Social learning: How to optimize your Facebook PPC campaign

For many of us, social media is a mysterious and ever-changing corner of the internet. Networks rise and fall at rapid rates, but one always seems to stay at the forefront of our minds. It’s clear that Facebook is the place to be, and 2.26 billion users may feel inclined to agree. If you feel like you’re not getting the most out of Facebook PPC ads (or are too afraid to take the plunge right now), you may have asked yourself how effective campaigns can take place through the social network.

As the data shows, Facebook is only a narrow second-place to YouTube in terms of popularity among US audiences, and the world-renowned social network is twice as popular as its nearest like-for-like competitor.

(Image: LYFE Marketing)

Naturally, this means that your PPC campaigns will be accessible for more users if utilized on the pages of Facebook. If your business has serious ambitions focused on attaining more customers or scaling as efficiently as possible, it’s certainly worth looking at building some PPC campaigns to go on Facebook.

But how exactly can users optimize their PPC campaigns? And just how effective could Facebook PPC actually be? Let’s delve into how businesses can optimized their Facebook PPC campaigns in a way that drives conversions and generates growth:

Optimize your sales funnel

Facebook ads perform a little differently to Google ads, for example.

In the case of PPC advertisements placed via Google, it’s clear that audiences will be actively looking to buy the products or services in question, whereas with Facebook, it’s far more likely to be the case that you’re appealing to audiences who are simply browsing with little intention of making an immediate purchase.

This could potentially be problematic if you’re looking to operate on a smaller budget for advertising.

With this in mind, it could be more useful to create a Facebook campaign that’s more focused away from the act of making an immediate purchase. Through using Facebook as your platform, it’s potentially most useful if you run a series of campaigns at the same time, all with different goals which could lead to creating your own social sales funnel.

One of the most purposeful funnels you could create as part of your Facebook PPC campaign could focus on engagement. This helps to lure new customers in and is perhaps most effective when undertaken through the medium of video.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider exactly who your target audience are before focusing on crafting a campaign that builds meaningful connections with them.

Be sure to build engaging content for prospective customers and optimize your campaigns. When an uploaded piece of media has attained a healthy number of views – say, over 2,500 – create a new conversion campaign that targets users who viewed around 25% of your video.

By targeting audiences who have already engaged in viewing your campaign, it’s possible to yield much higher conversion rates as opposed to marketing in a more unfocused manner.

Build exposure through frequency

It’s possible to monitor the number of times one specific user views your advertising campaign through ad frequency. This is an important metric because audiences that witness your ad repeatedly are more likely to recall it.

It’s important to leave your mark within campaigns – but be careful of overdoing your frequency – if your ad appears too often, it’ll only lead to users ignoring your branding.

To help you take control of your exposure, be sure to place a frequency cap on your advertising report. Once the audience is saturated, your PPC costs will slowly begin to increase.

If you notice sharp increases in your costs, it could be worth duplicating your ad set and re-launching it for new targets – thus helping to realign your campaign for new audiences.

Make your budget go further

A/B testing is always a great way of checking which type of campaign is best for your business.

When you first create your PPC setup for Facebook, you’ll likely be running two-to-three ad sets with multiple adverts within each set. To pick which ad set is more effective, it’s important to study the metrics available to see which campaign is best helping you accomplish your goals.

When you’ve determined which ad is performing best, gently allocate more budget towards the set – a steady boost of about 10-20% will help to optimize the money you’re using without taking too many dangerous risks.

If you continue to see encouraging results, repeat the process each day until you see signs of diminished returns on your investment.

To help to study your ad performance more forensically, Google Analytics has a reliable platform for gaining insights into campaigns, while external platforms like Finteza can provide rich insights into your overall website performance as well as deep traffic quality checks.

Fine tune your target market

Proper placements bring perfection to PPC campaigns. It’s possible to use automatic placements here as well as edit your settings. There’s no right or wrong answer here, but different options will benefit different types of campaign.

For example, if you decide to incorporate Instagram into your ad reach, it’s reasonable to expect far greater engagement, but it’s likely that you’ll see far fewer comments or likes if you choose to place your ad as a Facebook page post.

Another effective add-on comes in the form of Facebook Messenger, which generally performs well when it comes to conversions. Audience Network placements can often increase a brand’s reach but it’s important to constantly monitor your metrics to ensure that no budgeting is being wasted.

Get the right bidding option

Facebook uses an auction-based system when running advertising campaigns. Simply put, the social network chooses the most appropriate ad for audiences based on the level of money bid by a company and its performance on the website.

The bidding system utilized by Facebook is becoming more complex than earlier in the 2010s however, and now users need to choose how they want to optimize their ads. Advertisers need to pick the type of campaign they want to run – whether it’s based on conversions in the form of link clicks, landing page views, or certain on-site interactions.

Naturally, this will require some introspection and businesses will need to have a clear idea of their respective advertising goals before determining the bidding option that best suits them.

Recycle ads to preserve engagement figures

It’s vital that your advertisements go down well with their intended audiences. More popular ads will be viewed widely as more favorable among users, and will likely receive considerably more engagements from targets.

However, many of the ad tests that you’ll perform to optimize your PPC campaigns will remove your comments and restart your engagement stats for each post.

This can be a nuisance because of the value of likes and comments to advertisers, however, it’s possible to utilize the technique of ‘social stacking’ in a way that helps to keep all interactions in tact for all to see online.

To perform social stacking, go to the ad preview page for the existing advertisement you’re aiming to keep. Click on the drop down menu to the top right of the preview and select the option ‘Facebook Post With Comments’. Copy the end of the existing URL for your ad and then choose to ‘Use Existing Post’ when setting up a new campaign. Paste the copied Post ID from the previous step and voila – a brand new PPC ad with all the relevant likes and comments carried over.

Peter Jobes is the Content Marketing Manager at Solvid, a digital marketing agency who specializes in SEO, paid advertising and website designing.