If we’re completely honest, since the iOS14 update Facebook ads have given us quite the headache. Reporting has been way off, and getting any new campaigns to perform well has been really tough for many projects we’ve been working on. Certain objectives like Facebook Lead Forms, Reach and Engagement have been performing just as well as always because the results/actions are all native to Facebook so Facebook can easily track performance and optimise the campaigns. But running any type of website conversion campaign has been far more hit and miss. Facebook can’t record all of the conversions due to the iOS14 update and therefore can’t optimise as well.
However, we’ve noticed a little trick that seems to be really helping our campaigns perform much better. Before we go into details we’d just like to recommend that you get Google Analytics fully set up for your website and start using that to track all of your traffic and results – it’s the most reliable way in our experience.
Create 5 identical ads:
We’ve always liked to create at least 2 identical ads in any ad set. It just seems to force Facebook into pushing one of them to perform a lot better than the other. The worst-case scenario is that they force each other to perform better and you have 2 ads that are pushing each other for better results. What we would usually do then is switch off the ad that isn’t performing as well, and duplicate the ad that is. Then repeat. We started to notice that every time we duplicated the winning ad, the duplicate would underperform. No matter how many times we did it after we had enough data, the duplicate ad just wouldn’t bring any results. So we needed to try something different…
Instead what we did was create 5 identical ads for each ad set right from the beginning. Then as time went by it would be very clear which ads were performing and which weren’t, and all we had to do was switch the underperformers off. This way Facebook would be forced to spend more budget on the performers, and very often we find that we end up with just 1 ad running per ad set and it performs great.
It’s definitely worth a try!
