Facebook advertising hacks have been covered in hundreds of articles across the web.

However, many of these “hacks” are really just tips and basic advice, not actual hacks to bring you better Facebook ad results.

That’s not very helpful, is it?.

Nobody cares about useless hacks – Image source

The real Facebook advertising hacks are what differentiates the advanced marketers from the crowd, helping them get 10x higher ROI out of their Facebook ad campaigns.

The 28 hacks covered in this article will help you to:

  • Create engaging Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns that bring results
  • Optimize your campaigns for lower ad costs
  • Reach even more high-ROI audiences
  • Lower your cost-per-acquisition
  • Get more sales without breaking your budget

Want to create successful Facebook advertising campaigns? Find out all the hacks and best practices used by the pros.

We’ve divided the Facebook ad hacks into three different categories. Click on them to move to the right section:

Facebook campaign optimization hacks
Facebook audience targeting hacks
Facebook copywriting & design hacks

Facebook Campaign Optimization Hacks

In the first part of our guide, we’ll start off by learning some of the more technical Facebook advertising hacks that can bring the highest surge in your advertising ROI.

Once you’ve applied a couple of these tactics to your campaigns, you’re gonna feel like…

Killing it today – Image source

So what are these magical hacks we’re talking about?

1. Get Your Ad Campaigns Deliver Fast

I like to call this Facebook advertising hack the FTO – Fast Take-Off.

The FTO method helps to accelerate your ad delivery, especially at the beginning of your campaign.

Here are the top three benefits of accelerated ad delivery:

  • You’ll get results at a faster rate
  • You’ll collect more ad data in order to start optimizing your campaigns
  • You’ll quickly find out whether a Facebook ad campaign succeeds or fails

Ok, so here’s how the FTO hack works…

  1. When launching a new Facebook campaign, assign Daily or Lifetime budgets that exceed your planned budget by 200%-500.
  2. Do not select the “Accelerated Delivery” option as Facebook will then focus on the speed of ad delivery over quality and cost

Start with increased budgets

3. After your ads have 10,000+ impressions, you can start measuring the results and decide whether your campaign’s delivering the results you were hoping for.

Instead of waiting for 5 days for the results to come in, you should get them in 48 hours or less.

After the initial campaign take-off, you can change your campaign’s budgets back to match your planned total budget.

Important: You should always give Facebook at least 24 hours to optimize your campaigns before drawing any conclusions. The algorithms need some time to work their magic.

2. Always Optimize for Conversions

Speaking of Facebook’s AI-powered algorithms, they’re really really good at delivering your ads to the people most likely to be interested.

That’s why, there’s really no need to be playing around with your Facebook campaign objective to try and lower your advertising costs.

Campaign objective is the first selection you’ll make when setting up your Facebook campaigns.

facebook-campaign-objectives

Looks familiar?

For best results, I recommend that you select the campaign objective that’s closest to your ultimate advertising goal. Most of the time, it’s sales.

That’s why, usually, you should select one of these campaign objectives:

  • Conversions
  • App installs
  • Product catalog sales

Naturally, you can also run brand awareness campaigns and share blog content.

But if you’re advertising a sales-oriented offer like Prezi or The Economist, make sure to optimize your ad campaign for Conversions.

facebook advertising hacks

These ads are focused on sales

Tip: Unsure what to optimize your Facebook campaigns for? Set up two ad campaigns with the same offer and audiences but with a different campaign objective and ad delivery optimization.

Read more on this topic: How to Set Facebook Ad Goals for Phenomenal Results

3. Optimize Your Facebook Ad Likes and Shares

Have you ever seen a Facebook ad with hundreds of likes and shares and wondered: “How on earth do they get so many likes?”

Ahrefs facebook advertising

Ahrefs’ ad has a crazy number of likes

Naturally, one way to get many likes is to show the same Facebook ad to hundreds of thousands of people.

But what if you want to use the same ad copy and design in multiple ad campaigns, so that you can change the audiences and bids?

If you re-enter the same ad elements across multiple campaigns or ad sets, Facebook will still count all of them as separate ads.

Not if you use the “Use Existing Post” option when setting up your Facebook advertising campaign!

By using the “Use Existing Post” option, you can gather all the campaigns’ post engagements under a single ad.

Facebook post

Use the same Facebook post across many ads

The easiest way to set up multiple ad campaigns using the same Facebook post is to first publish the post on your company’s Facebook Page.

Next, you can select it whenever setting up a new campaign in the Facebook Ads Manager.

4. Optimize Your Facebook Ad Bidding

When setting up your Facebook ad campaign, you’ll be presented with lots of different options and tools.

What are you to make with all of these manual and automatic bidding options?

facebook ads bidding

That’s a LOT of options

In my experience, there’s not a huge difference in whether you use automatic or manual bidding.

However, if you know how much a conversion is worth to you, you can set the manual bid that’s slightly under your anticipated ROI.

The good thing about Facebook advertising is that there’s no danger of overbidding. This means two things:

  • You’ll often be charged for less than your initial bid
    Even if you bid a lot more than needed for winning the auction,
  • Facebook will only charge you for the amount it takes to beat the competition.

5. Set Up a Custom Ad Schedule

Chances are that your Facebook ads aren’t relevant to yo your audience 24/7.

For example, it’s rather unlikely that someone will create a free trial of your B2B product in the middle of the night. Rather, they might sign up for Netflix or order a pizza.

Take a look at your Facebook ad reports to learn which days and hours bring you the most conversions at the lowest cost.

To do that, go to Facebook Ads Manager and break down your campaign reports by Time.

Facebook ad reports

Use the Breakdown menu

Now, you’ll get an overview of how your ads perform at different weekdays and hours. You can use this data to set up a custom ad delivery schedule and show your ads to people only at specific dates and time of day.

Note that you need to use a Lifetime budget (instead of a Daily budget) to be able to use the custom scheduling option.

custom ad schedule

Set up a custom ad schedule

6. Lower Your Ad Frequency With Smart Scheduling

My personal favourite use case for custom ad schedules is slightly different.

Sometimes, when working with large-scale ad campaigns that are set to run for multiple weeks, you must be prepared to fight the ad fatigue.

Ad fatigue happens when people have seen your Facebook ads for many times and grown tired of it. This can be avoided by using multiple Facebook ad designs that are displayed at different weekdays.

So for example, you could create 3 different Facebook ad images and place them in 3 different ad sets that are delivered on different weekdays.

facebook advertising schedule

Rotate your Facebook ads

How to pull off this Facebook ad hack:

Set up a Facebook ad campaign with one ad design and schedule it for Mondays and Thursdays (you can change the days as you wish).

Facebook ad scheduling

Schedule one ad variation for 2-3 days

After publishing the campaign, duplicate the ad set and add two more ad sets that include a different ad design and are scheduled for different days.

Et voila! You’ve got yourself a Facebook ad campaign that delivers different ads on changing weekdays.

facebook ad examples ebook

7. Optimize Your Facebook Ad Placements

According to AdEspresso’s data on Facebook ad costs, the cost-per-click can vary by more than 550%, depending on your ad placement.

facebook ad cost per placement

Facebook ad cost per placement – Image source

However, a cheap cost-per-click does not mean a cheap cost-per-conversion.

As you look at the Campaigns A and B and compare their results in terms of CPC, it’s easy to conclude that Campaign A outperforms Campaign B by over 105%.

facebook ad goals

Campaign A looks like a sure winner

However, the tables turn as you compare the click-to-conversion rate. In this case, Campaign B has a significantly higher return on investment.

facebook ad goals

Campaign B has a higher ROI

Here’s the key takeaway: Always measure the cost-per-result and avoid getting misguided by vanity metrics such as the cost-per-view or cost-per-click.

Currently, there are nine different Facebook ad placements available in the Ads Manager:

  • Facebook Desktop Newsfeed
  • Facebook Mobile Newsfeed
  • The Right-hand Column
  • Facebook Instant Articles
  • Facebook In-Stream Videos
  • Facebook Suggested Videos
  • Instagram Feed
  • Instagram Stories
  • Facebook Audience Network

To uncover your top-performing Facebook ad placements, log in to Facebook Ads Manager and use the Breakdown menu to break down your campaigns by Placement.

ad-placement-report

Use the Breakdown menu

After you’ve discovered and works and what doesn’t, you can edit your Facebook advertising campaign’s placements in the Ads Manager.

Read more: Facebook App Install Ads – 114-point Guide for More Installs

8. Set Up Auto-optimization Rules

Have you heard about Facebook Automated Rules?

If you’re using the Facebook Ads Manager to setup and manage your campaigns, chances are you’ve been missing out on this cool feature.

Automated rules help to keep your Facebook ad campaigns under control by automatically updating some campaigns or sending you notifications.

facebook automated rules

The ruleset is pretty extensive

You can set up four different consequences if the conditions have been met:

  • Turn off the ad campaign, ad set or ad
  • Send notifications to the ad manager (that’s you)
  • Adjust budgets (increase/decrease daily/lifetime budget by…)
  • Adjust manual bids (increase/decrease bid by…)

To set up an automated ruleset, select a campaign, ad set or Facebook ad in the Ads Manager and go to the editing panel. Here’s you can click on the “Create Rule” button to apply ruleset.

how to create an automated rule

Click on the “Create Rule” button

Here are some ideas for automated rules:

  • Be notified if your ad frequency reaches 3 points
  • Turn off an ad campaign if its cost-per-conversion gets too high
  • Increase the budgets for campaigns with good results

9. A/B Test Your Facebook Ads

One of the best ways to find out which ad designs, call-to-actions, ad placements, audiences, and campaign objectives work best is to experiment.

homer simpson gif

There are so many things to test!! – Image source

There are SO many Facebook advertising campaign elements that can be split tested:

  • A/B test your Facebook ads’ value proposition
  • A/B test your Facebook ads headline
  • A/B test your Facebook ads copy
  • Experiment with different bidding methods
  • Split test your Facebook ads landing pages
  • Split test different campaign objectives
  • A/B test your Facebook audiences
  • A/B test your Facebook ad types
  • Split test your Facebook ads images
  • Split test stock photos vs.custom illustrations
  • Split test images vs. videos
  • Split test your Facebook ad placement

However, not all A/B tests are worth conducting, and some might even damage your campaign results.

Head on to read this guide before!! you set up any Facebook experiments: 10 Crucial Rules for Facebook A/B Testing

10. Avoid Over-optimization

Like with many things in life, there’s a certain breaking point when too much good stuff gets overwhelming.

And while you’re thinking that you’ve just optimized all your Facebook campaign details to perfection…

cat gif

Don’t get too excited yet  – Image source

You may actually be losing out on big opportunities as you’ve limited your ads’ reach.

If you set your ad budgets too low and segment your campaign audiences into narrow groups, you might damage your campaigns’ reach.

Without a proper set of data, Facebook’s unable to optimize your ads. You may also lose the chance to get high relevance scores when spreading your individual ads’ reach too thin.

Instead of creating 8 different ad campaigns that target a similar audience, create 1-2 campaigns and A/B test one ad element at a time.

Also, remember to give Facebook at least 24 hours before making any new changes to your campaigns – the updates won’t have an immediate effect on your ad results. In Facebook advertising, staying patient is often the key.

11. Install The Facebook Pixel

As you might have noticed, most of the Facebook advertising hacks mentioned in this article require some extra work and effort.

That’s what makes them so efficient – the extra work that will separate you from your competition and other marketers bidding to reach the same audiences as you do.

Before you even start to advertise on Facebook, it is critical that you install the Facebook marketing pixel on your website.

install facebook pixel

You NEED this pixel

The pixel is beneficial in several ways:

  • You can track conversions on your website, not just on Facebook’s platform, making sure your Facebook ads are bringing results
  • You can retarget all your website visitors
  • You can see additional Facebook ad reports and metrics based on the actions people take on your website

Here’s the official guide from Facebook that will help you to get the pixel installed.

12. Track Standard Events to Get More Insights

In addition to tracking your website visitors, you can also track nine different Standard Events.

This is incredibly helpful for evaluating your ad campaigns’ performance as well as later retargeting people who completed a specific action on your site (e.g. added things to cart but didn’t complete the purchase).

Facebook advertising hacks

The list of Standard Events

To track the Standard Events, all you need to do is add an additional line of code to your Facebook pixel’s main code on the pages where the Standard Event occurs.

Here’s how the code will look:

  1. Your website’s original code: Paste the Facebook pixel code between the <head> and </head> tags of your web page.
  2. Your Facebook pixel base code: what you installed in the previous step of this guide
  3. Your standard event code: Within your Facebook pixel code, above the </script> tag, paste the Standard Event code. You’ll need to add the Standard Event’s code to every page you want to track.
standard events code

How the code looks

Tip: If you want to track EVEN MORE specific events, you can set up some Custom Events. Here’s Facebook’s guide that shows how.

Facebook Audience Targeting Hacks

Your Facebook target audience is arguably THE most important part of your ad campaign.

If you advertise to the wrong people, they’re not going to be interested in your offer.

So you should take extra care to set up advanced Facebook audiences to reach the audience that will fall in love with your product. Or at least says…

you got it dude gif

Oh yeah you got it dude! – Image source

Up next, I’m going to share with you my personal TOP Facebook targeting hacks that have helped many startups improve their Facebook advertising ROI.

13. Create Advanced Facebook Audiences

Usually, when marketers start advertising on Facebook, they’re going to target people based on their demographics and interests.

Creating Facebook Saved audiences is not a bad strategy per se.

However, if you limit yourself to only these basic audiences, you’ll be missing out on the more profitable Facebook ad campaigns.

facebook saved audiences

That’s the easiest way to create an audience

Facebook allows advertisers to create three types of audiences:

  1. Saved Audience – Facebook audience that you can define by choosing people’s interests location, age, gender, used devices, income level, etc.
  2. Custom Audience – Facebook retargeting audience that lets you reach people who have engaged with your Facebook ads or posts, visited your website, or belong to an email list you manage
  3. Lookalike Audience – audience that includes people similar to your existing customers or other Custom Audience types.

Include all of these audience types in your Facebook targeting mix to reach new potential customers, nurture the leads, and keep your current customers engaged.

14. Target These High-ROI Audiences

If you’re unfamiliar with all the targeting possibilities available on Facebook, here’s a list of audiences that help to improve your ad results.

  • All your website visitors (Custom Audience)
  • Pricing page visitors (Custom Audience)
  • Shopping cart abandoners (Custom Audience)
  • Existing customers and past purchasers (Custom Audience)
  • Specific landing page visitors (Custom Audience)
  • Email list subscribers (Custom Audience)
  • Blog readers / readers of particular articles (Custom Audience)
  • Free trial and freemium users (Custom Audience)
  • People similar to your customer base (Lookalike Audience)
  • People interested in your competitors’ brands (Saved Audience)
  • A wide audience of people interested in your industry (Saved Audience)

Note: Use the last one (11.) only when optimizing your campaigns on conversions, so that Facebook’s auto-optimizations algorithms can deliver your ads to people most likely to convert.

Facebook advertising hacks

How the Custom Audience setup looks like

If you’d like to learn more about creating these audiences and how to advertise to them, read this article I wrote for AdEspresso’s blog: 9 Facebook Audiences With Extremely High ROI

15. Segment Your Retargeting Audiences

After you’ve installed the Facebook Pixel, you can start retargeting the people who have been on your website.

The most common way to do remarketing is to target all your past 30-90 days website visitors.

However, targeting your blog readers, visitors from paid advertising, and let’s say referrals with the same ads and offers is highly inefficient.

If you keep repeating the same message that’s largely irrelevant to all targeted audience segments, people won’t click on your Facebook ads.

not impressed gif

Not impressed – Image source

That’s why you need to start segmenting your Facebook retargeting audiences.

But how should you segment them?

Use this approach: Segment your audiences to the extent that you’re able to deliver everyone a relevant offer. At the same time, you shouldn’t create audiences smaller than 500 people as it’s not worth your time to craft highly specific ads for a smaller audience.

For example, you could segment your retargeting pay-per-click audiences based on the topic of the landing page they visited. Or place warm yet doubtful leads into another audience and make them a discount offer they couldn’t possibly refuse.

16. Think In Terms of the Conversion Funnel

Another way to think about your Facebook (retargeting) audiences is to consider your Facebook ads conversion funnel.

Cold leads should be targeted with low-threat offers, e.g. blog articles, and other types of helpful content.

Your top of the funnel Facebook advertising goal should be creating brand awareness and creating interest in your product.

For example, BuzzSumo’s promoting an original research article.

buzzsumo facebook ad hack

That’s interesting and helps create brand awareness

As people have already visited your website and are familiar with your brand, things get spiced up. In the Prospecting and Converting stages of your marketing funnel, it’s time to introduce sales-oriented messages and prompt people to complete a purchase / sign up.

saas marketing funnel

Know when’s the right time for your offers

For example, you could remarketing to your online store visitors with a limited-time discount offer. Here’s a perfect example by Happy Socks.

happy socks facebook ad

This makes for a great retargeting campaign

17. Exclude Converters From Your Campaign

One of the keys to successful retargeting on Facebook is moving people from one ad campaign audience to the next as they convert.

For example, after a person has clicked on your brand awareness campaign or read a couple of blog articles, they could be moved on to the next stage advertising campaign and be targeted with a sales offer.

facebook advertising

Move converters from one audience to the next

To move people who convert on your Facebook ad from one audience to the next, use the EXCLUDE function.

For example, you could exclude the people who have already read a particular blog article from this article promotion’s target audience. AND you could set up another ad campaign targeting that blog article’s readers, offering a product/service related to that blog article.

Exclude past converters

Exclude past converters

You should also exclude all of your current customers from the campaign targeted at cold leads.

There are a lot better offers and content to be advertising to your existing clients than brand awareness messages. Take a look at these 142 Facebook ad examples for inspiration.

18. Frequency Cap Your Remarketing Campaigns

I guess almost everybody has seen a remarketing campaign that keeps following them across the web and shows up tens of times across multiple weeks.

That’s just annoying.

ghost gif

Some remarketing ads just keep haunting you – Image source

If you do not want your Facebook retargeting campaigns not to bore people to death, you should deliver the remarketing ads at sensible intervals.

Here’s how I like to set up highly specific remarketing campaigns (Targeting up to 10,000 people):

  • Use the Reach campaign objective as you don’t really need Facebook auto-optimization algorithm’s help, you want to reach all the people in your retargeting audience.
  • Optimize your ad delivery on Daily Unique Reach, meaning that Facebook will show your ads max 1 time per day to every audience member.
  • If you want to create a remarketing campaign that targets people for longer than 15 days, set up a custom ad schedule, so that your ads are delivered every other day or even more rarely.
Daily Unique Reach

Use the Daily Unique Reach option

19. Trust Facebook’s Auto-optimization

I’ve been mentioning Facebook’s auto-optimization algorithms a couple of times over the course of this article. That’s because I believe they’re doing a darn good job at improving your campaign results.

Facebook’s algorithms have two simple goals:

  1. Creating value for advertisers by helping them reach and get results from people in their target audiences
  2. Providing positive, relevant experiences for people using Facebook, Instagram or Audience Network

Put simply, Facebook wants advertising to be a win-win situation for both brands and customers.

Here’s an example. AdEspresso ran a Facebook ads experiment to see which Lookalike Audience returns the best results:

adespresso experiment

They tested 3 different Lookalike Audiences – Image source

They targeted 1%, 5%, and 10% Lookalike Audiences of people similar to their existing customer base. Note that 1% Lookalike Audience includes the 1% and 10% Lookalike Audience includes 10% of a country’s population that Facebook considers the most similar to the existing client base.

Basically, the 1% Lookalike Audience is where Facebook’s auto-optimization algorithms are supposed to excel the most.

After analyzing each campaign’s results, here’s what AdEspresso found:

  • The 1% Lookalike Audience had the cost-per-lead of $3.748
  • The 5% Lookalike Audience had the cost-per-lead of $4.162
  • The 10% Lookalike Audience had the cost-per-lead of $6.364

The experiment showed that Facebook is pretty good at guessing who is most likely to convert, and was able to deliver the ads to the right people.

gif

Nicely done, Facebook! – Image source

Here’s a simple way to make the auto-optimization work for you:

Create a Facebook marketing campaign that targets a wide audience of 200,000+ people and optimize the campaign for conversions.

Then, let Facebook’s algorithms learn which audience members are the most likely to convert, and deliver your ads to the right people.

20. Check Your Ad Reports to Uncover Top Audiences

Once you’ve applied the previous Facebook ad hacks and let Facebook to auto-optimize your way to audiences that convert, you can check your ad reports to see who belongs in that top-performing audience.

By using the Breakdown menu, you can find out:

  • Which age groups converted on your Facebook ads
  • Where are your top audiences located
  • Which mobile/desktop devices they’re using
  • Many additional insights
facebook ad reports

This menu is AWESOME

Important! You need a fair share of ad results before these insights become statistically valid.

You can’t conclude that 25-year-olds like your product just because 10 people have bought it.

I’d recommend that you collect at least 500 conversions per ad campaign before tracking down the best-performing audiences.

21. Optimize Your Facebook Posts’ Audience

Did you know that Facebook has an Audience Optimization tool that let’s you choose who should see your Facebook posts?

This advanced option is located in your Facebook page’s New Post sharing box.

optimized post audience

Have you ever noticed this icon?

As you click on the tiny icon, you can specify the interests that are most relevant to your posts. This way, you’ll be telling Facebook whom to show your Facebook post first (this is particularly useful to brands/publishers with thousands of Facebook fans interested in various topics and news).

facebook audience hack

You can target each post’s audience based on interests

You can also restrict the audience of your Facebook post. This is helpful if you want your post to only reach the people speaking a particular language or located at a specific location.

facebook advertising hack

Also test the Restrictions

If your Facebook page has more than 5,000 likes, the Audience Optimization has already been activated.

If your page has fewer than 5,000 likes, click the “Settings” tab in the top right corner of your Facebook page. From the “General” tab, you’ll see a row for “Audience Optimization for Posts.”

Click on “Edit” and check the box to activate the Audience Optimization. The, hit the “Save Changes” button.

facebook audience optimization

Turn on the optimization option

According to Facebook, optimizing your Facebook post’s audience helps to slightly improve the ads’ reach and relevance to their audience.

Facebook Copywriting & Design Hacks

In the part of this guide, we’ll be exploring what makes a good Facebook ad in terms of the design, ad type, and copywriting.

Believe me, there’s a huge difference between a good and a bad Facebook ad layout. And a bad-looking ad could end up costing you thousands of dollars of your advertising budget.

terrible gif

Yup, that’s terrible – Image source

So what can you do to ensure your Facebook ads are awesome and engaging?

I’ve already shared my TOP Facebook ad design hacks in this post here: 25 Facebook Ad Design Hacks to Make People Click

However, there’s so much more that you can do to increase your Facebook ads’ ROI.

22. Think What Would Make YOU Click

It is easy to start thinking about the people you’re advertising to as a huge crowd of incognito faces. After all, you’re targeting your ads at thousands if not millions of people.

But that approach is just plain wrong. It makes you publish ads that no real human would never ever click – boring ads that carry no value to a user.

The best litmus test for a good Facebook ad is to ask yourself: Would I click on this ad if I were in the shoes of my target audience?

  • Would the Facebook ad catch my attention in the newsfeed?
  • Would I consider the ad image attractive?
  • Is the offer so good that I’d feel that I need to get this?

The best Facebook ads make you answer YES!! To all of these questions. However, 80% of the rest would not.

For example, this ad by Google nails it, being well-designed, having a clear (and attractive) offer, and indicating what’s the next step (with a Sign Up call-to-action button).

google facebook ad

That’s one nice Facebook ad

So what are the top commandments for creating a Facebook ad that good? It all begins by understanding what matters to your target audience.

23. Offer Something of Value

The first and foremost reason people use your products is that it brings value to them and they’re willing to give their money and time in return.

Money and time… Those are the two most carefully kept resources each of us has. And surely we wouldn’t give them away on every random request.

So here’s the rule: Your Facebook ad offer needs to be so good that people are willing to spend their time clicking on it.

Simply asking people to check out your product or Facebook video without explaining how it will benefit them is useless. Nearly nobody will click on your ad.

don't care gif

Why would anybody care? – Image source

Here’s how you can make your ads more value-oriented:

  • Explain how your product will benefit the customer
  • Make sure that the benefits include something they can’t get elsewhere
  • Offer a discount or a limited-time free trial

Even if you’re marketing an software tool like AdStage, you can tell people how your product will improve their work life.

AdStage facebook advertising

This ad talks about the benefit to the customers

What you shouldn’t do:

  • Don’t expect people to be interested in case studies unless they’ve already shown interest in your product (e.g. visited your website)
  • Don’t expect people to be excited about poor-quality videos of your product (that’s like THE most boring type of video one can watch)
  • Don’t brag about your product’s features that seem amazing to you but irrelevant to your target audience.

24. Test Different Ad Copies

We already discussed that you shouldn’t promote the same Facebook ads to everyone – the offer and messaging depend on a person’s place in your conversion funnel.

Here’s another tip: you can test different ad copies for the same offer.

For example, Intercom’s testing a slightly different ad copy for their offer.

intercom facebook ads

Note that they’re testing one text at a time

Don’t limit yourself to testing the ad’s copywriting also try different lengths of copy or leave one text placement (e.g. the link description) completely unfilled.

intercom facebook ad

The link description has been left unfilled

25. Catch Attention With the Ad Copy

If you thought that your Facebook ad image is the only way to catch people’s attention, you’re on the wrong track.

There are ways to make your ad copy noteworthy as well.

One way is to include multiple numbers in your ad copy.

A case study published in Moz blog found that by starting your headline with a number, you’re 36% more likely to have people click on your ads.

facebook advertising tips

People prefer numbered headlines – Image source

Here’s a nice example by Inkbox, using three numbers across the Facebook ad.

inkbox facebook ad

All those numbers help to catch attention

Here’s another tip: Use emojis in your Facebook ads.

In addition to making your ads more fun and engaging, emojis can also be used to structure your ad copy and make it easy to read.

Here’s an example by Soylent, using emojis as bullet points. That’s just genius!

soylent facebook ad

This ad is so smart ?

Read more about emojis + Facebook ads here: How to Use Emojis in Facebook Ads – The Complete Guide

26. Experiment With Facebook Ad Types

For someone starting out with Facebook advertising, the range of options might be overwhelming at first:

  • Single Image
  • Single Video
  • Carousel
  • Slideshow
  • Canvas
  • Collection

And then there are the different variations of each of these ad types:

  • Link Click Ads
  • Video Ads
  • Boosted Page Posts
  • Multi-Product (Carousel Ads)
  • Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)
  • Facebook Lead Ads
  • Canvas Ads
  • Collection Ads
  • Page Like Ads
  • Page Post Photo Ads
  • Page Post Video Ads
  • Event Ads
  • Offer Claims
  • Local Awareness Ads

It’s crazy, right?!

squirrel gif

All those different ad types…

Here’s the complete guide that gives you an overview of ALL the Facebook ad types we published in collaboration with AdEspresso: Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ad Types

Why do the Facebook ad types matter?

When managing the Facebook ads for SaaS startup Scoro, we tested a carousel ad vs. a regular image ad.

Here’s an example of one of our regular ads:

scoro facebook ad example

One of Scoro’s Facebook ads

Here’s an example of the carousel ad, featuring the sign-up process and explaining the product’s benefits:

scoro carousel ad

Looks good, doesn’t it?

What do you think, which Facebook ad typed performed better?

While there are many articles explaining why carousel ads are a better option, truth is that the regular image ad performed A LOT better.

The regular ad had a higher relevance score, a lower cost-per-click, and delivered more conversions at a lower cost. However, we would have never known this unless we tested both ad types.

That’s why I recommend that you experiment with at least three different ad types. The easiest ones to get started with are:

  • Single image ad
  • Video ad
  • Carousel ad

27. Check Your Ads’ Relevance Score

Facebook ad relevance score is a 1-10 metric that shows how relevant your Facebook ads are to their target audience.

And it’s a super important campaign metric.

When AdEspresso analyzed 104,256 Facebook ads to see what’s the average relevance score, they discovered that it’s a perfect indicator of your campaign’s success.

If you have a high Facebook ad relevance score, the cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion will be significantly lower.

facebook advertising relevance score

Lower relevance = Higher costs – Image source

You can check your Facebook ads’ relevance score in the Facebook Ads Manager reports by selecting the “Performance and Clicks” standard report.

relevance score report

How to check the relevance score

Tip: The best time for checking your Facebook campaign’s relevance score is around 48 hours after publishing or after a Facebook ad has collected at least 2,000 impressions.

That’s when Facebook has enough data to tell how people react to your ads.

If your ads have a low relevance score of 1 point, it’s best to pause your ad campaign ad take steps to fix it:

  • You can change the campaign’s target audience to reach people to who your offer’s more relevant.
  • If your ads’ offer is unattractive, you should try to improve it by adding a discount or another type of engaging offer.
  • If you’re promoting a blog article or other types of content, you could test rewriting the ads’ copy to make it more engaging and clickable.

28. Learn With the Facebook’s Pages to Watch Tool

Pages to Watch is a tool available to all Facebook pages with 100 or more fans. The tool allows you to effortlessly keep your eye on the competition.

You can find it by navigating to your Facebook page Insights and scrolling down on the page.

page insights

Check this out!

Facebook suggests a few pages that might be relevant to you. However, you can add other pages by simply typing in their names.

facebook pages to watch

Type in your competitors’ names 😉

After you’ve added some brand pages to your watchlist, you can see the following stats:

  • Total page likes (and the % +/- change from the previous week)
  • How many times a page has posted to Facebook this week
  • Their total engagement count for the week

But it keeps getting better. As you click on a particular brand’s icon, you’ll be able to see all their past week’s Facebook posts, filtered by engagement (from the most engaging to the least engaging).

You can use the Pages to Watch tool to follow your competitors, partners, influencers, and other industry-related pages. I also like to follow some inspiring brands that make awesome Facebook posts – just for inspiration.

Use these insights to spot new trends and learn what’s working for other Facebook marketers.

Over to You

Naturally, I’m curious about learning about your top secret Facebook advertising hacks as well.

What are the tactics and tricks that made the most difference to your campaign results?

Leave a comment!

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