Cool. I’ve been doing that a lot recently, too.

That’s because video ads have become an indisputable requirement for any Facebook advertising campaign.

When researching Facebook Ad Library for good examples, I noticed that 80% of the TOP brands’  Facebook ad creatives were videos.

Facebook video ads have become a necessity in 2025. You can’t go on running static ads only.

Read more about social media advertising trends in 2025.

Fun fact: Facebook algorithms deliver static and video ads to different audiences, depending on what a user is more likely to react to. So if you want to reach the people more susceptible to video content, you’ll need attractive video creatives.👀

The #1 obstacle that marketers come across when creating video ads for their Facebook or Instagram campaigns is the lack of skill and know-how.

For additional inspiration, you or check out what we’ve published on this blog – including 180 Best Facebook ad examples and 84 Best Instagram ad examples.

Meta video ad best practices

Before I created my first video ads, I had a number of questions:

• What are Facebook video ads’ best practices?
• How long should the ad videos be and what’s the correct size of Facebook video ads?
• What should the Facebook video ads feature?
• What tools are used to create video ads?
• Do we need an agency to create the ad videos for us?

I’ll do my best to answer all of these questions for you in this article.

Let’s not drag this intro too long and get to the Facebook video ad examples!

Best Facebook video ad examples,  2025 update

I found the following video ads while browsing the Facebook Ad Library – I like to regularly check my selected 100 brands’ ad creatives to keep my creative know-how up to date.

#1: Oreo

I envy whoever produced this video ad for Oreo as it’s perfectly executed, having a high-quality sleek look, fast-paced movement, and eye-capturing shifting patterns.

#2: Deliveroo

Deliveroo is running tens of similar Facebook ads, each featuring various city districts and relevant restaurants. Such automatically customized ads are usually created with a creative automation tool, e.g. Smartly. 

​#3: Spotify

Similarly to the previous ad, this Spotify looks a lot like it’s created using an automated Facebook video duplication tool.

Be it as it may, they have managed to create an engaging Facebook video ad with very few resources: An album cover, mixed colorful elements, and on-point typography.

#4: Restream

Working with Restream, we created a set of Facebook video ads that are essentially an animated version of their static ads. 

Bringing your static ads to life is a good way to get started with video advertising on Facebook. You just need a motion designer who can help to make your existing design assets move.

#5: Airbnb

The first four ads that you saw were all around 15 seconds long or even shorter. In contrast, this one by Airbnb is a brand awareness ad: it runs for 40 seconds and tells an inspiring story.

It is a best practice to use a mix of performance-oriented and brand awareness ads. Both need a slightly different approach:

• Performance ads should direct the viewer to make a purchase or take some other action. These ads usually end with a clear call-to-action.
• Brand awareness ads’ goal is to create… well… awareness about a brand and drive positive brand perception. These ads do not usually ask people to take an action immediately.

#6: Milka

Pardon my French. This ad by Milka is essentially reminding people to be nicer to each other. A simple and on-brand Facebook video ad.

#7: Sephora

This ad looks like it took a lot of work, so it is likely to be part of a big global Facebook campaign. 

You can create a mix of Facebook ads – some that take less time to create and that you run in the short-term + the branding ads that you invest more time and money into and will run for a longer period, e.g. for 3 months. 

#8: Klarna

I am a big fan of Facebook ad creatives that follow closely the brand’s CVI. That’s why I’ve always liked Klarna’s ads – they stay true to their pink color palette and as a result, their ads are easily recognizable in the news feed.

# 9: Snickers

Take notice of how this Facebook ad is pairing filmed video content with colorful background and typography.

By using highly contrasting sections throughout your Facebook video ad, you can assure that it will capture your audience’s attention while they scroll through their Instagram or Facebook feeds.  

#10 Moo

One more Facebook video ad effect to test out is the “endless loop” technique.

Repeating motion effects are especially helpful if you have interesting video content that lasts only a few seconds. To make sure your ad gets shows for the full 15-second story ad length, make it repeat on a loop for 15 sec.

#11: Nars

#12: Mailchimp

#13: Dior

#14: Grammarly

#15:Wrike

Facebook video ad examples, 2020 edition

Below, you will find the Meta ad examples that I collected for the previous release of this article. 

Looking at some of them made me think that we’ve come a long way from the time when only a few brands were able to produce high-quality video content.

I should probably start to learn video editing…

#16: VSCO

The Instagram video ad by VSCO showcases their product features in a simplified 15-second video. Here are some key takeaways for you to consider:

• The first 3 seconds matter most – Notice how the first few frames are using a bright color to lead people’s attention to the the ad copy “transformative tools” and get them hooked to watch the rest of the video.
• Video ads ≠ no copy – In fact, it’s a good idea to keep copy in your ad video to better explain what’s going on.

#17: Facebook

Yeah, Facebook is advertising on their own platform and they’re pretty good at it. Here’s what they’re doing well:

• The ad asks a question – there’s a highly visible question always visible in the ad video that catches the viewers’ attention.
• Video & message match – Notice how the message “Need a push?” matches with the moving car’s message.
• Simplicity – a video ad does not have to be 30-seconds long and take days to create. You can start testing with simple animations that are simple yet catch people’s attention.

#18: Monese

Monese’s video ad explains how their product works and shows their app in action. Here’s what’s noteworthy about this ad:

• Display your product – on the one hand, you won’t need as much new content. On the other hand, people will get familiar with how your product looks and feels. It’s a win-win.
• End with a call-to-action – don’t leave people hanging after watching your video. Tell them what’s the next step to take. In this case, it’s “download the app.”

#19: Squarespace

This Instagram video ad by Squarespace is another nice example of simple video design in action:

• Show small changes – showing small changes such as the growing numbers’ count in this ad is a good trick for catching the viewers’ attention.
• Show you logo – It’s a commonly known best practice to show your logo throughout the video ad (that’s also a suggestion in Youtube’s video ads’ playbook)

#20: Nike

If you’re working with a lifestyle or eCommerce brand, your audience might appreciate more story-focused ads. Nike’s ad would make for a great branding video.

• Make it look high quality – if you plan to film your Facebook video ads, make sure you’re using a high end camera.
• Mix video footage & copy – seriously, having some copy in your video ads makes them a lot more comprehensible and having a powerful impact on the audience.

#21: Web Summit

Here’s another example of a story-specific ad, showing how a conference venue is being set up in the matter of hours (being compressed into a 30-second video).

• Tell a story – our brains are hardwired to look for patterns and follow stories, leading your audience being hooked to your video ad
• You don’t need a fancy agency – Web Summit’s video ad could easily have been recorded by a camera set up by a crew member and edited by another crew member. Easy.

#22: AppSumo

This ad is not really a video ad but a Slideshow consisting of AppSumo’s product reviews. Here’s what I like about it:

• Creating it took 5 minutes max – you can create a similar ad by uploading 3-5 images to Facebook and creating a Slideshow ad.
• Showcase testimonials – third-party testimonials increase trust in your product. This ad could be shown in a Facebook retargeting campaign to nudge people to make a purchase.

#23: Mango

Mango’s Facebook ad is like a tiny movie that combines nice views, a celebrity model and the brand’s products.

• Use video ads for branding – while this ad doesn’t invite you to buy any specific product, it reminds you about the brand.
• Work with influencers – if you’ve got enough cash, having an influencer (that’s loved by your target audience) in your ad videos doesn’t hurt.

#24: Reedeshop

• Animate simple messages – even making a word blink or change color can help increase your ad’s click-through rate.
• Use the right ad formats – when creating video ads for Facebook and Instagram, you can upload ads in multiple sizes. Check out all the current Instagram ad specs here.

#25: The New York Times

This is one of my all-time favourite video ads. Seriously, I think it’s genius.

• Create unique ads – The NYT video ad is unique in that it only uses text to tell a story, But it’s super catchy at that.
• Know your tools – I created a similar video ad for a client by using Photoshop only (creating video ads is easier than you think).

The top 10 Facebook and Instagram video ad examples were my favourites. Up next, you will find more video ads for even more inspiration.

But before you check out the rest, here’s a list of tools that you can use to create video ads:

• Photoshop for GIFs + Illustrator to create icons, etc.
• Sketch + Flinto/Kite
• Adobe After Effects
• Record videos on your own
• Buy video footage on Stocksy or other stock photo sites

#26: BeUnsettled

BeUnsettled’s video ad is quote basic in terms of video content. However, they’ve combined video footage that looks like stock videos with copy, giving it more substance.

The nature-movie-like frames also fit perfectly into anyone’s Instagram feed, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on whether the ad manages to catch the target audience’s attention.

#27: Pelacase

This is another example of a Facebook video ad using average video footage, but using the correct medium to tell the story.

#28: Facebook

Here’s a good Facebook video ad example for marketers with small budgets that want to test our some kind of video animation.

You could basically take a static image and pair it with an animated loading icon – you’re guaranteed to get people look and wait for your ad video to load, without this ever happening. But then again, you’ve already got their attention, so they might as well read the rest of your ad.

#29: Okia

Playing around with text is the easiest way to create video ads. You could do a similar video on Photoshop in around 10 minutes. (+ the hours you’ll spend to come up with a good message and unique value proposition ideas for your ad).

#30: BetterMe

If you saw this ad as a static image v.s. a GIF ad, which one would catch your attention?

Try turning some of your existing static Facebook ad designs into GIFs to find out if it helps to increase the CTR and lower the cost-per-result.

#31: MyTheresa

Here’s an example of an Instagram ad that probably required a high budget to create. This is definitely appealing to a lot of luxury goods buyers.

However, spending tens of thousands of dollars on video creation does not always mean your ad is 10 times more efficient. Make sure to think who your target audience is before buying a video from an agency.

#32: Stuudionahk

For a leather goods brand like this one, creating a video ad to showcase their products makes a lot of sense. However, I would always suggest that you pair your video ads with image ads to see what works best.

#33: DRM Bracelets

This is a completely random campaign by some drop shipping brand. But I have to give it to them – using the country name in the ad is a nice personalised touch.

#34: Trvl

Notice how this Instagram video ad example by Trvl combines images, copy and colorful backgrounds to create a video-like effect. In fact, there’s no video footage in this ad – another proof that you don’t need a large budget to create marketing videos.

#35: Monese

I’ve always been a fan of slightly animated video ads (we also test a lot of them in Taxify). The reason these animations work is that they catch people’s attention but don’t lead the focus away from the ad’s main message.

Alright… We’ve reached the end of our video ad showdown.

Here are some key takeaways to remember:

• You need to test video ads – there are brands whose audiences love video ads. But there are also Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns where image ads work best.
• Creating video ads doesn’t have to be expensive – many of the examples above could have been made in just a few hours. With help from one of the many great unlimited video editing companies, you can keep production fast and affordable. Expenses do not equal results in the case of Facebook ads.
• There are many video ad hacks – from catching the attention in the first 3 seconds to ending the video with a clear call-to-action, there’s a lot you can do to double or even triple your video ads’ conversion rate.

P.S. if you’ve got some cool Facebook or Instagram video ad examples, send them over and we’re happy to include them in this list.

The post 35 Facebook Video Ad Examples – 2025 Update appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

You could either…

1. Create a personal Instagram account and start seeing ads
2. Browse online ad galleries
3. Read this article with 80+ Instagram ad examples

While browsing various ad examples, you will eventually reach another question: What makes the best Instagram ads so good?

There are several aspects:

1. Your Instagram ad design must catch the viewer’s eyes.
2. It’s best to follow Instagram ad size and specs best practices and create ads with the size of 1080×1080 px.
3. Create a different ad for your Facebook and Instagram campaign (1200×628 px vs. 1080×1080 px).
4. You must find a strong unique value proposition (USP).

As marketing legend David Ogilvy put it:

“If your advertising fails to get the message to the heads of people, your money’s wasted. And this is happening to millions of advertisers every day.”

So how can you create Instagram ads that won’t fail? – Check out the 84 ad examples in this article to get tens of new ideas for creating irresistible Instagram ads that will increase your sales.

How to use this article:

The first 10 ad examples come with an explanation of what makes them work – so that you can get a better overview of Instagram ad best practices.

While browsing all these examples, analyze:

• What makes the ad’s design good?
• What copywriting hacks could you copy?
• How to apply these best practices to your campaigns?

If you’re in B2B business, you might want to check out these 100+ LinkedIn ad examples by fast-growth brands.

Ok? Let’s roll!

#1: The Economist

What makes this ad good?

The Economist’s Instagram ad example showcases their magazine covers, letting the viewer immediately know what the product is. But instead of just showing the image, they have used ½ of the ad space to include a headline and a pricing point, making the ad more informative.

Key takeaways:

• Showcase your product – people will immediately grasp what it is that you’re selling.
• Add copy in your ad image – Consumer Acquisition found that images are responsible for 75%-90% of ad performance. It makes sense to add your USP in the image.
• Don’t make your ad too text-heavy

#2: HubSpot

What makes this ad good?

HubSpot’s Facebook ad is super simple – You could create it in under 1 minute by using Paint or Photoshop. However, the bright colours and copy will catch many people’s attention in the Instagram newsfeed. Think about it – the newsfeed is full of photos. This makes this ad example with simple background shine out.

Key takeaways:

• Use bright colours – People’s brains are wired to notice bright colours and associate them with positive feelings.
• Use simple ad design – In the crowded Instagram newsfeed, simplicity is often the key. Test ads that include only background + copy.
• Use the correct ad size – We can’t help but wonder how much more efficient this ad would be when created as a square image… It would take up more space in the newsfeed, and draw even more attention.

#3: New York Times

What makes this ad good?

This NYT Instagram ad is similar to the previous example in that it features a monochrome background with copy. However, this ad has taken a couple of steps further, playing with typography and including the brand’s logo. Also, the ad size is 1080×1080 px, which is perfect for Instagram ads.

Key takeaways:

• Use interesting typography – If you’re planning to include a lot of copy in your ad image, use eye-catching fonts to bring your ad to life.
• Include your logo in the ad image – It will help to create higher brand awareness at no extra cost. Moreover, your logo can serve as a design element.
• Use contrasting font colours – When using the background + copy ad design hack, make sure your background colour and font colours contrast each other. Otherwise, it will be difficult to read your ad’s copy.

#4: MeetFrank

What makes this ad good?

MeetFrank’s Instagram ad example uses a simple custom design which is highly efficient when it comes to Facebook and Instagram advertising. Moreover, the ad design features a growth curve which immediately draws the viewer’s attention. Not to mention showcasing numbers – another element that’s guaranteed to get more eyes on your Instagram ad.

Key takeaways:

• Use symbols in your ad design – Including positive symbols such as a growth curve in your ad design will make your audience remember you with positive emotions.
• Include numbers in your ad design – Research shows that by starting your headline with a number, you’re 36% more likely to have people click on your ads. Numbers draw attention.
• Address your users in the ad – By asking “UI/UX DEsigner” in the image, MeetFrank’s ad gets the attention of everyone who feels themselves addressed.

#5: Rains

What makes this ad good?

Being an apparel brand, it’s increasingly important for Rains to show their product in the best light. To showcase their products, Rains has created an Instagram carousel ad that features 3 different images (notice the three blue dots under the ad image). Moreover, the ad image’s size is in an interesting format, resembling a portrait photo rather than square image.

Key takeaways:

• Create Instagram carousel ads – Include more than one image in your ad to show multiple products within a single ad.
• Use professional photographs – If you’re planning to advertise a photo ad image, make sure these look professional. You can hire a photographer to help you out.
• Test portrait images – Instagram allows advertisers to set up ad images in portrait formats. Use this option to take up more space in the newsfeed.

#6: Zaful

What makes this ad good?

This Instagram ad example by Zaful caught our eye due to the original way of dividing the ad image into several pictures, creating a mosaic effect. That’s a smart idea to showcase different sides/elements of your product in a single ad image. You can also use it as a Facebook advertising hack.

Key takeaways:

• Test mosaic images – If you want to show multiple aspects of your product, test dividing your ad image into multiple image blocks.
• Combine mosaics with carousel ads – You could use the mosaic-style image as the first card in your Instagram carousel ad, and then include each mosaic image in a closeup as individual carousel ad images.
• Use hashtags – Instagram is all about hashtags. Did you notice the #FreeShipping hashtag in the ad text? Using hashtags will make your ad feel more like it belongs on Instagram.

#6: The Dots

What makes this ad good?

The Dots’ Instagram ad combines a colourful background image with in-image value proposition. While the in-image copy is a little bit difficult to read due to low contrast, it looks sleek and in balance with other ad elements.

Key takeaways:

• If you use stock photos, use good ones – Sometimes, it pays off to use a stock photo in your Instagram ads. However, do not include an overused free stock photo. Make sure people haven’t seen your ad image before.
• Mention your customers – Listing your well-know business customers’ names in the ad copy helps to increase trust in your brand. Note that this tactic requires the approval from your clients.
• Select the right call-to-action – Instagram allows you to select between several CTAs. Use the call-to-action that’s closest to your goal (if you want people to buy something, use the “Shop Now” CTA, etc.)

#7: The Kooples

What makes this ad good?

Here’s another Instagram ad example featuring apparel. Notice how the photographs have been taken by a professional photographer, showing the clothes in good light. Moreover, the ad copy lets the viewer know that there’s a SALE going on, increasing the ad’s click-through rate.

Key takeaways:

• Use emojis – Include emojis in your ad copy to make your ads more interesting. Read how to use emojis in your Facebook ads.
• Add up to 10 carousel cards – Do not limit yourself to 2-3 carousel ad cards – you can add up to 10.
• Add a different link to each image – When setting up your carousel ads, you can make each image to direct to a different link. Use this option to direct people to the correct product’s landing page.

#8: 8fit

What makes this ad good?

8fit’s Instagram ad image looks like it’s taken directly from a health blogger’s Instagram page. That’s the key to their potential audience’s hearts. If you’re advertising a lifestyle brand, use images that showcase your product in normal settings, so that people can imagine themselves using it.

Key takeaways:

• Copy successful Instagram accounts – No, we’re not suggesting that you copy their posts one-to-one. That would be plagiarism. But do copy them in terms of style.
• Write actionable ad copy – Use words like “Use,” “Get,” “Start,” etc. to indicate that people are supposed to take action on your Instagram ad.

#9: MindTitan

What makes this ad good?

This Instagram ad example by MindTitan is not here to sell – it’s focused on attracting talent and getting them to join the company. Instagram is a great platform for advertising your job offers – an opportunity that’s often overlooked by companies. Moreover, the ad states a question in the ad image, nudging people’s minds to answer “Yes” or “No,” and getting them engaged in the first few seconds.

Key takeaways:

• Test Instagram ads for hiring – In addition to promoting your product on Instagram, you can use it to reach talented people.
• Ask a question in the ad image – This will get more people hooked to your Instagram ad, and they will also read the rest of your ad copy.
• Use branded ad design – If you want your ads to be associated with your brand, it’s a good idea to create Instagram ad images that use your branded colours and design elements.

#10: Facebook Audience Network

What makes this ad good?

Instead of trying to sell you anything, this Instagram ad starts with a content marketing offer – an informative article. Facebook Audience Network is using the Instagram ad to keep their customers – marketers – informed about the upcoming features and changes.

Key takeaways:

• Use Instagram ads for promoting content – Especially in B2B sales, it’s important to start with a soft sell, and slowly turn your leads into paying customers.
• Mix icons and symbols – An easy way to create a custom Instagram ad design is to download some free icons and symbols and use Illustrator or Photoshop to mix them together into a good-looking ad image.

If you want to learn more about Instagram advertising, check out this in-depth guide: Instagram Advertising – Always Up-to-date Guide (2018 Edition)

#11: UsabilityHub

#12: Airbnb

#13: Blinkist

#14: Poketo

#15: Brooklinen

#16: Foreo

#17: Cofounders Lab

#18: Squarespace

#19: Deloitte Baltics

#20: The Dots

#21: Kickstarter

#22: Facebook Marketing Developers

#23: Workplace by Facebook

#24: Ohheygirl Store

#25: Folsom & Co

#26: Freefly Systems

#27: Getdesignrr

#28: Gurushots

#29: Harvard Business Review

#30: Hisuperhi

#31: H&M

#32: Hyatt

#33: Inch2

#34: Jason Squire smm

#35: Jon Loomer

#36: British Journal of Photography

#37: Aceroix

#38: Architonicag

#39: Asanarebel

#40: Alex la Rigato

#41: Udemy

#42: Alexander Wang NY

#43: Azalea’s Boutique

#44: LIFT99

#45: Makery

#46: Masterclass

#47: Flachsmann Watches

#48: Gagosian Gallery

#49: Nortal

#50: Nosto

#51: Olive Clothing

#52: Onelive

#53: Cbyloredanapinasco

#54: Origin

#55: Out in London

#56: Paradise Amsterdam

#57: Parts of 4

#58: Pelacase

#59: Pexel Photos

#60:Black Mirror Fans

#61: Rains

#62: Reserved

#63: Rise of the Kings

#64: Scoro

#65: Frontrow

#66: Shopify

#67: STAC

#68: Stitch and Story

#69: Studio Living

#70: Bold Tuesday

#71: Sugar and Cotton

#73: Taxify

#74: Tentree

#75: The Horse

#76: Trvl

#77: Two Dots

#78: Udemy

#79: Venngage

#80: Vidcon

#81: Mvmforher

#82: Web Summit

#83: Wizzair

#84: Your Plug Clothing

Conclusion

Now that you’ve quickly scrolled through all the Instagram ad examples in this article, you definitely have some great new ideas.

If you want to learn even more about creating efficient Facebook and Instagram ads, check out this guide: 215+ Best Facebook Ad Examples (2025 Update)

The post 80+ Best Instagram Ad Examples (2025 update) appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Many of the Facebook ad audits I’ve done happened during a 1h AMA (Ask Me Anything) call. This means that we managed to discuss all other marketing-related questions and do a quick audit. 

In smaller accounts, Facebook ad campaigns audit can be done fast, almost at a glance – in 15-30 minutes.

How? How to audit a Meta advertising account? What to check? How will you know what to improve?

This article will give you some pointers on how to conduct a Facebook ad audit. Bookmark it for later or open up your Facebook Ads Manager right away to follow along and audit your ads in 15-30 minutes.

Take a quick crash course in Facebook analytics by learning about these 15 Facebook ad metrics.

10 questions for Facebook ad audit:

Here’s a quick overview of the 10 questions that I always ask/check/review when auditing a Facebook advertising account. They’re based on my 5+ years of Facebook ads management experience and what I’ve seen working.

Ad campaign level:

1. Are the ad campaigns set up with the correct structure?
2. Does the ad account have remarketing and re-engagement campaigns?

Ad set level:

3. Are all ad sets optimized on correct goals? Is Facebook Pixel set up?
4. Do all ad sets collect enough conversions for algorithms to learn?
5. Which target audiences are being used? Are they optimal?
6. Does the account use Lookalike audiences and Custom audiences?

Ad level:

7. Are there static ads in all correct sizes?
8. Do your Facebook ads look overall attractive?
9. Do your video ads follow all of the best practices?
10. Is your ads’ post-click experience converting?

One of the questions – Do the ads look attractive? – can sound subjective. We’ll take a look at some 👍 v.s. 👎 examples to clarify what works and what doesn’t.

As you read further, I suggest that you open up your Facebook Ads Manager and follow along as we walk through each point. I wrote this guide with specifically small businesses and non-marketers in mind, and will try to share as much guidance as possible – so that even a person who hasn’t opened the Facebook Ads Manager once in their life can navigate through.

Ready to audit? 🕵️ If you don’t know how to access your Facebook Ads Manager, try this link: Open your Facebook Ads Manager.

You should land in a view that shows all your company’s ad campaigns. If you’re added to multiple Facebook ad accounts, you can navigate between them using the dropdown menu. 

Alternatively, if you don’t find your company’s ad account, you can ask your in-house marketer or agency to give you the access – it is possible that you’re not currently allowed to access the advertising account.

In case you made it, you should now see your company’s Facebook ad account. Let’s begin with the audit!

1. Are the campaigns set up with the correct structure?

The first thing that I always check during a Facebook ad audit is the campaign structure:

• Does the ad account have an optimal number of campaigns?
• Are the campaigns set up using the correct objectives and campaign types?
• Are the campaigns set up to run long-term or are they often paused and replaced with new campaigns?

The main mistake that I usually see is that the companies have too many or too few ad campaigns. 

A good amount is one prospecting, one remarketing, and one re-engagement campaign per country (or per region/globally if you work with small budgets).

Also, many companies make the mistake of launching a new ad campaign every time they change their ad creatives or launch a new marketing campaign. 

You should rather always keep on the same campaigns and ad sets (just change the ad creatives inside them), so that Facebook algorithms learn based on accumulating conversions.

I’m not going to get too much into detail, but I’ve written extensively on Facebook ad structure best practices before, so check out that article if you want to learn more. 

Just to quickly illustrate a good example: here’s the general Facebook prospecting campaign structure that I always use with my clients.

• There is one campaign with two ad sets: one with a broad audience and another with 1% or 5% Lookalike audience.
• Both ad sets have the exact same ad creatives inside them.
• Sometimes, I also add ad sets with special interest-based audiences (if I want to show these audiences different more targeted ad creatives).

Here are the top 3 questions to answer when reviewing your account on ad campaign level:

1. Do you have separate ad campaigns for different countries? – YES is correct, you should have separate campaigns for markets with different income levels.
2. Have you launched a new ad campaign for every new marketing campaign? – NO is correct, you should reuse old campaigns whenever possible.
3. Do your ad campaigns have less than 3 active ad sets per campaign? YES is correct, it is better to have fewer ad sets, especially if you’re working with small budgets.

P.S. Here’s something interesting that I learned over the past 12 months: Most of the recommendations I was given by Facebook’s official account managers (all big advertisers get a special support person from Facebook) to improve my clients’ Facebook ad accounts led to worse results v.s. what we were already doing with my clients. So maybe, even if your agency is telling you that “we do it like this because it is the best practice,” ask them to at least A/B test your other hypotheses too.

2. Does the ad account have remarketing and re-engagement campaigns?

Remarketing campaigns are a must-have for any brand, especially for any B2C company with an online store.

It is such a given that I wouldn’t even think about including it under the 10 points of this auditing guide if I hadn’t seen many ad accounts with no remarketing.

So… Are you running remarketing campaigns to reach past website visitors, landing page & blog viewers, last-minute shopping cart abandoners, repeat purchasers?

If you can’t see any remarketing happening on your Facebook ad account, ask your agency or ad specialist what’s up.

Another thing to review is how much are you spending on remarketing and is the budget split optimal? Learn more about seasonal marketing planning and budgeting.

With the brands that I’m working with, we usually spend ca 20-30% of the total advertising budget on remarketing.

Here’s the full-funnel breakdown:

• Prospecting campaigns: 60-80%
• Remarketing campaigns: 20-30%
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I usually mix these with prospecting): 0-10%
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I recommend to use these): 0-10%

The re-engagement campaigns target people who were active customers in the past, but haven’t used your product (or purchased from your store) for a while. If you want to reach those users via Facebook ads, make sure that these campaigns are set up as well. 

In this phase of your audit, ask these questions:

1. Do you have remarketing and re-engagement ad campaigns set up and actively delivering? – The answer, of course, should be YES.
2. Are the remarketing ad campaigns reaching all the correct audiences? Are some audiences left out of remarketing? Are you targeting web visitors, shopping cart abandoners, past purchasers, etc.?
3. Are your remarketing and re-engagement campaigns spending the optimal part of your total budget? It should be around 20-30% of the total spend.

3. Are the ad sets optimized on the correct goals? Is Facebook Pixel set up?

Assuming that the Facebook ad account that we’re auditing has both prospecting and remarketing campaigns set up, we can move on to the ad set level and continue the investigation.

To navigate to the ad set level, either click on a campaign (blue markup) or tick the box before a campaign and select “Ad Sets for 1 Campaign” in the navigation bar (red markup).

You will end up seeing all the ad sets under that specific ad campaign. To see how each ad set is set up, click on the tiny “Edit” text under its name.

Click on “Edit” to see how each ad set is structured

On the ad set level, you will be able to see who is the target audience + how the ad delivery is optimized.

Right now, we’re interested in making sure that your ad delivery is optimized on conversions (instead of Clicks or Impressions).

Scroll down in the editing popup window until you reach the “Optimization & Delivery” section. Make sure that you see “Conversions” here.

There are a few cases where ad sets do not need to be optimized on conversions. For example, if your campaign’s goal is to reach the maximum number of people.

However, if your ad campaign’s goal is to drive sales and bring you new customers (which is true for 95% of advertisers), your ad campaigns (and ad sets) should be optimized on those purchase events.

Another quick way to review all your ad sets’ optimization goals is to check what is counted as a result in the Results column.

Ideally, you should see down-the-funnel events here (such as purchases and registrations).

If your ad sets are not optimized on those events, there are two possible reasons for this:

• It is actually smarter to optimize on top-of-the-funnel goals like clicks or impressions as you only want to raise brand awareness instead of increasing sales.
• You don’t have the Facebook Pixel set up and you’re unable to optimize on Purchase or Registration events because Facebook isn’t tracking them.

Is Facebook Pixel tracking all the important conversions?

To make sure that all your important online events are tracked by Facebook, visit the Facebook Events Manager. You can access it under the 9-dot menu icon at the top left corner of your Ads Manager).

If your Pixel isn’t set up at all, you will see something like this. 👇 It means that you yet have to set up Facebook Pixel on your website / online product / mobile app (or all of them).

If your Facebook Pixel is properly set up, you should see a list of all the tracked events and the time when each was last received by Facebook.

Facebook Pixel is correctly set up

I have yet to see a business that wouldn’t benefit from Facebook Pixel setup, This means that you should definitely have your Pixel set up and tracking all the main events. If it’s not doing that, your ad account has a big deficiency.

So, to sum up, here are the 3 questions to ask in this audit stage:

1. Are your ad sets optimized on events such as Purchases or Registrations (v.s. link clicks or reach)? You should be answering this one with a YES.
2. Is Facebook Pixel set up for your advertising account? It better be!
3. Are all your important marketing conversion events being tracked via the Facebook Pixel?

4. Do all ad sets collect enough conversions for algorithms to learn? 

Facebook algorithms have a learning phase – a specific amount of clicks and conversions that are needed for the algorithms to understand who’s the best target audience for you.

Usually, new ad campaigns have worse results (higher cost-per-result) during the learning phase. So it is important that your ads pass the learning phase.

If your ad campaigns never pass the learning phase, you will never reach the full potential of your Facebook ads.

The main mistake I see on the audited Facebook ad accounts is that they have too many campaigns, and none of these reach the end of the learning phase. 

Either the campaign is paused and a new one started or there are simply too many different campaigns with too low budgets.

To check whether your ad campaigns get enough conversions, set the reporting timeframe of the past 30 days. Then review how many results each ad campaign and ad set has collected.

What is a good number of results that a Facebook ad campaign should collect in 30 days? Ideally, each of your ad sets should collect at least 50 conversions over 30 days. Usually, I expect to see even higher numbers.

Is the ad account using a correct attribution window?

Always check what’s the attribution window of your ad account.

The attribution window is the number of days between when a person viewed or clicked your ad and subsequently took an action. Having a different attribution window changes what results you see in your Ads Manager reports.

Facebook tracks conversions both via clicks and ad views:

• Click-through attribution: A person clicked your ad and took an action.
• View-through attribution: A person saw your ad, didn’t click it, but took an action within the attribution window.

By default, each Facebook ad account’s attribution window is set to 1-day view and 28-day click. However, it should usually be changed to 1-day click or 7-day click as you don’t want to give Facebook credit for conversions that actually happened without its help.

You can review your attributtion window under the Ad Account Settings.

Summing it up again, here are the 3 questions to ask in this audit stage:

1. How many results did each campaign and ad set collect in the past 30 days? If it’s lower than 50 results per ad set, you may need to increase your budget or lower the number of separate campaigns and ad sets. 
2. Are the ad campaigns turned off and new ones added frequently? That’s not good, reuse old campaigns whenever possible.
3. Are you using the optimal attribution window? E.g. 28-day click-through window is usually way too long and Facebook will attribute to ads the conversions that actually happened via other channels.

5. Which target audiences are being targeted? Are they broad enough?

The success of your Facebook ad campaigns largely depends on your target audience. You need to catch the attention of the right people.

As part of your audit, take a look at all of your campaigns’ target audiences.

Assuming that your ad account has both prospecting and remarketing campaigns, we’ll need to review both of them.

Let’s start with prospecting campaigns – the campaigns target a broad audience that haven’t yet heard about your product.

Your Facebook ad campaigns’ targeting is set up on the ad set level. To see which audience each campaign is targeting, navigate to its ad sets and click on the “Edit” icon under each ad set to see who’s targeted.

Here’s a list of the main Facebook ad targeting mistakes that I’ve seen companies making in their prospecting stage campaigns:

👎 Targeting very narrow audiences of fewer than 50,000 people. You want to keep some room for Facebook algorithms to do the optimization for you.

👎 Targeting multiple countries with very different purchasing power or language in the same ad set.

👎 Targeting the same audience in multiple ad campaigns, creating a large-scale audience overlap (we’ll discuss this in greater detail soon).

👎 Not targeting some of the most efficient audiences such as Lookalike audiences of top purchasers.

The last mistake leads us to the next question in our Facebook ads audit…

6. Does the account use Lookalike audiences and Custom audiences?

In addition to interest-based and location-based audiences, Facebook also allows you to create Custom and Lookalike audiences.

Every properly set up Facebook ad account should make use of all three audience types. 

Here’s a quick explanation:

• Custom Audiences let you target existing audiences (people who visited your website, past purchasers, etc.)
• Lookalike Audiences expand your ads’ reach to people who are similar to your existing customers.

Using these two additional audience types helps to reach more relevant audiences and drive up your Return on Ad Spend (ROI).

To review whether your Facebook ad campaigns are targeting Custom and Lookalike audiences, review the ad-set level audience targeting, just like under the previous point.

Also, you should make sure that there is no huge overlap between the audiences targeted in various campaigns. 

Audience overlap makes your campaigns bid against each other and amplify your Facebook ads cost.

How to audit if your Facebook audiences overlap:

1. Check which audiences your live campaigns are targeting
2. Navigate to the Audience Manager and select up to 5 audiences that you suspect might overlap
3. Select the “Show Overlap” 

Usually, Facebook ad accounts using a mix of Saved, Lookalike, and Custom audiences tend to have a higher risk of audience overlap.

If you encounter a high audience overlap, you can either pause one of the competing ad sets or use the “Exclude” feature to exclude an audience from any ad set.

In the example below, we excluded a Lookalike audience from an ad set targeting another Lookalike audience because they overlapped by 60%. And naturally, we don’t want to target people who already purchased, so we also excluded the Custom audience of past 60 days’ purchasers.

To wrap up this stage of our Facebook ad campaign audit, here are the 5 top mistakes to look out for:

1. Missing remarketing audience – You should always target Custom audiences of past website visitors, shopping cart abandoners, etc. with remarketing ads.
2. Missing Lookalike audiences – You should always test out 1% and 2% Lookalike audiences of top purchasers and later try more different options.
3. High audience overlap between ongoing ad campaigns – Make sure that different ad sets’ audiences don’t overlap.
4. Not excluding converted users – You shouldn’t keep showing sales-oriented ads to people who recently purchased or have an ongoing subscription
5. Not testing new audiences – When auditing a Facebook ad account that has been used for a while, it’s easy to see if the marketers are testing new audiences on a regular basis.

Here’s some good news: We’ve more or less covered the technical aspects of your Facebook ads audit and can now move forward to an arguably more engaging part: the visuals.

To view the ad visuals of a specific Facebook or Instagram ad campaign, click on a campaign name, then click on an ad set name, and you can see all the Facebook ads inside that ad campaign. You can see the full visual by clicking the “Edit” icon.

7. Are there static ads in all correct sizes?

In the example above, the ad visual only exists in one size: the landscape format. In our Facebook ad audit, that’s a red flag.

For your Facebook campaigns to perform well across the feed and stories placements, you need to have each one of your ad visuals in all three main formats:

• Newsfeed: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Stories: 1080 x 1920 pixels
• Landscape: 1200 x 628 pixels

Why do you need three different sizes per ad? Mainly in order for your ads to look great and attractive across the entire Facebook ad network.

As you can see, missing a visual that’s optimized for Instagram Story placement can result in a very ugly ad creative.

This story ad looks fairly ugly.

Regularly, you also shouldn’t leave exclude any of the ad placements. It is a best practice to use automatic placements (this is set up on ad set level) and let Facebook algorithms optimize the best placements for you.

Use the Automatic Placements to scale your campaigns’ reach.

Here’s a more detailed guide on Facebook ad specs and size.

If your ad creatives are set up correctly in all three sizes, you should see different (and good-looking!) ad visuals for feed, story, and instant article placements.

Your feed and story ads should look different.

In my experience, 7/10 of the Facebook ad accounts that I’ve audited did not have all the correct ad sizes for each placement. And in 10/10 of cases the results have improved significantly after we fixed the mistake and added the ad creatives in all correct sizes.

8. Do your Facebook ads look overall attractive?

Based on all the Facebook ad audits that I have done, the most frequent reason for dismal Facebook advertising results are ugly ad creatives.

The most common mistakes include not having text in ad visuals, using stock photos, or design solutions that look like they’re straight outta 2000s.

Such a wasted opportunity and yet such a great opportunity to fix the campaign performance

If your Facebook ads make one of the above-mentioned mistakes, rest assured that it can be quickly fixed with some help from an experienced designer or Facebook marketing expert.

For example, this Meta ad example by Klarna is not painstakingly difficult to create – you just need someone with a good eye + experience in what works on Facebook. 

To better understand how some top brands’ Facebook ads look like, check out the following articles:

• 40 Instagram Story Ad Examples
• New Facebook Ads that Beat the Competition in 2020

9. Do your video ads follow all of the best practices?

Before we make sure your Facebook video ads follow all the best practices, there is one even more urgent question:

Do you even have any video ads in your ad campaigns?

Truth is, video ads aren’t always the best-performing ad creatives. But every advertiser should at least test videos to see how well they work.

Here’s rule number one of this Facebook advertising audit stage: Your Facebook ad campaigns should have either live or paused video ads.

If they’re paused, there’s a good reason to assume that they just weren’t performing too well.

Rule number two? Your video ads should follow these best practices:

• Clearly showcase your product.
• Be short (15s maximum) and immediately engaging.
• Feature written text and your brand’s logo.

Here’s a nice example by TransferWise: Their video ad is eye-catching, explains the product’s benefits, and doesn’t drag along for too long.

Your video ads do not have to be complex in order to work. They just have to be optimized for being shown on Facebook and Instagram.

Using TV-ad like videos usually doesn’t work because the videos are too long and slow. 

Rather, you should use flashy colorful video ads. Such ads can be created as a simple combination of animated image content and colorful text captions. Like the Delliveroo ad below…

When conducting a Facebook advertising audit, I usually evaluate video ads based on my gut feeling which comes from having seen videos that worked and didn’t work.

Not to lose hope! If you haven’t seen many Facebook ads before, a good way to understand if your ad creatives are good is to compare them against your competitors’ ads. 😉

To see the Facebook ads that your competitors are running, go to the Facebook Ad Library and type in your competitors’ brand name. Et voila! You can see a selection of their active Facebook ads. How do your ad visuals compare to what you see?

If your ad account is missing video creatives, give them a try. Or if you see that your current video ads more or less suck, create new ones that look better.

To learn more about creating highly effective video ads, check out how brands like Bolt, Spotify, Netflix, Starbucks, and Klarna are doing them. Or view the collection of 21 Facebook Video Ad Examples.

10. Is your ads’ post-click experience converting?

Sometimes, the reason for low Facebook ad results is not a poorly set up ad campaign or ad visuals. The problem might also hide in the post-click experience ( your website or App Store listing).

I’ve come across several cases where a company’s Facebook ads looked great and had a high click-through rate. However, there weren’t that many Purchase conversions. In a number of such cases, the problem laid either in a bad post-click experience or a mismatch between the messaging in the Facebook ads v.s. their landing page.

To see where your Facebook ads are leading people after they click, review the URLs in your ad-level setup.

Landing pages are an important gateway between your paid ad creatives and product. And the messaging + style of your Facebook ads should match with what your potential customer will see on the landing page.

For example, you don’t want to promise people a 50% discount and then take them to a landing page with no information about the discount. Or you don’t want to advertise a mobile app that provides Instagram filters and then take people to a website that promotes a product for Instagram Business account management.

Here are a few more questions for auditing your Facebook ad landing page:

1. Is your post-click experience simple and clear? You want the user to stay focused on your offer and not get too carried away.
2. Does your landing page mention a clear next step? – Is there a call-to-action on the landing page (e.g. “sign up” or “add to cart”)?
3. Is your promoted product visible on your landing page? People want to see what they’re buying, especially if they already saw it in your Facebook ads.

For example, this landing page by Doordash is in many ways the perfect ad landing page: it’s brief, the design aligns with Doordash’s’ CVI, the text mentions a clear benefit, and it is obvious that the next step would be to sign up.

Efficient landing pages are usually short.

P.S. If it looks like your Facebook ads and website pages look completely off, it is sometimes easier to start from scratch and redo both of them, so that you’ll get new better-looking ads together with a matching landing page that converts more visitors.

—

Alright, that’s it! Hope we managed to beat the 30 minute mark. If you found out that your Facebook ad account is not 100% perfectly set up, don’t feel down – look at it as an opportunity to improve your results.

If you have any comments or questions about the Facebook ad audit, reach out via LinkedIn.

The post 30min DYI Facebook Ad Account Audit appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

As there were so many great questions and a surprising variety of topics, it felt like a good idea to also document ‘em in this blog. I also reviewed the answers and added bits and pieces to give more context + suggest further reading.

Up next, you’ll find a mix of marketing advice, career confessions, and opinions on a range of marketing-related subjects, from how to get published in TOP marketing blogs to the “agencies vs in-house team” debate.

The Q&A is categorized under a few headlines, so feel free to navigate to the sections that interest you the most.

• Growth hacking
• Learning as a marketer
• Online advertising
• Reporting and measurement
• Rebranding (from Taxify) to Bolt
• Content marketing
• Career and work-life

P.S. if you have any additional questions, you can still submit these on the GrowthHackers AMA page.

One last thing… I’ve had a few people reach out to me and ask how did I get picked out by GrowthHackers for the AMA. I just wrote to them saying I’d like to do one. They said yes.

🚀 On growth hacking

Q1: Can you talk about an experiment that was a really big win or led to some breakthrough insights at Bolt? – Taavi Kalvi

When I joined Bolt in 2017, one of my first tasks was to come up with better creatives for our Facebook ad campaigns. So I figured what people care about most when ordering a ride… Duh, the cost of the ride, of course!

I created a new type of Facebook carousel ad that no other app in the industry was using yet. The carousel ad included 5 cards with popular routes in a city and showed the average cost of the specific ride (which was much lower than with regular taxis).

These ads picked up super well and are still one of our top performers. We even see some competitors using the same ad format now. 😄

Q2: What has been your number one learning/lesson from your entire marketing career? – Liis Laisaar

One of the things I learned early on is that you should always try to go a bit wild and test things that others haven’t tried yet. A lot of the best-performing marketing hacks/projects are not shared in marketing blogs.

So, you should make up your own.

For example, when working on content marketing and SEO in the project management software startup Scoro, I had an idea to compile a list of 50+ project management tools, include Scoro as #3, and thereby be listed as the first Google search result for the “best project management tools” keyword.

First, my manager was strongly against the idea: why would we promote our competitors?

However, I kept pushing to test out the idea and it worked: our listicle soon ranked as #1 result on Google and we got thousands of website visits and tens of new leads from there every month.

Today, Scoro has published more than ten similar list articles and these make up a huge part of their website’s organic traffic.

A good starting point for coming up with original ideas is to first define the goal you want to achieve. As you know the outcome, it’s much easier to figure out how to get there.

I also like browsing Facebook ad examples or graphic design galleries such as Behance, thinking how I would use some ideas I see on the brand I’m working for.

Q3: If you were giving a lecture at university to a group of MSc. students in a marketing/entrepreneurial class, what philosophies, tools or books would you share with them? – Taavi Kalvi

I recently wrote a blog article on how to learn marketing where I shared all the advice I wish someone had given me when finishing high school.

I’d say that the most crucial skills for every marketer are creative problem-solving and critical thinking, as well as writing skills and understanding the basic foundation on how human psychology works.

You can find the list of my all-time favorite marketing and branding books here: 49 Best Marketing Books – New and Classics

Q4: Have you ever a situation where you had been skeptical about some idea, but as a result, it proved a great move? What was that? – Maksymilian Plociennik

My manager at Bolt who taught me to be a lot more critical and always question the ROI of different projects. Whenever my team proposes something that I don’t think is a good idea, we talk it through and see if we can run a small-scale test to check the ROI.

For example, we tested animated Facebook ads some time ago and they performed worse than static ads. So we paused the ads and didn’t waste any more time scaling the video ads to additional Facebook campaigns.

Fast forward 6 months, we tried different a type of video ads (longer ones, another design) and they performed much better. So it’s always worth to test all ideas you think may bring results and even revisit some tests multiple times.

On the other hand, there have also been many cases where I’m skeptical about an idea but still agree with the team to run a test. Even if the test fails, it’s still a success in the sense that we’ll know it in the future and won’t do the same mistake twice.

NB, make sure to document your tests!

Read more: Facebook Ads A/B Testing – Why, What and How to Split Test

Q5: What do you recommend for someone getting started from scratch on building their personal brand? – Saura Johnston

Based on my experience, a good way to get started is by creating a blog and writing about the topic you want to be known for. This can also be some other channel, e.g. Instagram. Also, guest blogging and interacting with people on LinkedIn or closed Facebook groups doesn’t hurt.

For the past few years, I’ve received all my job offers via this blog or LinkedIn as people have read my blog or know me via a network of mutual marketer friends.

I recently started an Instagram account project about our houseplant hobby with a friend.

The key takeaway from this Instagram project is that it’s HARD to grow followership.

It takes a lot of persistence and continuity to build up an extensive following on the platform. To push through, you must be truly passionate about the topic you’re building your personal brand around.

Another good starting point is to look at the websites or social media profiles of people who have already made it. Scroll down to their very first posts and see how they got started and which parts of their content gained traction.

 ⭐ On building a marketing team

Q6: What has proven to be the key deciding factor when recruiting new people to your team? (Which qualities make the best team members and employees in marketing (e.g. experience, willingness to learn <– how to validate this, etc.?) – Liis Laisaar

Having interviewed tens and tens of people while growing the team in Bolt, I realized at some point that you will get the right feeling during the interview if a person is a good match to the team. There’s a kind of special connection and understanding that you get when meeting the right candidate to a position. Things like speaking at the same terms, understanding each others’ questions, having similar opinions on specific topics…

I always look for the proactive “let’s get things done” attitude and evaluate the candidate’s home task and previous work experience. I never look at a marketing candidate’s educational profile as this is not what matters (at least not in Bolt and most other successful tech companies).

I also like to hire people with good copywriting skills and a creative problem-solving-oriented mindset.

Additionally, I follow the rule of “If it’s not a YES!! it’s a no” when hiring. If a candidate doesn’t seem to be the perfect fit for the role, we’ll just keep looking rather than making the wrong hire.

Once you’ve hired someone, you’ll spend tens of hours onboarding and training that person. So you should only hire people if you think they are the very best person to fill the role.

Q7: How do you set up your team KPIs? Do you work with some framework, e.g. OKR? – Karolina Krolicka

The global marketing team at Bolt is currently using a quarterly OKRs approach. We make sure that all OKRs are measurable and directly linked to the projects that a particular team member is working on.

Which leads me to a book that everyone in a high-level management position I know recommends (so do I): High Output Management by A. Grove.

Q8: What is the ideal marketing team structure? – Vasyl Sergienko

There isn’t one single ideal marketing team structure that would fit all companies. But all marketing teams benefit from having clear ownership of projects, clear reporting structure, and team leads not having more than 8 direct reports.

Example team structure by CoSchedule– Image source

I personally like to keep the global marketing team functions centralized in the HQ rather than, for example, having a separate Facebook marketing function in every market.

Also, I would rather build a central marketing team with clear ownership for every function. And only then start to split their resources per region as the company expands to more markets. Instead of building a fully functional marketing team for every different region.

Q9: I saw on Bolt’s website that you are currently hiring for marketing roles in 4 different countries. I’d love to hear more about your experience leading an internationally distributed team. What are some challenges you have faced? How do you handle communication and deliverables among many locations? – Hale Schneider

I’d say that the main challenge is always finding the best people, no matter where they’re located. Also, as our HQ marketing team is based in Tallinn, Estonia, it’s a bit harder to find people with international experience than, say, in London.

However, note my answer to the previous question: We still prefer to hire to the centralized team over building out regional marketing teams with all functions.

The good thing is that Bolt is a very international company and we have teams in 30+ countries around the world. So we have built up a strong information-sharing system that involves internal wikis, Slack channels, and regular all-hands meetings where the information is shared between everyone globally.

Markets where Bolt operates

I’ve gotten used to discussing things with people on Slack or via a call that having a team that’s based across multiple locations is a natural way of working.

We always set quarterly OKRs and focus for each team and give them relatively much freedom on achieving those results.

Q10: How to balance between creativity and data-driven culture? – Vasyl Sergienko

First of all, you can also be creative around the ways of interpreting the data.

Different people can look at the same data and come up with different takeaways. Also, you need to be creative to come up with new ideas to improve the results reflected through data. So I’d say that the data-driven and creative approaches go very much hand in hand in today’s marketing.

Q11: Agency or in-house? Why? – Liis Laisaar

I always prefer in-house marketing teams to agencies as the people’s motivation to grow the business, test new things and get results is times higher.

In-house people genuinely care about the company and go the extra mile to make things work. Having worked in and with agencies, I have seen projects often handed over to interns which can lead to low-quality work and poor results. It also takes a ton of time to onboard agency people and to keep communicating with them on a daily basis to approve ideas and changes.

In Bolt, we’re growing so fast and changing things up all the time, so we need to be able to get new campaigns live in less than 1-2h sometimes. This would never be possible when working with an advertising agency.

I do see a benefit to using local agencies if there’s a need for local contacts to execute a one-time marketing/PR campaign.

Agree with the PROs in this chart – Image source

💸 On online advertising

Q12: What’s the number one mistake people make when trying to improve the performance of their PPC campaigns? – Taavi Kalvi

This really depends on the campaign… But that’s not the answer you were hoping for. 😀

Usually, the biggest PPC mistake is looking at the wrong metrics and KPIs in the first place.

Let’s say your goal is to get new B2B clients for a SaaS tool. So you optimize your campaign on getting new leads. When trying to improve your campaign results, you want to increase the number of leads or lower the CPA (cost per acquisition) of leads. While optimizing on this, you may forget to look at the quality of the leads, so you may end up with more leads with lower quality. So always try to optimize your PPC campaign performance towards more revenue, not mid-funnel or vanity metrics.

Another mistake is always optimizing your PPC campaigns around the same thing.

For example, you want to optimize your Google Search PPC campaigns, so you add new keywords + negative keywords. Maybe, instead of working on this, you should test another channel (like Facebook/Instagram) or another campaign type instead. Or another target audience.

As I’m already ranting on the topic, I also often see Facebook marketers A/B testing small changes. It’s generally more efficient to run tests with variations that are clearly different (e.g. not the color of a CTA button but an entirely different creative vs the current one).

A/B test with visible changes in variations

Q13: Which do you prefer when entering a new market: a) start wide and get maximum exposure OR b) start with as specific targeting as possible and expand later based on already collected data? Why? – Liis Laisaar

It depends on the product and your marketing budget.

In Bolt, we’re marketing a consumer product relevant to most people, so we can use wide targeting in our online ads and let Facebook and Google algorithms to optimize our campaigns based on results.

If you’re marketing a niche product, I’d recommend starting narrower. If you already have a user base, I recommend using Facebook Lookalike audiences.

Q14: What is your approach to influencer marketing? How do you measure its success? – Ane Voje

We have a very data-driven approach to all marketing activities and influencer marketing is no different. We measure the CPA of new users acquired through our influencer marketing activities by counting the referrals made with each influencer’s unique referral code. We also check the reach and CPM of the influencers’ posts and compare it to our other online channels’ metrics.

Q15: What needs to be done to perfectly grow your business throughout the social channels? – Soner Alemdar

A: I’d say that the key thing to succeed in social channels is to constantly create value to your audience. This can mean sharing useful advice, giving away free stuff, informing people about special offers – whatever people can benefit from.

For example, Bolt shares relevant blog articles for drivers

Also, as the organic reach on Facebook is very low (as low as 2% of your page likes), you should always put some boosting budget behind each post.

You can find more social media marketing best practices here: 28 Facebook Ad Hacks for Social Media Growth

Q16: What would you do, if you have to lead a business in the grey market? You know, in a situation, where you can’t promote your brand on Facebook, Reddit, etc. – Maksymilian Plociennik

Tricky… And truth be told, I haven’t marketed such a product before. My first approach would be to find industry influencers and try working with them. Also, building virality to the product so it will pass from person to person. And testing out affiliate marketing.

Q17: Should a new company first focus on client acquisition only or should branding also start from the get-go? – Andreas Velling

You need to understand your brand’s mission and key value proposition from the get-go. But especially with new brands, earning some revenue and getting to the first 1000 paying users should be the priority, so I’d focus on acquisition campaigns first.

You don’t necessarily need to run brand-only marketing campaigns, but can integrate the branded message in acquisition ads.

🤓 On reporting and measurement

Q18: What do you think about marketing automation and who is responsible for that in the team? – Vasyl Sergienko

Marketing automation is a highly relevant project when working with a large scale of users. In Bolt, we have multiple teams working on automation, for example, our Lifecycle marketing team.

Q19: This is a very open-ended and more of a process question and how you go about things but with Bolt being in different markets, how are you able to work and adjust as best you can in creating and executing marketing plans for the different product offerings in each market? I can imagine what “success” or “failure” in one market can be totally different for another. You may have already covered a little bit of this with Mr. Hale Schneider’s question. – Kian Paras

We’re able to use quite a global approach when it comes to marketing in specific countries. Our product offering is not that different from market to market and we focus on promoting our main service above others.

However, we work with local teams to understand each market’s specifics. If you compare Bolt’s social media or blog to some of our competitors, we’re still much more local in our approach.

Q20: How do you approach branding/awareness? Is this just a “side-product” of having the right messages or do you have separate branding campaigns? – Andreas Velling

We do not run a lot of branding-only marketing campaigns as we’re a highly performance-driven company and like to work on things that we can measure.

However, we’ve set the key brand messages and all our performance marketing campaigns and most social media posts also revolve around those messages.

Recently, we launched a green initiative to make all Bolt rides in Europe carbon neutral. It’s a good combination of branding mixed with digital communication channels.

Social media post on the Green Plan

There’s another reason we don’t focus on branding campaigns: as our main brand asset is our product. As long as we’re providing the best ride-hailing experience in a city, we’ll get new users through word-of-mouth and keep the existing ones happy as well.

⚡ On rebranding (from Taxify) to Bolt

Q21: What was your approach for the launch campaign – which channels and assets did you find most valuable and why? – Kati Kuustik

As I set out to work on the first rebranding campaign I’d ever done, I was surprised by how little information about rebranding you can find online. There were literally no articles sharing usable know-how on how to rebrand a company. Only stuff on “how to pick your brand’s name” = useless.

During rebranding, our most valuable channels were those that helped us reach the highest number of our app users: PR, in-app messages, and emails.

We also used other marketing channels like online ads to communicate about the brand name change from Taxify to Bolt. Also, Google Search ads were very helpful in making sure that people will find our website and app store listing with both the old and new brand name.

I’ve found that there are quite many articles on how to do the rebranding / decide if you should rebrand, but very little information mostly on how to approach the launch of the new rebrand.

Q22: What goals did you set for the rebranding launch? – Kati Kuustik

Our main goal was not to lose users and the volume of rides not to drop. There were, of course, a set of lower-level goals that every involved team monitored.

Q23: If you had to do it again, what would you do differently? Or what were your biggest learnings? – Kati Kuustik

The thing with rebranding is that you probably (and hopefully) only get to do it once. 😅

If I had to help a company go through a rebranding again, I would focus on planning early on, having clear timelines, and making sure that all teams follow it. Which is what exactly happened in Bolt and why our rebranding went (almost) smoothly. Although there are always some last-minute surprises…

I’d also start preparing the new brand’s marketing assets and CVI (in case you want to change it) earlier and upload all new ad campaigns in advance. It took our 2-person advertising team weeks to replace all of our 5000+ online ad creatives.

🎡 On content marketing

Q24: What’s the biggest challenge for a B2C company related to content marketing strategy? – Eduarda Lemos

In my opinion, the biggest challenge for all brand blogs is understanding how to create extra value for your users that they can’t find elsewhere.

For example, at Bolt we focus on blog articles that share useful information to our drivers. This information is much harder to find compared to lifestyle-related advice for riders (as there are so many blogs and magazines already creating this type of content).

Q25: How do you manage the content production process understanding that each country has different personas/language, etc.? – Eduarda Lemos

We try to keep our blog content as evergreen and universal as possible and localize it to many languages. Sometimes, our local teams also write additional blog content targeted at their market specifically.

At some point I started to write English copy while thinking how it would sound in Estonian or French, to make sure everything is easy to localize to our 20+ languages.

Q26: Aside from your blog, I’ve read a lot of your guest posts in different blogs and platforms. I am a little biased towards the Copy Hackers one and KlientBoost as my favorites among your written guest posts but the Adespresso ones and Entrepreneur piece are up there too. What was your mindset like early on in figuring out which blog/publication/platform to pitch and how did you pitch to guest post or wrote for them? – Kian Paras

I started out pitching to 10+ marketing blogs, and it was very hard to get in initially. Once you already have a few strong articles in good blogs (in my case, HubSpot and AdEspresso) you can pitch to the next ones and will have proof of your writing quality to present.

You can read more about my guest blogging journey here: After Guest Blogging 50+ Articles, Here’s What I Learned

However, note that you won’t get much extra traffic to your blog from guest posting. For example, when I published an article in Entrepreneur, only nine readers looked up my profile and website.

The main value you’ll get from guest publishing is:

• additional blogging and podcast invitations
• job offers and help requests
• high-quality backlinks

🎢 On career and work-life

Q27: What’s an average workday look like for you? – Mary Green

My regular workday is always full of surprises, project managing some marketing campaigns, attending meetings & job interviews, discussing ideas with the team, and sharing information between teams.

But my favorite days are the ones where I disconnect from Slack and email for 4h or longer and focus on macro-level planning and improving the current team/reporting structure.

Q28: What is your biggest struggle currently? – Karolina Krolicka

When growing as fast as Bolt, you run into a lot of struggles.

I’d say the biggest challenge is understanding the business impact and ROI of all the different online and offline marketing activities that we’re doing.

We’re testing and learning something new every month, adding layers of data analytics to our campaign reporting and improving the attribution between different marketing channels.

Q29: How much of your life is dedicated to learning your craft and improvement? I love hearing how others invest in their craft. – Rob Fulton

I feel that I can learn the fastest through my work. Also, running a blog around Facebook advertising helps me stay aware of all the best practices and latest hacks.

I like to research what other top brands are doing and do a monthly review of their social media channels and blogs. Another great way to learn about new best practices is to talk to other marketers. You can even reach out on LinkedIn and propose to have a call and share your key learnings.

Also, whenever I’ve got time, I follow some industry newsletters and listen to podcasts.

I shared a long list of blogs, books, podcasts, and newsletters I like in this article, might be helpful: https://karolakarlson.com/2018-key-learnings-facebook-ads-marketing/

Q30: I remember reading your work and learning a little bit about your career profile while I was doing college internships and I only graduated in 2017. From the outside, it makes it seem like you “Bolt(ed)” upwards so quickly (jk, bad pun) or rose up relatively quickly but you may see it differently.

What is your work-life balance/integration prioritization or however you call it like, especially when you were just getting started!? Because you have Bolt, the blog, possibly other side hustles, and clients although you did mention you do not have the capacity at the moment, and possibly other hobbies and personal pursuits. You may have alluded to it with Ma’am Mary Green’s question but gosh it makes it look like you worked 24/7 to get where you are at. I personally think it’s super cool with all you’ve done so far and I can imagine some of your best work is yet to come. 🙂 – Kian Paras

About the work-life balance… I guess that early in my career I was so into marketing, looking at it as my job, hobby, relationship… (kidding about the last one :p)… But seriously, I think I easily worked at least 60h per week, also spending the Sundays working on either planning for Botl or writing to my blog.

By now, I’ve taken a step back and try to limit my workweek to 50h max. It’s become more about managing my time and focusing on the high-impact items only, removing meetings from my schedule, and learning to say “no” to more low-efficiency projects.

However, I believe that if you find a career you’re really passionate about, working the extra 20h per week doesn’t feel like a burden. Instead, you’ll be thrilled to learn by doing.

I would also say that I was very lucky to have the right opportunities to enter my life at the right time. E.g. I got an email from the CEO of Klientboost inviting me to freelance for their blog and Bolt reached out to me just as I was about to leave my past company. So it’s all about doing good work and noticing the good opportunities as they arise. You’ll be offered cool jobs only if you put yourself out there.

The post AMA with GrowthHackers – 30 Questions and Answers appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

While setting up your Instagram Business account is a fairly straightforward process, it is best if you follow each of the important steps.

In this chapter of the 8-chapter Instagram Advertising Guide, you will learn:

• What is an Instagram for Business account?
• What are the benefits of having an Instagram Business account?
• How to create an Instagram account for your business?
• How to set up an Instagram advertising account
• What are the best practices for account setup on Instagram?

What Is an Instagram Business Account?

Many marketers make the mistake of managing their brand’s Instagram account as a regular account. However, they’ll be missing out on some great features available with Instagram for Business.

By creating an Instagram Business account, you can:

• See real-time insights into how your stories and promoted posts perform throughout the day
• Learn additional information about your followers and how they interact with your posts and stories
• Include more information about your company like business hours, location and phone number
• Set up Instagram advertising campaigns and see your Instagram ad reports
• You can also promote any posts you’ve shared, and include a button like “Learn More”, to reach new potential customers

Up next, you will find the step-by-step instructions for setting up your Instagram Business account.

How to Create an Instagram Account for Your Business

Step 1: Download and launch the Instagram app

Download the Instagram app for iOS from the App Store, Android from Google Play store or Windows Phone from the Windows Phone Store. Once the app is installed on your mobile phone, tap to open it.

Step 2: Sign Up for Instagram

Tap on “Sign Up”, then enter your email address and tap “Net”t, or tap “Log in with Facebook” to sign up with your Facebook account.

Step 3: Create a business profile

Within the Instagram app, find settings, then scroll down and tap on “Switch to Business Account”. Here, you can link your Instagram account to a Facebook Page.

Once you’ve changed to a business account, you can add additional business information like store hours, business address or a phone number.

Note: Currently, a Business Profile on Instagram can only be connected to a single Facebook Page.

Step 4: Start posting!

Now that you’ve set up your Instagram Business account, it’s time to make your first post!

You can also set up Instagram ad campaigns right after you’ve completed creating your Instagram advertising account that’s linked to your Facebook Page.

Read more: 84 Best Instagram Ad Examples in 2018 From TOP Brands

How to Add Your Instagram Account to Facebook Business Manager

In order to start advertising on Instagram, you need a Facebook advertising account and a Facebook Page.

You do not necessarily need a Facebook Business Manager account. However, if you’d like to review and respond to the comments on your ads, you’ll need to add an Instagram account to your Business Manager.

To add your Instagram account to your Facebook Business Manager, follow these steps:

1. Go to your Facebook Business Manager
2. On the left side of the page, click “Business Settings” and “Instagram Accounts”
3. Click on “Claim New Instagram Account”
4. Add your username and password, then click “Next”
5. To authorize one or more of your ad accounts to use the Instagram Account, check the box next to each ad account and hit the “Save Changes” button

If you don’t have a Facebook Business Manager account yet, here’s how you and set it up.

How to Set Up an Instagram Advertising Account on Facebook

There is no individual Instagram Ads Manager that you can use. Instagram ads are managed with the same tools as Facebook ads:

• Facebook Ads Manager
• Facebook Power Editor
• Facebook’s Marketing API

In addition to these four options, you can also advertise by using:

• The Instagram app
• Instagram Partners

To set up a Facebook advertising account, follow these guidelines:

1. Open your Business Manager Settings.
2. Under the People and Assets tab, click on “Ad Accounts”
3. On the right side of the page, select “Add New Ad Accounts”
4. Choose one of the 3 options: “Claim Ad Account”, “Request Access to an Ad Account” or “Create a New Ad Account”
5. If you choose to request access or claim an ad account, enter the ad account ID. (Learn where to find the account ID)

To add your Instagram account to your Facebook advertising account, follow these steps:

1. Go to your Business Manager
2. Click on “Business Settings” and then “Instagram Accounts”
3. Click on the Instagram account you’d like to assign an ad account to
4. Click “Assign Ad Accounts”
5. To authorize one or more of your ad accounts to use the Instagram Account, check the box next to each ad account and hit the “Save Changes” button

How to Add New Users to Your Instagram Ads Account

If you’re working with a marketing team or an advertising agency, you may need to give them access to your Instagram for Business account.

Note that in order to add new users to your Instagram Business account, you have to have an admin access to the Facebook Page related to Instagram account.

If you’re already using the Facebook Business Manager (which you really should), here’s how to give new people editing access to your Instagram account:

1. Open your Business Manager settings
2. Go to the “People” section and select the person you want to give Instagram account access to or click on “Add New People” to add new users
3. Click on “Assign Assets” and select either “Pages,” “Ad Accounts,” or “Product Catalogs”
4. Select the specific assets you’d like to share access to and choose a role
5. Hit the “Save Changes” button.

There’s a large set of different roles that you can assign to your colleagues and partners.

Team members: If you want to add your team members to your Instagram account, you should assign them the “Page editor” role.

Ad agency: When working with an advertising agency that doesn’t manage your Instagram posts, assign them the “Page advertiser” role.

Once you’ve completed the Facebook Business Manager account setup and invited your team members to manage your Instagram Business account, you’re all set.

Now, all you need to do is nail your Instagram targeting and Facebook ad design to get a high ROI out of your campaigns.

Congrats! You’re ready to go!

Now that you’ve successfully created your Facebook Business Manager account and linked it to your Instagram Business account, you can start seeing more insights and create your first Instagram campaign.

Proceed to learning the step-by-step guidelines for creating your first Instagram campaign by using one of these three tools:

• Facebook Ads Manager
• Facebook Power Editor
• Instagram’s app

Additional reading:

• From 0 to Results. How to Set Up Low-Budget Facebook Campaigns

The post Instagram for Business Guide – 2025 Update appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

I still agree with most of what I wrote back in 2017. However, no matter if you’re just starting out with Facebook ads or rely on what you learned a couple years ago, revising the latest best practices will help to get up to speed with high-ROI testing.

And if you’re not yet running split tests on your online ad campaigns…

Well… Consider improving your cost-per-result 5% with each of 10 consecutive tests. If your CPA is around 5€, it would drop to 3€ after 10 x 5% improvements. That is close to half of the initial CPA!

Here’s a quick overview of best practices that will help you get high ROI out of your Facebook A/B tests. You’ll find a detailed explanation on each point below.

1. Test high-impact ad campaign elements
2. Test one campaign element at a time
3. Prioritise your A/B test ideas
4. Test a reasonable number of variables
5. Make sure your split tests are statistically valid
6. Calculate the right budget for each A/B test
7. Focus on the right metrics & conversion events
8. Run as many (good) split tests as you can

But before we jump to all the best practices, here’s what is wrong with many of the “We did an A/B test that improved our results by 1000%” clickbait articles in many (sadly, including the top) marketing blogs.

Key mistakes in Facebook ad A/B testing

Back in 2017, I read an article about a Facebook ad A/B test of 26 design variations.

The article drew several conclusions, showing which ads outperformed others. However, there was no word about the experiment’s setup and budget.

Which left me wondering… Were the test results even statistically valid?

Most likely, they weren’t.

However, this wasn’t just one bad example. Many marketers make the same mistake of running Facebook A/B tests without realizing their results are skewed or statistically insignificant.

Here are some of the key reasons Facebook split tests fail to bring meaningful results:

• Trying to test everything at once – it will be impossible to later tell what tested element resulted in success/failure
• Concluding tests too fast + using too low test budgets – you need a proper amount of conversions to conclude that one variation outperforms the other
• Wrong test setup – you need to give each variation equal opportunity to deliver results
• Testing low-variance elements – changing one line or word in your ad creative will not result in meaningful split test results

Ok, so how to run Facebook ad A/B tests that actually help to improve your CPAs and reduce cost?

⬇⬇⬇

Rule #1: Test high-impact ad campaign elements

Not all your split testing ideas are gold. 💡💡💡≠💰

And with limited marketing budgets, you’ll need to find the test elements that have the highest ROI.

When searching for Facebook ad A/B testing ideas, think which ad element could have the highest effect on your click-through and conversion rates.

AdEspresso studied data from over $3 millions worth of Facebook Ads experiments and listed the campaign elements with highest split testing ROI:

1. Countries
2. Precise interests
3. Mobile OS
4. Age ranges
5. Genders
6. Ad images
7. Titles
8. Relationship status
9. Landing page
10. Interested in

However, take this list with a huge grain of salt. As you already know your target audience’s locations and demographics, this list becomes irrelevant to your A/B testing strategy.

Instead, you might want to split test the following Facebook campaign elements:

• Ad visual
• Ad copy, especially the headline
• Ad delivery objectives

Consumer Acquisition found that images are arguably the most important part of your ads — they’re responsible for 75%-90% of ad performance.

Not surprising, considering that most of an ad placement on Instagram or Facebook mobile newsfeed is filled with…🥁🥁🥁… The image.

So improving your ad visuals is a good place to start from. Here are 25 hacks for improving your Facebook ads’ design.

Here are some more things to test after you run out testing ideas for image, copy, and ad delivery objective:

• Ad placements
• Call-to-action buttons
• Campaign type

Rule #2: Prioritise your A/B test ideas

A/B testing Facebook ads doesn’t only require money, it also requires time.

Even if you’re lucky enough to not be constrained by budget, consider how much time and effort your design/copywriting/PPC team will put into preparing a split test.

You need to carefully consider which split tests to work on first.

The best way to do it is on a prioritisation spreadsheet.

Create a prioritisation table for weighing all your A/B testing ideas. You can assign up to 10 factors with different weight to validate the ideas with highest potential.

If you haven’t created a prioritization framework before, check out the ones by Optimizely and ConversionXL.

Start by A/B testing the most promising ad elements – image source

Rule #3: Test one element at a time

As you get started with Facebook advertising, you’ll realize that there are soooo many things to test: ad image, ad copy,  Facebook ad targeting, bidding methods, campaign objective, another ad image, another ad copy, another… You get the point.

The rookie mistake you’re likely to make at this point is to create an A/B test with more than one variable category.

Let’s say you want to test 3 ad images, 3 headlines, and 3 main copies. This makes 3x3x3 = 27 different Facebook ads. It would make much more sense to test one of these ad elements at once, e.g. three different images.

📍 The fewer ad variables you have, the quicker you’ll get relevant test results.

Here’s a great illustration by ConversionXL, showing what will happen if you try to test too much stuff at once.

It gets super messy – Image source

Test one element per split test, and use your prioritisation table to define which one to examine first.

P.S. this doesn’t mean that you should only run 1 experiment at a time. You can have five A/B tests running if you have enough audiences and marketing budget to play around with.

Rule #4: Test a reasonable number of variables

Even when testing a single ad element, you may be tempted to create tens on variations with small alterations.

Here’s an example of an A/B test that overdid the number of tested ad design variables.

It will cost them $1k+ to get valid results – Image source

It doesn’t make sense to test that many ad variations at once as Facebook will either start to auto-optimize the ad delivery too soon or your target audience will see 20+ different ads by you.

That’s going to be one expensive (and most likely, annoying) experiment.

What is a good number of variables per campaign? Ideally, it’s 2 (old vs new version). But you can include up to 10 variables in your test IF you have budget for each test cell to collect minimum of 50 conversions.

In most cases, there is no need for more than 5 ad variables. If you test too similar variations, the test won’t bring meaningful difference between results.

Rule #5: Test 3-5 highly differentiated variations

If you haven’t yet found your perfect ad copy or ad design, you should aim to experiment with highly different ad variations.

It won’t make much difference to your target audience if you change a few words or move your product around in the image a bit.

However, as you test highly differentiated variations, you can get insight about the type of ad design or ad copy people prefer and expand on it later.

For example, at Scoro, we’ve tested many various ad designs to find the one that works best.

First, we A/B tested 3 highly different ad designs

Each of these ad designs has a completely different design angle.

Later, we could use the winning ad variation to develop similar designs for further testing.

Later, we split tested the winning design’s alterations

Here’s the formula:

A/B test 3-5 variables ➡ Find a winning variation ➡ A/B test winner’s alterations

Rule #6: Use the right Facebook campaign structure

Update: We have published a dedicated article on Facebook ad campaign structure. Check it out for improved results. 😉

When testing multiple Facebook ad designs or other in-ad elements, you’ve got two options for structuring your A/B testing campaigns:

1. A single ad set
2. Multiple single-variation ad sets

Soon after I published this article in 2017, Facebook released the Split Test feature in Ads Manager that helps you to quickly set up a multi-cell split test (option 2).

However, you can still set up A/B tests manually in Ads Manager if that’s what you’re more comfortable with.

Let’s check out both options.

1. A single ad set – all your ad variations are within a single ad set.

A/B test campaign structure 1

The good side of this option is that your target audience won’t see all your ad variations multiple times as with multiple ad sets targeting the same audience.

However, this A/B testing campaign structure has a huge negative side: Facebook will start to auto-optimize your ads and you won’t get relevant results.

Use the single ad set option when launching a set of completely new ad creatives to a new audience to quickly learn what works. And then run A/B tests to improve the initial campaign’s results.

2. Multiple single-variation ad sets – each ad variation is in a separate ad set.

A/B test campaign structure 2

As you place every ad variation in a separate ad set, Facebook will treat each ad set as a different entity and won’t auto-optimize based on little results.

That is the best option for getting relevant experiment results. This is the setup you will get when using Facebook’s Split Test feature.

Rule #7: Make sure your test results are valid

Do you know when’s the best time to analyze your A/B test results and conclude the experiment?

Is it three days after the campaign activation? Five days? Two weeks?

Or what would you do if Variation A had the CTR of 0.317% and Variation B the CTR of 0.289%?

For example, how would you conclude the experiment below? 👇

Would you conclude this A/B test?

Truth be told, the test above should not be concluded yet as there isn’t enough data to really tell which variation performed best.

To make sure your A/B tests are valid, you’ll need to have a sufficient amount of results to draw conclusions.

The best way to guarantee the quality of your Facebook ad test results is to use a calculator, a very specific kind of calculator.

Rule #8: Calculate statistical significance

If you want your Facebook tests to give valuable insights, put them through an A/B significance test to determine if your results are valid.

Test your test’s validity – Image source

Instead of website visitors, enter the no. of impressions to a specific ad variation or ad set. Instead of web conversions, enter the no. of ad clicks or ad conversions.

Look for a confidence level of 90% and more before you consider one variable to win over the other.

Tip: Wait at least 72h after publishing before evaluating your split test results. Facebook’s algorithms need some time to optimize your campaign and start delivering your ads to people.

According to an article on ConversionXL, there’s no magical number of conversions you need before concluding your A/B test.

However, I’d suggest that your collect at least 100 clicks/conversions per variation before pausing the test. Even better if you’re able to collect 300 or 500 conversions per each variation.

Rule #9: Know what budget you’ll need

The logic is simple: The more ad variations you’re testing, the more ad impressions and conversions you’ll need for statistically significant results.

So, what’s the best formula for calculating your Facebook ad budget?

What’s your perfect Facebook testing budget?

It’s quite simple:

Average Cost-per-conversion x No. of Variations x Needed Conversions

Start by looking at your other Facebook campaigns and defining your average cost-per-conversion.

Let’s say your goal is to get people clicking on your Facebook ad and the average cost-per-click for past campaigns has been $0.8.

Let’s continue the hypothesizing game, and say you’re looking to split test 5 different ad variations.

To get valid test results, you’ll need around 100-500 conversions per each ad variation.

So, the formula to calculate your budget would be:

$0.8 x 5 x 300 = $1,200

Now, before you bury all the hopes of getting statistically significant A/B test results, consider this:

You can cheat a little.

If one of your test variations is outperforming others by a mile, you can conclude the experiment sooner. (You should still wait for at least 50 conversions on each variation.)

Rule #10: Track the right metrics

As you look at you Facebook A/B test results, there will be lots of metrics to consider: ad impressions, cost-per-click, click-through-rate, cost-per-conversion, conversion rate…

Which metrics should you measure in order to discover the winning ad variation?

It’s not the cost-per-mile or click-through rate. These are the so-called vanity metrics that give you no real insight into your campaign’s performance.

Always track the cost-per-conversion as your primary goal.

Cost-per-conversion is your single most important ad metric as it tells you how much it costs you to turn a person into a lead or customer. And most of the time, increasing sales is the ultimate goal in your Facebook ad strategy.

Facebook ad split testing rulebook

To sum up, here’s the list of all the Facebook split testing rules discussed in this article. 👀

Rule #1: Test high-impact ad campaign elements

Rule #2: Prioritise your A/B test ideas

Rule #3: Test one campaign element at a time

Rule #4: Test a reasonable number of variations

Rule #5: Test highly differentiated variations

Rule #6: Use the right Facebook campaign structure

Rule #7: Make sure your A/B test results are valid

Rule #8: Calculate statistical significance

Rule #9: Know your test budget in advance

Rule #10: Track the right metrics

And, finally, keep some tests running all the time. Small improvements will incrementally lead to big improvements.

The post Facebook Ads A/B Testing in 2019 – Why, What, and How to Split Test appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Campaign optimizations hacks like “A/B test a lot of different ads” or “set up a custom ad delivery schedule” sound awesome in theory, but do they really work in practice?

As someone who has managed hundreds of Facebook ad campaigns, my answer is “no.”

Or rather, “not exactly.”

That’s where this article is coming from, intended as…

1. A rant about micro-level ad optimization (from a previous advocate of such a practice)
2. A comforting guide to any marketer thinking that they’re not optimizing their campaigns enough (success lies elsewhere than optimization)
3. A warning sign to marketers who are overthinking their Facebook campaigns (to the extent that might ruin your campaign’s success)

But first, let’s make one thing clear…

I’m guilty as hell of promoting micro-level Facebook ad optimization.

I’ve written on this topic for a handful of business blogs, including Entrepreneur, Content Marketing Institute, AdEspresso, KlientBoost. The top Google Search results for “facebook ads optimization” are the cherries on top of my Facebook ads optimization articles cake.

The logical question to follow is… Are all these articles BS?

That’s not true either.

There’s the right place and time for each and every of those Facebook ad hacks.

Thing is, all Facebook ad hacks are not relevant to ALL campaigns.

How over-optimization may damage your Facebook campaigns

To make things a bit clearer, here’s a list of popular Facebook ad optimization hacks that marketing blogs suggest:

1. Set up a custom ad schedule, e.g. show your ads only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 5pm to 10pm.
2. Optimize your ad placement, e.g. let Facebook show your ads only on desktop or mobile, or remove the Audience Network placement.
3. A/B test your ad ideas, e.g. first test 10 different ad variations and later use the best-performing one.
4. Set up many different Custom Audiences, e.g. target people who are on your email lists.
5. Create Lookalike Audiences who are similar to your existing clients.

There are so many more of those! These three I found from a Social Media Examiner article that’s also a top Google Search result on the topic.

1. Set up a sales funnel and create a different campaign and messaging for prospects, clients, retargeting audiences, etc.
2. Monitor your ad frequency and when you see the frequency exceed 1.7, you better be careful!
3. Select the right bidding option, e.g. optimize for Link Clicks at the beginning of your campaign, then switch to Conversions.

Every time I read about such hacks I’m thinking “OMG I have to try them!”

And, well… I have tried them – tens of different optimization hacks.

Do they work?

Yes and no.

Sometimes, no optimization is better than over-optimization

Here’s the caveat – many Facebook ad optimization hacks are relevant only to high-volume campaigns.

In some respects, it would make sense that if you’re running a low-budget Facebook ad campaign, you need to save more money and optimize more.

That’s when over-optimization happens.

If you apply 10 different Facebook ad hacks to a campaign with a $100 – $1000 budget, you’re probably going to damage your campaign’s delivery and results.

Why?

Because you’re limiting your ad delivery to a way-too-small audience or ruling out potentially good ad placements.

Also, you’re likely to make frequent changes while optimizing your campaign (more than one change per every 24h) that are impairing the work of Facebook’s auto-optimization algorithms.

Not good.

So what is the silver bullet here?

A year ago, I would never have thought I’d come to saying this, but…

You should test running a campaign without using any optimization hacks.

Just test it for once.

Also, whenever you’re unsure what an optimization hack is meant for, don’t apply it to your campaign.

And while you’re not getting worked up about small things like which call-to-action buttons to test or which campaign placements to use, you’re going to save a lot of time!

The time you’re going to spare by not puzzling about campaign optimization, can be put into a lot better use.

Here are the two TRULY MAGICAL TRICKS that will make your ad campaign perform better than any micro-level optimization hack:

1. Figure out your product’s unique selling proposition (USP)
2. Create 2-3 (not 10) high-quality ad images

Believe me, both of these are easier said than done.

Figuring out your USP is a difficult task in today’s competition-heavy business world. The advertising legend David Ogilvy had some pretty good suggestions on this topic up his sleeve.

Regarding high-quality ad images, you can start by learning what’s working for other brands and gathering inspiration. Also, I suggest that you read this article about top Facebook ad design hacks. For inspiration, check out these Facebook and Instagram ad examples.

! No Facebook ad optimization hack is going to make your campaign succeed if you have boring ad messages and your images fail to catch attention.

Focus on initial campaign setup rather than optimization

The key to successful Facebook campaigns lies in well-done homework.

Before you go to the Facebook Ads Manager to set up your campaign, figure out what your campaign’s goals are.

Do you want to increase brand awareness or boost sales? Who is your most potential target audience? And so on…

Based on your campaign goals, you will know what kind of messaging and campaign objectives to use.

For example, if your goal is to get mobile app installs, you should use Facebook Mobile App Installs campaign objective.

I have explained my recommended Facebook campaign setup process in this article. Just a few key takeaways that you should keep in mind:

1. Spend at least $100-$200 per every new campaign – for less, Facebook auto-optimization algorithms won’t be able to optimize your ad delivery.
2. Set up a single ad campaign with a single ad set and 1-3 ads while resisting the urge to fragment your campaigns into scattered low-budget ad sets.
3. Don’t A/B test too many elements at once – you won’t have enough results to conclude the test. Here’s my guide to Facebook ad A/B testing.
4. Don’t worry too much about the ad placements, custom delivery schedule, and manual bidding. Use Facebook’s default settings for all these things.
5. Set up Facebook Pixel to track your campaign’s results and set up Facebook retargeting campaigns. IT’S A MUST-HAVE!

Once you’ve hit the “Publish” button, let your Facebook campaign run for at least 6h before making any conclusions. (In the perfect world, you’d let it run for at least 24h, but you probably can’t make yourself wait that long)

Optimizing you Facebook ads based on results

When it comes to optimizing your Facebook ads after publishing your ad campaign, it’s a whole different story.

Naturally, you should keep your eye on campaign results and if you don’t like what you’re seeing, take action.

In addition to other ad metrics that you consider important, you should definitely measure the COST-PER-RESULT. This is the one KPI that will tell you if you campaign’s doing well or not.

(I am not going to explain in this article how to save a badly performing campaign. But it’s for sure a topic I’d like to cover in the future.)

Ok… But returning to the discussion over Facebook ads optimization, there’s one last question I’d like to answer.

What about third-party Facebook advertising tools?

Today, there’s a software tool for everything, especially in the profitable industry that is Facebook advertising.

These tools are meant to help you with campaign setup and ads optimization.

Facebook ads management tool – Image source

Should you use a third-party Facebook advertising tool such as AdEspresso or Smartly?

The answer is a big “no.”

If you come to think of it…

• You don’t need a third-party tool for setting up your Facebook ad campaigns – Facebook has been adding new features to the Ads Manager and that it the fastest tool on the market for campaign setup (especially for small campaigns)
• Third-party tools also offer you suggestions for optimizing your campaigns, e.g. “pause this ad as it has a lower CTR” or “automatically increase the best-performing ad set’s budget.” Facebook’s auto-optimization algorithms do the exact same thing for free and they have thousands of times more training data than any third-party algorithm.

So instead of paying for a third-party Facebook ad management tool and hoping it will improve your campaign results…

Pay this money to copywriters and designers who will help you improve your ads and landing pages. You will get a significantly higher ROI out of the process. Also, check out this guide on copywriting for Facebook to write better Facebook ad copy.

P.S. if you have other arguments that I’m not aware of that justify the use of third-party advertising tools, I’d love to have a discussion.

When to use Facebook ad optimization hacks?

Look I’m not overly grumpy about Facebook ads optimization.

As I said before, there’s the right place and time for different hacks.

Here’s a list of popular Facebook ad hacks together with potential use cases. I hope this will help to clear up the picture.

Set up a custom ad schedule

This hack is relevant to products that people generally use at specific times of day. For example, a pizza delivery service could schedule their ads to show on Friday and Saturday nights, when people are most likely to order a pizza. If your product is used by people on a daily basis, there’s no point in scheduling your ads.

Optimize your ad placement

I would say that there is really no need case for this hack. That’s because Facebook will automatically show your ad on the most effective channels, optimizing for best results. This might be handy when your desktop landing page has a lower conversion rate that your mobile landing page or vice versa. In this case, you could show your ads either only on desktop or only on mobile.

Set up A/B tests

Split testing new ad ideas is definitely something you should do in the long term. However, if your campaign budget is lower that $100, it is best to use a single ad variation, so that Facebook’s algorithms can focus on optimizing the ad delivery, not the visual.

Set up Custom & Lookalike Audiences

Advertising to a Custom Audience is worth the effort when there are at least 100 people in it. Also, do not create Lookalike Audiences from Custom Audiences smaller than 100 people – less is usually not enough data for Facebook to identify the key characteristics of your Custom Audience and make relevant matches.

Monitor your ad frequency

There are other ad metrics more important than ad frequency, e.g. your cost-per-result. Checking your ad frequency is relevant when targeting small audiences (less than 10k people) while having high budgets – you likely don’t want people to see your ads more than 5 times per week.

Select the right bidding option

There are campaigns where optimizing for Link Clicks at the beginning of your campaign, then switch to Conversions is a good option. Switch to Conversion-based optimization once you have at least 50 conversions per ad set. If you’re planning to run a long-term campaign with high budgets and many conversions, you can select “optimize for Conversions” option right from the start.

Conclusion?

To sum this all up, here’s the verdict:

Facebook ad optimization hacks can be of huge help when applied to correct use cases.

Just use them responsibly – not piling them up on a single campaign but using them as fairy dust that you sometimes sprinkle on campaigns in need.

The post The Best Facebook Ad Optimization Hack is… No Optimization appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

When I got started with Facebook advertising around 4 years ago, in all honesty, I had no idea how Facebook advertising works.

Fast forward to 2019, managing millions of dollars in Facebook ads budget has taught me a lot. I’ve digged into Facebook ads big time, and have since contributed tens of articles on this topic to:

• Content Marketing Institute
• AdEspresso blog
• KlientBoost blog
• Kissmetrics blog

Up next, you’ll find the 25 Facebook and Instagram ad design hacks that have sometimes resulted in 200%+ higher CTRs and conversion rates.

Expect to see tons of case studies, A/B test results, and success stories – and apply all of them to your own Facebook ad campaigns.

Read more: 162 best Facebook ads in 2018 and 2019

Want to improve your writing skills as well? Read this guide on copywriting for social media and Facebook posts.

Make sure that all your Facebook ads have the correct measurements by following this guide on Facebook ad size in 2020.

Your Facebook ad design is critically important

A Facebook ad image can make or break your campaign.

Consumer Acquisition found that images are arguably the most important part of your ads — they’re responsible for 75%-90% of ad performance.

If your ad image fails to catch attention, nobody will read your ad copy.

So it’s crucial that you’re constantly A/B testing new Facebook ad designs to find a winning solution.

At Scoro, we’ve tested at least 20 different ad designs over the past 10 months.

Did all those various ad designs really have different CTRs and conversion rates?

They sure did.

Here’s an example of three different Facebook ad design’s performance:

So you better create your first highly converting Facebook ad designs and put them all on trial in a quick A/B test.

And then, once you’ve tested enough ads and applied the best design hacks, boom, you’ve found yourself an ad image that people can’t help but click.

Facebook ad design hack #1:
Use colourful Facebook ad images

If you think about the Facebook newsfeed, it’s full on photos and dull ads.

Creating a colourful ad that pops into people’s eyes is the best way to earn their attention.

And you don’t even need hardcore Photoshop skills to do it. Take a look at this Facebook ad example by OptinMonster – their ad is super simple yet compelling.

Research shows that people make up their minds within 90 seconds of their initial interaction with people or products. About 62‐90% of their assessment is based on colors alone.

If you’re unsure which colour to use, you can:

• Keep to your branded colours
• Choose according to the colour psychology
• A/B test 3-5 different colours

The New York Times is constantly testing new Facebook ad colours to avoid ad fatigue and appeal to more people.

There’s one more thing you should know about colourful Facebook ads, leading us to the next point.

Facebook ad design hack #2:
Use highly contrasted colours

A study by UsabilityTools showed that using highly contrasting landing page call-to-actions resulted in 75% higher click-through rate, compared to a low-contrast CTA.

Higher contrasts help to draw more attention to your ad.

Take Nike’s ad for example. Their contrasting carousel ad immediately catches attention.

Here’s another example by Udemy (notice the contrast between orange and white ad elements).

But sometimes, the contrast you’re looking for isn’t the one between ad elements. You can also create Facebook ads that contrast with the entire newsfeed.

Facebook ad design hack #3:
Create ads that contrast with the entire newsfeed

We once ran an A/B test to see what works best – a colourful red ad vs. an ad with a white background.

We discovered that the white ad had a 60% higher CTR and attracted 40% more conversions at the same budget.

Sure, there are other aspects that might have contributed to the light ad’s success. However, as we kept using this ad design with new ad copy and CTAs, it returned awesome results for months to come.

Here’s another example by Squarespace. They’ve contrasted white image background with colourful icons, making the ad easy to notice.

So here’s my recommendation: Test creating Facebook ad images with white backgrounds – they’re sure to differentiate you from other Facebook advertisers.

Facebook ad design hack #4:
Add your value proposition in the ad image

If your ad image is the first thing people notice, it makes sense to place your key message right there in the image.

Make sure that the ad image text is short and sweet.

Upwork, for instance, uses the in-ad copy of “Find Your Perfect Freelancer,” placing their UVP in front of the ad viewers’ eyes.

Facebook ad design hack #5:
Keep your in-image copy short

Facebook doesn’t like ad images with too much copy on them and will start to limit your ads’ reach if they’re heavy on copy.

Instead of getting a “Yes” or “No” from Facebook, your ad’s text density will fit into one of the four classifications:

• Ok
• Low
• Medium
• High

You can test your ad’s classification by using Facebook’s Text Overlay Tool.

The good thing is that Facebook sends advertisers email notifications, guiding your attention to text-heavy ads.

Facebook ad design hack #6:
Use creatives that spark emotions

I bet you’ve never thought about using ad images that make people emotional, especially if you’re in B2B business.

However, there’s plenty of evidence to make you re-consider.

An analysis of 1,400 successful ad campaign case studies found that campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content.

There’s really no limit to the emotions you can bring into play – excitement, melancholy, happiness, sadness, surprise, etc. Just make sure the emotion matches your ad’s offer.

Eventbrite’s colourful ad image shows people at a concert, sparking the emotions of fun and belonging. This trend can also be noticed in many Instagram ad examples.

Trend Hunter Marketing analyzed 55 emotional marketing campaigns, and found the average popularity score to be 8.0 — higher than in other campaign categories.

The next time you’re adding new ad designs to your Facebook campaigns, consider testing an emotional image.

Facebook ad design hack #7:
Use the right image size

Make sure that your Facebook ad design is at least 1200 x 628 pixels wide (the standard size), and that the colors look solid on all screen types.

While Facebook also allows advertisers to upload images in different sizes, following the guidelines is a surefire way make your ads look good on every screen.

Facebook ad design hack #8:
Use symbols to your advantage

Studies show that people rely on emotions, rather than information, to make brand decisions. As you include a symbol in your ad image, people will associate your brand with the symbol’s meaning.

Here’s my favourite example by Sumo. Their ad displays a growth chart, and that’s exactly what their product helps to achieve – increase your website traffic.

SaneBox’s Facebook ad uses Gmail icons so that people will immediately associate their product with email.

But that’s not the only reason SaneBox is using the Gmail icon. They’re also benefitting from the fact that people recognize a popular brand that they already trust.

Facebook ad design hack #9:
Include well-known concepts and logos

Remember when I told you about our light Facebook ad that performed extremely well?

Another reason it might have brought a high ROI is that it included many popular brands logos: Dropbox, MailChimp, iCal…

Studies show that our brains prefer recognizable brands. If your product has integrations with other popular tools or you collaborate with a well-known brand, show it in your Facebook ads.

Here’s another smart example by 123 Reg that uses WordPress’ logo in their ad design.

Tip: When running a Facebook App Install ads campaign, include the App Store icons in your ad image to indicate you’re promoting a mobile app.

The simple Facebook ad hack of using well-known logos is hardly used. Test it out and be among the first to benefit.

Facebook ad design hack #10:
Make ad designs personal with hero shots

According to research by Psychological Science, seeing a smiling person makes us feel happy, comfortable and safe.

Don’t limit yourself to using hero shots on your landing pages. Try replacing your current Facebook a design with a picture of a happy customer.

Marketing Experiments shows that using a real person associated with your product instead of a stock photo can increase conversions by 35%.

Here’s an example by WordPress, featuring an image of a happy user.

Facebook ad design hack #11:
Mix hero shots with a short ad copy

If your hero shot takes up only part of your Facebook ad image, add some copy on the other side of the image.

According to Design Shack, captions get read 200% more than body copy so you

want to make the most of them.

Facebook ad design hack #12:
Show your product in action

People usually like to see what they’re buying. So it makes a lot of sense to include your product on your ad.

A study by the University of Iowa compared our hearing memory to the visual memory. We’re hardwired to remember things we see much longer compared to things we hear.

To make people remember your products, place them in your ad image, just like NARS Cosmetics has done:

Showing your product in the ad images is beneficial in many ways:

• People can immediately see whether they like your product
• If your product looks nice, more people will click on your ads
• People start to imagine themselves using your product, making them more likely to purchase
• It helps adjust people’s expectations to what they’ll see on your landing page
• It helps to increase brand awareness

You don’t need to have a physical product to showcase it in your Facebook ads. An online product can look just as good. Take Pipedrive’s Facebook ad, for example:

Facebook ad design hack #13:
Show the “before and after”

If your product needs to be unpacked or prepared in some way or another, you can include both of the phases in your Facebook ad.

Showing the before and after is highly engaging as it makes people’s brains put together the full story. With this one simple Facebook ad hack, you’ve turned your offer into a story.

Take a look at this Facebook ad example by Plated. It tells a story of receiving a subscription package and cooking it into a delicious meal.

The “before-and-after” technique follows George Loewenstein’s “information-gap” theory proved in the ‘90s: The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.

If you show the before and after images, people will spend more time engaging with your ads while their brains develop the missing parts of the story.

However, not all “before and after” ads get approved by Facebook. According to Facebook’s Advertising Policies:
“Ads must not contain “before-and-after” images or images that contain unexpected or unlikely results. Ad content must not imply or attempt to generate negative self-perception in order to promote diet, weight loss, or other health related products.”

Facebook ad design hack #14:
Tell better stories with carousel ads

A report by Kinetic Social says that carousel ads are 10 times better at getting people to click through compared to static sponsored posts on Facebook.

While I’m not 100% convinced that carousel ads’ ROI is really 1000% higher that that of regular ads, this ad type can help you increase the CTRs to some extent.

Carousel ads let you add up to 10 successive offers to showcase your product or tell a story.

Hired has used the carousel ad format to make their Facebook ad appeal to a number of developers.

Facebook ad design hack #15:
Use carousel ads to show process

If you’re working in a SaaS company, you can set up a carousel ad that shows the various steps of your sign-up process.

If you’re offering a subscription service, you could guide people through the subscription and delivery phases.

How to create awesome carousel ads that get clicks:

1. Tell a consistent story throughout the slideshow
2. Make your ad’s first slide so good people want to see the rest
3. Include a clear call to action (Get, Try, Learn, etc.) under each slide

Facebook ad design hack #16:
Make sure your creatives are unique

If you’re working with tens of different ad designs over a short period of time, ensure they all look trustworthy and high in quality.

Never compromise high quality over quantity.

One stellar Facebook ad image can be worth 10x more than five low-quality images. Take MailChimp’s ad, for example:

Avoid using stock photos, especially the free ones. People are tired of seeing the same images in their newsfeed over and over again.

Facebook ad design hack #17:
Use a colour overlay to create a branded look

If you’re looking for a quick way to create Facebook and Instagram ad designs that differentiate you from the rest, use this hack from Holini.

They always add a light purple layer over their blog images. This way, their content’s easily recognizable and they can use free stock photos as the background layer.

Facebook ad design hack #18:
Be consistent with your ad designs

If you want to get the benefit of increased brand recognition in addition to sales, try to keep your ad designs consistent over time.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t test various colours or different image types. However, try to keep at least some ad elements in place.

• If you want to test different background colours, keep the fonts and foreground the same
• If you’re planning to test animated images vs. stock photos, keep the colours close to those on your website
• If you’re testing various in-image messages, keep the background unchanged

For example, Marketo always uses their branded colour purple in creatives:

AdEspresso’s Facebook ads always feature their brand mascot, making the ad image instantly recognizable in the newsfeed.

NewsCred’s study found that 62% of Millennials feel that online content drives their loyalty to a brand. The most important driver of brand loyalty for Millennials is a great product at 77%. That’s followed closely by brand recognition and trust at 69%.

Making brand recognition one of your Facebook advertising goals will pay off in the long term as people get increasingly used to your products.

Facebook ad design hack #19:
Match your ad designs with landing pages

If you clicked on an ad featuring a delicious ice cream and then landed on a website selling dog food, you’d probably feel quite negative about the deceiving ad.

Getting people to click on your ads is only half the victory. You also need to get people make a purchase on your landing page.

As we matched our ad designs closely with our landing page, we saw the conversion rates go up by 20-35%.

Here’s an example of the Facebook ad images we used:

Notice how the ad’s background matches exactly with the landing page:

There are other great examples out there. Take a look at Thistle’s Facebook ad and landing page:

Don’t forget to also match your ad offers with landing pages to increase the conversion rate.

Facebook ad design hack #20:
Replace static images with video ads

When analyzing the ROI of video ads, Kinetic Social found that video ads have the lowest eCPC, with an average eCPC of $0.18.

We’ve tested Facebook video ads in Scoro and there are a couple of key learnings I’d like to share with you:

• The first 5 seconds are the most important ones – you need to immediately catch people’s attention so that they’ll watch the rest of the video.
• Videos work well with complex products, giving you a chance to explain all your product’s benefits
• Adding captions to your video increases the view rates. According to Facebook, captioned video ads increase video view time by an average of 12%.

You can either promote a video of your product or share branded video content like Adidas has done:

Tip: Keep your videos short – Wistia discovered that on average, people watch more than 80% of a video shorter than 30 seconds. However,  as the video length increases, the engagement drops.

See these 21 Facebook video ad examples for tons of inspiration.

Facebook ad design hack #21:
Include discount offers in your ad image

If you’re running a Facebook or Instagram campaign offering a discount, make sure that people notice the offer as soon as possible.

For example, MOO’s Facebook ad has a large yellow “25% off” sign right in the ad image, making their offer clearly visible.

How to create better discount offers for your Facebook ads:

• Promote limited-time offers, flash sales, limited-stock items, etc.
• Define clear dates, e.g. “Today only” or “Offer ends in 24h” to create a sense of urgency
• Offer a substantial discount, e.g. “Get 25% off today”
• Match your advertisement’s offer on your landing page
• Place the discount offer in your ad’s headline or the image

Facebook ad design hack #22:
Include a straightforward call to action

While A/B testing Facebook ads at Scoro, we discovered that the ad with the “Sign Up” CTA outperformed the ad with the “Learn More” CTA by 14.5%.

There are mainly two reasons for that:

• The “Sign Up” CTA matched the offer on our landing page
• People who clicked on the “Sign Up” CTA were more willing to sign up than the ones who just wanted to learn more

When creating ad designs, don’t lose sight of your final Facebook advertising goal – conversions. While people are more likely to click on low-threat CTAs such as “Learn More”, they’ll actually convert at a higher rate after having clicked the “Sign Up” CTA.

Test adding the call-to-action in your ad image to draw more attention to the action you’d like the ad viewer to take. Here’s a nice example by LinkedIn:

Facebook ad design hack #23:
Use GIFs instead of images

Earlier in 2017, Facebook announced that it’s now letting advertisers use GIFs as ad image.

As there are still many people who have no idea about this, you can use this Facebook ad hack to your advantage.

In fact, Buffer’s put together an awesome guide on creating your own GIFs.

How to create a Facebook ad with an animated GIF:

• Create a Facebook ad campaign in the Ads Manager
• Instead of selecting your ad’s image, select a GIF that you can upload to the Videos section

Facebook ad design hack #24:
Create location-specific ad images

There’s a simple rule that applies to all Facebook ad campaigns – the more relevant your ads are to the target audience, the more they’ll convert.

Location-specific Facebook ads take the relevance to the next level.

By mentioning particular cities in their ad images, Lyft’s able to catch more people’s attention. That’s because people will immediately view the ad as more relevant as it mentions their current location.

Mazda created dynamic ads based on geographic radius to target people who are likely to go to a specific Mazda dealership. The results were staggering: Visitors who saw these ads converted at a 53% higher rate than the control group.

Tip: Make sure that your location-specific target audience is big enough to justify the extra time you spend on creating new location-specific ads.

Facebook ad design hack #25:
Avoid ad fatigue by rotating ads

Imagine you log in to your Facebook Ads Manager account and notice that your campaign’s performance is down 50% from two days before.

What happened?

This scary marketers’ nightmare is called the Facebook ad fatigue – the moment when your target audience gets tired of seeing your ads.

AdEspresso’s analysis showed that Facebook ads’ cost-per-click increases by more than 45% on the second ad view and over 120% after a person has seen the same ad 6 times.

So how can you avoid your ad designs becoming old news?

Here’s the secret tactic I like to use with all my customers: we’re rotating our ad designs, so that the target audience will see a different ad design every few days.

Here’s how it works:

1. Set up 3-5 ad sets with different ad designs
2. Schedule each ad set to be active on different weekdays

Now, you don’t need to worry about your target audience seeing the same ad design over and over again. They’ll only see each design a couple of times, extending your Facebook campaign’s lifetime by multiple weeks.

The post 25 Facebook Ad Design Hacks (2019 Guide) appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Why?

Imagine this scenario…

You’re advertising your product to a large group of people. But although they clicked on your ad and checked out product, they weren’t willing to make a purchase right away.

Now if you’re not running a retargeting campaign to bring those potential buyers back to your website, here’s what happens:

A competitor who’s more advanced in Facebook advertising will show their ads to your potential buyers and snap them away from right under your nose.

“Alright,” you say… “I get it. I’m in. How can set up a Facebook remarketing campaign?”

That’s exactly what this guide is for: to help you understand…

• … why Facebook remarketing campaigns work
• … how to set up your marketing funnel for remarketing
• … how to use Facebook ads for efficient marketing
• … how to set up Facebook retargeting pixel
• … how to create Custom Audiences on Facebook
• … and what are the best practices for Facebook retargeting campaigns

But in case you need some more convincing, here’s some additional proof.

Do remarketing campaigns really work?

Put briefly: they work 95% of the time.

And there’s plenty of proof that Facebook retamarketing ads can be highly effective.

An eMarketer study showed that 30% of consumers show a positive reaction to retargeted ads, while only 11% feel negative about retargeting campaigns.

Moreover, 58% of people surveyed said that they usually notice online ads for products they have previously checked out.

But there’s more to it…

A comScore study with ValueClick Media revealed that retargeting tactics generated the highest lift in trademark search behavior at 1,046%, compared to other targeting strategies.

To give you more Facebook-related examples, here are some key takeaways from some campaigns I’ve worked on:

• When promoting Aggregate blog’s Facebook posts to a warm audience vs. cold audience, our CPC for remarketing audience is usually 40% lower.
• When we advertised an HR application to an audience that had already read about the app, the CPI (cost-per-install) was 32% lower compared to a cold audience.

Facebook ads are highly efficient and applicable in almost every industry.

But in order to get the best results, you’ll need to build a marketing funnel with different offers for each stage.

How to create a (re)marketing funnel?

Marketing funnel is a technique used by marketers for getting a better overview of different audiences they have.

As Johnathan Dane from KlientBoost put it: Some of your audience members are ice cubes while others are hot as lava.

When running marketing campaigns for the first time, you will reach people who know nothing about your brand (ice cubes). After a while, there will be a new group of people who are already slightly familiar with your product and offers. People who are ripe to buy from you are the hottest (lava).

Each of the stages in your sales funnel requires a different set of messages and remarketing campaigns.

You can add as many steps into your marketing funnel as you please.

Here’s an example you can use as a model.

Let’s break down the stages in the traditional marketing funnel one by one.

Awareness – In the first stage of your advertising funnel, your Facebook campaign will be targeting people who have never heard of your product or service before. This is a regular ad campaign, not yet remarketing.

Prospects – Your first-stage Facebook retargeting campaign should be directed at people who have seen your ad or visited your website at least once.

Leads – This is an optional stage that includes people who have engaged with your website/posts/emails many times. You can but don’t necessarily need to set up a separate Facebook ad campaign for targeting this stage of the funnel.

Customers – In this funnel stage, you’re going to run a retargeting campaign that’s focused on engaging your existing customers. E.g. you could upsell or cross-sell something.

Promoters – This is also an optional stage that you can use to segment your brand’s fans and loyal users. From Facebook marketing perspective, you could advertise to them some special offers or promote news about your brand.

Ok, now that you’re aware of how to set up a marketing funnel for your Facebook retargeting ads, here’s what we’ll do:

1. We’ll learn how to set up the Facebook retargeting pixel and create Custom Audiences.
2. We’ll take a look at 8 efficient ad strategies that cover all the stages of your marketing funnel.

You can skip the first part if you already know how to set up Facebook remarketing campaigns, and go straight to the section with ideas and examples.

How to create a Facebook retargeting campaign?

To set up an ad campaign on Facebook, you need to know how the setup process works.

We’re not going to stop on it longer. But you can check out this guide on how to set up Facebook campaigns.

Assuming that you already have Business Manager and Facebook Ads Manager accounts set up, you will need to take the following steps:

1. Add the Facebook remarketing pixel on your website or app.
2. Identify your Facebook campaign’s goal.
3. Create a remarketing audience using Facebook Custom Audiences.
4. Set up an advertising campaign in the Ads Manager.

After all is said and done, you can sit back and wait for the sales to come in. And, if you do everything correctly, the sales will follow.

Tip: To add a retargeting campaign, you need to create a new ad set with a Custom Audience. You can create new Facebook campaigns or add new ad sets into a current campaign.

We’ll also cover the setup process for remarketing audiences later in this article.

How to set up Facebook retargeting pixel?

Facebook pixel is a tool that helps to track all your website visitors and on-site conversions. Without the pixel, you can’t create any remarketing audiences.

Facebook pixel allows you to target your ad campaigns on the people who have previously visited your website or a specific landing page.

To set up a Facebook remarketing pixel, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Facebook Business Manager, and navigate the top-left menu to find the “Pixels” section.

2. Click on the green “Create a Pixel” button to set up your first pixel.

3. Name your Pixel and click “Next”.

4. Add the pixel code to your website. Usually, it’s easier to copy-paste the pixel code to your website’s header section, just above the tag.

5. Verify that your pixel is working and recording on-site events.

If you want to learn even more about the Facebook pixel, here’s an in-depth guide I recently wrote for the AdEspresso blog.

After you’ve set up the pixel, Facebook will start tracking your website visitor data, and you can start targeting your website visitors.

Tip: Note that it may take a couple of days or even weeks until you have an audience big enough to create a Custom Audience.

According to Facebook, you need at least 20 people in your audience. In my experience, it’s better to have at least 1,000 people per target audience – otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time creating a campaign that only reaches a handful of people.

How to create Facebook retargeting audiences?

The next big question you’ll run into is “How to set up my audiences?

First of all, it’s important to know that all remarketing audiences for your Facebook campaigns are targeting Custom Audiences.

What is a Custom Audience?

It’s a Facebook audience that’s based on people’s engagement with your brand.

For example, your Custom Audiences could include people who…

• … engaged with your Facebook Page, Facebook ads or Facebook posts
• … visited your website in the past 30 days
• … watched your videos on Facebook’s platform
• … read one of your blog articles
• … made a purchase on your website
• … added sth to their shopping cart on your website
• … signed up for a free trial on your website
• … took a specific in-app action in your application

There are many more options.

Are you already getting excited about all these low-hanging fruits?

Let’s see how you can set up all of these Custom Audiences from scratch.

How to create Facebook Custom Audiences?

To create new Facebook audiences, go to the Ads Manager and from the top-left menu, select “Audiences.”

On the Audiences page, you can see all your existing target audiences and create new ones.

From the “Create Audience” drop-down menu, select “Custom Audience.”

Next, you will have plenty of different options for creating a Facebook retargeting audience.

There have recently been many Facebook updates that made new audience types available to all advertisers.

As of January 2018, you have the following options:

You can create Facebook Custom Audiences based on:

Customer Files

Add a file with names and email addresses of your leads/customers that Facebook will match with their user base.

Website Traffic

That is the most widely-used option for Facebook retargeting campaigns. You can target…

• … everyone who visited your website
• … people who visited specific pages
• … users that spent a specific amount of time on your website

App Activity

This Custom Audience is relevant for advertisers running Facebook Mobile App Install campaigns. You can target…

• … the most active app users
• … users who made in-app purchased
• … people who have installed your app
• … users that have taken specific action in your app
• … users with a specific number of sessions

Offline Activity

You can also upload or import via API offline conversions to Facebook and match them with people on the platform.

Engagement

This audience type is based on how people engaged with your branded content on Facebook’s platform. You can target…

• … people who watched your videos on Facebook for specific time or % of video
• … people who opened/completed your Lead Ads’ lead form
• … people who engaged with your Facebook Canvas ads
• … people who engaged with your Facebook page/posts/ads
• … people who interacted with your Facebook events

Phew, that’s A LOT of options for retargeting on Facebook!

And we didn’t yet mention the fact that you can also exclude people from your Custom Audiences by using advanced targeting options.

However, the fact that you can use all of these Facebook remarketing options doesn’t necessarily mean that you need all of them.

A couple of well-defined Custom Audiences will do the job.

8 Facebook retargeting ideas that work

As said before, all advanced Facebook advertisers run some kind of retargeting campaigns.

Depending on your business type, there are many options to choose from, one more efficient than the other.

Up next, you will find 8 retargeting campaign ideas I’ve seen succeeding repeatedly.

#1: Start with a brand awareness campaign

The first step of every remarketing campaign is making the first touchpoint between people and your brand.

Before you can start campaign setup, you need to have an audience. And that’s why it’s good to start off with a brand awareness campaign.

The goal of your Facebook brand awareness campaign is to introduce your product to potential buyers and arise their interest.

For example, Packlane’s Facebook ad simply explains what their product is: Custom branded packaging.

You could also advertise a media article about your product, and later retarget the people who engaged with your Facebook page.

Do not try to immediately sell in the awareness stage. First, you need to get people’s attention with softer marketing tactics.

For example, MeetFrank’s advertising a Business Insider article about their secret recruitment app before launching other Facebook ad campaigns.

Need more ideas? Check out these 84 best Instagram ad examples.

How to set up the audience for awareness campaign?

Target a wide audience of 100,000+ people, and let Facebook’s auto-optimization algorithms find the best audience for you. Create a Saved Audience where you target people based on demographics, interests, and location.

How to increase your success rate:

• Make sure your Facebook ad clearly says what your product or service is.
• Lead people to your website, where you can track them with Facebook pixel.
• When sharing an article, write a fascinating headline that catches attention.
• Run the awareness campaign for 1 week or until you have a big enough remarketing audience.

This tactic works best for: All types of businesses, i.e. consumer products, business services, eCommerce, SaaS, mobile apps, etc.

#2: Retarget all your website visitors

After running a brand awareness campaign, you have a set of website visitors who have shown some interest in your product (or service).

That’s an opportunity for setting up your first retargeting campaign.

Important note! If you’re already getting thousands of daily web visits, you can get more specific with your remarketing audience segmentation. (See the next point.)

However, if you’re a small brand, you can start by showing the same ad to all your website visitors.

But what should you advertise?

If your product is consumer-facing and people make the purchase quickly, you could offer a slight discount to drive people back to your website/e-store. Here’s an example by TopShop:

When you’re doing marketing for SaaS or other B2B services, your sales funnel can be a little more complex.

Before a company purchases your product, they need to understand its value to their business. In this case, you could advertise a webinar introducing your product or a free trial period.

AdEspresso ran a 10-day Facebook ad campaign targeting Custom Audiences made of past 30-day website visitors.

As a person visited AdEspresso’s website, they were added to the retargeting ads campaign, and were offered a free eBook. As someone downloaded the eBook, they gave AdEspresso their email, and were entered into an email marketing campaign.

AdEspresso’s campaign is a good example of a multi-step lead nurturing strategy that turns cold leads into customers via constant Facebook advertising. Also, they managed to keep down their Facebook ads cost.

How to set up this remarketing audience:

To target all your past website visitors, create a Custom Audience based on website visits, and simply target all the people who have visited your domain.

How to increase your success rate:

• Advertise a compelling offer, e.g. a free giveaway, a discount or a free trial period.
• Make sure that your remarketing campaign’s frequency won’t get too high (keep it at the maximum of 10 ad views per every two weeks).
• Advertise blog articles, eBooks or webinars to make people more familiar with your brand and product.

Works best for: Consumer products, B2B products/services, eCommerce, SaaS.

#3: Retarget specific landing page visitors

If your website is getting a lot of traffic, you have a big enough audience pool to divide it into multiple segments.

By segmenting your remarketing audiences, you can create more relevant Facebook campaigns for each.

For example, if you’re selling multiple products, services or use cases that each have a different landing page, you can set up different ads with different messaging.

Let’s take MOO, for example – they sell business cards, branded stickers, notebooks, etc.

Instead of creating one remarketing campaign that tries to sell everything, they could…

• … advertise business cards to the people who visited a landing page about business cards.
• … advertise stickers to the people who visited a landing page about stickers, etc.

How to set up remarketing audience:

Create Facebook Custom Audience based on website visits, but instead of selecting all website visitors, only include the visitors of specific landing pages.

How to increase your success rate:

• Make your campaign’s offers specific to particular landing pages.
• Indicate what’s the next step – what do you want the person to do after clicking on your Facebook ad (Buy something? Start a free trial?)
• Exclude the people who have already converted on your offer, so that they won’t keep seeing your ads.

This tactic workd best for: SaaS and B2B products/services.

#4: Set up dynamic remarketing ads

If you’re running an eCommerce store, you don’t have to set up a different campaign for every single product on your website.

You can completely automate your campaign, and show people the exact product in your online store that they have previously looked up.

This Facebook feature is called Dynamic Product Ads.

The Dynamic Product Ads feature allows you to create an online product catalogue, and automatically create ads based on the products people check out on your website.

This makes it super easy to deliver super personalized Facebook ads. For example, like this ad by The Kooples:

According to a Facebook case study, the Honest Company saw a 34% increase in CTR and a 38% reduction in cost-per-purchase when using Dynamic Product Ads.

To create a Dynamic Product Ad, you’ll need:

• A Facebook Page
• A Facebook ad account
• A Facebook pixel installed on your website
• A Facebook catalog or another catalog of your products that’s hosted online through Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Magento.

How to set up this remarketing audience:

Facebook will automatically create a personalized ad for every person visiting your online store. You will need to set up a product catalogue and a campaign with the Catalogue Sales objective.

How to increase your success rate:

• Make sure your product catalogue features high-quality product photos.
• Make attractive offers, e.g. a limited-time discount.
• Make sure that you have the advertised products in stock, so that people won’t be left empty-handed.

This remarketing campaign type works best for: Large online stores with a wide selection of products.

#5: Advertise to your blog readers

In case you’re actively working on a branded blog, you can retarget people who have read particular blog articles.

For example, if you’re a grocery brand, you could first promote a blog article on Facebook, and later advertise your products to the people who read the blog article.

Here’s another example: Grammarly could promote an article about copywriting, and later advertise their grammar correction tool.

But what if you want to retarget to people who read other blogs?

With a third-party tool, this is possible as well. You can use a tracking tool like PixelMe that lets you retarget anyone who clicked on your link – even if it leads to another website. These tools are far from perfect in tracking all the clicks – you will get around 30-40% of people to your Facebook Custom Audience.

So basically, you can first create a high-quality audience by promoting another publication’s story, and then show these people your Facebook ads.

How to set up remarketing audience:

To set up a target audience of your blog visitors, create a Facebook Custom Audience based on website traffic, and target people who visited your blog page (use the slug “/blog” or whatever link best refers to your blog).

To remarket to people who clicked on your links to third-party blogs/websites, use a tracking tool.

Tips for retargeting blog visitors:

• Target people who have read more than one blog article – they are more engaged.
• Target readers of a specific blog article.
• Make sure that your Facebook ad is related to the article or blog that your audience previously read.

This tactic works best for: All brands with a blog, nut also brands that want to remarket to people interested in specific articles/websites not their own.

#6: Bring back shopping cart abandoners

Shopping cart abandoners are users that have been shopping in your online store, even added some things to their cart, but then abandoned your website without completing the purchase.

Tip: The concept of cart abandoners is also applicable to other types of services. For example, people who almost completed a signup form or a survey on your website.

Shopping cart abandoners are a highly valuable segment as they have shown clear interest in buying your product. According to Statista, as many as 80% of people abandon their shopping carts. What if you could use some Facebook advertising hacks to bring back even 20% of them…

One of the easiest ways to convince cart abandoners to return to your website is offering them a discount or a coupon. Even better if you can make the offer personalized and limited in time.

For example, Nespresso is promoting a limited-time free delivery. This offer could be directed towards all potential buyers or only used as a remarketing ad.

How to set up remarketing audience:

To make your Facebook ads reach people who have abandoned their shopping cart, create a Custom Audience based on online events. You can set up an event on your website that records a person clicking on the “Add to Cart” button.

How to increase your success rate:

• Don’t just advertise your products as you would to a new website visitor.
• Make your remarketing ad’s offer worthwhile of returning to your website – add a discount or coupon to nudge people to complete their order.
• Advertise rather aggressively on the first 7 days after the person abandoned their shopping cart, then pause, and advertise your products again to them after 30 days.

Works best for: eCommerce, all other types of online stores, mobile apps.

#7: Turn free trial users into paying clients

Are you marketing a SaaS (software as a service) or some other type if subscription business?

On top of your marketing funnel, you’re likely offering a free trial / subscription period, so that people can learn more about your service.

After the trial period, the user has two options: to continue paying for your service or discontinue using it.

In my experience, it is not after the trial period that you should convince the person to sign up for a paid subscription. It is more efficient to get a person’s readiness to pay during the test period.

During the free trial period, your number one goal should be to delight the user with great user experience. However, you can also convince people to continue using your paid service by advertising an attractive offer.

You can run a Facebook retargeting campaign and…

• Offer to the user a nice discount if they sign up for a longer time period. E.g. “sign up for 12 months instead of 1 month and save 40%.”
• Offer to extend the free trial for users who haven’t been active this far.
• Share helpful materials such as guides and eBooks on how to get more out of your product.

For example, Litmus has created a series of blog articles around email marketing to help their customers succeed at work.

How to set up this remarketing audience:

The easiest way to remarket to your free trial users is to set up a Facebook Custom Audience based on the “Free Trial Signup” website conversion event. Another way to target your existing users is to upload a customer list with people’s emails and names to Facebook, and create a Custom Audience based on that.

How to increase your success rate:

• Differentiate the free users’ ad messaging from your top-of-the-funnel value offers.
• Think what would make you to start paying for your service/subscription. Outline that value offer in your ads.
• Educate your free trial users – offer them guides, webinars, etc.

This type of Facebook marketing strategy works best for: SaaS and online subscription services, but also for delivery services and publications.

#8: Re-sell and upsell to past customers

According to WordStream, the remarketing CPC is significantly lower to than that of regular search and social ads. Display and social remarketing ad clicks by contrast might cost anywhere from 2-100x less.

The same applies to advertisng to your existing customers. Once someone has already bought something from you, they’re a lot more likely to purchase again.

Targeting your existing customers on Facebook is a powerful way to remind them of your product line and show them your latest products.

For example, a fashion brand could advertise their new collection while a software vendor could use Facebook advertising to introduce their upgraded services.

GoPro uses another interesting tactic to get their product owners upgrade to the latest device. Instead of just promoting the new GoPro model, they offer to trade it for $100 off when a client returns an older model.

You can also use Facebook ads to inform your clients about ongoing discounts, e.g. like this ad by AllSaints.

So here’s the key takeaway: Once a person has purchased something from you, don’t move them out of your Facebook marketing funnel. Keep showing hem relevant offers (e.g. discounts) once in awhile.

How to set up this remarketing audience:

Set up Facebook Custom Audiences based on customer lists or website purchase events.

How to increase your success rate:

• Find ideas for cross-selling. For example, if someone bought coffee, advertise a coffee machine to them.
• Use Facebook ads to notify your clients about discounts and other offers.
• Support your campaigns with regular Facebook posts. For example, share a blog article on Facebook that your clients will find helpful and interesting.

Here’s another interesting thing to know about Facebook retargeting. While people will easily get tired of seeing your regular ads, it’s the opposite when doing remarketing.

People will still act upon your retargeting ads even after they’ve seen it for over five times.

Final suggestions

If you’re going to take away five key insights from this article, remember these:

1. Facebook retargeting campaigns can really benefit any type of business, both B2C and B2C.
2. Don’t be lazy about setting up your campaigns, they’re usually highly efficient and well worth the effort.
3. Your ads should deliver a slightly different message from your main ad campaigns – their goal is to engage people who are already aware of your brand and product.
4. Let your remarketing campaigns reach people for more than five times, but don’t keep them running infinitely. Ten ad views during a 14-day retargeting period is sufficient.
5. Combine Facebook ads with other online marketing channels to bring more people to your marketing funnel, and then use Facebook ads to convert them to customers.

Alright. You’ve got it! Good luck with your remarketing campaigns!

The post Facebook Retargeting Campaigns – The Practical Guide for 2018 appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Sometimes, the only way to find out about new Facebook features is to spot the blue “New” sign next to an updated feature.

But how can you find all of them?

For instance, did you know that…

• You can set up an ad with multiple creatives and copy; and Facebook will determine the best combination.
• You can dynamically optimize the language of your ads.
• Facebook is looking to restrict like-to-win posts’ reach.
• You can now customize your ad creatives based on placement.

You had no idea these features exist?

Well, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. In the past three months, Facebook has made many updates to its advertising platform.

Here are the 12 most important Facebook updates in Q1 2018 that could have a huge effect on your results and ad cost:

1. You can create Facebook ads with a Dynamic Creative to find top creatives.
2. Facebook ads now have dynamic language optimization.
3. Facebook now has a Creative Split Testing feature.
4. You can verify your domains on Facebook and keep editing link previews.
5. You can now customize your creative assets by placement.
6. There are new multicity and multicountry targeting features.
7. Facebook is clamping down on engagement bait.
8. You can customize the Thank You screen of your Lead Ads.
9. Facebook is launching Sound Collection – a set of free video sounds.
10. Facebook is testing a new type of Messenger ads.
11. Facebook is adding click-to-WhatsApp messaging ad buttons.
12. You can now invoice buyers via PayPal’s Messenger extension.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these updates, and see how you can benefit.

UPDATE: On January 9, Facebook launched its latest new feature: Campaign Budget Optimization. Check it out!

1. You can create Facebook ads with Dynamic Creative

Have you ever run a Facebook ads A/B test to find out which ad image works best?

Maybe you also wanted to test some ad copy variations alongside your ad images. As a result, you had 10+ ad variations in a single ad set.

That’s a little bit messy.

Luckily, you can now have Facebook’s algorithms find you the best combination of ad images, headlines, and main text.

This feature is called the Dynamic Creative

Dynamic Creative allows you to create a single Facebook ad that includes up to 30 creative assets. After you publish the ad, Facebook will mix and match your ad to find what performs best.

In addition to the overall limit of 30, Facebook caps the number of individual creative variations that can be submitted.

You can include up to…

• 5 headlines
• 10 images or videos
• 5 texts
• 5 link descriptions
• 5 CTA buttons

Note that you can’t submit images and videos to the same Dynamic Creative ad.

How to set up Dynamic Creative ads

To create an ad set with Dynamic Creative ad, you’ll have to use the Facebook Power Editor or updated Ads Manager and select the Quick Creation workflow. (Not the Guided Creation workflow)

Currently, the new Facebook feature is available for three campaign objectives only:

• Conversions
• App install ads
• Traffic

As you’re setting up your new ad set, look for the Dynamic Creative box and turn on the option.

After you’ve made all the selections in the ad set phase, move on to your ad and upload all the different creative elements you wish to test.

FYI, here’s a list of supported ad placements for Dynamic Creative ads:

• Facebook Newsfeed on desktop and mobile
• Right hand column
• Instagram feed
• Audience Network classic
• Audience Network In-stream video
• Audience Network rewarded video

As you’re creating your Facebook ad, you should see the “+ Add” button and be able to add several variations of images, headlines, and copy.

After you’ve added all the ad element variations you need, it’s time to publish your new campaign.

Up next, Facebook will start to show people different variations of your Dynamic Creative ad, learning what people prefer. Note that you won’t be creating multiple ads, just one ad with Dynamic Creatives.

After a while, you’ll be able to see in your campaign reports which images, text, headlines, etc. performed best in various combinations with other tested elements.

To see how your dynamic creatives performed, click on the “Breakdown” menu at the top right of your ad reports and select “By Asset.”

Running some Dynamic Creative ads will help you easily find out what your best-performing ad creatives and headlines are.

Tip: You need at least 20 conversions per creative to draw meaningful test results. That’s why, it makes sense not to submit 30 different elements, but test up to 10 elements per ad. I personally prefer testing ad images and the main ad copy, as these two Facebook ad elements make the highest impact.

2. Facebook ads now have dynamic language optimization

Note: This Facebook feature is still in beta, and will be gradually rolled out to all advertisers.

However, it’s a really helpful feature, making many Facebook marketers’ life easier and also lowering the Facebook ads cost.

Here’s how it works:

If you’re advertising to people in several languages, Facebook’s dynamic language optimization allows you to deliver multilingual ads to the right audiences.

Instead of having different ad sets with translated ads for different languages, you can create one ad with up to 6 different language versions, and Facebook will auto-optimize your campaign budget to deliver your ads in the right language to the right people.

This is highly beneficial when:

1. Advertising in a single country to people speaking multiple languages
2. Promoting your product to a group of countries, regions or worldwide

How to set up a Facebook ad with multiple languages

Step 1: Create a new Facebook ad campaign.

Use the traffic, mobile app installs or conversions campaign objective.

Step 2: Set up your new ad set.

Note that this Facebook feature only supports ads placement in Facebook Newsfeed (web and mobile), Instagram and Audience Network.

Step 3: Set up your Facebook ad with multiple languages.

To create your ad in more than one language, click the “Create in Different Language” button under Multiple Languages.

Step 4: Select your Default Language.

Choose a default language that you think will be the most spoken language in your target audience.

The ad in the default language will also be served to people who don’t match any other languages your ad includes. Next, add a headline and text for your default ad.

Step 5: Add additional languages.

Up next, you can add up to five more language options to your ad. Add the headlines and copy for your ads in other languages.

Tip: If you are using the website clicks and website conversions objective, you can also include language-specific website links.

After you’ve added all the language variations you need, hit the “Create” button to publish your new language-optimized ad.

Tip: When showing a Facebook ad in a specific language, you should also make sure that your landing page is in the same language to avoid a high drop-off rate.

3. Facebook now has a Creative Split Testing feature

Facebook Ads Manager has had a built-in split testing feature for almost a year now.

This feature allowed advertisers to A/B test different delivery optimizations, ad placements, and audiences to see what works best.

As a recent update, you can now also split test your ad creatives.

(Do not confuse this with Dynamic Creatives that we covered in step 1. With Creative Split Testing feature, you will create more than on Facebook ad while there’s only one dynamic creative ad.)

For example, if Google wanted to A/B test what background color works best, they could set up a creative split testing campaign in the Ads Manager.

How the Creative Split Testing feature works:

Previously, when you wanted to A/B test your Facebook ad copy or images, you needed to create multiple ad sets that contained all your ad variations.

This meant multiple ad sets, all targeting the same Facebook or Instagram target audience.

This was a bit messy and most definitely time-consuming.

Moreover, people in your target audience saw all the variations of your Facebook ad. This could get annoying pretty quickly.

One of the main benefits of Facebook Creative Split Testing feature is that it helps to avoid the audience overlap – the same people won’t see multiple different versions of your Facebook ad.

To set up a creatives split test in the Ads Manager, create a new ad set and let Facebook know you want to A/B test your ad creative.

Up next, you can select your ad placements and set up the Facebook ad bidding.

Note that your split test has to be running for at least three days. This is required so that Facebook can get the minimum sample size necessary to determine a winner. The maximum duration of a Facebook split testing campaign is 14 days.

You can also ask Facebook to complete the split test once it has enough results to draw conclusions. Simply tick the box.

To set up all tested ad variations, create your first ad as you normally would with image, link, headline, text, link description, CTA button, etc.

When you click the “Test Another Ad” button, Facebook will copy your ad and you can create a slightly different variation of it.

You can split test up to five different creative variations.

After you’ve hit the “Publish” button, Facebook will create several ad sets with your ad variations.

The good thing about this Facebook update is that the audience members for your split test’s ad sets won’t overlap – something you couldn’t achieve when setting up a regular A/B test.

4. You can now verify your domains on Facebook

At the beginning of 2017, Facebook marketers were able to edit the link description of every link they published on their Facebook page.

These golden days are long gone.

Now, when adding a new link to Facebook, you won’t be able to edit the headline nor link description (text under your post’s headline) – it’s just static and Facebook takes it from your link’s meta description.

And sometimes, it’s super annoying.

Luckily, Facebook only recently added a new feature – Domain Verification.

By verifying your domain ownership on Facebook, you can edit the link previews of your website links again. Thank god.

What is Facebook Domain Verification?

Domain Verification provides a way for you to claim ownership of your domain in Business Manager.

This ownership allows you to control editing privileges of your links and other content to prevent misuse of your domain and to keep bad actors from spreading misinformation. Basically, it’s a new feature to fight fake news and other faulty content.

How to add a new domain to your Facebook Business Manager

Step 1: In Business Manager, click on the Business Settings button.

Step 2: In the Business Settings, make sure you are in the People and Assets tab, and select Domains from the left side navigation list.

Step 3: Click on the Add New Domains button, and enter your domain in the Add a domain pop-up dialogue.

Step 4: To implement domain verification, you can choose between two different methods:

1. Add a DNS TXT entry to your DNS record to confirm that you own the domain
2. Upload an HTML file provided by Facebook to your web directory and confirm domain ownership in Business Manager.

Personally, I find the second option easier.

1. Download the HTML verification file.
2. Upload the file to the root directory of your website. You will be able to see that it is uploading at the link provided in the HTML File Upload tab.
3. Once it is done, click the Verify button at the bottom of the HTML File Verification tab for the selected domain.
4. Leave the HTML verification file in your website’s root directory as it may be checked periodically for verification purposes.

You can also associate multiple Facebook Pages with your verified domains. Here’s a step-by-step guide by Facebook.

Key takeaway: By verifying your domain in the Business Manager, you can edit your domain’s link previews on Facebook.

Read more: How to Promote Your Blog in 2018 With Facebook Ads

5. You can now customize your creative assets by placement

First of all, what is a creative asset?

Well… A creative asset it’s your ad image, text, headline, link description or CTA button.

Now, let’s take a look at all the different ad placements provided on the Facebook ad network.

Facebook:

• Desktop Newsfeed
• Mobile Newsfeed
• Instant Articles
• In-Stream Videos
• Right Column
• Suggested Videos

Instagram:

• Feed
• Stories

Audience Network:

• Native, Banner and Interstitial
• In-Stream Videos
• Rewarded Videos

Messenger:

• Home
• Sponsored Messages

The problem with som many different placements is that they all have slightly different ad formats and image sizes.

For example, the ads in the Mobile Newsfeed have the measure of 1200px x 628px.

However, on Instagram, your ads size can be 1080px x 1080px, making your ad image a square instead of a rectangle.

So what should you do? Create multiple ad sets for different placements?

In the past, this was the only option to optimize your ad creatives based on placement. Not anymore.

Now, you can simply use the new Facebook feature that lets you add multiple ad creatives for different placements – all in a single ad.

How to customize your creatives based on placements

You can currently customize creative assets for the following placements:

• Facebook Desktop Newsfeed
• Facebook Mobile Newsfeed
• Instagram Feed
• Instagram Stories
• Audience Network (Native, Banner, and Interstitial)

As you upload a new image to your ad, you will see an option to add different creatives for additional placements.

By uploading different creatives for all your ad placements, you can optimize the size and font size of your ad images, making them a better match for each ad placement.

I personally like to create different visuals for Facebook and Instagram advertising – this way, you can have larger square images show up in people’s Instagram feeds.

 Tip: When creating placement-based creatives, make sure to follow the aspect ratios for all Facebook ad placements:

• Facebook News Feed: 254 x 133px minimum (1.91:1 aspect ratio)
• Instagram Feed: 500 x 262px minimum (1.91:1)
• Instagram Stories: 500 x 889px minimum (.56:1)
• Audience Network Native, Banner, and Interstitial: 254 x 133px minimum (1.91:1)

6. New multicity and multicountry targeting features

Many Facebook advertisers are showing ads across the world.

For example, if you’re running an eCommerce or SaaS (Software as a Service) business like Asana, you can serve the very same ad across borders.

For advertisers looking to expand their ads’ reach to new horizons, Facebook recently added two helpful features:

1. You can create multicountry Lookalike Audiences
2. You can create multicity audiences

Let’s take a closer look.

Multicountry Lookalike Audiences

Previously, when creating a new Lookalike Audience, you had to select one country to target. That’s not the case anymore.

However, note that if you’re targeting countries with different populations, the distribution of audience members may not be equal between the countries you’re targeting.

Multicity targeting

Often, advertisers want to target people living in cities as they’re more likely to be interested in specific products.

Now, you don’t need to type in all the cities in a specific country. You can simply select the multicity targeting option.

And it keeps getting better. You can also target cities based on their size, meaning that you can only reach people in small or big cities if you’d like.

Tip: Use this feature when entering a new country to uncover all the largest cities. You can break down your ad reports by city to see where your most engaged audience lives. Moreover, you can use multicity audiences to create Facebook retargeting campaigns that reach several cities at once.

7. Facebook is clamping down on engagement bait

As reported by TechCrunch, Facebook will soon start to limit the reach of posts that ask people to like, share or comment in exchange for a chance to win something.

“A new tweak to the Newsfeed algorithm will mean “stricter demotions” for Pages, and/or individual, who adopt engagement bait tactics. Starting in a couple of weeks, offenders will have the total reach on all of their posts reduced if their content is begging or baiting users to interact.”

Facebook did specify that there are some exceptions to this clampdown, including examples like a missing child report, raising money for a cause, or asking for travel tips.

8. You can customize the Thank You screen of your Facebook Lead Ads

If you’re regularly running a Facebook Lead Ads campaign, here’s good news: you can now customize your Thank You screen that users see after submitting their contact details.

Here’s an example by Jon Loomer of how the new feature works:

9. Facebook is launching Sound Collection

Facebook is launching video editing tool Sound Collection for inserting into Facebook and Instagram clips “songs, vocals, noises, and instrumental tracks spanning genres like hip hop, pop, jazz, country, and more.

According to Facebook, the Sound Collection gives you access to thousands of high-quality audio tracks and sound effects from all over the world to spice up your videos.

These sounds are owned by Facebook, and are free and clear to use in any videos you create and share on Facebook and Instagram.

So basically, the Facebook Sound Collection is a set of free audio files that you can add to your ads running on Facebook and Instagram.

Check it out!

10. Facebook is testing new Messenger ads

As reported by TechCrunch, Facebook is developing and internally testing a new ad product called Messenger Broadcast.

Messenger Broadcast is a self-serve mass-messaging interface that lets businesses send marketing messages to users.

Once this Facebook update goes live, brands could send Messenger messages to thousands of people. This could look similar to the push notifications marketers can send to app users.

However, users will still have to opt in before brands are able to message them directly.

11. Facebook is adding click-to-WhatsApp messaging buttons

If you’re running Messenger ads in a country where WhatsApp’s the most popular chatting tool, here’s a recent update you should know about:

Click-to-WhatsApp messaging buttons are now rolling out in Facebook ads.

This new feature is not yet available everywhere. Facebook started to roll it out starting first with North and South America, Africa, Australia and most of Asia.

12. You can now invoice buyers via PayPal’s Messenger extension

With thousands of eCommerce stores popping up every day, there war a significant pressure on Facebook to make the buying experience on their platform ever more pleasant.

The new PayPal chat extension allows a seller to create and send their invoice without leaving their conversation, so the buyer can act on it immediately.

Like other PayPal transactions, those taking place over Messenger are covered by PayPal Purchase Protection for Buyers.

Now that you’re aware of all the latest Facebook updates, head on to the Ads Manager, and put your new insights into good use.

Note: We’ll be updating this post as new Facebook features are launched on a quarterly basis, so keep coming back for more news!

The post TOP Facebook Updates in Q1 2018 Every Marketer Should Know appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.