EMBRACING THE UPLIFT

With more people than ever spending their time on social media platforms, companies are embracing social adverts to get their products in front of potential prospects.

Although it’s great news for advertisers that more people are online, depending on your industry, it could also mean your competition is stiffer. Remember, this is not just competition from your industry but competition across the board.

MORE PEOPLE = MORE COMPETITION

Let’s look at an example situation. Let’s take myself for example, I’m in my mid 30’s (I know I don’t look a day over 18!) I enjoy keeping fit with yoga and body pump. I have a huge interest in paddleboarding, I love interior design and before lockdown, we started looking at moving house. I shop online a fair bit with this increasing recently, from buying gifts from a boutique down the road to buying pants on ASOS, to purchasing workout weights on Amazon! 

What am I being targeted with? I am seeing a lot of clothing adverts, I am seeing a lot of workout ads, I am seeing adverts for new home developments, I am seeing homeware adverts, I am seeing software adverts, I am seeing e-learning ads. All these companies are from different industries BUT they are competing against each other for my attention.

Let’s look at 6 things you should be doing to optimise those social adverts!

  • 1. Placement

    In the Facebook ad platform, you should not be using the same creative for all your placements – i.e. the creative for Instagram stories should be different to the Facebook newsfeed creative. Look at the different ad sizes and specs to tailor your creative to the placement. Does the placement allow for text? If not, make sure your image is powerful enough to get your message across – try to limit any text you have on an image to 20% max. 

    You can customise text & image for the placements – this is a great idea so you can mix up your messaging, I always like it when I see an advert on Facebook and then go to Instagram and see the same advert but the text is different – showing me a different message. It makes the advert more interesting and you can get different messaging across to your prospect.

  • 2. Multiple text optimisation

    Facebook rolled out a new feature called Multiple Text Optimisation, you should already have this feature but if not you will get it very soon. The text variation feature lets you add up to five different text versions for your ad’s primary text, headline and description. This feature is available for single image or video ads that use the Traffic, App Installs or Conversions objectives. Use multiple text options to highlight different aspects of your product or service. They will show different combinations of text to different people based on what they’re more likely to respond to. The frustrating thing about this however is that you can’t report on the different variations – really annoying!

  • 3. Have 2-3 creatives

    Facebook is super clever! I always say you should have 2-3 creatives in an ad set so Facebook can show different creatives to different people. It knows which people interact better with certain creatives and it will learn what creatives push sales for a particular person! Have a static image and a slideshow/video/carousel and let Facebook show these different creatives.

    One thing to note, if your static image for example is getting more sales than your slideshow, don’t turn the slideshow off, as long as the ad set is getting good results, leave both creatives on – let Facebook do the optimisation.

  • 4. Messaging

    Here we go back to marketing basics. What is it you are trying to sell and why should a person buy it? What makes your product unique, why should someone part with their cash for your product or service?

    If you have a video, those first few seconds really count, don’t leave important messaging to the end, you need to catch their attention in the first few seconds or they will simply scroll past your ad.

  • 5. Don’t touch me!

    Try if you can to not make any changes to your adverts in the first 7 days. This is when Facebook is in its ‘learning phase’. If you start tweaking text and images during the first 7 days, it re-sets the learning and this can cost you more in CPC’s and CPA’s.

  • 6. Have you got the right optimisation?

    What are you optimising your advert for? Landing page views, clicks, purchases? Let’s say you’re an online store and your main goal is to get people to purchase from your advert. In theory, you would pick ‘conversions’ and ‘purchases’ as your objective. However, Facebook really struggles to learn if the ‘result’ (purchases in this case) is below 50 in the first 7 days. So, if you expect less than 50 ‘results’ in the first 7 days, you should change your objective so something like ‘add to cart’ rather than purchases as this will probably have more results. This will mean Facebook can learn better and will bring your overall KPI’s down.

  • Thumb Stopping?

    Before you make your adverts live, think, IS MY ADVERT THUMB-STOPPING? If the answer is no, look at the above advice and see how you can improve it. 

    Hope you found this useful, stay safe and give me a shout if you want any support with your social ads!