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.

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?.

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…

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

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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%.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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).

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.

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…

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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?!

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:

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

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.

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

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.

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

The post 28 Facebook Advertising Hacks for Complete Success appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.