3 Big Things We’ve Learned about Successful Facebook Campaigns

At TwoSix Digital, we believe in the power of online campaigns that fit a specific niche, event, activity, or initiative and directly align with your goals. As we have run many successful paid campaigns, we’ve learned what works best in terms of maximizing results to achieve client campaign objectives. Here are three noteworthy items about audiences and ad targeting that can help enhance your next Facebook ad campaign’s performance.

1.) Leverage Owned User Data to Build Better Audiences

We continually discuss the importance of leveraging owned data and the benefits of adopting a paid-first strategy. A key aspect to benefit from a paid campaigns is to build custom and lookalike audiences within the Facebook Ad Manager. Start with utilizing the already built audience within your email marketing subscriber list. The key is to take this process to another level using only users who have previously engaged with specific themed content.

For example, when you send out a monthly newsletter, the email contains multiple pieces of specific niche content like golfing, biking, kayaking, etc. When the recipient opens the email and clicks on which content interests them the most, many email marketing platforms can identify users’ engagement. After identifying this data set, export the list and use that segmentation to build out a much more targeted custom or lookalike audience for your next promotional ad campaign. This type of data profiling can garner much healthier ad results based on theconsumer’s previous known actionsr.

#2 – Utilize Ad Type Selections to Increase Campaign Success

During the deployment of a campaign, each consumer action is recorded and analyzed within Facebook to maximize every ad set you run.  It’s done in real-time, and the results are immediately leveraged to optimize the campaign.

Facebook tells us that when you optimize for “Landing Page Views,” you’re optimizing one step further down the funnel than just link clicks. Link click optimization finds people who are the most likely to click on your ad. Landing page view optimization finds people who are likely to click on your ad and then wait for the landing page to load.  This provides us with a better opportunity for the consumer to engage with website content.

So, each time someone clicks from the ad to the website landing page and engages within the landing page, their persona and online characteristics are noted. Facebook then attempts to serve that ad to more people with a similar persona that drive a higher quality of audience that will propensity to engage with your content. This is done through the technology-driven Facebook pixel implementation.

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3.) Use The Power of an Engaged Audience to Discover a Better Audience

Video and slideshows ads work very well in terms of “thumb-stopping” which means consumers gravitate to them in the feed, stop and engage with the content for a specific period of time and/or click through to additional content if it is available. To utilize this engagement, Facebook allows us to build a retargeted audience to target those who have previously engaged with content.

We can also build a future audience based on the level of engagement – i.e., those who engaged with 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of that content. This gives us levels of engagement, and more engaged users mean a higher quality prospect for a future ad set.

Some of our most successful campaigns are built around lookalike audiences developed through previous ad engagement—for example, a 1% lookalike audience of those who viewed 50% of the video. We would serve up an ad with a similar context to the video but with a different objective – like “landing page views” to maximize results.

Although these are just a few tactics and best practices to enhance your paid-first promotions, be sure to include these in your next campaign! Don’t know where to start with a paid campaign? We’re here to help. Contact one of our Ad Strategists today.

For more tips and tricks on how to build a successful ad campaign for your organization, be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter to stay on top of digital marketing updates and more!