What is Optimization?
An optimization can be accounted for any change in the campaign's structure that directly impacts its performance.
Why is Optimization Necessary?
Optimization plays an important role in fulfilling client KPIs. Even after the KPIs are met, you need to be consistent in delivering high performance that helps in upselling and building success. Optimizations help us give consistent push and drive desired results in the long run.
Let’s go through these basic yet interesting optimizations that can help you boost your campaigns’ performance.
Optimizations can be made on 3 Levels as follows:
- Campaign level - Budget Change
Budget Optimization: This is the most common yet efficient way of optimizing the campaign.- While focusing on generating conversions, we often tend to allocate more budget towards the conversion campaign. The best optimization on the campaign level would be to increase the budget in the traffic layer, this can improve the performance of the campaign as it helps build a high volume of remarketing audience that can be funneled down to the conversion campaign, hence driving more conversions.
- Use CBO: CBO helps optimize budget across the ad sets. However, another optimization that can be made while using CBO is to add spend limits to the ad sets to ensure efficient budget utilization as the Facebook algorithm allocates more budget to the ad sets with larger audience sizes.
- Ad set level - Audience/Targeting Changes
- Coming to the audience level, for the upper funnel level campaigns, we would always recommend broader targeting such as broader interest targeting, competitor interest audience or lookalike audience to reach as many people as possible.
- Down to the middle funnel campaigns- We would recommend targeting remarketing audience. In addition to the video viewers, website visitors and CRM audience that are most likely used, there is one more source through which you can build an audience that can bring significant changes in performance.
- The Pixel-based audience: Interestingly, by using the Facebook pixel we can target audiences specific to different events. The events include ‘PageView’, ‘ViewContent’, ‘CategoryView’ , ‘AddToCart’ , ‘Initiate Checkout’, ‘Purchase’, ‘CompleteRegistration’ and ‘AddPaymentInfo’. Selecting the right event that perfectly aligns with the client’s interest can help you get fruitful results.
- One more crucial thing to keep in mind at the adset level is to add proper audience exclusions to ensure that there is no audience overlap. Audience overlap results in poor delivery of the adsets as similar adsets compete against each other and only the one with historically best performance gets displayed. Consequently, your ads compete against each other in the auction resulting in auction overlap, to avoid this proper audience exclusion is necessary.
- Ad level - Creative Changes
- Refresh creatives every 4-week to avoid ad fatigue. Testing different creatives can also make you survive in the competitive market of dynamic paid media.
- On the creative level, you can always test different copies and analyze which copy resonates the most with the target audience.
For example, if you have an e-com client selling different products, you can always test two copies, one being urgent based copy and the other being product quality focused copy. This approach of creative copy targeting can help you understand your target audience better and can also help improve targeting. - Furthermore, you can use Dynamic Ads for catalogue products that dynamically generates an ad for a person according to their preference, interest and taste. This removes the burden of creating individual ads for each product and provides a seamless user experience and streamlines the path of purchase.
- Another test that you can do is by launching product focused creatives v/s lifestyle focused creatives in the different funnels of the campaign. This will help you analyze which creative performs better for which funnel and you can then launch them accordingly to maximize efficiency.
Below is an example of an optimization implemented for one of our e-commerce clients.
Campaigns were on CBO (Campaign budget optimization) and in CBO Facebook algorithm pushes more budget towards the ad set with larger audience. This resulted in Denmark (DE) region getting allotted less budget just because the audience size was lower even though it was showing better results than the UK region in terms of CPA.
We added a minimum spend limit to the DE ad set to flow more budget, giving it space for optimum budget utilization and parallelly giving enough control levers to CBO for budget distribution. After the campaign ended, we saw that DE could achieve a 20% lower CPA than it was achieving previously.
Please be advised that optimizations steps are subjective and can vary across campaigns/accounts.
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