Introduction

Facebook is the number one social media site for driving conversions, which makes creating an optimized Facebook ad an integral part of your social media strategy.

Facebook ads can eat through your social budget, but with some strategic adjustment, you can actually pay less for your ads and get more results at the same time. 

By focusing on increasing your engagement, and CTR, you’ll boost your relevance score and lower your ad cost in the process. 

The higher your ad performs, the less it will cost you.

Tips to Optimize Facebook Ad Campaign

Understand relevance score

Facebook Ad relevance score directly affects CPC, so it’s important to watch it carefully and understand it. Facebook ads provide a relevance score on every campaign you run. 

As the name suggests, this score tells how relevant your ad is to your target audience.

To create this score, Facebook looks at your Ad draft, considers the audience’s potential positive and negative feedback, and boils it down to a score of 1 to 10. 

Once the ad is live, your score updates based on the actual feedback received.

Facebook prioritizes ads with high relevance scores, and will actually lower your CPC if you have high scores. This lowers the cost of your ads. 

Because of this, you should be watching all of your campaigns’ relevance scores, and either adjust or stop campaigns that have scores on the lower end to optimize your Facebook ad campaigns.

Create Custom Audience 

Make sure to target a custom audience, it’s the best way to optimize CPC. 

One of the most effective strategies that you can use is to build custom audiences based on their behavior on your website.

Since It doesn’t make sense to keep delivering the same ads to a person who has already converted on the offer. These leads should be moved to the next stage of your marketing funnel and targeted with new messages.

You can create a Facebook Custom Audience of the converted and exclude them from your campaign’s audience.

Broaden your Audience

When creating an ad, opt in to “targeting expansion” and Facebook will get more users similar to those you have specified in the “interest targeting section.” 

Not only does this allow you to reach more people, but it also has the ability to drive more conversions at a lower cost per conversion.

Go a step further and use your custom audiences to identify Lookalike Audiences, which are new users that have similar profiles to your customer base.

Choose the Right Ad Format

Depending on campaign goals, certain Facebook ad formats may serve your needs better than others.

Here are a few things need to look into when choosing the right format:

• Carousel and collection ads – are ideal when you have multiple products or various features to highlight.
• Facebook Offer ads – allow you broadcast special deals or discounts as purchase incentives. If someone visits the ad, Facebook will send notifications reminding them to redeem.
• Facebook Canvas ads – are best suited for high-impact visuals and experiences on full screen.

Increase Ad CTR

Increasing click-through rate (CTR) will increase your relevance score and thus lower your Facebook ads cost. 

Aim for CTR > 3% (3 out of one hundred people click the ad)

One way of increasing is by always using desktop newsfeed ad placement. These generate higher CTRs in the long run.  The Learn More button is more attractive to cold audiences that don’t trust you right now. 

Also, write a simple, clean copy that gets right to the point and doesn’t leave users guessing at what they’re clicking on or why they should.

Keep your ads frequency (or the number of times the same user sees the same ad) as low as possible. If frequency gets too high, your CTR will fall. If frequency goes above three either change the targeting or change the ad copy.

Optimizing your click-through rate (or CTR) is one way of telling Facebook that your ad content is relevant to your targeted audience. In this case, Facebook lowers your CPC since many audiences find it useful.

Run Highly Targeted Campaigns

Running highly targeted campaigns gives you a distinct advantage since you know who you’re targeting. So you can craft ads and offers that you know whom they’ll be receptive to.

You can use different targeting options like age, gender, location, interests, and even behaviors to create iron-clad audiences. 

Under behaviors, for example, you can target specific device owners, people who are having birthdays within the next two to three months, and users who have recently made business purchases.

If you run a brick-and-mortar business, then you definitely need to use Facebook’s geo-targeting options.

Geo-targeting allows you to show ads to people within a specific geographic area. This can give tremendous results since the more relevant ads are shown to your audience, the more likely they are to convert.

You can target ads based on… City, Province, State, Country, Congressional district, Radius, Zip or postcode

Utilize Retargeting

Retargeting is the practice of showing your ads to users who are familiar with you and your product. Because this is a “warm” audience, they’ll be more likely to interact with or click on your ad, increasing CTRs and lowering CPC.

You can create custom audiences for those who have interacted with your Page, your site, and your mobile app.

Optimize for Conversions

You need to check off the “conversions” box on Facebook. You’ll find this option under the “Optimization for Delivery” section in the Budget and Schedule form.

Selecting this optimization is optional, but many case studies have proven its usefulness. 

But in case your ad isn’t driving enough conversions in the first few days, Facebook may not have enough data to properly deliver your ad. Facebook needs around 50 conversions per ad during the first seven days to effectively deliver the ad.

If you find that your ad has fewer than 50 conversions, Facebook recommends that you optimize for link clicks instead of conversions.

Select the Right Campaign Objective 

As you set up a new Facebook ad campaign, the first selection you’ll have to make is the campaign objective.

The campaign objective tells Facebook about the ultimate goal of your advertising campaign and helps its algorithms optimize your ad delivery for perfect results.

So actually, you’re telling Facebook to auto-optimize your ad campaign based on the campaign objective.

Always choose the campaign objective that matches your advertising goals. For example, if you’re after new trial signups, select the “Conversions” objective. Or, if your goal is to increase brand awareness in a given location, select the “Local awareness” objective.

Use the “Use Existing Post” option

It’s an efficient way of optimizing your ads’ likes and shares.

When setting up a Facebook ad campaign, you’ve got two options, the default is: “Create New Ads” for every ad set and campaign and another one is “Use Existing Post”.

The “Use Existing Post” allows you to gather all the campaigns’ post engagements under a single ad.

The easiest way to set up multiple ad campaigns using the same post is to first publish the promotional post on your company’s Facebook Page.

Next, you can select this post every time you’re setting up new ad campaigns or new A/B test variations.

Optimize your ad schedule

An important part of Facebook ad optimization is analyzing your Facebook ad accounts to see which days contribute to the most conversions at the lowest CPA. 

To check that go to your Facebook Ads Manager reports and use the Breakdown menu to get your campaigns by Day.

You can use the performance data from multiple Facebook campaigns to discover the best time for advertising.

Then, you can set your campaigns on a custom schedule, so that you reach your prospects at the time with the highest potential.

You can then use this information to apply a schedule to your campaigns, making sure your campaign runs at the most engaged hours of the day.

Another reason to keep your ad campaigns on a custom schedule is to decrease Ad Frequency. That will ensure people will see your ads less often and can avoid ad fatigue.

Set up auto-optimization rules

You can set up automated optimization rules in Facebook Ads Manager. This feature is called Facebook Automated Rules. 

It improves Facebook ad performance without relying on manual optimization which saves time, energy, and resources.

With automated optimization rules, you set predefined conditions for KPIs such as likes, reach, and leads, and ad campaign elements (campaigns, ad sets, ads, etc.).

Then Facebook will check the condition you set at specific time intervals, and when a campaign meets that criterion, it will take a predefined action you have set. 

If the rule conditions are satisfied, four things can automatically happen:

• Turn off your campaign, ad set or ad
• Send notification to the ad manager
• Adjust budget (increase/decrease daily/lifetime budget by…)
• Adjust manual bid (increase/decrease bid by…)

Optimize Ad placement

When advertising on Facebook, ad placement has a big impact on advertising costs. To know your top-performing ad placements, log in to Facebook Ads Manager and use the Breakdown menu to see your campaigns by Placement.

After you’ve discovered top-performing ad placements, optimize your campaigns accordingly.

Increase your bids on the top-performing ad placements. If an ad placement performs below your expectations, just remove it from your ad set.

Optimize landing pages 

One of the best ways to optimize your Facebook ad campaign is to optimize your landing page. 

Your landing page must have these essential elements – headline, subtitle, and call to action (CTA)

You should remove any distractions (e.g. reducing form fields) on your landing page. Make it simple for visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for. Also, use explicit cues to guide users to call to action.

If your ad promises anything, make sure the landing page delivers that. You don’t want to have a user looking for shorts land on a shirt product page.

Install Facebook Ad pixel

Use the Facebook pixel to optimize and track landing page views. Optimizing for landing page views is a much more useful metric than simply optimizing for clicks. 

This is an efficient way to know which ads are converting the most in lead generation

In conversion tracking, Facebook uses optimized CPM (oCPM) to determine who will see your ad. That means, when you optimize for landing page views, Facebook will serve the ads to people who are more likely not only going to click on your ad but also wait for the landing page to load. 

This means you immediately get more value from every click you receive.

If you use WordPress, you can install the Facebook Tracking Pixel plugin, which inserts the Facebook conversion pixel code to your WordPress landing pages.

Include a direct call-to-action

Conversions are about motivating actions, a strong call-to-action is essential. Strong verbs like find, start, discover, explore, etc. are best if your conversion goal is to have users visit a product page or learn about your company.

If your goal is to drive for purchases or subscriptions, use phrases like “buy now” or “sign up.”

Fast Take off (not Accelerated Delivery)

When launching a new campaign, assign a Daily or Lifetime budget that exceeds your planned budget

After your ads have run for a week or have more than 10,000 impressions, you can evaluate what’s working and what needs to be improved.

After the initial campaign takeoff, you can lower your budget back to match your planned total budget.

Leverage Influencers

An effective way to lower your CPC on Facebook Ads (optimize Facebook ad) is to leverage influencers and tastemakers in your niche. Leverage the audiences of the influencers representing your brand, and run ads directly from their account.

Basically, it comes down to capturing attention, and if you can produce a video or picture with the audience’s favorite influencer, they are much more likely to engage with that ad and click through.

Split Test Your Ad Creative and Ad Sets

One of the best ways to optimize your CPC on Facebook Ads is by doing multivariate testing with your targeting and creatives.

Instead of running 1 or 2 ads, run several (around 8 to 10) different ads with different combinations of the main headline, images, ad copy, and CTA) to see which one is the most effective.

Images are the key part of Facebook ads, and it is one of the significant factors that help the user decide whether to click an ad or not. 

Test different images and find the one that optimizes the Facebook ad campaign. Use a high-resolution image to showcase your product or brand. Try to avoid too much text in the image. 

Multivariate testing helps in understanding which ad creative, audience, delivery, or placement best meets your marketing goals.

So once you determine the most effective ad, increase your budget for that over time as you begin to improve your ROI.

Rotate Ad to Get Rid of Ad Fatigue

After your target audience has seen your Facebook ad more than four times, the CPC will increase significantly.

To overcome that, create several variations of your Ad with different Ad designs.

Actually, you should set up an ad campaign with multiple ad sets and ads, and schedule every ad set to be active on a different weekday.

This will make people see a different ad every day and your ads won’t create ad fatigue.

Set Low Daily Budget

After the fast take-off or without that, you set your daily budget lower than actually planned.

With the high daily budget, the same audience will start seeing your ads more frequently and the conversion will go down and the Ad costs will go up, and consequently cost per lead will also go up.

So if you have a budget of say 10 lakh rupees for lead generation, it is better to spend 10 lakhs across 365 days (approx 2700 rupees per day).

If you try to spend 10 lakhs in a month, the daily cost would be 33,000 rupees a day approximately increasing the cost of the leads by 5x to 10x.

Therefore, generating the leads at the lowest cost is to make sure that you have a lot of lead magnets and many campaigns running at a low daily budget for a long time.

Conclusion

With the above-mentioned tips, you can optimize Facebook Ad campaign to get better ROI and you can skyrocket your business revenue through high-converting ad campaigns.