Launch a Facebook Ad Campaign

You’ve launched your campaign. Well done! But it's not over yet, on the contrary! This is just the beginning. Now you have to optimize your campaign by observing how your audience reacts and drawing preliminary conclusions from these reactions.

Monitor Your Campaign

Monitoring your campaign means keeping tabs on it on a daily basis by monitoring certain indicators and tweaking it as best you can to increase your conversion rate.

Fair enough, we haven't! I mentioned the concept in passing when we talked about campaigns aiming to generate conversions on a website (with a conversion Pixel), but I didn't go into detail.

However, we have already discussed conversion in previous chapters. 😉 Remember:

A conversion is when a user does what you want them to do on your site. It might be a purchase, watching a video, submitting a form, etc.

The conversion rate is the percentage of conversions in relation to the ad impressions, i.e., the number of people who have achieved an objective compared to the number of people who have seen it.

Your objective is to increase this conversion rate, so you will focus on two main axes:

• Making sure Facebook is running your ad.

• Making sure that the users who see it are as high quality as possible in that they accomplish your campaign objective.

If you've been following my explanation of the Facebook algorithm, you'll recall that your campaign must be both relevant (drive engagement) and competitive (its cost per click must be higher than the competition).

So, we have four metrics to monitor:

• Reach: managed by Facebook based on the performance of our campaign and bid.

• Conversion rate: automatically calculated.

• Engagement (all actions performed by the user). 

• Cost per click. 

We don't have control over all the parameters of this equation, but we can influence engagement and cost per click!

So, here's our strategy:

• Encourage engagement by being responsive to user comments.

• Adjust the cost per click as you go along.

• Promote ads that work by removing poorly-converting ones as soon as possible.

Adjust the Cost per Click

Adjusting the cost per click (or cost per thousand) starts with determining your return on investment (ROI). Of course, you can bid and pay much more to win a campaign, but if the investment does not match the expected return, you may well end up kicking yourself for having invested so much! 

Here’s an example: Your campaign’s objective is to promote a new cologne that is all the rage with young men.

The cologne costs $50. But if you make only one sale and your campaign costs $50, your return on investment will be zero. On the other hand, if you make two sales (i.e., two conversions), your return on investment will be $50 (2 x 50 - 50).

You can then set the maximum CPC on your campaign. If a click costs $50, running this campaign is basically useless.

So, you adjust your budget directly on the platform by monitoring the cost per click advised by Facebook and lowering it from time to time to see how low you can go before losing profitability.

Let's see how to add a bidding limit to all your ads and modify the maximum CPC or CPM to optimize your campaign:

To adjust the price, click on the name of your campaign, then in the Campaign budget optimization section, select the bid strategy’s bidding limit.

Click Next and scroll down to the Optimization and Delivery section of your ad set configuration page.

Pause Your Ad Campaign at the Right Time

A campaign has an expiration date. Once everyone in your audience has seen it, the results will start to fade. Here are some key indicators to help you identify the right time to stop.

Frequencies

First of all, watch the frequency. Frequency indicates the average number of times a user has seen your ad. Obviously, the higher the rate, the less happy your user will be!

It all depends on your industry. In general, 5 is an acceptable limit, but you can go beyond that. Just compare this with the other indicators that feature in the equation.

Other Indicators

Other indicators include a drop in reach, decrease in engagement and fewer conversions, increasing your cost per conversion. These signals indicate that Facebook has served your ad to the entire target audience and that the audience is starting to get bored. It's time to stop and take stock of how the campaign performed!

Draw Conclusions From Your Campaign

Dashboard

Your campaign is over; it's time to write out your conclusions!

You'll be able to see the results of your campaign and analyze them on the Facebook ads manager tool. Let's see what your dashboard looks like:

Facebook's ad tool may not highlight all the data you want to analyze or make a note of. That's why I suggest creating your own dashboard to measure your campaigns, either in Excel or on Trello.

For example, my performance dashboard includes my conclusions (qualitative data) and my ad relevance rankings, conversion rate, the total budget spent, ROI, conversions, and the total number of actions.

Make sure to tailor the performance dashboard to your requirements and objectives!

Well, now's a good time to explore it in greater detail!

As your campaign progresses, Facebook will analyze your results and give you access to relevance rankings that will let you know where you stand compared to other ads in terms of quality.

There are three rankings you can analyze:

• Quality ranking: The quality of your ads compared to competing ads. 

• Engagement rate ranking: This ranking allows you to compare the expected engagement rate of your ad against competing ads for the same audience.

• Conversion rate ranking: This ranking allows you to compare the expected conversion rate of your ad against ads with the same optimization objective on the same audience.

For each of these data points, you will know if you are above or below average, and you can then implement solutions to increase your ranking as you run your ads.

Stop a Campaign

Select an ad set or ad, and click the Off/On button to stop a campaign.

Share Your Reports

Facebook allows you to create and share performance reports. This feature is quite useful if you want to work with several people on an ad campaign without everyone having to log into the Ad Manager. 

To create a performance report, click on the hamburger menu at the top left of your Ads Manager (All Tools) and then Ads Reporting.

Once you have created your report, all you have to do is select it and click Share. Facebook will generate a link that you can then send to any collaborators.

Let's Recap!

To improve your advertising campaign, you should:

• Track results regularly and see if they are meeting your objectives.

• Calculate your return on investment to limit the bids if necessary.

• Build and share a dashboard that includes the metrics relevant to your campaign (frequency, reach, quality ranking, etc.).

In the next chapter, we’ll discover how to generate more conversions by refining your audience!