Paid advertising is all about the ROI.
The goal is to get as much revenue as you can as a result of each advertisement you create and publish, while keeping your total ad spend as low as you can.
Facebook ads usually involve a lot of trial and error.
You might find yourself experimenting with different imagery, copy, and audience targeting before you figure out what sticks.
It's different for every business, but there are a few general best practices that apply universally.
In a recent blog post from Hootsuite, contributor Ana Gotter offers a few tips on how to get the most out of your Facebook ad budget.
She recommends optimizing for click-through rate (CTR), which can increase your ads' “relevance score.”
This score is assigned by Facebook to every campaign, using proprietary algorithms that aren't publicly known.
If Facebook assigns you a high relevance score, your cost per click (CPC) will be lower.
Here's her advice for stretching each dollar you spend on Facebook ads as far as you can, minimizing your CPC while getting a lot more engagement from your audience.
Understand your relevance score
Your relevance score will directly affect CPC, so it’s important to watch it carefully and understand it.
[image source: Hootsuite]
Facebook ads will provide a relevance score on every campaign you run. As the name suggests, this score tells how you relevant your ad is to your target audience.
We don’t know the exact algorithm Facebook uses to calculate it, making it a black box metric, but we know that positive interactions like engagement, clicks, and saving the ad will improve the score, while hiding the ad will lower the score.
Facebook prioritizes ads with high relevance scores, and will actually lower your CPC if you have high scores. This lowers the cost of your ads, sometimes significantly. Because of this, you should be watching all of your campaigns’ relevance score, and either adjust or stop campaigns that have scores on the lower end.
Focus on increasing CTR
Increasing click-through rate (CTR) will increase your relevance score, and thus lower your Facebook ads cost.
- Some of the best ways to increase your ads’ CTRs include:
- Always use desktop newsfeed ad placements, which generate higher CTRs.
- Use appropriate CTA buttons. “Learn More” will sometimes drive more clicks than “Shop Now” for cold audiences that don’t trust you yet.
- Write simple, clean copy that gets right to the point and doesn’t leave users guessing at what they’re clicking on or why they should.
- Keep your frequency (or the number of times the same user sees the same ad) as low as possible. If frequency gets too high, your CTR will fall.
Image source: AdEspresso
Without a doubt, though, the most effective way to increase your CTR is to run highly-targeted campaigns for niche audiences. Which brings us to our next tip…
Split test images and copy
You should A/B test everything if you want to keep your CPC low. It doesn’t matter if you’ve come up with the most genius offer ever—you still need to split test it. Create different versions of the same ad campaign that use different images, videos, and copy (both in the description and the headline).
[image source: Hootsuite]
Not only will this help you see what your audience actually prefers, allowing you to run the campaigns with higher CTRs and pausing the ones that are lackluster, it will also keep your ads fresh and interesting to the users who see them.
This keeps frequency down, engagement up, and your spending low.
You can find more Facebook tips over at Hootsuite, including three more ways to bring down your CPC.
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