How to Do Facebook Ads Optimization in 2021

Are You Doing Facebook Ads Optimization?

If you’re not optimizing your ads, you’re wasting money and losing out on the power of Facebook ads.

Let us show you how to optimize – we’ve got some hacks to accelerate your ad launches that you may not have heard before. 

Today, we’re bringing you Facebook ads optimization, updated for 2021.

Optimizing ads is an essential part of any healthy, successful advertising campaign on Facebook. It’s an essential skill. 

So let us share the best Facebook ads optimization tips for 2021 and how to implement each. 

In today’s post, we’ll cover: 

1. What to optimize for (and how)
2. Some Facebook “hacks” (or lesser-known tactics) to give your ads a boost from the beginning

But warning! 

Don’t get so focused on optimization that you over-edit these ads.

When making edits to your campaigns, it takes Facebook between 24 and 48 hours to adjust to the changes and start delivering normally again.

Sometimes it’ll cause you to stay in the learning phase even longer.

So you need to let the ads sit, and not make any major changes or draw any conclusions for a few days after edits. 

Facebook Ads Optimization: What To Optimize For

1. Optimize ad schedule
2. Optimize creative combinations
3. Optimize ad placement
4. Use A/B testing

1. Optimize Ad Schedule (time of day and day of the week)

Check to see which days of the week and what time of day works best for your ads. Every business has peak and off-peak hours.

You want to find out which days and hours get the most conversions for the lowest CPA.

You can find that here:

1. Go to Facebook Ads Manager.
2. Click on Reports.
3. Use the breakdown menu to break down your campaign by day.
4. You can use data from multiple campaigns to find the best time for your ads.

Set your campaigns a custom schedule: 

1. Go to Ads Manager.
2. Select Ad Sets.
3. Click to check the box next to the ad set you want to edit.
4. Select Edit.
5. Make changes to your schedule in the Budget & Schedule section. You can:

• • Choose a specific date to have your ad start or stop.
  • Schedule your ad to run on specific days of the week.
  • Extend the date of an ad that has already completed its run if you want to keep running it.

6. Select Publish to publish your changes immediately, or select Close to save the changes to publish later.

Note that these changes will reset your ads to the Learning Phase.

So you may want to save these to make other major optimizations like audience targeting, creatives, etc. 

2. How to optimize creative combinations (avoid ad fatigue and get lower CPA)

Your ad creative is what people are going to be looking at, reading, and interacting with.

The behind-the-scenes setup things like targeting and placements aren’t visible to your customer. This is all they see. 

That’s why you need to show the best ad possible for each person.

But how can you do that when you’re making one ad with one graphic or video at a time? You don’t.

You let someone (or something) else do the work for you. 

Use Dynamic Ads

Dynamic ads are the way to go to skip the agony of A/B testing creative, and waiting weeks and weeks for results.

We like the option a lot for small business owners or digital marketers who don’t have a ton of time.

When you use dynamic ads, you’re creating a template with your catalog, so that Facebook can make a bunch of different versions of your ad.

Facebook uses machine learning to put together customized ads for each viewer.

Our social media management company especially likes to use dynamic ads when we’re retargeting website visitors or abandoned carts.

This is so Facebook can show them the actual products they shopped.

We’re going to show you how to create a dynamic ad next, but first, we just want to say that for those who want to learn more about social media ads…

…we have a new social media ads training course that will give you more tips and strategies to get the best of your social ad campaigns.

Check it out after reading this post. 

How to Set-up Dynamic Ads

Now that you understand how to do Facebook ads optimization and what we look for first…

…we want to share some of our tips for accelerating the launch of your ads and give them a bit of a head-start. 

To create your dynamic ad:

1. Go to Ads Manager.
2. Select + Create.
3. Create your campaign. Choose Catalog Sales, App Installs, Lead Generation, Conversions, Traffic, or Messages as your objective.
4. Depending on your campaign objective, you will select your catalog at the campaign, ad set, or ad level.

• • Catalog Sales: Choose your catalog at the campaign level.
  • App Installs or Lead Generation: Choose your catalog when you create your ad set.
  • Conversions, Traffic, or Messages: Choose your catalog when creating an ad. Dynamic audience options are not available for these objectives.

5. Finish creating your dynamic ad according to your campaign objective. The steps will be slightly different depending on your selection.

If you want to see the full video tutorial for these steps, then be sure to watch the video at the top of this post.

Here’s an extra tip for you:

If you use dynamic ads and retargeting audiences, and you see a sustained decrease in performance, try testing your ad against a broad audience.

It might make all the difference. 

3. Optimize Ad Placement (so you stop wasting money)

The next one on our list of Facebook ads optimization tips is to optimize where your ad will be shown.

Cost per click can vary over 550% depending on ad placements, so this is something you need to pay close attention to.

This can have a major impact on your cost per result and Ad Ranking Metrics. 

You can find that here: 

1. Go to Ads Manager.
2. Use the breakdown menu to show Placements.
3. Identify your top-performing placements. 

Here’s what you’ll do with that information: 

a. Increase your bids on the top-performing ad placements.

Check your bid for ads across placements. You can find that information here, use the bidding and optimization reporting preset:

1. Go to Ads Manager.
2. Click the Columns dropdown.
3. Select Bidding and Optimization.

b. Remove very poorly performing placements.

1. Go to Ads Manager and navigate to the ad you’re editing.
2. Click Edit.
3. You’ll be dropped in the ad, but you can navigate using the left sidebar here. You’ll adjust placement at the Ad Set Level.
4. Click on the Ad Set, organized a step above. 
5. Scroll down and click the checkbox to remove placements from your ad. 
6. Click Publish to publish the changes. 

Keep in mind that a significant change like this will reset your ad to the learning phase, and you’ll need to wait 24-48 hours for the ad to reset. 

4. Use A/B Testing to more quickly find the best settings and creatives for your ad.

As a small business owner or digital marketer, one of the most important things you need to do (as part of your Facebook ads optimization)…

…is figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

And you need to do so as quickly (and affordably) as possible. 

We recently published a post on Facebook ad testing, so we recommend you go check that out after you get our head-start hacks that we’re sharing next. 

Lesser-known Facebook Ads Optimization Tactics

We use these tactics to give our ads a head-start:

1. Use existing posts as social proof ads.
2. Inject a little rocket fuel by fudging your budget setup at launch.
3. Use someone else’s fan base to jump-start your success.
4. Poach big event audiences in your target market.

Hack #1: Social Proof

What is social proof? 

The first Facebook ads optimization tactic we’re going to share with you is social proof. But what is it?

When we talk about social proof in online marketing 101, we use it to mean something like evidence.

Social proof is evidence that your product or business is liked by other people.

Humans, being communal animals who seek approval and conformity from others…

…are more likely to engage with something positive, if there’s social proof that other people like it too.

Why does social proof matter? 

Social proof can be the reason your product does really well (and conversely, lack of social proof could be the reason your product fails).

When you use social proof, you’re making your customers feel more comfortable making that purchase.

That is because there are more indicators telling them it’s a good idea. 

Plus, one of the biggest, most successful forms of marketing out there is social proof. Can you guess what it is? 

If you said influencer marketing, you’re right! Influencer marketing is social proof.

The influencer tells their group of people, “Hey, I like this product.” They give it a try and join in on praising and promoting the product.

Here’s a good example of influencer marketing.

Social proof. 

How you can collect social proof for your small business:

• Publish a great post to your page. 
• Boost this post to get more engagement (make sure it’s an engaging post).
• When you’re in the Ads Manager, create a new ad. 
• Select Use An Existing Post instead of the other options. 
• Set up the rest of your ad as you normally would (an A/B test would be a good idea – try testing targeting first).
• Publish your ad. 

Now your brand new ad has the engagement that exists on the post, including reactions and comments. 

Hack #2: Budget Setup

Now we learned this Facebook ads optimization hack from a website called AdEspresso.

They have a ton of great information, and we’ve been using this trick for a while and it works great. Check them out, but check out this trick first: 

If you’re working with a small social media budget, it can sometimes take days or weeks before you start to see results.

And that time can be frustrating as a small business owner who just wants sales. 

Facebook offers accelerated delivery as an option, but if you choose this, Facebook will focus on the speed of delivery by sacrificing your budget.

To get around this, you can fudge your daily or lifetime budget at launch, and adjust it later. 

Here’s how you can hack your budget like this: 

1. You set up your ad, but set your daily or lifetime budget higher than your actual budget. 
2. Launch your ad and wait until you have over 10,000 impressions. Then start evaluating what’s working and what’s not. 
3. Make changes to what’s not working and adjust your budgeting to match your expected spend. 

You don’t need to use this method every time you make changes to your campaign, just at the initial launch. 

Hack #3: Use Someone Else’s Audience (Ethically)

There are people and pages who are followed by millions of folks in your target audience.

You can target these audiences – built completely by someone else – to give your ads a head-start by reaching people more likely to want what you offer.

Now how can you do this Facebook ads optimization hack? Here’s what to do.

Hack #4: How you can (ethically) poach someone else’s audience 

1. Find pages that have built large audiences around your industry or niche. 
2. Go to Ads Manager and create an ad as you would normally do.
3. Choose Video Views as your objective. Make sure your video is awesome. Click here to learn how to design short Facebook video ads.
4. When you get to targeting, you’ll go to Interests.
5. Enter the name of the people or pages that you found when you did that search earlier.
6. Add them to your audience. We chose Gary Vee here. He’s worked hard to build up a very big audience, and we can use that to our advantage. 
7. Continue creating your ad as you normally would. We suggest you use A/B testing and Dynamic Creative to make the most of your ad. 

You’ll want to optimize for the things we mentioned earlier when monitoring your ads. A/B testing will be key here. 

Try These Facebook Ads Optimization Tips!

We hope you’ve found these hacks helpful. What other hacks have you tried lately that worked well for you?

If you want more results from your Facebook ads, then work with our Facebook advertising services today.

Get in touch with us to schedule a free meeting.

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