7 Tips to Optimize Your Facebook Ads

Facebook advertising may have been hit the hardest by Apple's privacy updates, but that doesn't mean it's going to lose its effectiveness. In fact, according to Sprout Social, Facebook ad revenue alone grew 56% in 2021, and according to Statista, there are 10 million active ad accounts.

https://www.statista.com/

Facebook ads are still strong and Facebook advertisers are plentiful, which means you need to know how to optimize your Facebook ads to stand out and make the most of your ad spend.

That also means you've come to the right place, because in this article, I'm going to provide a roundup of the top 10 ways to optimize Facebook ads.

How to optimize your Facebook ads

1. Perfect your account structure

Too many times, advertisers plan their campaigns with targeting in mind, thus grouping campaigns by audiences. The better way to do this is to create campaigns based on bid strategy or objective, and grouping targeting by ad sets.

2. Configure Meta Pixel & Conversion API

Facebook pixel is a piece of code added to your website. It gathers information that enables you to monitor conversions from Facebook ads, optimize ads, create targeted audiences, and remarket to website visitors who have already taken some sort of action. Conversion API is a server side version of Facebook’s pixel that is used alongside the pixel for better tracking, due to privacy measures, you’ll want to use both to get a more accurate look into ads performance.

3. Dig into Facebook page engagement

One of the most effective Facebook retargeting campaigns is to serve ads to previous website visitors. For example, you can retarget visitors who signed up for your newsletter, submitted a contact form, or viewed a specific product page. But with iOS 14+ can opt-out of being tracked for retargeting purposes, making these website retargeting audiences aren't as reliable as they used to be.

That being said, the next best retargeting tactic would be to retarget users based on how they interact with your Facebook page. Since these audiences rely on Facebook's first-party data, they will be precise.

4. The fast takeoff method

When you launch a Facebook ad campaign, it takes some time before Facebook can truly begin tailoring its ad delivery to meet your unique objectives because it needs some time to gather useful data.

Your ad may not be served as frequently if you have a tight budget, which will make it take longer to move past the learning phase.

The fast takeoff technique involves creating your Facebook ad campaign as usual, followed by setting a budget that is higher than what you anticipate spending. When the campaign receives 10,000 impressions, scale it back to your original budget. This will expedite the learning process and provide data for your optimizations.

5. Parallel interests

When building interest targeting audiences, we tend to focus on targeting direct interests, but with parallel interests, if you were advertising toys, you might choose to target kids' clothing instead of just "toys" as an interest. Alternatively, if you're marketing exercise equipment, you might target individuals who enjoy electronic music or nutritious food.

6. Influencer audiences

Even if you are targeting the right interests, it is impossible to predict the size of an audience until you have selected it. Some audiences are too small to exist on their own, and others are getting smaller due to privacy laws changes.

What you can do, however, is a little market research into the pages your followers are following and liking. Not pages of direct competitors, but of influencers and adding them to your audience targeting.

7. Automated rules

Facebook has an excellent tool to create automated rules for ad optimization. We all know that optimizing your ads can be time consuming and involves continuous tweaking. With automated rules, you can:

• Adjust ad budgets based on how well they perform.
• Increase bids if your not serving as many impressions
• Pause low-performing ads

However, keep in mind that if you make any adjustments to your campaigns, you must give Facebook at least 24 hours before you can draw any conclusions. You should also give Facebook enough time to calibrate its delivery optimizations.

Where these optimizations cost more than they return

Each tip above has a situation where it costs more than it gives back, and the mechanism is usually visible in the account within a week if you know what to look for.

• The fast takeoff on an unattended campaign. The higher budget is meant to run until the impression mark, however the catch is that nobody is watching when it gets there. You then pay takeoff prices for ordinary delivery. Put an automated rule on the impression count so the cut-back happens without you.
• Automated rules that fire on noise. The mistake most people make the first time is pausing ads after one bad day. The rule then pauses and relaunches ads on random variance, and every relaunch resets learning. Give rules a multi-day window and a minimum spend before they act.
• Page-engagement retargeting at small scale. These audiences are precise, and the downside is that they are small. Frequency climbs, cost per result follows, and the audience burns out. Cap frequency or blend engagement audiences with your customer lists.
• Parallel interests that drift from purchase intent. It is counterintuitive that a nutrition interest can beat a fitness-equipment interest, and sometimes it does. That said, the further the interest sits from the product, the more reach you buy without relevance. Run parallel interests in their own ad sets so the trade-off is measurable.
• Structuring by objective when each ad set is starved. Campaigns grouped by objective are the right default, except when the split leaves individual ad sets with too little data to exit learning. In practice, consolidating audiences is the fix, even if it feels like giving up control.

How we run an optimization pass on client accounts

An optimization pass on a client account follows a fixed order on our paid media engagements, because the tips above interact. The audit comes first: where spend is going to ad sets that never leave learning, which audiences overlap, what a customer is worth. Measurement is next, and it is where pixel and Conversions API work happens: both channels live, deduplicated, and checked before any structure changes, so later decisions rest on complete conversion data. Then the rebuild, with campaigns grouped by objective and targeting held at the ad set level. Automated rules are the last thing we switch on, once there is enough history for them to act on signal. From there the account runs on a weekly cycle where losing ads lose budget and winners keep it. In our work with the ASU+GSV Summit, the annual summit where education, talent and venture capital meet, paid media alongside conversion rate optimization reached a 27x peak return on ad spend, sold 15,000 tickets and sold out the summit (case study).

To wrap up, here is the list of how to optimize your Facebook ads:

1. Perfect your account structure
2. Configure Meta Pixel & Conversion API
3. Dig into Facebook page engagement
4. The fast takeoff method
5. Parallel interests
6. Influencer audiences
7. Automated rules