Facebook is one of the premier advertising platforms for businesses today. With a global reach and billions of active monthly users, it can be a powerful tool for increasing brand awareness, engaging your consumer base, generating leads, and ultimately driving sales.
Of course, any tool is only as good as its user. The same is true with Facebook advertising: it's only as effective as the level to which you optimize your ad creative. Interestingly, only 39% of marketers say that they feel successful at tracking their marketing efforts. One big factor that could play into this trend is the lack of knowledge around how to use marketing platforms, such as Facebook, to maximum effect.
In contrast, advertisers that do know how to use Facebook are unlocking new opportunities for growth on a daily basis. For instance, in response to a recent announcement by Facebook, many companies have begun using a new set of automated ad tactics known as the "Power 5." When used properly, and especially in combination with one another, these tactics can optimize direct-response ad performance, generate online sales, and efficiently scale across the Facebook family of apps. Let's dive into these 5 automated tactics, one at a time.
1. Account Simplification
A complicated ad account can prove to be a friction point for you as the advertiser, and ultimately for your consumers. For instance, in years past ad account setup often involved creating multiple campaigns and ad sets, leading to costly overlap and redundancy.
Now, you can simplify your ad account to include only a few campaigns, such as top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel. Within those few campaigns, Facebook's powerful AI will test out which ad sets are the highest performers, and then optimize your ad delivery in real-time.
When you simplify your ad account to improve efficiency, you may see almost immediate results in terms of click-through rate (CTR), leads, and sales. For instance, by simplifying their ad account Bombas saw a 2x increase in product purchases and a 23x increase in sales per ad set.
2. Campaign Budget Optimization
It's no shock that companies are always looking for ways to reduce their cost per conversion (CPC, or CPCon) rate. After all, why spend money on low-performing ad sets when you can get similar results from focusing exclusively on high performers?
The old way of operating Facebook Ads was to input your budget parameters at the ad set level. However, with Facebook's new CBO feature, the platform will find the best opportunity for results and automatically allocate more spend to top-performing sets — all in real-time.
With this capability in mind, it's clear that campaign budget optimization on Facebook is one way to maximize your campaign results while lowering costs. One example of a business that leveraged this tactic is Molekule. For them, campaign budget optimization yielded a 9% lower cost per purchase, and a 1.25x increase in return on ad spend (ROAS).
3. Automatic Placements
Facebook's programmatic ad-buy capabilities (aka "automatic placements") can ensure that your ads reach the right person at the lowest possible cost. These automatic placements can be customized to fit your budget, so you won't have to worry that certain conversions are costing your company more money than they're worth.
Automatic placements is a default option on the ad set level; just make sure the option is enabled, and you're good to go! This feature has yielded exceptional results for many advertisers. For example, Busuu's use of automatic placements netted them a 39% lower cost per install, and 21% higher ROAS.
4. Auto Advanced Matching
The Auto Advanced Matching feature in Facebook's tracking Pixel allows you to collect user data entered directly into forms on your website. Facebook can then use that data as matching information for their profile, which in turn allows the platform to track user events across multiple devices and ad blockers.
To turn on the Auto Advanced Matching feature, simply go into Pixel's settings and activate it. By doing so, you'll be able to accurately attribute conversions and increase audience size. On average, this leads to an 8% increase in matching Facebook users to online purchases.
5. Dynamic Ads
The Dynamic Ads feature is perhaps the most powerful tool that Facebook offers in terms of automated advertising. Basically, Dynamic Ads pull products from your online catalog and show them to the converting customers that are most likely to be interested. In effect, Dynamic Ads do the heavy lifting around personalization for you, thus enabling you to deliver product ads to high-value prospects from your website, app, or elsewhere. All you have to do is upload 5-10 images for the customer's product feed, along with accompanying captions, headlines, and link descriptions, and Facebook will do the rest for you.
Dynamic Ads boast a 2.8x higher CTR for advertisers that use them, as well as a 60% lower cost per purchase.
As the above information clearly shows, Facebook's "Power 5" set of automated ad tactics seems like a bright star in the future of social media marketing. By using these tactics, you can increase ROAS, reduce costs, broaden your consumer base, and drive sales. Of course, if you need help implementing these tactics in your next campaign, you can always reach out to an experienced media partner for assistance.
