When optimizing your ads, there are a lot of things you need to understand and look out for. If you want to profitably run your campaigns, you must understand what FB is trying to say.

One way of doing this is by knowing what metrics to look at… and in this article, you’ll know exactly just that.

Once you get a better understanding of how your campaigns work, you’ll be able to scale them effectively which would mean a lot more money for you.

If that’s something you’d like to have, then keep reading.

Why Optimize Campaigns

This is pretty obvious. Optimizing campaigns simply gives you better results.

But it doesn’t just stop there.

When you optimize your campaigns, you need to check the different variables that are affecting your results. By doing so, you’ll get to understand your funnel better, how your audience responds or what they respond to and which areas you need to improve on.

With that said, the more you check and learn about how your campaigns are doing, the more understanding you’ll get… and the more understanding you get, the more you’ll be able to make your campaigns perform better.

Before Everything Else, Your Pixel

To be able to effectively optimize your campaigns, you must be sure that your pixel is firing.

One way of checking this is by using the Facebook Pixel Helper.

The Facebook Pixel helper is a tool (downloadable through Google Chrome) that checks your website the Facebook Pixel code. If your website has the FB Pixel installed, the </> icon in your extension bar turns blue and tells you how many pixels are installed on the page.

This is a great tool that you can use for debugging your pixel.

There’s a lot of problems that can occur with your pixel and the with the Facebook Pixel Helper, you’ll be able to know what those problems are.

Learn more about how you can troubleshoot your Facebook Pixel here.

Optimizing Campaigns – What To Look Out For

To start off, when your Facebook Ads campaigns for ecommerce, there are usually 2 goals:

1 is to decrease the cost per acquisition (CPA) and the other is to increase the return on ad spend (ROAS) to have better profitability overall.

The question is, how do you achieve this?

The first thing you have to do is to know and understand what key metrics you should look at.

Let’s talk about it.

The Key Metrics To Look Out For

When optimizing campaigns, there are a lot of things I need to look out for:

The Cost Per Impressions (CPM), the Cost Per Click (CPC), the Click-Through Rate – Link Click (CTR-LC), View Content (VC), Add To Cart (ATC), Initiate Checkout (IC), Website Purchases, Website Purchases Conversion, Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) and Cost Per Purchase (CPA/CPP) are just some of them.

There are a lot more things to look at and keep in mind, but these are the main metrics I look at when I optimize campaigns.

These metrics help me understand what’s going on with my campaigns. They give me the data I need to know what I can do to make my campaigns better.

How Each Metric Affect The Other Metrics

Remember the 2 goals are to decrease the CPA and increase the ROAS.

To have a lower CPA, your CPC must decrease, and/or your conversion rate must increase. To increase your ROAS, your average order value (AOV) must increase and/or your CPA/CPP must decrease.

Assuming we’re running conversion campaigns optimized for purchase, let’s have some examples.

Example#1

Say you started off an ad set with a $10 CPM. A week after running that ad set, the CPM increased to $15. How would that affect your ad set?

Well, if your CPM increases, your CPC would also increase… and if your CPC increases, your CPA will also increase.

When your CPA increases, your overall profitability would go down.

Example#2

Say your CTR is usually at 2%.

You changed your creative, made a new copy and tested them out, and now your CTR increased to 4%. Assuming your CPM neither decreased nor increased, what do you think would happen?

Your CPC will decrease and eventually lead your CPA to decrease as well… and when your CPA decreases, your ROAS will increase.

“Will that always happen? Will your CPA always decrease when your CPC decreases?”

No, but generally, when your CPC decreases, you will get more people to go through your funnel… and when they convert down the funnel, then you’ll get more purchases. If they don’t, then you having a lower CPC won’t help you.

Example#3

Let’s assume that your CTR increased and your CPM decreased. Now you have more people who went to your site.

Will you get more purchases? Generally speaking, yes.

However, if people stop at your product page and don’t add to cart, then you won’t be getting any purchases.

You need to optimize your funnel first. You need to know what’s stopping people from adding to cart. What’s on your product page that stops people from adding to cart — and eventually buy?

Is it the price? Not enough social proof? Is it the copy? The visuals?

Knowing how your audience responds will help you optimize your funnel. It’s like getting instant feedback when you really understand what’s going on.

Ask yourself: If I was the customer, why wouldn’t I add to cart? Where would I go to first? What would I look at? What’s stopping me from clicking that bright red button?

Optimizing Campaigns – Analysis And Decision Making On Testing

Now that you know what you should look out for, you need to know how to decide when to cut off your ads and ad sets.

Let’s assume I’m only selling 1 product, I’m testing audiences and I’m leaving my ad sets to run at $20/day. Let’s also assume that I have winning ad creatives and my average CTR is at 5%, CPC is at $1, CPA is at $20.

Now, let’s say I’m running 10 ad sets with different audiences each (lookalikes or interests) and 3 ad creatives inside 1 ad set. I dupe these ads inside each ad set so now I have 6 (3 unique ads and 3 duped ads.)

Lastly, let’s assume that my site’s conversion rate is good enough to get you sales.

Here’s what I’d do…

For the first 2 days

I simply check for the ads and see if their CPC aren’t crazy high. If it is, I kill it and give it another chance the next day.

There isn’t really much we can do here since we’re only spending $20/ad set and it’s just a day or two. I usually just leave it out unless it’s doing really bad.

Sometimes I dupe that ad (and pause the previous one) because the bucket of audience you’re getting could be trash.

It’s really about testing and finding out what works and making decisions quickly based on the data that’s being presented.

For the next 2 days

I can see that my tests’ average CTR is at 4% and CPC is at $.5 and CPA is at $25. The first thing I look at is the purchase metric. Anything that got a purchase, I leave it out.

The next ones are the CTR and the CPC. Anything that’s below 5% CTR is and above $.5 CPC is dead.

I also check the ads inside the ad sets. Facebook can be biased to 1 ad even if it is not doing well, so it would be best to just turn off that ad and let FB optimize again for the other ones.

For the next 2 days

I’d check my ROAS and CPA first here. You can start assuming that the ad sets are starting to perform better. If your ROAS isn’t close to your desired number, kill it off.

Those that have been performing consistently, dupe them to higher budgets. Those that are showing volatility but are still profitable, keep them running but reduce their budget by around 10%.

Keep it running for the next few days and see how it’ll do.

For the next 2 days

This time, I have ad sets at higher budget ($100+ ad sets). You can be quick to decide here since these are at higher budgets relative to your average results.

This is where your new focus goes.

If it’s not working well, kill the ads inside and give it another chance the next day.

Make decisions when it spends a certain amount, reaches a certain number of impressions, etc. Think of what logical actions you can make based on your past results.

For the tests, just keep them running on the side and vertically scale them. Don’t keep duping them at lower budgets. You want to give Facebook at least 50 purchases a week so you have to make it your ad sets’ goal.

Before we continue

What you need to know is that this simply 1 way to optimize campaigns. You can use it as a guide if you want.

There are many more ways to optimize campaigns and most of the time it involves your site. There are different frameworks and methodologies when it comes to optimization.

It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. You simply must understand what your business needs to do to achieve your goals.

One thing you have to note is that it’s easier to change your site and make it convert better than to tweak an ad to get lower CPCs.

Optimizing Campaigns – What You Can Use

A lot of people find it hard to optimize campaigns, that it’s a long process and would take a lot of time to do.

They’re right, it is… especially scaling campaigns.

It’s a hassle to look at a lot of ad sets and ad creatives – finding out what’s working and what isn’t and making the necessary changes.

Luckily, there’s a way to make it easier and faster for you to look at your campaigns at a deeper and more specific level.

Breakdowns

When you’re trying to find which part of your audience would be best to show your ads to (age, gender, state, country, etc.) using the breakdowns is the best way to do so.

By using breakdowns, you’ll be able to double down on what’s working and avoid what isn’t.

Not only that, you’ll also be able to see trends on how your overall campaigns are doing.

How? By breaking down to “day”.

This is crucial. You’ll know when an ad set is dying out or when an ad set is killing it. You’ll know what’s increasing/decreasing and you’ll be able to make decisions based on the trends.

Try it out yourself. Break your campaigns down piece by piece and you’ll know exactly where to improve.

Filters

Have a lot of ad creatives running? Want to know which ads are working on a high-level viewpoint?

Use filters.

Filter using ad name, ad set name, campaign name. It is very important that you do this. Filters will let you know what’s working and what’s not.

Say you have 4 ad creatives running throughout your campaign and you want to see how 1 ad is doing. By using filters, it’ll be easy for you to see the stats of a specific ad.

Same goes with the ad set or campaign level.

Maybe you want to cut something out and focus on a few ad sets. You can do that too. Simply include a certain name or filter by selection and you’ll be able to do so.

Final Words

Facebook Ads is all about testing. What works for me may not work for you.

We have different markets, so we’re receiving different data. This is the reason why learning how to optimize campaigns is a game changer.

If you know what to look out for, and what actions you’re gonna take to improve your campaign’s performance, then you’ll be able to generate better results.

 

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