, you can take things further and increase your CBO budget or add more creatives to the ad set.

Closing Thoughts 

CBO will become mandatory for all ad accounts exclusively by 2021. Until then, we have a fantastic opportunity to mix and match ABO and CBO to go great guns and to be better prepared for the final transition towards CBO.  

Whether or not you are happy about Facebook’s algorithm change, it makes an advertiser’s life a lot easier. As well as providing a simpler structure for advertisers to manage their campaigns, it also gives more potential for scaling. CBO offers you greater flexibility to test multiple audiences and creatives, easily get rid of underperformers and scale good performers faster and more aggressively. 

Have you already experimented with CBO? What are your scaling strategies? 

Leave your fear of change aside and embrace the power of CBO. Enjoy advertising!

The post How to Scale Your Facebook CBO Campaigns: 4 Strategies to Try appeared first on Adscook Blog.

September has come and gone, but CBO remained optional rather than mandatory. Some Facebook reps have claimed that the first rollout would be in February 2020 and ad set budget allocation will be removed altogether.

However, based on advertisers’ feedback, back in April 2020 Facebook announced that they abandon the mandatory shift to CBO and give advertisers the choice.

As reported by Marketing Land, a Facebook spokesperson says that:

To provide advertisers with flexibility and choice in their buying strategies, we have decided not to pursue a mandatory migration for Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). While we still believe CBO provides performance and value gains, we will move offering CBO as an option and not as a requirement.

Whether or not you choose to switch to CBO, one thing is for sure: you should still explore CBO and continue to incorporate it into your Facebook advertising strategy.

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Here’s what we are going to cover in this definitive CBO guide:

• What is CBO and How Does It Work?
• What is Facebook Trying to Achieve with CBO?
• How to Set Spend Limits with CBO?
• Quick Tips on CBO Setup
• CBO Setup Blueprints for TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU
• CBO and the Learning Phase

What is CBO and How Does It Work?

If in the past the advertisers could only allocate their budget among the ad sets or audiences at their own discretion, now they can choose to give control to Facebook’s smart algorithm. Facebook will automatically allocate your campaign budget across the ad sets to get you the best overall results. 

You simply set your campaign budget and bid strategy, and Facebook will try to find the best opportunities for you based on those settings.

In short, you’ll now manage the budget at campaign level rather than ad set level.

To better understand the algorithmic change, let’s look at an example. 

Suppose you manage your budget without CBO on an ad set level and allocate your $300 daily budget equally between 3 ad sets, giving them $100 each. In this case, the budget will be spent equally, without taking into account the performance of the ad sets. 

While with CBO Facebook takes care of the performance in the first place and, after the learning phase, it shifts the budget to the ad set with the highest ROAS and, most importantly, makes that decision in real time. When one ad set’s lowest cost results run out, the algorithm allocates the budget to the next ad set with the lowest cost results. 

That’s why you might sometimes see 90% of your campaign budget being spent on just one ad set while others are given little attention: Facebook simply hasn’t found many opportunities to spend more of the budget on other ad sets. 

At the end of the day, what matters most for advertisers is obtaining the most conversions at the lowest cost. 

What is Facebook Trying to Achieve with CBO?

But Still, How Can I Set Spend Limits within CBO?

It’s okay if you’re still reluctant to give up control of your budget. After all, it’s something that has kept your mind occupied for years. But there are still ways to control your budget if you have specific spending requirements: using minimum and maximum spend limits per ad set. 

Though Facebook recommends using the least amount of spending constraints and instead using cost and bid or return on ad spend (ROAS) controls, we advertisers just can’t resist experimenting with spend limits. 

Within a CBO campaign, you have the option to set min/max spending limits on each ad set, thereby letting Facebook know about your specific requirements.

• For example, if one of your audiences is smaller than the others but way more valuable, you might put a minimum spend on it to make sure that Facebook will spend a percentage of your budget on it. 
• Equally, if you see Facebook allocating most of your budget to one of your audiences, you can always give it a maximum spend and not let Facebook spend more than a specific amount. 

You can set min/max spend limits at the ad set level by going to the Optimisation and spending controls section and clicking on Show more options. From there, edit your Ad set spend limits and set your Minimum/Maximum spending requirements. 

Some Quick Tips on CBO Setup

With CBO entirely changing the rules for budget optimization, the Facebook advertising rulebook in general is being torn up and entering a new era. Advertisers are in constant trial and error to find out the formula for CBO success.

How do you set the right CBO budget? How many audiences should you consider within a CBO? What type of audiences should you group together? How long should a CBO run before stabilizing? What bid strategy should you choose?

These are just some of the common questions that arise when implementing CBO.

In this section, we’ve gathered a few quick tips on CBO setup to answer your key questions and make things a little bit clearer. Here we go!

About CBO Audience Sizes and Types

• When setting up your CBO campaign, start with 3-4 audiences that are similar in type and size.

• Set up your CBO campaigns based on funnel stages. To get accurate results, don’t mix prospecting (ToFu) audience with custom audience (MoFu) within a single CBO. For example, don’t mix a lookalike, cold audience with your website’s custom audience that is already familiar with your brand. This is because Facebook tends to spend the budget where there are more people. As a result, if you group them together, you may end up seeing more of your budget being spent on a prospecting audience, when it might have been more valuable to your business to spend it on a remarketing audience.

• Likewise, try to group audiences of the same size. For example, if you group different types of lookalike audience within a CBO, don’t mix a 2% audience with a 10% audience but keep them within the same percentage.

About CBO Budget Setup

• When doing budgetary calculations, take into account that the more ad sets and ads you have within a CBO, the more budget you should allocate. What this means is that the budget size is proportional to the number of ads and ad sets. If you set a small budget with many ad sets, Facebook will not have enough range to find the best opportunities. 

• When calculating your CBO daily budget, take into account the number of ad sets and your target CPA. Suppose that your target CPA is $100 and you have 3 ad sets within a CBO. To break even, you should spend $300 daily ($100×3). Want to receive twice the ROAS? Double your spend to $600 daily.

About CBO Duration

• Be patient when running a CBO campaign. Give it at least 48-72 hours before making any conclusions, and allow at least a week before making any changes to your campaign. The biggest mistake with CBO campaigns is shutting them off too soon. 

• As Facebook states, each ad set requires at least 50 conversions for Facebook to complete its learning phase and provide stable delivery. 

About CBO Bidding Strategy

• Start with the Lowest Cost Bid strategy, formerly known as Automatic Bidding. After you get some performance benchmarks, you can start experimenting with other bid types like Cost Cap or Bid Cap. 

About Ad Placements within CBO

• When choosing placements, start with Automatic Placements. You’ll see where Facebook spends more of your budget along the way and can then optimize accordingly.

About Evaluating CBO Performance

• Evaluate the results of CBO at the campaign level first. This doesn’t mean you should ignore the ad set level results: these can still give you valuable insights into your audience performance which you can use to improve your overall marketing strategy. 

Effective CBO Campaign Structure: Blueprints for Each Funnel Stage

As already mentioned, CBO works best if structured based on marketing funnels.Your marketing funnel is the journey a visitor takes before becoming your customer. Therefore, when advertising on Facebook, you can’t treat all audiences in the same way. 

For example, a cold audience shouldn’t be shown the same offer as the audience that has already engaged with your brand in one way or another. 

With CBO, following funnel stages becomes even more important. In general, the golden rule of CBO is to group audiences of similar sizes and types: this is the underlying principle of funnel advertising. Depending on your funnel, you will target different audiences and set different budgets.

We’re now going to share with you the CBO structure blueprints for all three funnels: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU. These are CBO structures that have been proven to work for ecommerce businesses, but you can take them as patterns and make them comply with your own business funnels. 

Be aware that you’re not restricted to just one CBO campaign per funnel, so you can go further and set up several CBOs per funnel to see which targeting works best.

CBO Blueprint for Prospecting or TOFU

Your prospecting audience is the audience that has never heard from you but has the interest in the industry your business is related to. In this funnel stage, then, you should target either interest-based audiences or your lookalike audiences. Here’s how to structure your TOFU CBO campaigns: 

CBO Blueprint for MOFU

Your mid-funnel audience is the audience that has engaged with your business in some way, but is not yet convinced enough to make a purchase from you. Obviously, in this funnel stage your ad sets should target custom audiences based on specific actions. 

Here’s how you can structure your MoFu CBO campaigns:

CBO 1

• Adset 1: 180 FB Engager
• Aset 2: 180 IG Engager

CBO 2

• Adset 1: Top 25% Website Custom Audience Last 180 days
• Adest 2: 30 Day Email Opens (if similar sizes)

CBO Blueprint for BOFU

Your bottom-of-funnel audience is your most valuable audience that is hot and just a step or two away from purchasing from you. That’s why you might want to allocate more budget across these CBOs and make your audience an offer they can’t refuse. 

In this funnel stage, you can segment your audience based on large and small time windows: 

Conversion objective – Large time window

CBO 1 

• Ad set 1: 30 Day Add to Cart Custom Audience
• Ad set 2: 15 Day view content Custom Audience 

CBO 2

• Ad set 1: Dynamic Product Ads – 30 Day Add to Cart Custom Audience
• Ad set 2: Dynamic Product Ads – 15 Day view content Custom Audience

Conversion objective – Smaller time window 

CBO 3

• Ad set 1: 7 Day Add to Cart Custom Audience
• 4 Day view content Custom Audience

CBO 4

• Ad set 1: Dynamic Product Ads – 7 Day Add to Cart Custom Audience
• Ad set 2: Dynamic Product Ads – 4 Day view content Custom Audience

CBO and the Learning Phase: 5 Questions Answered

As we’ve been getting many questions about the CBO learning phase and what edits affect its delivery, we decided to answer 5 of the most frequently asked questions in this section. As with ad set budget optimization, not all edits affect CBO in such a way as to make it re-enter the learning phase, just significant ones. 

Question 1: How long does the Learning Phase take for CBO to stabilize performance? 

As per Facebook, each ad set requires at least 50 conversions for CBO to deliver stable results. The recommended time frame is a minimum of 48-72 hours.

Question 2: Will CBO re-enter the learning phase or will other ad sets be affected if I make a significant edit to an ad set?

No, other ad sets will not re-enter the learning phase as long as the edit is made on the ad set level.  

Question 3: Will adding a new ad set to CBO cause other ad sets re-enter the learning phase? 

In the same way as with editing, adding a new ad set will not affect other ad sets within CBO. 

Question 4: How is my CBO affected if I delete underperforming ad sets? 

If you delete underperforming ad sets, your CBO budget will simply be allocated among the remaining ad sets. Moreover, if you see an ad set performing far better than others, you can shut off the other ad sets so that the budget is completely redirected to the better performing ad set. This is an effective way to scale your ad set within CBO.  

Question 5: Will increasing my budget kick CBO back into learning mode? 

No, you can effectively scale your CBO campaign, increasing the budget by 30% every 24 hours. Some advertisers have even got results by taking a more aggressive approach and increasing their budget by 50%. However, every case is unique, so you should test to find the most effective scaling strategy for your own business.

Closing Thoughts

CBO is the most significant update to occur to Facebook advertising ever since Facebook introduced its three-level campaign structure back in 2014. With CBO becoming mandatory for all accounts in the near future, all advertisers should be ready to enter the new era of Facebook advertising. Have you already experimented with CBO? Did you discover any winning strategies? Come share with us your specific strategies and help us all switch to CBO more smoothly and easily. 

The post Facebook Campaign Budget Optimization Guide: Facts, Tips, Strategies appeared first on Adscook Blog.