Facebook’s Ads Manager, is where you will build Facebook campaigns, which are structured by campaign, adset and ad. Each level encompass details needed to build the campaign which include, the goal, audience, budget, creative and copy. After your campaign is built and approved, you will monitor and optimize your campaign to work towards attaining the campaign goal in an efficient way.
Building Your Campaign Structure
- Campaign Level: This is where you’ll define what the goal is of your campaign. There are several objectives to choose from such as, traffic, engagement, sales, awareness, app promotion and leads. What are you hoping to achieve by running this campaign? If for example, you were aiming to get people to install your app, you would select, App Promotion, as your objective.
- AdSet Level: This is where you’ll enter the requirements such as the app you want consumers to install, audience targeting, optimization goal, budget and schedule.
- If your optimization goal is to have as many people install your app as possible, but you’re unsure of the targeting you may want to start with a broad audience starting with all ages and genders and a location. Then evaluate results and use it in future campaigns.
- Select a daily budget and a start date. Note the daily ad spend will fluctuate as some days will reach more people than others but it won’t deviate too much unless you change the budget mid-run.
- Ad Level: This level is where you include all the assets of your ad such as the creative image or video, copy text for the headline that appears above your image and you can select your call to action. For an app install objection, the “Install” call to action makes the most sense. This will appear on the ad as a button to click to install the app. You are able to see how this will look while building this out in Ads Manager. You are also able to preview the ad in Facebook by sending it to your notifications in your personal Facebook account. Or you can open it on your desktop to see it on your computer. This is a great way to test the Install button to ensure it takes the consumer to the correct app store to install your app.
Campaign Review by Facebook
- When you’re happy with your campaign, you can publish it in Ads Manager. It will take 24 hours for Facebook to review your submission and approve it before the campaign begins to run. Facebook looks at your ads and accepts or rejects them based on compliance with their ad policy. Don’t be afraid of a rejection! This is automated, so a human is not necessarily reviewing every single ad you have in the campaign. You can resubmit the ad for review which most likely will get approved the second time around, as long as you are compliant with their ad policy. Be sure to review the reason for the rejection, make any adjustments if needed and resubmit.
- Pro Tip: Be familiar with the Facebook Advertising Standards and Policies to ensure your ads are in compliance. They center around Facebook’s Community Standard goals which are to have authentic content, a safe content environment, and protect personal privacy and dignity.
Monitor and Optimize Your Campaign
- Now that your campaign is live, you’ll want to keep an eye on its performance and optimize as needed. It takes time for the algorithms to understand the goal of your campaign based on the parameters you’ve set in the adset. Don’t get too impatient and start making changes too soon. You want to see how it performs, evaluate and then make minor adjustments. Note that when you edit your campaign, it will continue to learn and adjust for the new rules set. Results won’t happen immediately, it takes 24 hours or more to adjust, depending on how big the change. Monitor the results to see what has changed over a week then you can evaluate and consider next steps.
- Metrics to review for an app install campaign are the number of app installs and cost per install (CPI), which tells you how much each install is costing you. If CPI is higher than you want, look at the creatives to see if there is one that is costing more than the others. Perhaps you can pause the costly creative. Is your campaign in the learning phase or is it limited learning phase? If limited learning, then you may need to increase your budget to achieve the result you want.
- Pro Tip: Don’t interrupt the learning phase! Every campaign begins in the learning phase. It takes 50 conversions to get out of the learning phase and into an active phase. An active phase means it’s efficiently optimizing. Making major changes, such as significantly increasing or decreasing the budget, can slow the learning process or make it start all over again. This will cost more time and money. However, you can make small changes without affecting the learning phase, such as adjust daily spend at a max of 30% increase or decrease at a time.
The above outlines the basics on building a Facebook campaign, the review process and steps to monitor and optimize to aid in better performance. The process will take time, but patience is key as the algorithm learns and you do as well.
By Erica Carey / erica@loyal.app
