Facebook ad campaigns can deliver an impressive return on ad spend to achieve your marketing objectives from increasing brand awareness to conversions with increased sales and lead generation for your business.
There are many approaches that can be taken and testing involved with running Facebook ads therefore your business may not have been seeing the results you were hoping for. This could be down to the way your Facebook ad campaign has been set up and how it is being delivered.
Facebook want you to continue to run Facebook advertising and be happy with the performance of your Facebook ad campaigns. Therefore they have recently launched ‘Meta Performance 5’.
Meta Performance 5 provides five focus areas from their own findings and learnings which they have found proven to improve performance for other businesses using these techniques. Below we take a look at each of the Meta Performance 5.
Gemma Finch
Social Media & Paid Ad Specialist at 1PCS Creative. Love engaging and impactful social content, family time with my little girl and helping companies grow and build their presence online.
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Conversions Data
To improve the performance of your Facebook advertising as part of the Meta Performance 5 it has been recommended if not doing so already to track your conversion data in Facebook ads manager. Facebook campaigns have been proven to deliver lower cost per action across multiple ad types and ad formats once it has access to the relevant conversion tracking.
Facebook advertising work by understanding how Facebook users are interacting with your paid ads on your online store or website to take learnings to improve the ad performance. To do this before create ads in ads manager they recommend the Meta pixel and the Conversions API is set up.
Facebook offers tools with their partner platforms such as WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify to help with installing the Meta pixel. It is best to also set up Conversion API as this captures additional data such as from the server and additional event information to further help learnings for your Facebook ad campaign.
As part of tracking conversion data this includes setting up the relevant events, such as add to cart and purchases. Facebook then has a deeper understanding of the catalog sales store traffic and any points which need improving to improve performance, such as if there is a high percentage of people abandoning their cart.
Facebook advise to monitor the event quality, therefore if any are marked as ‘poor’ or ‘ok’ then improving these to get to ‘good’ or ‘great’ should benefit your social media strategy, as the improvements made can lower the Facebook ads cost.
Ad Sets
When creating a new Facebook ad campaign in business manager it provides numerous options for choosing the right ad set for your ad campaign to reach your target audience. This could be deciding to be broad with your targeting for your paid advertising.
An example would be when advertise on Facebook to have an ad set aimed at 20-50 male and female. Alternatively each ad set could have detailed targeting such as a smaller age range and fine tuned interests and behaviours, with several ad sets running ads at the same time from the Meta business suite.
Facebook with Meta Performance 5 have recommended simplified ad sets for your Facebook campaign. They have data proven findings to show this approach will maximise the ad budget when run ads for future campaigns.
Each ad set within a Facebook campaign regardless of if it is the first ad campaign or have been delivering them for years, should be reviewed to identify any cross over in audiences. If there are audiences in the ad set which overlap another ad set then Facebook recommends they are combined together.
This will allow Facebook to receive more data due to being a larger audience size which they advise means gives them deeper data lead learnings to improve your Facebook ad campaign such as ad placement across the audience network to maximise your campaign budget. It also prevents two or multiple ads competing with one another running with the same ad creative.
Target Audience
Above we spoke about the different approaches to selecting your audience when creating Facebook ads in Facebook business ads manager. One of the pillars of the Meta Performance 5 to help improve the performance when run Facebook ads is to choose broad targeting for location, age or gender. With the aim to have between 1-10 million in the audience size.
This recommendation is included for small businesses and they have found from their testing and learning it can benefit your lifetime budget by reducing the cost per action. By this we mean for example the campaign objective is conversions, the above recommendation should lower how much it costs each time a purchase is made as a result of your Facebook ads, whether that be Facebook video ads, image ads or carousel ads.
The logic behind having a broader audience is Facebook then has a larger pool of data to learn from to help make improvements to performance. If an audience size is too small it can slow down the process to help Facebook make changes to lower the cost per action.
Selecting a broad audience for your Facebook business page within Facebook ads manager when create Facebook ads can allow your Facebook campaign to reach more potential customers.
Mobile-friendly video
When it comes to ad creative it can be tough to know the best Facebook ads to run for your ad placements with a new campaign. Meta Performance 5 have run studies to understand and recommend the best type of creative to use when creating ads in your ad account.
They have found when they compared ad campaigns running static image ads versus running static image ad with also mobile-friendly video, that including video ads delivered better results for Facebook ads.
For the best results as part of Meta Performance 5 for this recommendation to be successful, the videos should be created with mobile in mind first. Therefore filmed vertically will utilise the screen size for mobile and fill the space when a users sees the Facebook ad. This could be recorded for example on your phone.
They found video ads shown in the Facebook feed as part of a Facebook campaign which runs image ads alongside, worked best if the video is 15 seconds or less. Their findings found this resulted in a higher proportion of people watching the video to the end.
Also keeping your video to 15 seconds or less will mean this particular ad could be used in more ad placements such as Stories or Reels. Rather than filming a video, multiple images sized to the Facebook ad specs could be used to create this ad format instead.
Testing
As the saying goes ‘practice makes perfect’. The final pillar from the Meta Performance 5 to help improve the performance for an ad campaign, is to run A/B testing. The reason being is testing ads directly against one another if done correctly will help to identify which particular element is more successful for your campaign objective, to then further improve the Facebook ad campaign.
For this to be run successfully as part of Meta Performance 5 it is recommended to ensure you are only changing one key component in the A/B Testing on Facebook ads manager. This may be the targeting or the ad creative for example. If too many variables are changed then it won’t be possible to identify from the data results what led to the most successful Facebook ad.
When running A/B testing it should be delivered for a minimum of 2 weeks or once one advert in the test is clearly performing higher. This allows Facebook time to gather enough data to analysis how the A/B testing is performing. It is also best to not run too many tests at the same time as this can make it difficult to find a clear winner from the results.
From the Meta Performance 5 running A/B testing has been a proven method to help businesses to increase the performance of their Facebook campaigns.
We hope our blog post has been useful to know more about Meta Performance 5 to help make changes and improvements from the Facebook recommendations and learnings to benefit your social media strategy for your Facebook ad campaign.
At 1PCS Creative we are experienced with creating and delivering Facebook ad campaigns for our clients. We can happily discuss with you how we can help improve the performance of your current Facebook ads or deliver your first Facebook ads. Please feel free to get in touch to see how we can help you.