Continuous testing allows for deeper insights.
Whether it’s A/B testing creatives or expanding lookalike audiences, the benefits of experimenting with new targeting and creative formats are endless. Learnings that are discovered during the off-season can help better prepare brands for when they need to drive the most results. Some creative and audience tests to consider include:
The most common strategy for driving lower-funnel results usually entails some form of retargeting, whether it’s reengaging past purchasers or users who have visited your website. While this remains one of the most effective methods for driving conversions, scaling up your campaigns may become an issue based on the size of your retargeting pool. To counter this, brands should consider adding Interest and Behavioral segments to lower-funnel campaigns to increase maximum reach while maintaining revenue as the primary objective.
While it’s tempting to implement an extremely segmented structure in your campaigns for maximum control, consolidating where possible and allowing Facebook’s algorithms to optimize can lead to stronger performance and increased scale.
Campaigns that share the same objectives should be combined, allowing Facebook to more easily determine which audiences/tactics are driving the most efficient results. Likewise, overly segmented audiences can limit performance by preventing top-performing ads from delivering enough impressions to result in a conversion.
Best practices include implementing the Campaign Budget Optimizer (CBO) to allow the algorithms to optimize delivery in real time toward those ad sets that are driving the greatest results. It’s also beneficial to set a campaign daily spend limit to ensure your budgets aren’t exhausted too quickly.
Additional control over your delivery can also be obtained by adding minimum spend requirements at the ad set level, although it’s important to remember that some budget should remain unallocated to allow Facebook to spread the remaining spend across the audiences that it deems most efficient.
It’s no surprise that video ads have become more regularly utilized over the past few years due to their ability to showcase a variety of products while complimenting a brand’s unique identity. Put simply, videos allow users to easily recognize the brand through visual cues. To achieve immediate brand recognition, be sure to follow Facebook’s best practices for video:
Another way to get the most out of your video units is by reengaging users that watched them to completion. Creating a custom audience of previous video viewers and serving them ads that feature products shown in the video is a great way to sequentially target those that have already expressed an interest in your brand.
Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) allow brands to target users based on the products they viewed or interacted with on the brand’s website. This presents opportunities to segment your audiences based on which collections users were closest to purchasing by showing them the individual products that they either viewed or added to their carts.
This is typically one of the most effective forms of retargeting as these users took one of several steps toward completing their purchase, but fell off somewhere along the way. Once a catalog or product feed is linked to your account, Facebook will personalize the ads each user sees, enticing them to return to site and complete the purchase.
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