For organic posts, 1080 x 1350 pixels (4:5) is the best-performing feed size in 2026. It takes up more of the mobile screen without cropping on desktop. Square format (1:1, 1080 x 1080 pixels) still works everywhere and is the foolproof choice.

For Meta ads, the same two sizes apply: 1080 x 1350 for feed placements, 1080 x 1080 when one file has to work across every placement.

Facebook Stories and Reels, organic or paid, are 1080 x 1920 pixels (9:16).

However, there is more to know about Facebook ad specs and size. For example, how to design your Facebook ads to get more clicks? Or what Meta ad sizes to create for maximum success?

Running the same creative on Instagram? See the Instagram ad specs and sizes for 2026 → Instagram ad sizes in 2026.

Also, when advertising on Facebook, you’ll have the option to use more than one ad type.

In fact, there are currently ten different Facebook ad formats (not counting Instagram ads), each perfect for some kind of Facebook ad campaign structure. It is super helpful to know about all the seven ad layouts and when to use them.

In this guide, we’ll touch upon the following questions:

• What’s the right Facebook ad size?
• What’s the best Facebook feed post size?
• What are all the different Facebook ad types?
• What are all the Facebook ad specs?
• What are some of the best examples of Facebook ads?
• How and when to use particular ad types?

Let’s begin with the basics: the dimensions for Facebook feed posts and news feed ads. And then move on to more advanced Facebook banner sizes.

But first, a question that 90% of the articles listing the ad sizes do not cover: How to select the right ad types and sizes when creating your Facebook campaigns?

Read more: 35+ Best Marketing Newsletters to Follow in 2026

Facebook post sizes in 2026 (organic posts)

Facebook has quietly shifted toward vertical. 4:5 (1080 x 1350) is now the best-performing feed size because it takes up more of the mobile screen without getting cropped on desktop.

Square format still works, however, and is the safest single export if you only make one.

How to select the right Facebook size for each ad type?

If you’re just getting started with Facebook advertising, you’re likely to need some help with picking the correct ad dimensions.

After all, there are MANY possible placements…

After seeing such a wide variety of options, it is easy to get confused…

Also, back in 2018, the go-to Facebook ad size used to be 1200 x 628 pixels. Now, you can publish Facebook posts that 1080 x 1080 pixels wide or portrait: 1080 x 1350 pixels. This means a lot more real estate in the news feed.

For example, compare these two ads:

❗ 2025 UPDATE! All Facebook feed ad placements are now eligible for the 1:1 format ad sizes, so you don’t need to upload a landscape ad format anymore.

When creating a new Facebook ad campaign, we recommend using Automatic Placements for maximum reach.

Suggested article: 30min DYI Facebook Ad Audit for Non-marketers (and Marketers)

This means that you will need to create ads in at least 2 formats:

• 1080 x 1080 pixels for Facebook and Instagram news feeds
• 1080 x 1920 pixels for Facebook and Instagram Stories

You can upload images with different dimensions under a single ad by selecting “Select a placement to customize” when editing your Meta ads.

Below is an example of the static image ad types we use in a MeetFrank ad campaign. We used the three banner sizes listed above.

What happens if you do not upload some of the special Meta ad sizes?

If you don’t have time or resources to create custom image sizes for Instagram ads, you can also use the 1:1 format ads and Facebook will automatically adjust your creative for the Story placements.

Not adding a custom ad image for the Story placement can result in slightly less good-looking ads. But you can still run them and get ok results.

Here’s the difference:

To sum this up, you can follow these three best practices:

• Use as many Facebook ad placements as possible for maximum reach.
• Upload custom image and video sizes for all the placements you’d like to use.
• If you don’t have time to create all image sizes, just go with the 1080 xs 1080px ad size.

When publishing Facebook posts, you can also use images 1080 xs 1080 pixels wide.

Alright… Let’s now take a look at the Facebook ad specs for all the available ad types, so that you can create high-performance ad creatives.

Facebook ad sizes and formats in 2026

When creating Meta ads for my own managed ad accounts, I always export static image ads at PNG files. JPGs are ok as well, but may deliver slightly lower quality in the final result seen by your audience.

Design at 1080 x 1080 and 1080 x 1920 and you’re covered for roughly 90% of Meta ad delivery.

Here’s the full spec sheet, with the ones that matter marked.

Facebook News Feed ads

The most popular Facebook ad type is News Feed ads. These are the ads that you see when scrolling your Facebook news feed, both on desktop and mobile.

What is the ad size of the Facebook News Feed ad?

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Minimum width and height: 600 pixels.
• Recommended aspect ratio is between 9:16 to 16:9, crops to 1.91:1 with a link
• Recommended image formats: JPG, PNG (PNG has higher quality)
• Images with 20% or more text may get disapproved by Facebook

Feed ad text character limits:

• Text length: max 125 characters
• Headline length: max 25 characters
• Link description length: max 30 characters

Facebook News Feed video ad specs:

• Resolution: Upload the highest resolution video available that meets file size and ratio limits
• Video file size: 4GB Max
• Recommended video length: 15 – 30 seconds
• Video length minimum: 1 second
• Video length maximum: 240 Minutes
• Video ratio: 9:16 to 16:9
• Minimum dimensions 600 x 315 (1.9:1 landscape) or 600 x 600 (square)
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Video captions: Optional but recommended
• Video sound: Optional but recommended

Facebook Carousel ads

Compared to single-image ads, Facebook carousel ads provide a great opportunity to present more images and benefits inside a single ad.

This can mean higher ad engagement rates and, hopefully, also lower cost-per-click prices.

You can add up to 10 images into one Facebook carousel ad. And all of the carousel ad images should be in 1:1 format and 1080 x 1080 pixels wide. Your Meta carousel ads can also include videos instead of static images.

Facebook Carousel ad specs and size:

• Recommended ratio 1:1
• Image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Minimum width and height: 600 pixels (minimum 254 x 133 pixels for Messenger Home carousel ads)
• Minimum cards per ad: 2 images
• Maximum cars per ad: 10 images
• Max image size: 30MB
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Carousel ad character limits:

• Text length: max 125 characters
• Headline length: max 40 characters
• Link description length: max 30 characters

Tip: You can ensure that your banner images do not include too much text with the Facebook Text Overlay tool.

Facebook carousel video ad specs:

• Recommended resolution: minimum of 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Recommended ratio 1:1
• Minimum cards per ad: 2 images
• Maximum cars per ad: 10 images
• Maximum video file size. 4GB
• Video length: 1 second to 240 minutes
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Video captions: Optional but recommended
• Video sound: Optional but recommended

Facebook & Instagram Story ad specs

Instagram Stories placement is slightly overtaking the other Facebook ad placements, with an increasing number of users reacting to Story ads.

If you’re not yet using the Story placements in your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, you should: You will get much higher reach and scale the results at a lower cost.

Facebook and Instagram Story ads have the same dimensions and specs, so you can use the same creatives for both placements.

Facebook Story image ad specs:

• Text: no extra text, all text must be part of the image file
• Format: Full-screen vertical ad (9:16)
• Recommended size: 1080 x 1920 pixels
• Minimum resolution: 600 x 1067
• File types: .JPG, PNG
• Max. image size: 30MB
• Photo content: visible for 5 seconds

Facebook Story video ad specs:

• Media type: video
• Recommended video duration: 15 seconds
• Minimum length: 3 seconds
• Maximum length: 60 seconds
• Aspect Ratio: 1.9:1 (landscape)
• For videos under 9:16: Colored gradient bars are rendered above and below
• Video file size: 4GB max
• Video Captions: Not available
• Video Sound: Optional
• Frame rate: 30fps max
• File type: .mp4 container
• Video: H.264 video compression, high profile preferred, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan
• Audio: Stereo AAC audio compression, 128kbps + preferred

Read more about Stories ad dimensions in this guide by Facebook.

Facebook Right-hand Column ads

In addition to the main Facebook ad placements – news feed and stories – you can also upload the images in size 1200 x 628 pixels and have them visible in the right-hand column.

The Facebook right-hand column ads can bring you extra reach and clicks. And you can add them with very little extra effort.

Right column ad size and specs:

• Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
• Minimum width and height of 600 pixels
• Recommended aspect ratio is between 9:16 to 16:9, but crops to 1.91:1 with link
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Right column ad character limits:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Facebook Audience Network ad specs

The Facebook Audience Network allows you to extend your Facebook and Instagram campaigns across the internet – and to have your ads shown on thousands of high-quality websites and apps.

In a Facebook ad campaign study, the conversion rates and results were 8x higher among people who saw ads across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network than people who only saw the ads on Facebook.

So it usually makes sense to include the Audience Network placement in your ad campaigns. If possible, also add video creatives into your ad campaigns as many Audience Network placements only show video ads.

Facebook Audience Network ad size and specs:

• Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
• Minimum width and height of 600 pixels
• Recommended aspect ratio is between 9:16 to 16:9, but crops to 1.91:1 with link
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Audience Network ad character limits:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Audience Network video ad specs:

• Resolution: Upload the highest resolution video available that meets file size and ratio limits
• Video file size: 4GB Max
• Recommended video length: 15 – 30 seconds
• Video length minimum: 1 second
• Video length maximum: 240 Minutes
• Video ratio: 9:16 to 16:9
• Minimum dimensions 600 x 315 (1.9:1 landscape) or 600 x 600 (square)
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Video captions: Optional but recommended
• Video sound: Optional but recommended

Facebook Instant Article ad dimensions

Instant Articles is a mobile-optimized ad format that enables publishers to distribute fast-loading interactive articles to Facebook’s app.

The Instant Article placement will allow your Facebook ads to appear when people read these articles.

Instant article ad image specs:

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Minimum width and height of 600 pixels
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Instant article ad character limits:

• Text: 30 characters
• Headline: 25 characters

Instant article video ad specs:

• Recommended to publish the highest resolution video possible
• Recommended video length: 15-30 seconds
• Recommended aspect ratio: 9:16 to 16:9
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Max video file size: 4GB

Facebook Marketplace ad creatives

Facebook Marketplace is a place on Facebook’s platform where users can buy and sell items. As they browse around, they will also spot some ads in the feed.

We wouldn’t recommend using Marketplace as the only placement in your ad campaign as the potential reach would be fairly low.

However, if you already have ad images in 1:1 format for other placements (e..g for the Audience Network), you can also add the Marketplace placements for additional reach.

Facebook Marketplace ad image guidelines and dimensions:

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Minimum width and height: 600 pixels
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Marketplace ad character limits:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Facebook Marketplace video ad specs:

• Resolution: Upload the highest resolution video available that meets file size and ratio limits
• Video file size: 4GB Max
• Recommended video length: 15-30 seconds
• Video length minimum: 1 second
• Video length maximum: 240 Minutes
• Video ratio: 9:16 to 16:9
• Minimum dimensions 600 x 315 (1.9:1 landscape) or 600 x 600 (square)
• Recommended video formats: .MP4 and .MOV
• Video captions: Optional but recommended
• Video sound: Optional but recommended

Facebook Messenger ad specs

Facebook Messenger ads appear in between the messages in the Facebook Messenger app. People will see these ads in the Chats tab.

At first, users will see a collapsed version of your ad, like the example below:

If the viewer is interested in the offer, they can tap on it to expand the ad to find out more.

Learn more about Facebook Messenger ads in this guide by Facebook.

Facebook Messenger ad size and specs:

• Format: single-image ad
• Recommended image size for collapsed ad: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Recommended image size for expanded ad: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image formats: JPG and PNG

Facebook Messenger ad character limits:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Facebook Sponsored Message ad specs

The Sponsored Message ads allow advertisers to have direct conversations with their audience on Messenger.

There’s a Facebook Messenger policy that businesses cannot send messages to contacts after 24 hours of a user’s last contact. Unless they are sent as sponsored messages.

That’s exactly when the Sponsored Messages come into play: you can re-engage with people with whom you had conversations in Messenger by using these paid ads.

Sponsored message ad image size:

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Minimum width and height of 600 pixels
• Recommended image formats: JPG and PNG

Sponsored message ad character limits:

• Text: 30 characters
• Headline: 25 characters

Quick recap

Although there seems to be an endless amount of different Facebook ad placements, specs, and dimensions, all the ads actually have similar requirements.

This means that you can already reach 100% of your Meta ad audience by uploading static image ads in three sizes:

• 1080 x 1080 pixels for Facebook and Instagram news feed
• 1080 x 1920 pixels for Facebook and Instagram Stories

Also, follow these character limits to make sure that your Facebook ads fit in all placements:

• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Not that difficult, is it? Learn more about creating highly converting Facebook ads in these articles:

215+ Best Facebook Ad Examples from TOP Brands
16 Copywriting Tips for Facebook Ads and Social Media Posts
28 Facebook Advertising Hacks for Complete Success

The post Facebook Post & Ad Sizes in 2026 – Foolproof Guide [Updated] appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

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

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

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

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

For more ideas, browse my Meta ad examples gallery with 230+ static and video ads, or, for B2B campaigns, these 105+ LinkedIn ad examples.

Read more about social media advertising trends in 2025.

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

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

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

Meta video ad best practices

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

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

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

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

Best Facebook video ad examples,  2025 update

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

#1: Oreo

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

#2: Deliveroo

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

​#3: Spotify

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

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

#4: Restream

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

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

#5: Airbnb

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

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

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

#6: Milka

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

#7: Sephora

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

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

#8: Klarna

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

# 9: Snickers

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

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

#10 Moo

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

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

#11: Nars

#12: Mailchimp

#13: Dior

#14: Grammarly

#15:Wrike

Facebook video ad examples, 2020 edition

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

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

I should probably start to learn video editing…

#16: VSCO

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

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

#17: Facebook

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

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

#18: Monese

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

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

#19: Squarespace

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

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

#20: Nike

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

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

#21: Web Summit

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

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

#22: AppSumo

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

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

#23: Mango

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

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

#24: Reedeshop

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

#25: The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

#26: BeUnsettled

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

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

#27: Pelacase

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

#28: Facebook

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

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

#29: Okia

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

#30: BetterMe

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

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

#31: MyTheresa

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

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

#32: Stuudionahk

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

#33: DRM Bracelets

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

#34: Trvl

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

#35: Monese

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

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

Here are some key takeaways to remember:

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

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

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

Ok, getting to the article now…

—

How to get good results with your eCommerce Facebook ads?

Based on most blog articles on the topic, you’re supposed to mess around with complex ad formats and set up a Facebook ad campaign structure based on a five-level conversion funnel.

But in reality, the key to successful eCommerce Facebook campaigns is to keep them simple.

If you’ve ever looked at the Facebook and Instagram ad creatives used by big-name brands, you should already know that most of them run basic single-image ads. No Collection ads, no dynamic remarketing, no carousels.

In the past couple of years, I have audited many online stores’ Facebook ad accounts and helped them to scale the results while lowering Facebook ads cost.

What we’ve seen s that detailed customer segmentation and exotic campaign objectives only damage the performance.

So in order to succeed, how should you set up your eCommerce Facebook ads and how to create world-class Facebook ad visuals?

🍩 Here are 12 suggestions to keep in mind:

1. Keep your marketing funnel simple
2. Use a minimal Facebook ad campaign structure
3. Avoid creating new ad sets for each new promotion
4. Keep your target audiences broad
5. Do not over-optimize your campaigns
6. Optimize on conversions, not clicks
7. Perfect your Facebook Pixel setup
8. Use the optimal number of ad creatives
9. Use a mix of static and video ads
10. Create ad visuals in two formats: feed + stories
11. Copywrite the perfect headlines + texts
12. Experiment strategically and document key learnings

We’re gonna expand on each of these suggestions in a moment. 

In case you’re rather interested in perfecting your eCommerce ads design, scroll ahead until you reach the 20 eCommerce Facebook ad examples that I personally consider to be smart and inspiring (and that I assume are bringing good results to the brands using them).

Rule #1: Keep your marketing funnel simple

One of the main mistakes I have seen eCommerce businesses make with their Facebook ads is that they tend to overcomplicate their marketing funnel and customer segmentation.

You don’t need to create an ad campaign for every one of your 5 marketing funnel stages:

• Awareness
• Consideration/lead
• New customer
• Existing customer
• Churned customer

You can’t have it all as it will spread your budget too thin and each campaign and ad set will collect too few conversions to perform optimally.

You can’t have it all

Setting up Facebook ad campaigns for three different audiences is enough:

• Prospecting
• Remarketing
• Retention

Also, you should split your campaigns per country or per region, so that countries with similar behavioral patterns and cost of advertising are bundled together.

For more detailed suggestions, read more about my approach to Facebook ad campaign structure.

Rule #2: Use a minimal Facebook ad campaign structure

Another big mistake that many brands fall upon when setting up their Facebook campaigns is creating a separate ad set (or even a separate campaign, even worse) for each customer segment.

Sometimes, companies end up with 5-10 different target audiences, each having different ad sets with specific creatives and messaging.

While hyper-segmentation works well in some areas of marketing, it doesn’t perform well in the Facebook Ads Manager.

Always keep the number of your Facebook ad campaigns and ad sets minimal.

I usually suggest the following approach to my eCommerce clients:

🍪 One Prospecting campaign with up to 3 active ad sets:

• One value-based LAL (lookalike) audience of your past 60 days top purchasers (start with 2% LAL and expand up to 8% LAL)
• One broad audience of all people living in your target area, aged x-x
• One interest-based audience that signifies one of your more specific customer segments (you can switch these over time, but don’t have 5 different ones running at the same time)

🍪One Remarketing campaign with up to 2 active ad sets:

• Past 30 days website visitors
• People who added something to the shopping cart in the past 60 days

If you also run Awareness video ad campaigns (which I do not recommend), you could add a third remarketing ad set for video viewers.

🍪 One Retention campaign with up to 2 active ad sets:

• Past customers who haven’t bought anything for 30 days
• Past customers who haven’t bought anything for 90 days

Sometimes, a single retention ad set is also enough.

You can multiply the above campaign structure for each target country or region.

Rule #3: Avoid creating new ad sets for each new promotion

Continuing with eCommerce Facebook ad mistakes, here’s another one: creating a new ad campaign or ad set every time you want to promote a special offer or a new collection of products.

Facebook ad sets work in a way that the algorithms learn based on your conversion data. If you create new ad sets all the time, you will lose all your historical data (and will have higher CPA costs).

It makes much more sense to collect all your Purchase conversions under one ad set so that Facebook’s algorithms can learn more about your target audience and deliver ads to increasingly relevant people in your audience.

Instead of creating new campaigns and ad sets, try to re-use the existing ones. 

You can even change an existing ad set’s audience and fully replace all the creatives inside it, should you want to advertise a different offer to another audience.

Rule #4: Keep your target audiences broad

Facebook Prospecting-level ads bring the best results when you keep your ad sets’ targeting broad. 

And by broad I mean at least 5% of a small country’s population and 2% of a large country’s population.

For example, when setting up Prospecting ad campaigns in the US, I like to keep the audience size 3M or broader.

Don’t forget to exclude the past 60 days’ purchasers

You can go a bit more narrow when using lookalike audiences and use a 2% LAL audience even if it means reaching fewer people.

When it comes to Remarketing campaigns, each ad set’s audience should have at least 1,000 people in it. Facebook won’t usually deliver good results for an audience smaller than that.

Rule #5: Do not over-optimize your campaigns

Facebook Ads Manager offers unlimited options for optimizing every single detail of your campaigns, from custom ad placements to hourly scheduling of your ad delivery.

But in fact, the fewer special optimization features you use, the better job Facebook algorithms will do.

This is especially important when creating Prospecting campaigns (which probably take up 60% or more of your budget).

• Use campaign-level budget optimization
• Use automated ad placements
• Do not use customized ad scheduling

And while it’s tempting, do not make changes to your ad sets more than once a week. Otherwise, your ads will remain in the Learning Phase forever and won’t deliver optimal results.

It’s a best practice to do all the changes to your ad campaigns at once. So if you want to update the budget, audience, and upload new ad creatives, do it simultaneously and not on separate days.

Less work = better results

This doesn’t mean that you should leave your eCommerce Instagram and Facebook ad campaigns running for months without a single change.

Keep working on new ad creative ideas and experiment with new ad visuals at least twice a month.

Rule #6: Optimize on conversions, not clicks

Companies that do not have their Facebook Pixel set up often tend to optimize the campaigns on link clicks.

And I’ve also seen the Facebook ad accounts with perfect Pixel setup still running Traffic campaigns instead of Conversion campaigns.

Here’s the problem: if you tell Facebook that you want to get clicks from an ad campaign, the algorithms will deliver just that: clicks. 

But those clicks rarely turn into conversions.

That’s because Facebook doesn’t know that you also want Purchase conversions. It is bringing you cheap clicks from people who are in the habit of browsing the websites but not buying.

You reap what you sow, as they say

If you optimize your ad campaigns on conversions (website Purchases), you are signalling to Facebook that you’re interested in reaching people who’d make a purchase. And that’s what you’ll get.

Which scenario would you rather prefer:

1. You spend $500 to get 2000 website clicks at $0,25 cost-per-click + 10 purchases at $50 cost-per-purchase
2. You spend $500 to get 500 website clicks at $1 cost-per-click + 50 purchases at $10 cost-per-purchase

Always optimize your eCommerce ad campaigns (Prospecting, Remarketing, and Retention campaigns each) on Purchase conversions.

Rule #7: Perfect your Facebook Pixel setup

Setting up the Facebook Pixel takes about 1 hour and there’s no excuse for skipping this.

Essentially, you can’t get proper results from Facebook advertising without passing important website events like Add-to-cart and Purchase to the ad platform.

To ensure that your Pixel is correctly set up, compare the event count in Facebook Events Manager with your other website data sources, e.g. Google Analytics.

There might be small discrepancies in the data, but it shouldn’t fluctuate more than 20%.

Review the most important event’s count on Facebook v.s. other reporting platforms on a weekly basis to ensure that your Pixel receives correct data.

Rule #8: Use the optimal number of ad creatives

Let’s move on to the fun part: the ad creatives.

The rule that ad visuals contribute hugely to your results doesn’t only apply to eCommerce brands but any other industry as well.

But there’s a limit to how many active ad creatives you should have per ad set. 

If you have too few, there won’t be enough variety. If you have too many, it’s going to hurdle your campaign performance due to a time-consuming learning curve.

💎 The optimal number of active ad creatives per ad set is 6-8 visuals.

Rule #9: Use a mix of static and video ads

When working on my clients’ ad campaigns, I like to set up a varied selection of creatives in each ad set:

• 2 single-image static ads in one style
• 2 single-image static ads in a different style
• 2 video ads with different lengths (15 sec and 30+ sec)
• 1 carousel ad

Based on the initial results, you can either create more static or video creatives and keep experimenting with new ideas.

The main reason for including a mix of static and video ads is that they often appear in different ad placements. If you only use single-image static ads, you will miss out on video-only placements.

People often complain that creating video ads is super difficult. That’s not necessarily true. You don’t need to film original content in order to have video creatives. Use stock videos or animate some static product images and mix it with animated typography.

You can slightly animate your static ads to get a video ad

For creative inspiration, see these collections of Facebook ad examples:

• 195 Best Facebook Ad Examples (2021 Edition)
• 84 TOP Instagram Ad Examples (2021 Update)
• 40 Instagram Story Examples – Static + Video 

🔥 P.S. When reading a couple of blog articles on eCommerce ads, I came across recommendations to use all of the following ad formats:

• Collection ads 
• Video ads 
• Domain ads
• Instant Experience ads
• Lead ads 
• Carousel ads
• Facebook Dynamic ads

In fact, I have never seen an eCommerce brand get good results with Collection ads, Instant Experience ads, Lead ads, and Dynamic ads. 

As far as I’m concerned, I do not recommend using them (or first testing as an experiment).

Rule #10: Create ad visuals in two formats: feed + stories

Quite often when auditing Facebook ad accounts, I see brands using only the 1:1 (square) format ad creatives.

This means that they’re missing out on good-looking visuals in the portrait-format placements: Facebook stories, Instagram stories, Messenger stories.

And a large share of Facebook ad views happens exactly in-between the stories.

Here’s a comparison of how an ad visual in 1:1 format v.s. Story format will appear in the Instagram stories placement:

That’s probably not the brand image you’d want to cultivate. Rather, you’d want to have something looking like this:

When creating and uploading creatives to your Facebook ad campaigns, always add a special format for the story placements.

Upload both 1:1 and Story format visuals

🍊 Pro tip: Make sure to leave the top and bottom 20% of your story-format ad designs empty of any content and Instagram will add automatic overlays on top of your ad visual.

Read more about Facebook specs and size.

Rule #11: Copywrite the perfect headlines + texts

While the ad visual is the make-or-break element of any Facebook ad creative, the texts you use still contribute to the overall performance.

The most important text of your Facebook ads is the in-image headline.

I almost never upload a Facebook ad creative that only includes an image without adding a short headline with the USP (unique value proposition) on top of it.

If people aren’t attracted by your ad visual, they will never read the ad text. That’s why, you should include the most important slogan in the image itself.

When it comes to eCommerce ads, there might be some use cases where you wouldn’t want to include an in-image text. For example, if you’re advertising an image from a photoshoot. But if possible, I’d still recommend testing both options: with and without a headline.

You can also mix a text, logo, and photo

Another important principle to keep in mind: do not expect people to know your product.

Avoid catchy slogans and ad texts that do not explain what your product and its main benefits are. Think of Facebook ads rather as your website, not on-street brand ads.

Here are a couple of additional tips for perfecting your Facebook ad copywriting:

1. Keep it short and simple
2. Talk about the most relevant product benefits and value props
3. Address the user instead of talking about your brand (“we did X”)
4. Use active language: do, get, make, create, be, etc.
5. Assume that most people only read the first 2 lines of your ad text (the one that appears above or under the image of in-feed ads)

Read more: 16 Copywriting Tips for Facebook Ads and Social Media Posts

Rule #12: Experiment strategically and document key learnings

Most brands that I’ve worked with do not have a well-documented ad experimentation strategy. The PPC Manager just runs various experiments and keeps the results in their head.

If a new person were to join your Marketing team, would you be able to point them towards a document that gives an overview of all the Facebook ad experiments and top-performing creatives?

Or what if the agency or team member managing Facebook ad campaigns leaves the company? You would lose a lot of valuable information…

Unless you’ve properly documented all the experiments.

Whenever I start working with a new client’s Facebook ad account, we establish a spreadsheet for documenting all ongoing and completed experiments.

How the experiment tracking sheet looks like

I also like to keep track of all the Facebook ad creatives that we’ve created and tested.

Creative reporting could either be done:

• On a Figma page where you design your ads
• On a dedicated page in Notion, Confluence, or other documentation platform
• On a spreadsheet together with the PPC experiments log

Personally, I use a mix of all three + sometimes also write quarterly reviews that look back into all past 3 months’ experiments and tested ad visuals.

If I’m setting up a specific Facebook ad campaign for testing new creatives each in a separate ad set, I like to later add the test results to a Google Sheet, so that it will be easy to catch a quick overview in the future.

Example creative test report (with dummy data)

I have written about Facebook ads A/B testing in this blog before. Check it out for some ideas for your next experiments.

Or if you’re looking for inspiration specifically for your eCommerce business, gather new ideas from the 20 brands below. 

🍋 20 eCommerce Facebook ad examples

When browsing the following ad creatives, notice the following best practices used by almost all of the showcased brands:

1. They use a mix of video and static ads
2. There’s almost always an in-image text in the ad visual
3. All ad creatives are brightly colored and eye-catching
4. All photos and images used are of the best possible quality
5. There’s a lot of variety between the ad creatives by the same brand
6. Many eCommerce Facebook ads feature a promo offer
7. Almost all ad creatives use the “Shop Now” call-to-action
8. The focus is on the visual, not the ad text

While I have included a wide mix of various ad formats like Collection ads, in general, single-image ads, carousel ads, and simple video ads tend to perform the best.

But you can never know, so test with a variety of creative ideas and ad formats.

#1 Made.com

See the full video ad on this link.

#2 Nike

#3 AirBaltic

As you can see, there’s a different ad visual for the story placements.

#4 COS

See the full video ad on this link.

#5 NARS Cosmetics

#6 NARS Cosmetics 

See the full video ad on this link.

#7 & Other Stories

#8 Finnish Design Shop

#9 The Sill

See the full video ad on this link.

#10 Starbucks

See the full video ad on this link.

#11 La Roche-Posay

#13 Teabox

#14 Vagabond Shoemakers

#15 Sandqvist

#16 Click & Grow

#17 Ferm Living

#18 Goli

#19 Pärla

#20 Mytheresa

Thx for reading, thx for watching!

If you’d like to be notified about upcoming blog articles, subscribe to my newsletter (max 2 emails per month.)

In case you’d like to work together on your Facebook ad campaigns, reach out at marketing@karolakarlson. I’m booked with ongoing projects until the end of 2021, but then again I’m bad at saying no to brands with cool products.

The post 12 Rules for eCommerce Facebook Ads + 20 Ad Examples appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Your Facebook ad campaign metrics also indicate whether you’re getting a positive ROI (return on investment). All in all, it is crucial that you measure your Facebook ad performance on a regular basis, ideally every week.

But how to know which numbers to track? Because there’s an almost endless choice of metrics available in the Facebook Ads Manager: Reach, Impressions, CPC, CPM, CTR, CPA, Quality Ranking, Engagement Rate Ranking, Landing Page View (All or Unique?) Video Views, Ad Recall Lift, Spend, Revenue, ROAS…  🤯

Which metrics to pick? – GIF source

You can easily get lost and derailed when evaluating your Facebook ad campaign results.

So what are the Facebook ad metrics that you absolutely should be checking? Personally, I always check three key metrics and then follow up with another ten that I use to better understand what’s affecting my top three. Also, the metrics that I review depend on the campaign objective.

By the end of this guide, you will know answers to all the following questions:

• How to see all important Facebook advertising metrics in the Ads Manager?
• Which campaign KPIs should you track and which ones can you ignore?
• How to evaluate and improve your Facebook ad performance?

Let’s start with a crash course in Facebook ad analytics and see how to navigate the Ads Manager and set up Custom Reports for faster performance evaluation.

How to review campaign KPIs in the Facebook Ads Manager?

All Facebook ad metrics can be seen in the Meta Ads Manager (formerly Facebook Ads Manager). If you’ve set up the Meta Pixel and Conversions API correctly, you won’t need any additional 3rd party tools for Facebook ad reporting. Since Apple’s iOS privacy changes in 2021, some of the conversions in Ads Manager are modelled rather than tracked one by one, so the Conversions API is no longer optional.

(However, if you’re working with a mobile application, you may want to use an attribution tool for reporting, so that you don’t get your app results attributed to multiple advertising channels.)

For quick access to your Facebook Ads Manager, you can bookmark this link: Open your Facebook Ads Manager.

In the below screenshot, you can see the default Ads Manager report. However, you can click on the “Columns: Performance” menu to customize your advertising report.

Once you click on the “Columns: Performance” menu, you can see a selection of default ad reports. However, scroll past them and select “Customize columns” to access a wide selection of additional Facebook ad KPIs.

You can select all the metrics that you want to see and organize them in the most convenient order.

Once you’re happy with your custom report, you can save it as preset and access it faster the next time.

⭐ Tip: If you always use the same custom Facebook Ads Manager report, bookmark the URL of this view for a 1-click access to your campaign results.

Now that you’re aware of how to access, navigate, and customize your campaign metrics in the Facebook Ads Manager, let’s see which KPIs should you add to those custom reports.

I will also explain why some Facebook KPIs are best to ignore – they won’t reflect on your real campaign performance and tend to be shown as vanity metrics.

TOP 3 Facebook ad metrics to measure

While there are around 10 different metrics that I track, depending on the campaign setup and goals, there are always the TOP three KPIs that I check every single time:

1. CPA – cost per acquisition
2. ROAS – return on ad spend
3. Frequency – impressions/reach

These metrics give an immediate overview of the ad account’s overall performance + your conversion-optimized campaign’s results.

Let’s see how to evaluate these metrics.

1. CPA – cost per acquisition

In all likelihood, you are running Facebook ad campaigns to collect results that can be measured by a conversion: either a new lead, 1st-time customer, app install, website purchase, etc.

If you’re not optimizing your Facebook advertising towards a conversion, you may want to reconsider your strategy. Read the guide to Facebook ad account audit to make sure you’re on the right track.

The CPA – cost per acquisition – shows how much it costs to achieve one conversion.

Essentially, CPA = total amount spent / number of customers acquired.

The reason why this metric is so important is that it allows you to immediately understand if the new customer’s or lead’s acquisition cost is sustainable in the long run: are you making more money from the customer than it takes to acquire her?

The CPA benchmark is completely different for every brand, depending on your industry, product type, and its net cost. You should aim to achieve a CPA that is lower than what you spend on creating and delivering your product.

2. ROAS – return on ad spend

The return on ad spend indicates whether your Facebook ads are paying off. If the ROAS is negative, it means you are losing money.

You can either see your ad campaign’s ROAS directly in the Facebook Ads Manager or use a spreadsheet / 3rd-party analytics tool to calculate it.

In order to see ROAS on your Facebook ad account, you will need to pass purchase values via the Facebook Pixel or Facebook app SDK.

What ROAS should you aim for?

I have seen companies achieving the ROAS of 12.0 with Facebook ads and others that are in the growth phase and happy with a ROAS of 0.50. 

Also, your return on ad spend will vary per campaign objective: 

• Remarketing campaigns usually have the highest ROAS, up to 20.0
• Awareness and Reach campaigns usually have a ROAS close to 0.0

You should calculate the overall ROAS of your acquisition, remarketing, and awareness campaigns combined to understand the total ROI of your Facebook ad campaigns.

If your total ROAS is under 1.0, ask yourself whether there’s really any point to running Facebook ads. In many cases, if the company’s still in growth phase and willing to invest at a negative net rate, it does make sense.

In addition to ROAS, many companies also calculate Facebook ad ROI by comparing the CPA to average customer lifetime value.

If the customer that you acquire via Facebook will keep making purchases (e.g. monthly subscriptions or small repeat purchases), you can calculate your average LTV to better understand the long-term ROI of your ads. Maybe your 14-day ROAS is low, but when you compare the CPA to a 6-month lifetime value, your advertising ROI will make more sense.

3. Frequency

Facebook ad frequency shows how many times a unique user has seen your ad during a set time period.

I usually check the frequency of past 7 days and 30 days. If the frequency is very high, it means that most people in your target audience have been reached times over. It’s time to either lower your ad budget or expand the target audience.

Frequency = Impressions / Reach

The frequency benchmarks also vary per campaign type.

• For Prospecting campaigns, I generally aim for a 7-day frequency of 3-5
• For Remarketing campaigns, the 7-day frequency can go up to 10-12 
• For Awareness campaigns that have a broad target audience, the 7-day frequency of 2-3 seems to be the golden ratio

TOP 3 Facebook ad metrics you should ignore

Before we get to the rest of the Facebook KPIs that help you understand campaign performance, let’s stop for a moment and see the ones that you should NOT be tracking.

Here are the 3 Facebook vanity metrics that I see companies reporting on:

• CPM – cost per 1,000 impressions
• CPC – cost per click
• Ad click-through rate + ad relevance diagnostics

Ad agencies often like to show these metrics to their clients. “Look, there’s been an improvement in CPMs this week.” Or another one I’ve often heard: “The results got worse because the CPM is getting higher.”

Here’s the thing: it is not the CPM that you should be evaluating. Always measure the CPA.

You can bring your CPM and CPC down by 10x easily by targeting a broader target audience or optimizing your campaigns on Reach or Clicks. But getting cheaper top-of-the-funnel results is useless if at the same time your real acquisition costs increase.

Which campaign results would you prefer to have:

Campaign 1:

• Targeting a 1% LAL audience in the US, optimized for purchases (Sales objective)
• Total cost = $425
• CPM = $65
• CPC = $2.3
• You get 50 purchases at $8.5 CPA

Campaign 2:

• Targeting everyone aged 18-60 in the US, optimized for link clicks (Traffic objective)
• Total cost = $425
• CPM = $5.5
• CPC = $0.3
• You get 25 purchases at $17 CPA

Naturally, you’d prefer Campaign 1 that has a higher CPM and CPC Facebook ad cost, but because it is targeted at a more relevant audience, it brings more conversions and thereby has a lower CPA.

That’s a bold comparison, but I’ve seen broadly targeted click-optimized campaigns (in the US) bring website visits at $0.15, but none of the 5,000 visitors converted. While conversion-optimized campaigns help you reach a much more relevant yet smaller audience that costs 10x more to reach, but is 50x more likely to convert.

If your Facebook advertising goal is to drive sales or other conversions, track the acquisition metrics (CPA, ROAS, number of results), not vanity metrics (CPM, CPC, Click-through rate).

Let’s also talk about the CTR or Click-through rate.

Sometimes, advertisers look at the CTR to understand whether their ad creatives are attractive to the target audience. However, I consider this to be a vanity metric as well. As long as your ads deliver a CPA and ROAS that you’re happy with, looking at the CTR doesn’t help to improve anything.

The same story goes for the ad relevance diagnostics (Quality Ranking, Engagement Rate Ranking and Conversion Rate Ranking). It is your ROAS and CPA that matter!

Instead of checking the vanity metrics, make sure to update your Facebook ad creatives every 2-3 weeks to avoid ad fatigue. Pause the 3-5 lower-performing creatives and add 3-5 new creatives into your existing ad sets. Need ideas? Start from these 240+ Facebook ad examples.

Read more: Facebook Advertising Cost Benchmarks

9 more Facebook KPIs to better understand your campaigns

While the TOP 3 Facebook ad metrics – CPA, ROAS, and frequency – give a fast high-level understanding of your ad account performance, you may want to get additional clues for optimizing your campaigns towards an even better performance.

The additional numbers you can check in your Facebook ad reports depend on what type of product you’re advertising. For example, the marketers running ads for mobile app, SaaS products or online stores all have slightly different metrics to check.

This said, here are the 9 additional Facebook metrics that I look at most frequently:

1. Total cost v.s. ad budget
2. Reach / target audience size
3. Number of mid-funnel conversions
4. Cost per mid-funnel conversions
5. Unique conversions + unique CPA
6. ROAS of 7 days + ROAS of 30 days
7. Results per ad creative
8. Marketing funnel conversion rates
9. Landing page conversion rate

Some of these metrics are not directly available in the Facebook Ads Manager. However, you can easily collect them on a spreadsheet or calculate them in your head while looking at your Facebook ads report.

Below, you will find a quick explanation about each.

7. Total cost v.s. ad budget

Sometimes, when your target audience is very small or there’s a problem with your ad campaign delivery, Facebook won’t use the total daily or lifetime budget that you have assigned.

To notice such problems, you can check the expected ad spend (calculated based on your set budgets) v.s. the real ad spend per campaign. 

If you notice that some campaigns are not using the full extent of the allocated budget, you may need to troubleshoot them.

8. Reach / target audience size

This metric will tell you what % of your ad set’s audience has been reached during a set time period.

I usually check the past 30 days Reach and compare it to the total audience size. You can either do this exercise on campaign or ad set level.

For example, if your total audience size is 2,000,000 people and your ad campaign reached 1,400,000 people in the past 30 days, it means that 70% of your target audience members have seen your ads.

Usually, if your Facebook ads have reached a high % of target audience, the performance will start dropping. 

There are no more new people to deliver your ads to.

In case I notice that more than 60% of my target audience has already been reached, I consider expanding the target audience. For example, I might create a new Lookalike audience of 5% and replace it with the previously used 3% Lookalike audience. If you use Advantage+ audience, Meta treats your audience as a suggestion and can deliver beyond it, so keep an eye on frequency instead.

9. Number of mid-funnel conversions

All advertisers have a one north star conversion. This is usually a purchase from an online store or the first purchase inside the mobile application.

However, there’s a number of aiding conversions that a user will do before committing the final conversion.

Conversions of eCommerce Facebook ads:

• Online store visit
• Product landing page views
• Add to cart
• Add payment method
• Complete order

Conversions of SaaS Facebook ads:

• Website visit
• Registration
• Free trial signup
• Purchase

Conversions of mobile app Facebook ads:

• Click to App Store
• App install
• In-app registration
• In-app actions
• In-app purchase

Look at all of your conversion funnel steps and seeing how many conversions you had for each. Sometimes, this can help to identify the problematic step in your conversion funnel.

10. Cost per mid-funnel conversions

When gathering data about your mid-funnel conversions, take a look at their cost-per-action.

How much does a mid-funnel conversion cost? If you multiply the cost with the conversion rate from this event to the final purchase, you get an indication of the total CPA.

Also, I like to keep track of some mid-funnel conversions’ cost on a week-on-week or month-on-month basis to understand if there’s any significant change.

Tip: To avoid getting lots of mid-funnel conversions that do not lead to the final purchase, optimize your Facebook campaigns always on the final purchase event. This way, you will indicate to Facebook algorithms that you’re interested in the final conversion, not mid-funnel events.

11. Marketing funnel conversion rates

Once you have collected your mid-funnel events’ numbers onto a spreadsheet, go ahead and create formulas to calculate the conversion rates from one conversion to the next.

E.g. if you know the number of website visits, add-to-cart events, and purchases, you can calculate the conversion rate between those events.

Looking at your marketing funnel conversion rates helps to identify any problematic stages.

For example, you might get 500 of Add-to-cart conversions, but only 90 visitors complete the purchase. This might indicate that there’s a problem with your online store checkout, there are not enough payment methods available or the shipping fees are too high.

Or maybe you get a lot of app installs, but none of those users will purchase. This can be a sign of poor in-app value proposition or a mismatch about what you promise in the ads v.s. what your product actually offers.

Another useful thing about reporting on full-funnel conversion rates on a week-on-week or month-on-month basis is that you will immediately notice if some conversion rate suddenly drops. And you can pinpoint + fix the issue faster.

12. Unique conversions + unique CPA

Depending on how your Facebook Pixel events are set up, Facebook may sometimes report on multiple conversions per user.

For example, if you optimize your campaigns on online store purchases and one user makes 3 purchases, Facebook will report this as 3 conversions.

If you want to see the results per unique user, check the unique conversions and their cost.

You can easily add the unique conversions to your Facebook ad reports by customizing the columns.

Even better if you use a third-party reporting tool, e.g. Appsflyer for mobile apps or your in-house built reporting system to match Facebook conversions with actual purchases.

The picture you get from the Ads Manager doesn’t always match the real results, so review if there’s a difference from time to time.

13. ROAS of 7 days + ROAS of 30 days

The most common conversion window that Facebook advertisers use is 7-day click and 1-day view, which is still Meta’s default setting.

This means that Facebook will attribute to its campaigns all the conversions that happen either 7 days after a user clicks on your ad or 24h after they’ve seen your ad.

When looking at the ROAS (return on ad spend) metric in your Facebook analytics, you will see the ROAS of your selected time period. As I like to report on ad campaign results on a weekly basis, I check the past 7 days ROAS.

If there’s a free trial period or a chance for repeat purchases within a 30-day period, I prefer to report on my ad campaigns’ ROAS on a spreadsheet and not directly in the Ads Manager. And I like to look at both the 7 days ROAS as well as 30 days ROAS. That’s because the users that have been acquired within a specific week might keep bringing additional value to the company. 

14. Results per ad creative

As I believe that good Facebook ad creatives play a huge role in campaigns’ success, I wanted to dedicate one point purely to ad visual evaluation.

When reviewing my clients’ Facebook ad campaigns on a weekly basis, I like click onto the ad creative level and see which ads are performing the best.

This helps me understand what types of creatives to create for the next A/B tests (top-performers) and which ones to avoid in the future (low-performers). Here’s my 3-step process to improve your Meta ad creatives.

I always evaluate ad creatives’ performance on the number of conversions that they bring (no vanity metrics like CPMs or CTRs!).

There’s one exception, however. Inside Awareness campaigns, I look at the Estimated Ad Recall Lift metric and consider the ads with the highest Reach and Ad Recall Lifts to be the top-performers. These are the ads that Facebook algorithms consider to work best, so they show them more frequently than other ads.

Evaluate Awareness ads by Estimated Ad Recall Lift

For an overview of good Facebook ad examples, browse my free Meta ads gallery with 230+ annotated Facebook and Instagram ads.

15. Landing page conversion rate

Whatever your product, its sales funnel goes beyond Facebook and Instagram. And many Facebook advertisers tend to forget about it.

If you’re running an eCommerce brand, you take people to an online store. If you advertise a mobile app, your users will be directed to App Store to install your app.

Your Facebook ads’ post-click experience is a critical part of your campaign. That’s why, you should also keep an eye on the landing page conversion rate. 

There are two main reasons for low landing page conversion rates:

1. Your value proposition is not attractive, people are not interested in your product
2. There’s a big mismatch between what people see in your ad creatives v.s. on the landing page

Understanding the reasons behind low post-click conversion rates will help you to optimize your campaign performance even further.

Quick recap

Whether you like to analyze your Facebook ad metrics in the Ads Manager or export them to a spreadsheet or 3rd-party analytics tool, the KPIs to check remain the same.

Below is the list of TOP 15 Facebook ad KPIs to remember.

3 most important Facebook metrics:

• CPA – cost per acquisition
• ROAS – return on ad spend
• Frequency – impressions/reach

3 Facebook ad vanity metrics:

• CPM – cost per 1,000 impressions
• CPC – cost per click
• Ad click-through rate + ad relevance diagnostics

9 additional Facebook KPIs to understand your campaign performance:

• Total cost v.s. ad budget
• Reach / target audience size
• Number of mid-funnel conversions
• Cost per mid-funnel conversions
• Unique conversions + unique CPA
• ROAS of 7 days + ROAS of 30 days
• Results per ad creative
• Marketing funnel conversion rates
• Landing page conversion rate

Et voilà! You’re set to open your Ads Manager and give your account a quick audit.

The post TOP 15 Facebook Ad Metrics to Track or Ignore in 2026 appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

This article’s going to answer all these questions. But first, here’s a quick answer to your question, based on research by Revealbot.

Looking at the Facebook ads cost data from April 2020 – April 2021, we can see that the average Facebook ads CPC is between $0.5 – $3,5.

Facebook ads CPC in 2021

Another important Facebook advertising cost metric that many advertisers keep their eye on is the CPM – cost per 1,000 views. 

In March 2021, the average Facebook CPM was between $2 – $20.

Facebook ads CPM in 2021

As you can already see from the two charts above, the Facebook ads cost can vary a lot based on your Facebook ad campaign setup.

After reading this article, you’ll have a much better overview of:

• How much you should pay for a Facebook ad click?
• Which Facebook ad placements have the lowest costs?
• How to lower the cost of Facebook ads?

Quick tip: One of the fastest ways to lower your Facebook ads cost is to improve your Facebook campaign structure and review your Facebook ad metrics. Start with this Facebook ad audit to ensure you’ve got everything set up correctly.

Alright, let’s start with the most burning question:

How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook?

While there is no way to tell exactly how much you’re going to pay for a click or results on Facebook, there are some benchmarks you can follow.

For example, AdEspresso’s research of 2017 Q4 results shows that the average CPC on Facebook is anywhere between $0.20-$0.80.

In-between 2017-2021, the advertising costs have significantly increased. You should now be ready to pay up to $3 per ad click. (Although some ads for broad audiences still deliver $0.20 CPC, even in the US.)

The average CPC is $0.20-$0.80 – Source: AdEspresso

The cost of Facebook advertising depends on multiple factors:

• Your target audience
• The seasonality
• Your marketing objective
• Competition
• Ad placements
• Quality of your ad creatives

Factor #1. The timing of your campaign

When evaluating your Facebook ads cost, it’s important to take into account the time of year.

For example, it’s more expensive to advertise during the holidays when everyone is using Facebook advertising to increase sales.

That’s also what AdEspresso’s data shows: The most expensive months for advertising are October, November, and December.

October, November, and December are the most expensive months – Source: AdEspresso

Key takeaway;

If your product’s sales aren’t affected by the time of year, you could spend less during the Autumn/Winter season and allocate a higher budget to Spring/Summer.

However, if the revenue you earn per sales is lower than the acquisition via Facebook ads, you should advertise all year round.

In case you’re running an online store, see this guide on eCommerce Facebook ads to bring down your CPC and CPA costs.

There is also a difference in your Facebook ads CPC depending on the hour of day.

Different time of day = different CPC – Source: AdEspresso

As the above chart is taking into account the average per all ads analyzed, it doesn’t reflect as well on how the cost in time depends on your product.

For example, when you’re selling pizzas, people are more likely to be interested in your ads during lunch, dinner, and late at night. That’s also when your CPC will be lower.

On the other hand, promoting B2B or SaaS Facebook ads outside of office hours is likely to make those ads’ CPC higher.

Here’s an example of how a Facebook campaign’s click-through rates and CPC changes, depending on the time of day. It’s not a big difference, but when you’re tight on budget, knowing your most profitable advertising times can be a life-saver.

Find your most profitable advertising times

If you want to advertise only during specific times of day, you can use the custom ad schedule feature.

You can set a custom schedule for your ads

If you’re unsure what are the best times for running your Facebook ads campaign, use the automatic scheduling and let Facebook’s algorithms do the heavy lifting.

You can later check your ad reports to discover which weekdays and times of day worked best.

Factor #2. Your target audience

There’s a high chance you’re not selling your product to the entire population.

And your cost of Facebook ads will also depend on who it is you’re targeting. For example, it costs less to reach people aged between 18-24 than those aged 55-64.

What’s your target audience’s age? – Source: AdEspresso

Moreover, the gender of your target audience can make a big difference in your Facebook ads pricing.

Surprisingly, it can cost more to attain Facebook Page likes from women than from men. This could be due to more eCommerce brands targeting women.

Women’s likes cost more – Source: AdEspresso

Key takeaway: The better you know you target audience, the easier you’ll find evaluating (and lowering) the advertising costs.

Factor #3. Your Facebook ad placement

When setting up your Facebook ads campaigns, you can select automatic ad placements or pick specific channels for your ads to be shown in.

For quick reference, here are the currently available Facebook ad placements:

• Facebook Desktop newsfeed
• Facebook Mobile newsfeed
• Instant Articles
• In-stream videos
• Facebook Desktop right column
• Instagram feed
• Instagram Stories
• Facebook Audience Network
• Facebook Messenger home
• Messenger Sponsored messages

Read more about all the Facebook ad types and their specs here: Facebook Ads Specs and Size (Always Up-to-date Guide)

AdEspresso’s data from 2016 shows that the cost-per-click of your Facebook ads variated greatly between different placements.

Ad placement can make a huge difference – Source: AdEspresso

It looks that the Facebook Audience Network is the cheapest ad placement while Instagram ads cost is the highest.

However, remember that this chart only shows the cost-per-click.

What about the cost per conversion? Or cost per signup?

As Facebook Audience Network consists of thousands of different apps and games, there’s a high chance that many clicks from that channel were accidentally made.

Here’s a randomly chosen campaign example that shows the number of clicks and app installs of a Facebook Mobile App Installs campaign.

Not all clicks turn into conversions

Notice that the click-to-install conversion rate in the Audience Network is only 20.8% while in the Facebook Mobile newsfeed it’s 55.4%.

So how to choose your Facebook ad placements and lower the cost?

I recommend that you run your Facebook ad campaigns with automatic placements for some time. After you’ve got some results, you can exclude the placements where costs are highest.

However, if the cost-per-acquisition in all placements is lower than your earnings from sales, keep all of them running to reach more people.

Factor #4. Your campaign objective

When creating a new Facebook ad campaign, you can choose between many objectives.

Facebook offers you many objectives

Depending on your Facebook ad goals, you’ll be paying a different amount for clicks and other types of conversions.

Usually, campaigns with broad target audiences optimized on Reach (Brand Awareness or Traffic campaigns) have lower cost per 1,000 impressions. Conversion-optimized campaigns make it more expensive to reach your audience, but the audience’s quality and engagement are also much higher.

Facebook ads CPM by campaign objective, 2021 data

Conversion-optimized ads may seem more expensive, but they also deliver more results,

This also makes perfect sense – the goal of a Reach campaign is for many people to see the ad, not click on it.

Tip: If your goal is to get people clicking on your ad, use the Traffic campaign objective.

When promoting your blog articles on Facebook, use the Engagement objective.

For example, there’s also a difference between the cost-per-like and cost-per-app-install.

Cost-per-app-install vs. cost-per-like – Source: AdEspresso

As you can see, the different objectives also perform at different rates depending on the placement.

This is getting too confusing?

We’ll learn more about selecting the right objective and optimization methods in the second half of this article.

Factor #5. Your ads’ relevance

In the end, the cost of Facebook ads comes down to THE most important factor: is your product relevant to people?

Do they want to buy it?

Do they want to click on your ad to find out more?

Or are they looking at your ads and thinking…

These ads are soo annoying

For example, if Hired were promoting these carousel ads to marketers instead of developers, their Facebook ads cost would skyrocket while their campaign underperforms.

This ad is relevant to developers, but not marketers

Or if Teabox were targeting different ads for people liking chai vs. black tea, their ads would probably have higher click-through rates and lower cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion.

Chai lovers are more likely to click on this ad

When analyzing 104,256 Facebook ads, AdEspresso discovered that Facebook campaigns’ Relevance Score successfully predicts both the cost-per-click and click-through rate.

If your ads’ relevance is high (meaning people engage with your ads), the cost-per-click will be significantly lower.

You better make your ads relevant – Source: AdEspresso

Tip: You can see your ads’ relevance score as you break down your Facebook reports by Performance and navigate to the Ads view.

What is a good relevance score?

I would say it’s anywhere between 5 to 10 points. However, ads with relevance score of 8-10 usually have a lower cost than the rest.

Find every ads’ relevance score

How to increase your relevance score?

• Nail your USP – unique value proposition
• Create eye-catching Facebook ad designs
• Make sure your ad targeting is focused on the right audience

Now that you’ve got an overview of some numbers and benchmarks for Facebook ads cost, let’s move on and see how to set up your Facebook ad bidding.

How Facebook ad bidding works?

Facebook ad bidding works like a worldwide auction where every second thousands of transactions are made.

Even while you’re fast asleep, your ad campaigns are participating in hundreds of auctions that determine whether your ads will be shown to the people you’re targeting.

In order to win the Facebook ad auction and keep your advertising costs low, it’s important to understand how the auction works. Or for that matter, how the entire Facebook ad bidding game works.

How Facebook ad auctions work:

First, you need to know that Facebook’s ad delivery is driven by two main goals:

• Creating value for advertisers by helping them to reach the best target audience
• Providing positive, relevant experiences for people using Facebook, Instagram or Audience Network

Read more: Facebook’s official page about ads pricing.

Unlike in a traditional auction, the winner isn’t the one who makes the highest monetary bid.

It’s the ad that creates the most overall value.

Facebook relies on three factors to determine the winner of an auction: Advertiser Bid + Ad Quality & Relevance + Estimated Action Rates

This is how Facebook ad auctions work

Advertiser bid – that’s the bid you place on your ad sets. You can also use automatic bidding, so that Facebook’s algorithms will determine the best amounts to bid at any given auction.

Ad quality & relevance – your ad’s relevance score isn’t only important for keeping your ad. According to Facebook, if your ad has got lots of negative feedback, it may decrease the ad’s total value.

Estimated action rates – The estimated action rate is a Facebook’s calculated measure that shows how likely a person is to take the actions you’ve optimized for. Facebook needs at least a couple of results per day to be able to estimate your campaigns’ action rates. The longer your ad campaigns will run, the better Facebook can optimize them.

Every time a Facebook ads auction occurs on the background, Facebook will standardize the factors and combine them into a total measure. The ad with the highest total value wins and gets delivered to people’s newsfeeds.

Key takeaway: A high bid won’t guarantee your ads will win the auction, unless they’re also relevant to the target audience.

How to win the Facebook ad auction

How to set up your Facebook ads budget?

You can set up your Facebook campaign’s budget in the in the Budget & Schedule section during your campaign setup phase.

Up next, we’ll take a closer look at all the options you have.

Go to the Budget & Schedule section

In the Budget section, you can select between two Facebook features:

Option 1: Daily budget

This is how much Facebook will spend on delivering your ads every day during your campaign’s set dates.

Note that when setting a daily budget, you’re setting an average. Facebook might still spend slightly more or less each day, depending on the opportunities that arise.

$10 is the average daily expenditure

Option 2: Lifetime budget

By using the Lifetime budget, you’re telling Facebook the amount you’re willing to spend over the duration of your ad campaign.

This means that on some days, you may spend $10 while only $2 on others.

Important! After you’ve published your Facebook ad campaign, you won’t be able to change the budget type, only the sums you want to spend.

Tip: If you want to switch your ad budget from lifetime budget to daily budget or vice versa, you can duplicate an existing ad set and change its budgeting method. Then, pause the old ad set.

Which budget type should you use?

Some performance marketers believe that using a Lifetime budget gives Facebook more room for optimization. However, if your campaign runs for less than a month, Facebook may not have enough data to optimize the ad delivery.

I personally prefer to set daily budgets – they’re more flexible and transparent when changed throughout the campaign.

January 2018 UPDATE

As a recent Facebook update, you can now also set campaign-level ad budgets. The new feature is called Campaign Budget Optimization.

As you publish a campaign-level budget ad campaign, Facebook’s algorithms will start learning, and will allocate your budget between the ad sets so that you will get the most results at the lowest cost.

How Campaign Budget Optimization works

How to set up your ad optimization & delivery?

As you scroll down to the next phase of your Facebook campaign setup, you will see something like this:

Scroll down until you see this

Optimization & Delivery… What is it?

Basically, here’s where you can tell Facebook what is your desired advertising goal and how much you’re willing to pay for it.

According to Facebook, the campaign optimization works like this:

“Your optimization choice tells us what to value when delivering your ad. For example, you could tell us to show your ad to the people in your target audience most likely to click a link to your website (optimizing for link clicks) or to show it as many times as possible (optimizing for impressions).”

Click on Optimization for Ad Delivery section

As you look at all the optimization methods for the first time, it can get pretty confusing.

Mind blown

Here’s a quick overview of all ad delivery optimization options together with explanations:

Conversions – When optimizing for conversions, Facebook will deliver your ads to the people who are the most likely to convert. The conversion could be a signup, purchase, app install, etc.

Post Engagement – When bidding on Post Engagement, Facebook will show your ads to the people most interested to like, comment or share your ad.

Impressions – Your Facebook ads will be delivered to as many people as many times as possible while staying within the limits of your advertising budget. There’s no algorithmic optimization regarding who is more likely to engage with your ad.

Link Clicks – Facebook will deliver your ads to the people most likely to click on your ad. With this optimization method, you’ll be charged every time someone clicks on your ad.

Daily Unique Reach – Facebook will deliver your ads to your target audience members up to once per day. That’s a good way to keep your ad frequency under control. I personally like to use frequency capping for Facebook remarketing campaigns.

Brand Awareness – Facebook will serve your ads to people most likely to be interested in your offer. You can use this delivery optimization method to make a campaign visible to a large audience. You will be charged on the basis of CPM — you’ll pay for every 1,000 ad impressions.

Should you use Manual vs. Automatic ad bids?

The next step of your Facebook ad budget setup is to select whether you’d like to use Manual or Automatic bid.

If you’re unsure how much your Facebook ads cost, always use automatic bidding.

However, if you’re interested in reaching more people at a higher Facebook ads pricing, you can set up a Manual bid to win more ad auctions.

Manual bidding options

And as you’re setting the Manual bid, there’s another set of options:

The Maximum vs. Average bid.

By now, you may start to get confused… There are TWO types of manual bids?!

Here’s what’s different about Maximum and Average manual bids.

When using the Maximum bid, Facebook’s algorithms stop delivering your ads if there’s a risk that the cost per result will be higher than your bid.

As you set an Average bid, Facebook will use the Pacing method to optimize your ad delivery for the optimal ROI.

Conversions in the box are missed with max bid – Image source

Here’s Facebook’s Pacing explained by Smartly.io:

“Without pacing, the ad set would spend the entire budget in the beginning of the day for more expensive ads and miss the better opportunities in the end of the day. The Pacing algorithm learns the optimal bid over time.”

Here’s an explanatory table by Smartly.io, showing when to use the Maximum vs. Average bids.

Plenty of useful information here – Image source

Pay close attention to the last rows of the comparison table.

With the Maximum bid, you will maximize your profit. With Average bid, you will optimize delivery while sometimes paying more per conversion.

How to set the right Facebook ad bids?

When setting a Manual ad bid, you likely have two main goals:

1. Get as many results as possible
2. At the lowest advertising cost possible

Wouldn’t that be nice…

So how can you set the right bid to keep your Facebook ad costs low but at the same time, drive enough traffic to your website?

One option is to use the bids suggested by Facebook.

The suggested bid is a sum that Facebook considers to be sufficient to achieve your anticipated result (e.g. a link click or conversion).

In the parentheses next to the suggested bid, you can see the bid range. This number shows a spectrum of bids that are currently winning auctions across the world that reach the same audience as you’re targeting.

Tip: As you check the Manual bidding method, Facebook is usually suggesting a really high bid. Make sure to change the sum in the box.

For example, if Facebook first suggests that you bid €3.10 per 1k impressions and the bid range is (€1.20–€3.40), you could bid €1.60 or even €1.25.

However, there’s an even better way for finding out how much you should bid per result.

Start running a new campaign on automatic bidding. After you’ve collected enough data about your average cost-per-result, you can change the bidding method to Manual and insert your target bid.

How to keep the cost of Facebook ads low?

Now that you’re aware of the average Facebook CPC and CPM, you may be thinking “But I want my ads to cost even less.”

Well, it’s totally possible.

But there isn’t a shortcut to lower ads costs. You need to put in some extra work and time to achieve better results.

Here’s what you’ll have to do.

1. Improve your USP

USP – the unique selling proposition – is what makes your product relevant to its users while also differentiating you from the competition.

Advertising legend Rosser Reeves explained in his book that USP has three parts:

1. Each advertisement must explain a clear and relevant benefit to the consumer.
2. The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique.
3. The promise must be so compelling that it can move the mass of millions.

For example, App Academy’s Facebook ad offers a clear benefit and also explains how much a person could earn after completing the curriculum.

App Adacemy nailed it!

Sometimes, it’s ok to advertise a message also used by your competitors. But try to find a small differentiator that makes your product more memorable.

There are thousands of companies selling socks in the world. However, through smart branding and great visuals, Happy Socks is able to differentiate its products from the rest.

Happy Socks definitely deserves its name

Key takeaway: Whatever it is you’re promoting try to find the key benefit to the buyer and make sure it’s clearly readable in your Facebook ads.

Check out these 180 best Facebook ad examples for more inspiration.

2. Ensure you’re targeting the right audience

There has been so much talk about buyer personas and knowing your customers that everyone’s kind of tired of it already.

Yea, yea… Don’t come to me with another customer survey talk.

You probably know how your Facebook ad targeting should look like.

But do you really?

Have you checked the Facebook Audience Insights tool to see which demographics are most interested in your product?

No?

You can do it right now.

Facebook Audience Insights tool – Image source

Using Audience Insights, you can get aggregate and anonymous information such as:

• Demographics – Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size
• Page likes – The top Pages people like in different categories
• Location and language – Where do people live, and what languages do they speak
• Facebook usage – How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on
• Purchases activity – Past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online)

Later on, you can create interest-based Facebook audiences that reach more people interested in your product. Or you will know what are the best locations for promoting your product.

There’s some fascinating data to be discovered.

3. Target advanced Facebook audiences

When creating new Facebook marketing audiences, don’t let yourself be limited to Saved Audiences (the interest-based audiences that are easy to create).

Saved Audiences will only get you so far

There are also other audience types available on Facebook: Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.

And these two audience types go a long way in helping you reduce your Facebook advertising costs.

A Custom Audience is Facebook audience that’s based on the data available from the Facebook Pixel on your website/landing page. You can also create Custom Audiences based on e-mail lists or in-app actions.

Creating a Custom Audience

A Lookalike Audience is a Facebook audience that helps your reach new people similar to your existing customers or website visitors. As a result, you can reach people who are likely to be interested in your product.

… and creating a Lookalike Audience

In the perfect campaign structure, you should be using all of the three Facebook audience types to reach slightly different audience segments.

Here’s a more in-depth article explaining how to create Facebook and Instagram target audiences.

4. Exclude past converters from your audience

A tiny yet super efficient hack to keep your Facebook CPC and CPC low is to exclude from your target audiences the people who have already converted.

You can move those people to the next step in your Facebook marketing funnel instead of delivering them the same ads over and over again.

Different levels require different approach – Source: KlientBoost

Here’s how to exclude the past converters from your Facebook audiences:

• Create a Facebook Custom Audience of people who have visited specific web pages (e.g. your download thank you page or a blog article).
• Use the EXCLUDE feature when setting up your ad set’s audience to stop targeting people in this Custom Audience.

Exclude past converters

5. Create highly converting ad images

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

Goes without saying that your ad’s image plays a key role in its success or demise.

There are ads that immediately catch every viewers’ attention. Like this one by Facebook for example…

This ad is eye-catching, isn’t it?

… And then there are ads that just inhabit the newsfeed without anyone noticing.

Want to make sure your ads look more like Facebook’s and catch everyone’s attention?

Here are the key 8 Facebook ad design commands to follow:

1. Use bright colours – a study by UsabilityTools showed that using highly contrasting call-to-actions resulted in 75% higher click-through rate, compared to a low-contrast CTA.
2. Avoid plain stock photos – If you must use a stock photo, use a colour overlay to make it more interesting.
3. Include icons and symbols – Create simple ad designs that mainly consist of symbols and backgrounds. Simple is efficient.
4. Show your product – if your product can be represented in an image, create a Facebook ad with it.
5. Test multiple ad formats – create Facebook Carousel ads or Slideshow ads to bring novelty to your mix of image ads.
6. Match ad design with landing pages – Make sure that before-the-click and after-the-click have the same branded look about them.
7. Use in-image text – add your value proposition in the ad image.
8. Keep your in-image copy short – people prefer images light in text.

Spotify’s Facebook ad just pop with color.

Spotify Facebook ad example

6. Add videos to your marketing mix

Videos aren’t only a nice addition to your ad sets. They can significantly lower your advertising costs.

Facebook did a case study with Refinery29, comparing the results of two various campaign tactics:

• Campaign A employed creative and images focused strictly on generating subscriptions.
• Campaign B over the same period featured different “sequenced” video-first ads that first told the brand story, next provided product information before inviting people to sign up.

The result?

Refinery29 had an 87% increase in traffic to the landing page and a 56% increase in subscription rate for those people who saw the branding video first.

Numbers don’t lie – Image source

The key to successful video ads is engaging people during the first 3-5 seconds.

Wistia did a research and discovered that as the video length increases, the engagement drops.

Short videos are more engaging – Image source

It makes sense to keep your Facebook video ads under 2 minutes. Even better if you’re able to engage people with a 30-second video.

7. Write stronger ad copy

Imagine you’ve spotted a really cool Facebook ad image in your newsfeed.

Would you click on it right away?

Or would you also read through the ad copy first?

If you’re like most people, you’ll also want to know what the copy is saying before making a click, not to speak of making a purchase.

Your ad copy matters. A lot.

So how can you write great Facebook ad copy?

Here’s what Joanna Wiebe, the queen of conversion copywriting, recommends:

• Write for the click. Your ad headline should be a CTA all of its own.
• Connect “what” with “why.” State what to do – and then say why. What’s the benefit or outcome of acting?
• Focus on a single, specific thought. People can’t save time and money. They can save time. Or they can save money. Simplify.
• Use numerals and special characters. We need to draw the eye. So people won’t save a thousand bucks. They can save $1000.
• Show empathy. The more you’re in their head, the more you’re in their head.
• Use “new.” Nothing puts an itch in people like the word “new.”
• Keep it short. AdEspresso found that a max of 5 words is best for FB ad headlines.
• Mention the offer, including any incentives. That could be free shipping or a downloadable ebook.
• Make a promise. But back it up.

Here’s a great Facebook post example by Intercom that’s both actionable and makes you want to get their e-book.

8. Avoid Facebook ad fatigue

Ad fatigue is like a monster gnawing on your good Facebook ad CPCs.

But it’s main goal isn’t to make you lose the Facebook ad auction and fail miserably. Its goal is to improve the experience for people seeing your ads and bring you more sales.

Looks like ad fatigue to me…

Ad fatigue means that people have gotten tired of seeing your Facebook ads for so many consecutive times.

Once you hit the ad fatigue, several things will happen:

• People stop noticing your Facebook ads in their newsfeed – this means fewer attention, likes, and shares.
• People stop clicking on your Facebook ads – you will start paying more per every Facebook ad click.
• Your ad campaign’s costs skyrocket – to get the same amount of new sales, you must pay a lot more.

So how can you avoid the ad fatigue?

The easiest way to predict ad fatigue is to check your Facebook ad frequency – how many times an avg. audience member has seen your ad.

To check this metric, go to the Facebook Ads Manager, click on a campaign, and in the reporting section select the Delivery view.

Check your ad frequency

You can check the ad frequency per campaign, ad set or specific ads. I recommend that you check the ad set level frequency.

Here you can see the campaign level frequency

Tip: In most cases, it’s best to keep your Facebook ad frequency under 2-3 points.

However, when working with Facebook remarketing campaigns, you can also let your ad frequency get slightly higher. I’ve also seen great remarketing results at the frequency of 15+ views.

Once you see your ad frequency increase and results drop, you can add new offers and ad designs to your campaign to keep your target audience interested.

For example, Lyft is using tons of different ads to catch their audience’s attention.

Keep adding new designs to your Facebook campaign

You can also change your Facebook target audience to reach new people who haven’t yet seen your ads and won’t have the ad fatigue.

Quick Recap

Alright, folks.

This article has gotten way too long and you’ve probably already forgotten some of the key learnings from the first half of the article.

So here’s a quick overview of everything we covered:

• The average Facebook ads cost-per-click in 2021 is between $0.5 – $3.5.
• However, your cost of Facebook ads depends on multiple factors.
• That’s why, there’s no one Golden Facebook CPC.
• But you must check whether your ads have a positive ROI.
• Meaning that your cost-per-acquisition is smaller than what you’ll earn per conversion.

To keep your Facebook ads pricing low, you can:

• Improve your value proposition.
• Ensure you’re targeting the right audience.
• Start targeting advanced Facebook audiences.
• Exclude past converters from your audience.
• Create highly converting ad images.
• Test adding videos to your marketing mix.
• Write stronger ad copy that converts.
• Prevent Facebook ad fatigue.

Are your average CPCs similar to the ones mentioned in this article? Let us know in the comments!

The post How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost – [2021 New Data] appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

All those campaign objectives, tens of targeting options, A/B testing features…

So what is the best way to structure your Facebook ad campaigns? What is the approach used by the top agencies and Facebook ad experts?

To be honest, some people who like to create tens of campaigns… And then there are the advertisers who believe that the opposite – having max 3 campaigns globally – works. 🤷

Personally, I am somewhere in between. I like to have campaigns split by countries, but I don’t like to set up a different campaign for every single niche audience.

As I figured this might be relevant to many advertisers, big and small, running Facebook ads, I’m going to share my approach.

You’ll find answers to the following questions:

• What is the best Meta ad campaign structure?
• How to select the right Campaign Objective for your campaign?
• On which events should you optimize your campaigns?
• Which target audiences to get started with and to experiment with?
• How to name your campaigns, ad sets, and ads for fast reporting?

So let’s take a look at how to set up your Facebook ad campaigns up for success.

What is a good Facebook ad campaign structure?

After working on Facebook ad campaign audits for 20+ brands while having weekly calls with Facebook reps, here are Facebook campaign structure best practices that deliver good results.

• Have fewer campaigns with broader audiences.
• Trust Facebook’s algorithms to do the targeting and optimization for you.
• Put a lot of emphasis on having good ad creatives.

One more thing that many PPC advertisers forget: You should not use the same campaign structure as you’ve used for Google ads on Facebook. It doesn’t work.

When it comes to Facebook ads, having fewer ad campaigns is not lazy, it’s smart.

Here’s the high-level Facebook ad campaign structure that I always use:

• Set up campaigns per country or region
• Create separate campaigns for prospecting and remarketing

You can also add brand awareness and re-engagement campaigns on top of prospecting and remarketing. The below chart by KlientBoost explains the 4 stages really well.

Create campaigns for multiple funnel stages. – Source: KlientBoost

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

Create a separate set of ad campaigns for each market

Why do I like splitting Facebook ad campaigns per country or region? There are a few reasons for that:

1. Countries have different ad costs. 

A click in the US might cost 5x as much as in say Lithuania. If you put these countries into the same campaign, Facebook is likely to spend 80% of ad budget in Lithuania as it seems like the cost-per-result is cheaper there.

2. The reporting and budgeting will be easier

Having separate campaigns per country will also make the reporting a lot easier – you can immediately see in which markets there’s a good product-market fit.

Also, you can easily define on campaign level how much money you want to spend on advertising in each country.

3. Your campaigns won’t get messy

If you add a lot of different countries to the same campaign, you can end up with a lot of different ad sets or ad designs. 

Especially if you want to use ads in local languages, it’s better to create a separate campaign for each market.

So how will the high-level campaign structure look like?

For each country, you should have the following Facebook ad campaigns:

• Prospecting campaigns
• Remarketing campaigns
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I don’t usually use them)
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I usually use them)

When it comes to the budget split, I usually go for:

• Prospecting campaigns: 60-80%
• Remarketing campaigns: 20-30%
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I don’t usually use them): 0-10%
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I usually use them): 0-10%

Let’s take a closer look at each of the campaign types and a few different ideas for setting them up.

Facebook prospecting campaigns’ structure

The prospecting campaign is a Facebook ad campaign that reaches a wide audience and attracts people who are potentially interested in your product. 

These people have not yet heard of your brand, so you’re trying to convert a cold audience into customers.

Usually, the prospecting-level ad creatives introduce your product’s benefits or show how great it looks. Like these two ads examples…

Prospecting-level Facebook ad examples.

If your product’s entry barrier is low, e.g. you’re promoting a free mobile app or run ads for your online store, prospecting campaigns will already bring a lot of new customers.

If your product has a longer sales cycle, e.g. software and B2B products, you can use prospecting ads to lead people to your website and convert them with remarketing campaigns.

Facebook campaign structure for prospecting ads

Here’s the general prospecting campaign structure that I always use.

• There are two ad sets: one with a broad audience and another with (1% or 5%) Lookalike audience.
• Both broad and lookalike ad sets have the exact same ad creatives inside them.

Sometimes, I add ad sets with special interest-based audiences (if I want to show these audiences special ad creatives that are more relevant to them).

And by “broad audience” I really mean BROAD. 🌍

For example, if I’m advertising a consumer-facing mobile app, I would target everyone aged from 18-55 in a specific country, optimize the campaign on in-app events, and let Facebook algorithms find the most relevant target audience for the ads.

The best ad campaign objective for prospecting campaigns is one that best reflects what you want to achieve:

• If you want to lead people to your website, use “Traffic” objective
• If you want people to complete an action, e.g. a purchase or mobile app install, use the “Conversions” objective

Suggested reading: Learn more about Facebook mobile app install ads.

Case study: Scheduled vs 24/7 ad delivery

Here’s one more proof that less optimization = better results.

We did a test with a client and the results were pretty staggering: a 300% difference in ROAS. 

💸 The country was the US, the product was SaaS, the test period was Mon-Thu of 2 consecutive test weeks.

WEEK 1: We used a Daily budget and didn’t use a custom ad delivery schedule.

WEEK 2: We used a Lifetime budget and scheduled ad delivery for Mon-Fri, 8am-6pm. (The total spent budget is higher as we spent more during the reported Mon-Thu period)

As you can see from the table below, the ads that were running daily with no restrictions delivered a higher ROI.

Key takeaways:

➟ Sometimes, high-ROAS conversions happen during non-business hours.

➟ It is better to keep Facebook ad campaigns targeting as broad and the ad delivery as unlimited as possible (use all placements, target entire countries + optimize on conversions)

We also ran the same test in other markets, the results were similar.

Keep your Facebook prospecting campaigns broad and don’t overdo with all the special optimization hacks you read in blogs. 😉

Facebook remarketing campaigns’ structure

The remarketing campaigns target people who have already visited your website or showed interest in some other way (e.g. watched a brand awareness video or downloaded an e-book). 

The goal of this campaign is to convert those lukewarm audiences into customers.

The ad creatives in your remarketing campaigns can be different from prospecting campaigns. Here, you should give people an extra incentive to complete the signup or purchase.

For example, Restream is offering a 20% discount from the subscription.

The most fool-proof remarketing audience that you can create for your Facebook ad campaigns is past 30 days website visitors.

Here are some other Facebook Custom Audiences you could include in remarketing campaigns:

• People who have watched 50% or more of your video ads
• People who have visited your Pricing page
• People who have started the signup process, but didn’t complete it
• People who have visited specific landing pages or blog articles (so that you can show them ads with a custom message around specific topics)

Personally, I like to create 1 remarketing campaign per country with a separate ad for every retargeting audience. This way, I can get a quick overview of how each audience performs.

Facebook campaign structure for remarketing ads

Here’s the general remarketing campaign structure I like to use:

Example Facebook remarketing campaign structure.

• There is one campaign per country: as I like to track per-country results from all campaigns (prospecting, remarketing, etc.) together
• All ad sets include the same ads or if you target special landing page visitors, that ad set’s creatives could be different

When setting up remarketing Facebook campaign, I usually go for “Conversions” campaign objective. Other options I sometimes use are “Traffic” and “Reach.”

Tip: The “Reach” objective is useful if you have a big remarketing or re-engagement audience and most people there would convert anyway.

In this case, there’s no point to optimize on conversions as Facebook would show your ads to people who would take action also without seeing the ad. To reach every target audience member, you can optimize the ad-set-level ad delivery to “Daily Unique Reach” – to that each audience member will see your ad once a day, regardless of how likely they are to convert. 💡

Remarketing ad campaigns’ frequency

Remarketing ad sets tend to be the most profitable ones. The ROI of a remarketing campaign can be 10x than that of a prospecting campaign.

So of course, you’d like to add more budget to remarketing campaigns. 🔥

Thing is, you only have a limited number of people in the remarketing audiences. And if you add too much budget to the campaign, the same people will see your ads over and over and over and over again.

At some point, you may reach the ad frequency of 10 points in a 14-day period. This means that on average, people in your remarketing audiences have seen your ads for 10 or more times.

And you know what? – This is fine.

When running Facebook remarketing campaigns for my clients, I usually see that a 14-day frequency of up to 15 points keeps delivering results at a positive ROI. It won’t drive up your Facebook ads cost.

You may bother some people, but in the end, showing more ads to your remarketing audiences pays off. There’s also more research to prove this point:

Meta ad campaign structure for brand awareness and re-engagement campaigns

I won’t stop on these two for long, as they’re both very similar to one of the campaign setups that we already covered.

Facebook brand awareness campaigns have a similar setup to prospecting campaigns. 

The main difference is the event that you optimize your campaign on + the results that you’ll measure.

For brand awareness campaigns, you could use the obvious “Brand Awareness” campaign objective, although options like “Traffic” and “Video Views” may deliver even better results, depending on your product and ad creatives.

Quite often, Facebook brand awareness ad creatives are videos. And you can target both a broad audience or your existing user base to remind them of your product.

For example, this Facebook ad by Oreo could be considered a brand awareness ad: It reminds you how much you love the 🍪 without directly leading you to an online store to buy it. (Although you may go to the grocery store to get it very soon) 🏃

When it comes to Facebook re-engagement campaigns, they’re targeted at your existing user base: to deliver a positive brand experience, educate them, or advertise special offers.

The campaign structure is very similar to remarketing campaigns: you will have one campaign per country and one ad set per each custom audience.

Potential target audiences for re-engagement campaigns:

• People who used your product/service/app, but haven’t done it for the past 30 days
• Past purchasers of your online store that haven’t made an order in the past 60 days
• People who were talking to your sales team 60+ days ago and didn’t make a purchase back them

For example, this Cos SALE ad could be shown to people who have bought during SALE in the past, but haven’t made a purchase in the previous 90 days.

5 best practices for improved Facebook ad campaign structure

Now that you’re aware of the basics, let’s cover 5 additional suggestions that help you improve your current Facebook ad structure or set up new campaigns from scratch.

1. Run the same campaigns and ad sets over a long period of time.

Instead of setting up a new Facebook ad campaign or adding new ad sets every time you want to add a new audience or ad creatives, edit the existing ones.

Using a single campaign over a long period of time is critical for Facebook’s algorithms to learn from the data. If you’re creating new campaigns every few weeks, you will lose out on this.

2. Less is more

Even if you have 20 amazing ideas for different target audiences or visuals, you will probably get better results if you keep the amount of assets lower.

The way I like to work with ad creatives is to always have 5-8 different ad creatives per ad set. And every time I add new ones, I pause some older ones that don’t perform as well.

3. Let Facebook’s algorithms do the work for you

There are 100+ Facebook ad hacks out there, some suggesting you to set a custom schedule, others showing how to leave out some ad placements.

More often than not, such hacks will actually decrease your results. That’s because you’ll be limiting your ads’ delivery without knowing if it actually helps. You’ll be better off using automated ad placements and 24/7 ad delivery and letting Facebook algorithms do the work for you.

However, for example, if I know that 80% of a company’s customers have a certain age or gender, I usually narrow down the target audience to reach a lower CPA.

4. Review your Facebook ad attribution window

Facebook attributes an action to your ad if someone viewed or clicked your ad and then took an action. 

By default, your Facebook ad account’s attribution window is set to 1-day view and 28-day click, which means that you see attributed actions that happened 1 day after someone viewed your ad and 28 days after someone clicked your ad.

To get a more accurate view of Facebook’s real contribution to your marketing results, change the attribution window smaller, to 1-day view and 7-day click.

Here’s how to do it: 

• Go to Facebook Ads Manager
• Navigate to Settings from the main menu
• Click “Edit” under Attribution
• Select your preferred Attribution Window

5. Name your Facebook campaigns in a systematic way

When your Facebook ad account has a complex international campaign structure, it will make your life a lot easier if all the campaigns and ad sets (and ads) are named by the same convention.

Here’s the framework I like to use:

Campaign level: Country-code_Campaign-type_Campaign-objective_Attribution-window. Example: US_Prospecting_Conversions_7days

Ad set level: Country-code_Audience_Delivery-optimization. Example1: US_20-55_Broad_Landing-page-views. Example 2: US_2%-Lookalike_Purchases

Ad set level: AD-number_Format_Content. Example: AD3_Static-image_20%-Discount-pink

Later on, you’ll be able to quickly filter out your Facebook campaigns based on the country, campaign objective, and edit the ads with the same number or content across ad sets on one go.

—

Hope that you got some inspiration for improving your Facebook campaigns. 🙌 If you want to learn about more best practices, check out the Facebook ad size guide with all the top formats covered.

If you have more questions regarding Facebook ad campaign structure, reach out on LinkedIn.

The post Facebook Ad Campaign Structure – Complete Guide appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

In 2018, Instagram Stories exceeded Snapchat in DAU. Facebook had the toughest year ever. (But nonetheless remains the foremost destination for marketers looking to reach a wide audience at arguably low cost)

For me, 2018 was the most eventful year ever. A year ago, I was freelancing for several startups while growing this blog. 12 months forward, my focus has shifted 110% to working with Taxify’s marketing team. (We’ve grown from 10 people to 30 in just one year, and we’re hiring 🤭) From attending for the first time Cannes Lions festival to last-minute panic-troubleshooting a large-scale marketing operation with Taxify’s French team, 2018 presented plenty of opportunities for learning and growth.

This said…

I took a look back at all the marketing projects I contributed to in 2018 and realised there were some interesting key learnings, potentially useful for other marketers.

Heads-up: a lot of what I thought to be efficient in marketing turned out to work the opposite way. And there’s a surprising amount of obvious best practices that no marketing blogs write about. Go figure…

So, without further ado, here are some of my key insights from 2018 that might be useful to you as well:

1. Facebook ads get over-optimized all the time. You’ll get better results when you let them run in peace.
2. Run more-more-more A/B tests about every aspect of your marketing activities. 90% of them fail, 10% will improve your results signifcantly.
3. Measure everything you do. Yes, even things you think will obviously work. Because sometimes, they don’t.
4. Facebook video ads don’t work (a shocker!). It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Read point 4 of the article for further explanation.
5. If you spend your time on marketing campaigns, also spend your 💸 on promoting them. + Focus on one big campaign rather than ten small ones.
6. Create all marketing campaigns, ads, emails, web assets, etc. first for mobile. Get over your desktop-skewed views.

If this list just sounded a bit click-bait-ish, you will find a more in-depth explanation on each of the learnings below.

+ I also did some digging in my notebooks and bookmarks, resulting in a list of the nice stuff I’ve been listening, watching, and reading in 2018. Scroll to the very end of the article for that.

1. Leave ad optimisation to the algorithms

If you’re using online ad channels to promote your product, you likely spend most of your 💸 with Facebook and Google.

Both Facebook and Google have increased their ad placement inventory significantly in 2018. Facebook recently added Facebook Stories ads on top of its existing placements while Google is expanding its Youtube video ad inventory.

Just take a look at all the Facebook ad placement options available in December 2018. A year ago, there were so much fewer ad placements to choose from…

On one hand, advertising on Facebook and Google is getting increasingly difficult.

You need quite a specialised marketing experience to play around with all the targeting, optimization, and placement options of main online ad platforms.

But there’s also good news – 2018 also brought about a wider use of AI and Machine Learning.

So…

Should you build an AI bot to do the Facebook advertising for you? – No.

Should you use third-party online tools that claim to optimise your ad campaigns for you. – No.

Just let Google and Facebook algorithms do their magic.

One of the articles I wrote in 2018 and like most is the one explaining that you don’t need to over-optimise your Facebook campaigns. Just let Facebook’s algorithms do it for you.

What happens if you optimise your Facebook ad campaign’s delivery schedule, placements, narrow down the targeting to 10k people or less?

I’ve mostly seen this happening:

So how can you set up Google and Facebook ad campaigns that will reach a wide audience interested in your product?

Try these best practices:

1. Spend at least $20/daily per every new ad set – algorithms need a lot of conversions to optimise your campaigns.
2. Optimise ad delivery on the right events – if you’re working with low budgets, optimise on landing page views. If you get at least 10 down-the funnel conversions daily per ad set, optimise on signups, etc.
3. Set up a single ad campaign with a single ad set and 1-3 ads while resisting the urge to fragment your campaigns into scattered low-budget ad sets. This applies to low-budget Facebook ad campaigns.
4. Don’t A/B test too many elements at once – you won’t have enough results to conclude the test. Here’s my take on Facebook ad A/B testing.
5. Don’t worry too much about the ad placements, custom delivery schedule, and manual bidding. Use Facebook’s default settings for all these things.
6. Set up Facebook Pixel to track your campaign’s results and optimise your ad campaigns on conversions. (So that algorithms can learn which type of audience converts on your offer and deliver it to more similar people)
7. Don’t make changes to your online ad campaigns too often. Adjust your campaigns 24h after setting them up (in case they’re not delivering yet), then let them run for 7 days minimum before making any further edits.

So, to wrap this up: don’t panic when your Facebook ad campaigns are not delivering amazing results 2h after publishing the campaign. Let them run for a while so that algorithms can start working their magic.

2. Run more A/B tests – 90% will fail, 10% will be game-changers

As someone lately explained to me, having 10 x 0.7% incremental improvements in your ad campaigns’ conversion rates results in 2x total improvement.

If you want to improve your marketing results, keep A/B testing new approaches.

However, be prepared to get demotivated once your tests show no significant improvement.

I ran 50+ A/B tests in 2018 and most of them showed either no improvement or negative results.

Quite disappointing, huh?

But that’s just fine.

The remaining 10% of A/B tests brought learnings that improved our marketing results big-time.

There’s an almost infinite pool of things to A/B test. And if you’re working with considerably low marketing budgets, you’re limited to a small number of tests.

So. What should you and what shouldn’t you test?

In my experience, the biggest improvements will come from optimising your online ad visuals. That kind of makes sense – your ad image is the first thing to catch people’s attention. (Also, the first thing that can cause ad fatigue is when people see the same visual over and over again for 10+ times.)

So, start by testing your ad visuals.

At Taxify, testing new ad visuals goes hand-in-hand with updating our branding.

This nonetheless means that you should ONLY test the visual side.

Think about your online ad campaigns as a collection of many different aspects, each contributing to the conversion – your ad image and copy, but also the landing page and later user experience of your product… And the emails you send out. Be on the lookout for ways to improve each step of the conversion funnel.

And don’t just assume that all the best practices shared across marketing blogs work in your case! We’ve discovered many best practices to be either useless or damaging to campaign performance.

Read more: 10 Best Practices for Facebook Ads A/B Testing

3. Measure EVERYTHING, especially the obvious stuff

“I know this is going to work!”

Of course every marketer thinks that, especially after reading some article about best practices.

Next thing you know, you’ve paused some of your old ads or implemented a big change on your website, without setting up any measurement test to confirm if it really works.

Not good.

Every time you change your email layout, add some new ad visuals or rewrite copy on your website, add to your to-do list a task to come back and check if it improved the results.

E.g. when I set up an A/B test on Facebook Ads Manager, I add to my calendar a note 2+ weeks ahead to return to the campaign and check the outcome.

Same goes about social media posts, emails, website changes, etc. – if you think a change will improve the results, make sure that it actually does.

Most of the time, you won’t probably see an improvement. What should you do in this case?

1. If the old and new version work on the same level (or there’s less than 2% difference) and you think the latest one better reflects your branding and messaging, keep it.
2. If there’s no big difference between the two options, keep the old version and start another A/B test to find another way to improve your results.

Another thing I’ve noticed: the bigger the difference between two tested A/B test variations, the more you will learn. Best to avoid A/B tests with very tiny variations in tested elements.

4. Key Learnings on 2018 about Facebook Ads

All the brands I worked with in 2018 run some Facebook Ad campaigns. It’s the easiest channel to get started with.

Also, having my Instagram and Facebook feeds flooded with ads by both local and global brands has been a perfect chance to learn what’s working.

Seriously – don’t underestimate scrolling your Instagram feed just to learn what other brands are doing.

Try this for 1 week, daily: Scroll through your Instagram feed. Take screenshots of all the ads you see. Put these to a G Drive folder or wherever you store your information. After 1 week, take a look at all the examples and write down the best practices you can use to improve your own ad visuals and copy.

You will end up with a personal gallery of Facebook ad ideas.

PS: If you’re interested, here are 142 Facebook ad examples I collected some time ago.

As this blog’s already full of Facebook ads best practices, I didn’t want to spend too much space listing new hacks & tips. Here’s a quick list of my new observations from 2018:

1. Facebook video ads don’t work – Yes, it’s an exaggeration. But with all the blogs and Facebook itself promoting the video ads to be the golden nugget of online advertising, I have yet to see video ads outperforming static ads. For sure, you should test if video ads work for you. Just make sure to measure their performance against single-image ads.
2. Prefer broad audiences – When setting up Facebook ad campaigns, leave your audience targeting as broad as possible. If you’re selling a consumer-focused product, you can even test targeting entire countries at a time – algorithms will deliver your ads to the most relevant audience.

3. Optimise your Facebook ad sets on right conversions – Whether you optimise your ad delivery on link clicks, signups, or purchases will have a huge impact on your results. If you have a high volume of down-the-funnel events, optimise your ad delivery on those instead of link clicks.

4. Use automatic placements – Yes, there’s an option to exclude some ad placement from your Facebook campaigns. However, it’s much more efficient to use auto-placements and, once again, let the algorithms decide what’s the best channel for showing your ads.

4. Use both illustrations and stock images – When it comes to ad visuals, it’s a good practice to use a mix of illustrations and stock images as different people relate to different images. Pro tip: using numbers in your ads will also help to improve results.

6. Create Lookalike Audiences – If you’re starting to advertise in a new country, it’s a very good idea to create a Custom Audience of your existing TOP customers all over the world, then create a local 5%-10% Lookalike Audience based on that. Simultaneously, set up a broad targeting ad set as it will at some point likely overperform the Lookalikes’ ad set (once you’ve reached all the people in the audience).

5. Value your time more and put 💸 into promoting each campaign

At Taxify, we do lots of fun marketing campaigns to engage with our riders and drivers.

Some of the most recent marketing campaigns include a Halloween giveaway, TOP drivers’ event in France, social media Advent Calendar, and more.

As you might imagine, a lot of time goes into planning and executing some of those campaigns.

But no matter how awesome those campaigns are, you’ll be missing out on a lot of potential if you just execute them without proper promotion.

What I mean by this is that when you’re doing a cool marketing campaign, e.g. a social media post in partnership with another brand, don’t stop by posting to your Facebook page. Make sure that you make enough noise for people to actually notice you campaign. You could do that by informing all your users via email, boosting your social media post for a higher budget, running online ads campaign to support the campaign, or use all of the aforementioned tactics combined. (And that’s so not the definitive list of things you can do to amplify your campaigns’ reach)

On a similar subject, don’t spend your time doing small marketing activities that have a very low reach and ROI.

Rather than execute 10 tiny social media campaigns or partnerships, focus on one bigger campaign that will truly engage your audience and will have a higher reach than all those 10 small marketing activities combined.

6. Create everything mobile first

How much of your work do you do on desktop? Around 100%, right?

This means that you view all the marketing campaigns, emails, websites, etc. that you’re working on from the desktop perspective.

Now, guess where your potential audience spends their time?

Mostly on mobile.

People read your emails on mobile, view your Facebook ads on mobile, browse your website on mobile…

Even this blog has a significant share of mobile traffic.

And you really need to remember the mobile-first approach every time you’re working on a marketing campaign. If you forget about it, here’s what happens:

• Your email visuals that looked amazing in your desktop inbox are unreadable on mobile
• Your website that was built looking at the desktop version is not fully mobile-responsive
• Your online ads with copy in the image look overcrowded on mobile devices, resulting in low CTR and conversions

So really… 📍📍📍 Create for mobile first, and then make sure it also looks nice on desktop.

Cool articles, websites, blogs, books, podcasts and whatever

While it’s difficult to remember all the good stuff I’ve read in 2018, here are some of the nice books, articles, websites, blogs, books, podcasts I discovered.

Books:

• How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp – this was recommended by a team member at Facebook’s Marketing Partners team as “the one book that all brand marketers have read.” I’m halfway through it, but it has been really informative this far
• Sprint by Jake Knapp – I read it earlier, but the brainstorming sessions we did in 2018 based on the book’s suggestions all turned out to be amazingly productive
• Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy – written in 1985, still highly relevant. Definitely worth your time more than any of the 2018 books on buyer personas and other random stuff

Most business books are similar in that they take 1-2 really good ideas that could be explained in a couple of pages… And turn those into a 200+ page book.

So what’s the point of reading these at all?

For me at least, the point of business books is not as much in learning a particular best practice. It’s more about the brainstorming that runs on the background while reading a well-written book. It kind of makes your mind wander and makes new ideas on how to improve your teamwork, marketing campaigns, etc. pop up – completely independently of what the book is teaching you.

• Art Is Work by Milton Glaser – As explained by Amazon: “A lavishly illustrated, oversized retrospective of one of history’s most influential figures in international design evaluates the role of art in business today… documenting the creative processes of several of his works.” – note the part about “documenting the creative processes” – the book gives you a nice perspective on how to approach design work – any work for that matter
• Joan Didion & Tom Wolfe – two writers who popularised the literary journalism movement throughout 60s and 80s. My favourite kind of fiction to read.

If you want to grow into a better marketer, reading just business books is not going to cut it. Differentiate your reading list with good fiction and art/design books to build your creative ideation and copywriting skills.

Newsletters & podcasts:

• Benedict Evans, Andrew Chen, Next Draft (newsletters) – three main newsletters I actually open and read. I’m sure there are plenty of other good ones I’m not aware of tho. Please share!
• Tim Ferriss (podcast) – not all of it is worth a listen, but check out the conversations with Seth Godin (another one), Nick Kokonas, and Naval Ravikant
• The Design Better podcast by DesignBetter.co – I just got started with this one and while it’s about UX and UI design, a lot of the principles used in design are applicable to marketing and teamwork in general
• Overtime Design podcast by Dribbble – If you feel like you’ve already heard everything discussed in marketing podcasts, switch to design podcasts

Online marketing resources and design galleries:

• Facebook Active Ads (Facebook ads run by any brand) – In case you missed the train, Facebook added an option to see all the ads run by any advertiser in any country. Just go to your competitors’ Facebook pages and check out what ads they’re running. 👀
• Really Good Emails (online email design gallery) – a super informative overview of the marketing emails sent by well-known brands
• Land-book (online web design gallery) – I worked on two website design projects in 2018. Both times I returned to Land-Book for inspiration and latest UI hacks
• Good Web Design (online web design gallery) – Another amazing gallery for anyone working on website design, This one’s more focused specific UI elements, e.g. CTA buttons, Pricing pages, and so on
• Dribbble, Designspiration, Behance (online design galleries) – for fresh ideas whenever u run out of them

Blogs & magazines:

• First Round Review (blog) – one of my favourite blogs featuring interview-style articles by managers and CEOs from top companies
• The New Yorker, The Atlantic, (magazines) – if reading amazing reportages and essays from some of the best writers in the world is not a good enough reason for you, consider it an investment in perfecting your English copywriting skills. Best read on paper. 👌
• The Purple Magazine, Frieze (magazines) – artsy magazines for great interviews (The Purple) and art inspiration (Frieze)
• IdN Magazine – I spotted an issue of the magazine in a Paris museum bookstore, ordered a bunch of these when back at home, and found some nice design and campaign ideas. These magazines look sooo beautiful.
• Trendhunter – I check this site way too rarely, but it’s a great go-to place for the latest cool stuff happening in branding

As you might have noticed, I didn’t read much marketing blogs. I’ve come to a conclusion it’s best to learn by doing.

Which is the perfect note to wrap up this year and this article.

But before that… the “I’d like to thank my mom” moment… To the marketing team at Taxify and guys at MeetFrank and MindTitan – I’ve had a truly great year together with you! 🙌

The post 2018 In Review – Key Learnings on Facebook Ads & Marketing in General appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Open up your newsfeed, scroll for a few minutes, and you’ll see that they are.

Should you also fall for the promise of quick wins while risking with ads that are borderline cliché?

No way?

Well… Following popular Facebook ad templates actually has its perks:

• Template layouts make the best use of ad space – Facebook’s 1200px – 628px ad format is quite limiting, so knowing the best layouts will help you quickly create ads that look nice in the newsfeed.
• They’re proven to work – Brands don’t use the same ad designs over and over again without a reason – some layouts simply work better than others.
• They’re easy to create – Universal ad templates can easily be filled in with your branded content and messaging, without you having to spend days designing your Facebook ads.

Find out all you need to know about various Facebook ad types and formats here: Facebook Ad Specis & Size (Always Up-to-date Guide)

Personally, I like to create 80% of ad designs following my go-to templates and treat the remaining 20% as tiny art projects, testing something new.

Where to find Facebook ad templates?

There is no online “Facebook ad templates” gallery that you can browse.

The best way to acquire a set of safe-for-work templates in to browse Facebook ad examples and see what layouts other brands are using.

Which I recently did, resulting in 18 ad ideas that you can apply to your campaigns as well.

Looking for Facebook ad specs? Read about Facebook ad dimensions in 2020.

While the following infographic is dividided into 3 parts – Universal, SaaS and eCommerce – most of the featured ad templates can be used for any kind of Facebook or Instagram campaign.

+ Scroll to the bottom of the infographic to see real Facebook ad examples for each use case. 👇

1. Image + centered text

This Facebook ad template works well with any kind of messaging, whether you want to mention your value props, a discount offer or a one-liner about your company.

All you need is a stock photo (check the above infographic for best free stock image sites) and a strong value proposition.

2. Image + left- or right-aligned text

This is another go-to Facebook ad template for most campaigns. Adding the call-to-action to your ad image can potentially increase your ad’s click-through rate, resulting in higher Relevance score and lower Facebook ad cost.

3. Image + text inside a circle

This format works best if you plan to feature some specific number, e.g. the pricing of your product or a discount rate.

Suggestions:

• A/B test various colours on the circle to uncover what catches most people’s attention.
• Make sure that the text and its background circle have a high colour contrast, so that the copy is easily readable (e.g. avoid placing white copy on light background)

4. Image + text inside a square

Use this Facebook ad template in brand awareness campaigns and place your logo inside the square in the centre of your ad.

You can also test a similar layout when promoting a blog article on Facebook, adding the article’s title on top of the background image.

5. Image + text + CTA button

When using a lot of copy on your Facebook ads – which you are when adding both a value proposition + CTA button in the image – make sure to use the Facebook Text Overlay tool to ensure that your ad is not too text-heavy.

6. Plain image + logo

If you’re wondering what’s the most beloved Facebook ad template of lazy marketers, this is it. However, this is not to say that this layout doesn’t work. Test it out!

7. Showcase your product

When it comes to Facebook ads for SaaS, it’s always a good idea to create some ads that showcase your product.

Showing people what your product looks like is beneficial for several reasons:

• It will catch the attention of people interested in software products
• The viewer can immediately tell if they’d like to use your product (you’ll get higher-quality leads)
• And, naturally, all you need to do is take a screenshot and do some Photoshop magic – easy.

8. Product image + value proposition

One step forward from the previous ad template with product image would be adding a value proposition on top of it. You can run a split test to see which results the ads with a simple product screenshot v.s. an additional value proposition deliver.

Combine product image with some copy

9. Product image aligned to the right

When working with SaaS companies, this is usually our go-to Facebook layout. Somehow, having the copy on the left and a product image on the right makes the image easy to understand and read.

10. Visualize a specific benefit

Does your product help teams to grow? Be more efficient and save time? Show it in your Facebook ads. To make things even more graspable for the viewer, make sure that your Facebook ad copywriting also revolves around the same benefit.

11. Visualize text with icons

If you’re looking for a good alternative to stock photos, find some high-quality icons and find various ways to organize them in your Facebook ad designs.

Tip: You don’t need to create the icons from scratch, there are many good websites for finding ready-made icons. (Check the infographic for suggestions)

12. Share a customer testimonial

You probably have plenty of positive customer testimonials on your website. Copy-paste them to your Facebook ad images, add a picture if a real customer (no stock photo), and you’ve got yourself a high-conversion ad.

13. Centered product + logo

This is a good Facebook ad template for any retail brand. You can also add a value proposition to your ad image to emphasize your product’s benefit.

Tip: Go an extra mile to get professional product photos as the first impression of your product will decide whether someone buys it or not.

14. Limited-time or discount offer

If you have a possibility to make a discount offer and promote it on Facebook, do it every time. This is especially relevant for Facebook retargeting campaigns, where you need to give people some additional incentive to buy your product.

15. Compilation of products + centered logo

Got a lot of products? Why not show them all in a single Facebook ad. You can also apply the same layout to your Instagram ad design where having catchy and colourful ads is the key to increased sales.

Read more: Instagram Ad Specs and Size in 2018 – The Complete Guide

16. Multiple products + colourful background

This layout is a good option when you’ve tested a lot of other ad templates already and want to introduce some new designs to your campaigns.

Tip: Don’t just repeat a single product, but find ways to show it from different angles, different colours, etc.

17. Carousel ad with multiple products

There are many ways to create a Facebook carousel ad that features multiple products:

• You can showcase simple product photos
• You can have an image or text as the first slide of the carousel ad
• You can have some copy on each slide throughout your ad

Or… You can test them all and see what works best.

18. Simple image + overlay + logo

Applying a colour overlay on top of your Facebook ad image is an easy way to make it more colourful and aligned with your branded colours. I personally like to use Sketch for designing ad images, but you can also do it on Photoshop or Illustrator.

That’s it guys. Have a go-to Facebook template that wasn’t mentioned in this article? Point it out in the comments.

Want even more inspiration? Check out this eBook with 200 Facebook ad examples. 👇

The post 18 All-rounder Facebook Ad Templates With 45 Examples From Top Brands appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

The potential audience of 2.19 billion monthly active Facebook users suggests that it is.

Can bad social media copywriting lower your chances of reaching more potential customers across Facebook’s platform?

Yes. It can.

There’s even a big difference in how mediocre v.s. well-written social media posts perform.

Thing is, you’re probably not spending half as much time on writing copy for social media posts than you would spend on developing a print campaign’s messages.

If you’re already going to say something as a brand, why not do it well?

Tens of Facebook ads and social media posts will eventually contribute to the general perception of your brand. The messages you use across your Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns can make a big difference in your ads’ ROI. (Naturally, there are also other important factors to your campaign’s success such as design and ad bidding, but copy is liable for part of the success.)

To make a point here, compare these two (hypothetical) ads:

They both look ok. I bet the ad on the left would get the company some results.

However, by adding some small extra touches and making your copy more user-focused, you’ll have a chance to increase your click-through-rates and conversions.

I mean… Nobody cares that your tool is New and Awesome. 🙄 (This line was taken from an actual SaaS Facebook ad.)

So how can you write copy that people will care about? That they will click on? That they’ll remember?

1. Know what you want to say

Kind of obvious, isn’t it?

However, take a look at the branded posts in your Facebook newsfeed. Many of them sound like someone just wanted to fill the box with “some copy.”

Here’s what often happens: By the time you’re posting a social media post or a Facebook ad, you’ll have an image/URL ready and you just need to add the copy + hit the “publish button.”

What’s wrong with the image-first kind of approach is that…

1. You won’t have an ad/post design that delivers your messages in the most efficient way.
2. Your ad copy won’t be focused on delivering the most important message.

As I don’t want to focus on negative examples, here are a couple of GOOD Facebook ad examples that have the messaging and design in place:

Why is this Sonarworks ad good?

• It has the key value proposition right in the ad image – the first thing people will read
• It clearly states what the advertised product does
• It focuses on a benefit that people care about
• It has a clear call-to-action

Here’s one more example:

Why is this Virgin America ad good?

• It focuses on a special deal and it’s already advertised in the ad image
• This ad features an offer people care about
• It lists all relevant information about the offer

Both designing and copywriting for social media posts should start by defining your key message – that’s something that also many marketing books emphasize..

Here’s the best way to plan your social media post’s content:

• Step 1: Plan what you want to say
• Step 2: Plan the exact wording
• Step 3: Develop the post’s design
• Step 4: Upload and publish your message

I think it’s an appropriate moment to recall one more important rule…

2. If you have nothing to say, don’t say anything

If you have to choose between quality v.s. quantity, opt for quality.

Of course, in the perfect world, you would have a lot of important things to say about your brand, product, and its users.

So what should this message be? And how to make people care about it?

3. Make it about the customer, not your company

Many marketers make the mistake of writing about their product’s features.

People don’t care about your product per se.

They care about how it will benefit them.

As the marketing legend D. Ogilvy put it: “Each advertisement must say to each reader: “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.””

He definitely followed his own principle when writing this advertisement for Sears. Furthermore, notice that the ad focused on savings and the ad image also calls for the attention of people who are interested in monetary savings.

Once you know the value proposition that you want your ads to focus on, you’ll have a clear path for writing relevant copy.

How to find a good audience-message fit?

Interviewing your existing users can give a good overview of what people care most about your product. You can also A/B test various ad messages to uncover what resonates with your audience.

For example, we tested many different ad messages with MeetFrank until we found one that people were most interested in: potential raise on their new job position.

4. Address various audiences

Remember that you may have more than one target audience that you want to address with different messages.

For example, you could advertise/communicate in social media to potential new customers, your existing customer base, your fans, etc. All of these target groups have various interests and thereby require a different messaging strategy.

• New potential customers (a cold audience that hasn’t heard about your product before) need to be informed about your product’s main benefit to them.
• Existing customers might be more interested in how to get additional value out of your product, they’re also more prone to react to upsell and discount offers.
• Your brand’s diehard fans will engage with branded posts, even if it’s just a fun fact/post about your company.

For example, this Facebook post by Slack is not relevant to people who don’t know about their work collaboration software. However, it engages their existing users and fans.

When it comes to Facebook ads, you can set up multiple campaigns that target different audiences. Similarly, you can publish social media posts and boost them to specific audience segments.

Read more about Facebook retargeting campaigns here.

5. Include important information only

Copywriting for Facebook is different from typing an email or a blog article. You’re limited in the real-estate for copy.

A general rule applies to 99% of marketing copy (website, blog, email and ads, included: You should only focus on what’s relevant and avoid fillers lacking a real meaning.

For example, Intercom’s Facebook ad mentions their product’s benefits first thing.

How to catch people’s attention with your ad copy?

• Mention the key value proposition fast.
• Ask a question to get the reader hooked.
• Avoid long intros and get to your point fast.

And then there’s the option to get people to click on your ads/posts with clickbait.

However, do you want your brand to sound desperate or trustworthy?

6. Place your key message in the first sentence

Read this copy for a Facebook post:

As the summer’s right behind the corner, it’s time to update your wardrobe with some color! For the next 24h, everything’s 20% off in our online store. Wait no more!

Sounds legit, right?

However, what’s the key message of this post? – “The summer is near.”

That’s not what the company wanted to inform you about. So why did they place this information into the first sentence? Careless copywriting alert.

Let’s try to rephrase the ad copy:

Flash sale! Get 20% off everything in our online store! Time to bring some color to your summer wardrobe.

Now, the reader will immediately get the most important message.

7. Keep it short

One of my favourite website conversion rate optimization rules (I think it might have come from Peep Laja) is that every element on your website must contribute to the conversion. If it doesn’t, remove it.

The same rule applies to social media copywriting.

If a word/sentence doesn’t contribute anything new to your message, leave it unwritten.

As a result, you will have a clear copy that takes less time to read while delivering the key message faster. That’s pretty useful considering that people don’t have a remarkably long attention span these days.

Once you’ve written the first version of your ad/social media post copy, take a break, then review to remove any unnecessary wording. Also, reword complex sentences to make them short and easy to grasp.

The above sentence actually started as a longer version:

Another simple hack to make your copywriting more engaging is to…

8. Use active language

Intercom’s Facebook ad that you saw above had one key message that can be framed in several ways:

• Your customers can now be supported faster and smarter
• You can now support your customers faster and smarter
• Intercom helps you support your customers faster and smarter
• Support your customers faster and smarter (original)

If I had to choose, I would go with the original version. Why? Because it almost tells you to go and do it.

Using active language suggests that there is a logical action the reader should follow, nudging them to take that step.

Airbnb is using a question to get people’s attention and as they answer “yes” in their mind, they’re told to “choose from …”

This is a good formula for Facebook copywriting: Question + a logical solution.

9. Organize and format your copy

Sometimes, you’ve got a lot to tell. If you can’t cut anything out, look for ways to turn a long paragraph into well-structured copy.

For example, take this copy from a BarkBox Facebook ad:

1 day left! Get a free upgrade and get a bonus toy in every BarkBox for your entire subscription (up to a $150 value!) As a member of the Extra Toy Club, you’ll receive a monthly delivery of 3 mind-blowing toys, tailored to your dog’s size, 2 full bags of drool-worthy treats, and an all-natural chew.

That’s a looong copy to put into a single paragraph.

But then again, all of this information is potentially relevant to various readers.

What do? 🤷

Here’s how BarkBox solved the issue – by using caps lock, parentheses and a lot of numbers (easier to read than words).

Another way to accommodate more copy into the Facebook post format is to use bullet points (or emojis as bullet points) to list several benefits/services.

If MindTitan had listed all their services in a single line, separated by commas, it would be one hell of a difficult ad to read. It got a lot better as we organized the information into a formatted list.

Here are a few simple formatting-related copywriting hacks:

• Use caps lock to outline words like LIMITED TIME and FREE. (Too bad Facebook does not support bold copy in ads and posts.)
• Use line spacing to split long paragraphs into multiple text blocks.
• Use bullet points for listing several benefits or products.
• Insert emojis in Facebook ads/posts to catch more attention.

10. Write as if you were talking

Many people hear a voice in their head while reading.

If you’re one of them, know you’re not alone. According to one study, 82.5% of contributors said they did hear an inner voice when reading to themselves, 10.6% said they didn’t, and the status of the remaining contributors was unclear.

To make your copywriting easy to read, make it easy to pronounce.

You can literally read your Facebook post’s copy out loud to yourself (or use that inner voice) to see if it sounds natural in spoken word.

For example, this Facebook ad by MOO sounds natural when read out loud.

This Facebook ad by Harvest not so much.

How to make your ad copy sound more natural:

• Use short sentences that would be easy to read out loud.
• Use questions and exclamation marks to make your copywriting sound more alive.
• Use natural wording that’s not too complex (and avoid industry jargon)

Additional social media copywriting hacks

To focus on the benefit for the reader (you), to cut straight to the point, and to follow other best practices listed above, I’ll just share some small yet effective hacks as a list.

11. Make it interesting to read – use fun and irregular wording.

12. However, never sacrifice the meaning over fancy wording.

13. Avoid double meanings – your message should be straightforward.

14. Be consistent in your brand’s tone of voice across all messaging.

15. Have someone proofread your copy before you hit publish.

16. End with a strong call-to-action

Last not least, end every social media post and Facebook ad with a call-to-action. Let the reader know what’s the next step.

For example, Squarespace tells people to start a free trial. The New York Times might have benefitted from adding a “Sign up today to save 60%…” at the end of the ad copy.

Don’t leave the reader hanging there after seeing your ad.

Successful Facebook copywriting starts by knowing your audience, your message, and how to best frame it.

It ends by taking the reader one small step ahead in your marketing funnel.

The post Copywriting for Facebook and Social Media – How to Make Sentences Make Sense appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

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

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

Or rather, “not exactly.”

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

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

But first, let’s make one thing clear…

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

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

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

That’s not true either.

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

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

How over-optimization may damage your Facebook campaigns

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do they work?

Yes and no.

Sometimes, no optimization is better than over-optimization

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

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

That’s when over-optimization happens.

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

Why?

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

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

Not good.

So what is the silver bullet here?

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

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

Just test it for once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus on initial campaign setup rather than optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimizing you Facebook ads based on results

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

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

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

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

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

What about third-party Facebook advertising tools?

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

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

Facebook ads management tool – Source: AdEspresso

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

The answer is a big “no.”

If you come to think of it…

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

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

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

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

When to use Facebook ad optimization hacks?

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

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

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

Set up a custom ad schedule

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

Optimize your ad placement

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

Set up A/B tests

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

Set up Custom & Lookalike Audiences

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

Monitor your ad frequency

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

Select the right bidding option

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

Conclusion?

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

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

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

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