Business Benefits
Improve your Facebook advertising performance.
Check that Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics are tracking traffic and conversions correctly.
Ad insights are only good if the data is accurate.
Check the delivery column in your Facebook reports.
- If the status is Learning, give Facebook more time to optimize performance – only make edits if they are absolutely necessary. Come back when the status changes to Active.
- If the status is Learning Limited, consider combining or expanding your ad sets, increasing your budget, increasing your bid, or changing the optimization event to something more frequent.
Compare total spend with target budget to ensure the pacing of your spend is evenly spread for optimal conditions.
If you are underspending, raise your campaign budget. Alternatively, create new ad campaigns or ad sets.
Check Facebook campaign objectives for overlap and ad spend alignment.
- Your Facebook campaigns should be organized by objective - for example, brand awareness, website clicks, or purchases - with minimal overlap. If there’s more than one campaign with the same objective, they are competing and spending your budget inefficiently. Consolidate them.
- Compare the ad spend per campaign against your business objectives. If they are misaligned, this is an indication that the budget can be better allocated.
Go through all ad sets and make sure the settings - demographics, location, interests - match your marketing strategy and review their performance.
- Remove or adjust ad sets that have high-cost per result, and reallocating budget to ad sets with lower cost per result.
- Check the potential audience size of your ad sets. Unless you’re advertising for a local business, aim to have an audience size between 500,000 and 1 million.
- Can you exclude audiences to make your ad sets more targeted? For example, you should exclude people who have recently purchased on conversion campaigns.
Look for audience opportunities by considering custom audiences and lookalike audiences.
- Consider how you can leverage your existing assets – website traffic, email list etc. – to create new audiences and retargeting campaigns.
- If an ad set is performing particularly well (low-cost per result), create a lookalike audience to expand your reach. You can also consider creating lookalike audiences with existing customers or leads.
- Check the audience overlap tool to ensure your audiences aren’t competing and wasting your spend. Again, use exclusions to create unique audiences.
Break down your Facebook ad set reports by device and placement to compare performance across devices.
Remove placements that have high-cost per result. Alternatively, update the ads and landing page to make them more suitable for a specific device. Or, if the device has a sizable reach and your budget allows, separate it into a new ad set and create more tailored ads for it. Remember to exclude the device in the original ad set.
Review ad-level variations, messaging, and performance.
- For each ad set, there should be 2-4 ad variations. If there is only one ad, plan to add more. If there are more than four, deactivate the ads with the higher cost per result.
- Evaluate the message of your ads – are they relevant for your audience and business? Make sure there is a clear call to action.
- Check how the cost per result is trending over time. If it’s increasing, this is a sign that the ads need to be refreshed – test new ad copy or ad format (single image, video, carousel).
For traffic and conversion campaigns, take note of performance inconsistencies between Facebook reports and Google Analytics.
Ads with low cost per click can sometimes result in low engagement on site. Make sure the volume and quality of the traffic is adequate. Note that data between Facebook and Google Analytics should be very similar. If there is a huge discrepancy in reported traffic, go back and review tracking.
Review the landing page conversion rate.
Sometimes the bottleneck to performance is the landing page, not the ads themselves. If you’ve already tested different ad sets and ads, but they are still seeing high click rates with low conversion rates, consider changing landing pages or updating them.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:35:35Z