Your complete guide to optimising your Facebook ads for success

Why is Facebook Ad Optimisation important?

When you invest in advertising, your key goal is probably to drive results for your business and get the most from the money you spend. You’ll also want your ads to reach the right people so you know your budget isn’t being wasted. 

Optimising your Facebook ads can do exactly this. It helps to tailor your ads based on demographics, interests, and behaviours and allows you to program them to achieve certain goals. 

So, let’s take a deeper look at exactly how you can optimise your Facebook Ads. 

How to optimise Facebook Ads?

1. Install the Facebook pixel

If you’ve never heard of the Facebook pixel, it works in the background of your Facebook website to track website visitors and how they interact with your site. This is so it can gather data, and it’s this data that will inform you of your customer’s behaviour so that you can optimise your ads to reach the right sort of customers.

It presents an opportunity to create new ads that are more specific to your target audience, which means that the ads you create will generate more effective results.

Installing the pixel is not a must, but it’s a strong recommendation!

2. Choose the correct goals and objectives 

When you set up your Facebook Ads, you have to select the objectives of your ads. The objectives that you choose influence how Facebook delivers your ad. These include:

• Brand awareness and reach
• Engagement and traffic (consideration)
• Conversions and sales

For example, if you’re an e-commerce business with a small customer base, you might want to focus on brand awareness and reach before promoting ads that aim for conversions and sales.

So, when you’re choosing your advertising objectives, ask yourself, ‘What do I want to achieve with this ad campaign?’ Always choose what is best suited to your business because ads can and will change, and your goals and objectives will change as your business—hopefully—grows. 

3. Decide who your target audience is

If you’re not sure on who you should be targeting with your ads, we highly recommend that you take some time to understand your audience first. 

You can use Facebook’s Audience Insights to gather data about your potential customers’ interests, behaviours, demographics and more. This information will help you to tailor your ads to the people most likely to be interested in your products or services. 

Consider factors such as age, gender, occupation, location, hobbies and interests or past purchasing behaviours. This will help you to ensure that your ads are seen by the right people and the people who are most likely to buy from you in the future. 

Making sure a specific set of people sees your ads ensures you’re not wasting budget on people who are never going to buy from you. 

4. Choose the right bidding strategy

Your bidding strategy will determine your ad spend and can help you get the most from your budget. 

You can choose from: 

• Cost Per Click (CPC) - best for driving traffic to your website 
• Cost Per Impression (CPM) - ideal for driving brand awareness 
• Cost Per Action (CPA) - Optimal for conversions such as sales or sign-ups 

We recommend experimenting with different bidding strategies depending on your campaign objectives and monitoring performance to adjust bids accordingly. 

5. Utilise automation 

While you’ll need to know how your ads are performing, it’s not always a bad idea to let Facebook control your ads. Facebook can automatically rotate your ads so that they all have a chance of being noticed by your target audience. Then, the ads that receive more engagements are shown more because they’re the ones Facebook recognises as meeting your goals. 

Facebook will also turn off some ads based on how well they’re doing, or increase your budget when ads are performing well. You can monitor all of these elements manually, but automation means it’s one last thing for you to think about. 

It’s still important to delve into the data and understand it so you can design and create effective ads in the future. 

Automation acts as a way to monitor the efficiency of your ads and shows you how you could improve performance. 

6. Ensure that the content of your ads is engaging and creative

Your ads, targeting and budget could be optimised to their full extent, but if your ads aren’t engaging, your target audience just isn’t going to pay any attention to your ads! 

The visual and textual elements of your ad will play a significant role in its success. Here are a few tips for optimising your ad creative: 

• Use high-quality images or videos: Eye-catching visuals stop users from scrolling and draw attention to your ad. Ensure that your images and videos are high-quality and relevant to your key message. 
• Write compelling copy: Your ad should be clear, persuasive and directly related to the action you want users to take Use a strong call-to-action (CTA) to guide users on what to do next. 
• A/B Testing: Regularly test different versions of your ad (images, videos, headlines, copy, CTA buttons) to see what resonates best with your audience and refine based on performance. 

7. Analyse and adapt 

Regular analysis of your Facebook ad performance is crucial. Use Facebook Ads Manager to track metrics such as reach impressions, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and cost per action. These insights will help you understand what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to make informed adjustments to improve your campaigns. 

Key takeaways

Optimising your Facebook ads should be an ongoing process that involves understanding your audience, refining your strategies, and adapting based on performance data. By following these detailed steps, you can enhance the effectiveness of your Facebook advertising efforts, achieve better engagement, and increase ROI. Remember, the key to success is in testing, learning and evolving your strategies to align with user behaviours and preferences. 

If you’d like to know more about optimising your Facebook Ads and ensuring they’re performing well for your business, please contact our team or request a free audit. 

‍