Set your budget and give Facebook some time!

Have a budget you want to allocate to a Facebook ad without wanting anything in return? No, we didn’t think so. But sometimes that’s how you need to look at it, and Facebook’s latest video about their advertising platform gives you a HUGE reason why.

Mindset

First let us try to persuade you to change your mindset for the next time you run a Facebook ad. Understandably you will normally look at how much money you’re putting into your ad vs how much money you’re getting as a direct result. You spend £1000 on a Facebook ad this week, you’re hoping to get at least £1000+ in sales. Well let’s try a different approach, just for a month. What if you were to spend £1000 this week on 1 Facebook ad and not expect a penny in return? Perhaps you don’t have that sort of money to spend without at least trying to get it back, so what about £500? £500 for a week to test out a Facebook ad that may work and bring you thousands back in sales, or it may not work…

Conversions mean MORE conversions

Facebook’s latest video explains that the BEST targeting data you can give them is people that have done what you would like your ad to get more people to do. So if you’re setting up a website conversions ad optimised for checkouts, the ad needs to be bringing in around 2-4 checkouts per day so that it can build from that data. Facebook will then use the data of those people who have done what you want them to do, and find more people who are likely to do what you want them to do.

Targeting can be a constraint

With this in mind, if you set up the targeting for an ad that’s particularly narrow it will have a negative impact on the results. Facebook will look for people within your target audience that are likely to checkout, but if the target audience is small it may not be able to find many people. However if the target audience is literally “United Kingdom” then Facebook has millions of people to work with.

Catch 22

It’s really tough because if you set up your targeting too broad, you’re not likely to get initial checkouts but if you set it too narrow, you’re ad won’t optimise very well. This is where the start of our blog post comes in. Are you willing to spend a certain budget on an ad for a week that targets the broadest audience you can possibly bring yourself to target, and hope that it brings enough initial conversions for Facebook to optimise? If you are, then you could see yourself with a really well seasoned pixel that gives Facebook all the data it needs to keep growing your business…or you could lose the budget!

Any advertising is all about testing, whether it’s digital or not. When it comes to Facebook this is the latest method that we would test. One pointer that we could give you is to change your conversion. If you’re worried that you won’t get enough initial conversions for Facebook to then optimise the ad, try changing your conversion to ‘add to cart’ or something else that’s not as far along your funnel. If you’ve been trying Facebook ads and getting a lot of add to carts but not many conversions, firstly you should be looking at why this would be, and secondly you should start optimising your Facebook ads for add to carts because Facebook will have enough data to work with.

Happy Testing!