Here’s a practical checklist for reviewing your Facebook Advertising.
If you answer mostly yes to the following, you’re in good shape.If you answer mostly no, you have a lot of work to do.
- Are you using Facebook Business Manager instead of merely boosting posts?
- Do you have a structured campaign approach based on a clear campaign plan or are your campaigns and ads created willy nilly without a clear structure?
- Are you using a consistent naming convention for your campaigns, ad sets and ads?
- Are you using UTM tracking URLs to track your Facebook ad traffic to landing pages and the resulting conversions from this traffic?
- Are you carefully choosing your ad placements (Facebook Newsfeed, Instagram Newsfeed, Messenger, Audience Network etc) or just accepting the default settings (hint: the Audience Network placement is a waste of money)
- Are you testing different audience targeting options based on the ideal audience for your products or services?
- Are you using lookalike audiences based on a converted customer custom list (upload an email list of your best customers to Facebook and the algorithms will find and target similar people on the Facebook or Instagram platform)
- Have you defined what the conversion events on your website are e.g. complete a lead form/complete a sale/download a PDF?
- Are you using the Facebook Pixel to optimise for conversion events from your advertising and to target people who have previously visited your website?
- Are you testing different ad formats e.g. single image, multi-image carousel, video, story?
- Do you have a clear messaging strategy for each of the ideal personas or audiences for your products or services and do your ads reflect this messaging strategy?
- Do you have clearly defined daily budgets for each ad set and do these budgets tie up with your overall marketing budget? You do have a marketing budget, right?
- Have you defined benchmarks for Facebook Advertising for cost per lead, cost per sale and revenue?
- Have you created campaign-specific landing pages for your Facebook Campaigns?
- Are your advertising landing pages optimised for conversion(visitor to lead/sale/download) for whatever your defined conversion events are, including on mobile? You need a clear call to action, landing page imagery that aligns with your advertising material and concise yet powerful landing page sales copy to inform and convert visitors
Once the Facebook Advertising basics above are in place you will need to continuously test and optimise your campaigns to ensure they keep performing according to your cost per lead, cost per sale and revenue benchmarks for Facebook Advertising.