It's a common question that has had many different answers since Facebook advertising first started. What is the best campaign structure to achieve optimal results?
In this episode, I'll review what seems to be working best for me and my clients as we enter Q4 2022.
Transcript
Well, today we're going to talk a little bit more about Facebook ads, how it's going today, and particularly, what is the best campaign structure that I'm seeing in the accounts that I run for my businesses, as well as some of my clients. As you know, things are always changing, so I try to stay on top of it. And you know, Meta doesn't make it very easy, between all their little optimization changes to all the changes in lingo if you go into your account today, you know, the texted the way things are described, may seem different than they were even a few weeks ago, you might publish something, and then your account gets disabled.
That happened to me too, today for one of my client's accounts, because there's a bug going on at Meta right now where lots of accounts are getting disabled. And they know about this, by the way, they know this is a bug, it's not because you actually did anything wrong. It's something they are trying to fix. So luckily, I recovered that account today, it took one review, so good there. But you know, all that being said, Meta is not going to make things as easy for us as they should. Even though we provide them with a lot of money, we spend a lot of money on advertising, and they kind of just use this as a foregone conclusion, right? It feels like that sometimes. But nonetheless, if you put the time in, it's still the best advertising network there is.
You have Google, it's highly competitive, especially whenever you're going on search bid campaigns, you know, I've seen bids as high as like 20 bucks a click, that's not very sustainable, especially if you're just starting out or, or an E-commerce brand. And you don't have a super high ticket offer.
You have TikTok ads, which are doing great for a lot of people. But the problem there is that creative fatigue so quickly. And the type of creative that you have to create for Tiktok is very much more personal, you have to get really into it with your videos, you can't just make a static ad, you can't just make little animation, or you can't just make a simple video, it has to be more planned out, in a sense and more produced in a sense, not necessarily with better cameras, and lights. But more produced in sense of the kind of hook you use and, and the way you present whatever it is you're selling.
All that said, Facebook ads are still the best. And as we enter the holiday season, I thought it'd be great to come onto the podcast and tell you what has been working for me, my clients, and the brands that I own and run ads for. So the key that I've come across recently, is simplification. It used to be where you used to want to have multiple campaigns in an account with multiple ad sets, and in there, all doing different things, and figuring out what works best. The idea now is to keep data together as much as possible. So how do you figure this out? The way I like to look at it is based on different product categories. Now, say you're an apparel brand, if you have t-shirts, you want all your T-shirts in one campaign. You don't want to split up different campaigns for different designs. That doesn't seem to be working right now for the accounts that I've been in.
Instead, you want to have all those ads within ad sets for all your different t-shirt designs, within those ad sets within one campaign. Meaning, within an ad set in that one campaign, you can have multiple different designed T-shirts or T-shirt designs as different ads within that ad set. Facebook will then figure out within that ad set, which is the best ad, and which is the best product. Now you might be wondering, as this is a thing that I come across as well, you ask yourself the question, well, I don't just want to sell this one style, I want to sell my whole catalog. I mean, great if I sell out of one style, but you know, I have this other one, it's here, it's in stock, I want to move this one too. Unfortunately, I have not cracked the code here. The only thing I can suggest is that maybe you need a better creative or that particular style. That's the only thing that makes sense.
I have had situations, where in an ad set, I have two different products, two different creatives, and they're actually receiving a very similar amount of conversions per day. So Facebook is splitting the budget between those two ads, because they're both doing well, people are liking that creative, they're liking that product, so it's splitting the budget between those two ads those two products efficiently, which makes you able to scale the campaign, and it continues that trend.
So the key is there. If you have one product, and it's not doing as well as the other, think about maybe the product isn't that good, or maybe they don't like that particular product as much as your audience, or the creative needs to be better or different from what it currently is. So, when you're thinking about a campaign, what kind of ad sets do you put in there? One thing that I'm finding to work very well, in some accounts, not all is to always have a broad campaign with no targeting whatsoever, except the country that you are targeting. So if you're targeting the US, that's all you'd put, you wouldn't mess with the age, you wouldn't add detailed targets, and you wouldn't add exclusions. lookalikes blah, blah, blah, blah, you wouldn't do any of that. Leave it completely open. With all the ads in that ad set.
The thought process here, with this particular structure, is that the creative itself will do the targeting for you. Now, I will say if you have more of a niche product, I've found this to be a little bit more restrictive than something that can help you.
If you have a product that's more broadly wanted, like, think about health and fitness, you know, that's a common thing amongst most people, most people want to be in better health, or to be more fit. That's a category that's more likely to work well, in a broad ad set. If you're making something that is very particular to a specific group, broad may not work as well. Nonetheless, you should try it. If you have enough data coming in, I'm talking you have if you're optimizing for purchases, if you're getting hundreds and hundreds of purchases per month, then lookalikes still may be a good option for you, that might be another ad set you want to add in to your campaign.
I've found anything over 4% seems to be doing well. Anything below 4% seems to be too restrictive because there's not enough data there. There's not enough of an audience size that Facebook can pull post apple. So think about more of that 4% to 10%. If you don't have that in purchases, if your E-commerce and you're trying to go for sales, maybe bring that back to add to cart if you have the numbers there.
If you're for leads, obviously you would go for the leads optimization event. If you're getting hundreds and hundreds a month, I would say be on the safe side three to four are 100 of those events per month, you can use the lookalike audiences, I think still effectively from the 4%, or, you can try just a 4%, or you can go higher. I've seen some have success with as high as the 10%, which is as high as it goes. And it gives you a pretty, pretty big audience. That's almost kind of broad, that gives Facebook a little initial data to work with. That's another audience that you can try.
Additionally, I like to throw in interests based as well. There are some in the Facebook ad marketing community that say interests are dead, they're a waste of time, and just go broad. I don't agree with that. If you are already spending, you know, maybe 50,000 a month, upwards of 75,000 a month, and you're more in that area, there's a possibility that maybe it won't work for you, but I'm going to gather that the majority of my audience that listens to this podcast, is probably more in the 5, 10, 25,000 or 50,000 or less per month area. If that's the case, there's still a great and bountiful amount of purchases or leads that can come from interest-based audiences. And I'd like to stack those audiences based on thoughts.
So you have one stacked audience of similar interests, and then you have another stacked audience of similar interests, those are going to be two different ad sets. Now all of these should have the same exact ads in them for whatever you're doing, whatever that product category is. So if you're doing t-shirt designs, you would have all your different t-shirt designs, I wouldn't do more than maybe five at a time, five different ads at a time, and then you're going to run those in all those different ad sets.
Now, some might also say that every marketing is dead, I don't agree with that either. Believe it or not, it depends on the amount of data that you're bringing in, and your company's ability to feed those lists for the remarketing campaigns. Again, if you're getting hundreds and hundreds of optimization events per month, which means you're probably getting thousands and thousands and thousands of visitors per month, you may have the ability to do one of those remarketing audiences. If that is the case, then you should in that same campaign along with your prospecting ad sets include a remarketing ad set. And as long as you're doing campaign budget optimization or advantage, plus whatever they want to call it, now, Facebook's automatically going to spread that budget across all those different ad sets. And guess what, it's going to feed whatever is getting the optimization that you need.
So, if remarketing is killing it, it's going to feed a little bit more budget there. But it'll always be less automatically than any of your prospecting campaigns because the audiences are smaller. And so I've put this to the test, and it's worked for multiple clients and some of my brands as well, to where not even the broad is getting the best results. It's some of my interest-based stuff is doing better than look-alikes, and the broad campaigns. And I'm also seeing some really good low-cost-per-purchase remarketing events happening within that remarketing audience. So you shouldn't just completely get rid of it.
So you would do this for every different category. So I'm using the example of T-shirts, and T-shirt designs. Say you also make hats, the hats would be a different campaign because they're different product categories. So when you think about it, you can think about it as you have your ecommerce site, and think about how you make those different categories, those different collections, you can think in that same process as well, in terms of how many different campaigns you should make. If you're in the lead space, you probably don't need multiple campaigns, unless they're completely different offers.
So if you're in the home services industry, maybe you have one for HVAC you have a campaign for HVAC and you have your different ad sets there and then, maybe you have a different campaign for plumbing or something, something that's completely different. Although I beg to say, depending on the data, I might want to put those together, it's hard to say exactly what I would do there. But it's some, it's something that you'd have to think about. But I'm just trying to give you the examples so that you understand what I'm trying to say.
So that is what I'm seeing work the best right now. Make sure you have your pixel all set up, make sure you have your domain verification set up, your aggregate aggregated events set up as well, all those things come into play.
Now, as we get into the holiday season with Facebook ads, I mentioned earlier that I had one of my client's accounts get banned temporarily for a second made me sweat a little bit, this tends to happen a lot around this time of year.
So if it happens to you, and you know you're following the policy, don't fret too much, because there is, I have confirmed with some people, there seems to be a bug that meta knows about that is causing erroneous Ad Account bans. And it's like, as soon as you publish something, the account gets banned. So just be careful, look over your creatives and your landing pages before you publish anything, and make sure everything's good.
Look at the text on your website and your landing page, and make sure there are not any terms that might cause an ad to get rejected and trigger one of these bands. Because during the holiday season, they have so much, just advertising coming through and delivering, their bots can't handle things, so they try to put it in full automation mode almost, and then you end up with these things kind of happening. So just throwing that out there. And if it happens to you, just go to your business manager request to review, and don't just select one of the prefilled options as well. There's going to be another option that says others actually type out why you think you don't deserve to get banned, one to two sentences max, just really quickly, that seems to do the trick. Just that out, throw that in there, along with the knowledge that I'm sharing today on this other stuff.
Well, that's it. Thanks so much for joining me on today's Ultimate Marketer Podcast. I'm sorry, I've been away. I'm going to try to be better about that, and make sure to visit Dropkickads.com.