How can marketers optimize their success in Facebook campaigns through effective use of Facebook auctions? This article discusses six key strategies aimed at maximizing success by understanding and utilizing Facebook auctions effectively. It highlights the importance of clear and flexible strategies, advantageous bid strategies, audience specificity, careful use of conversion objectives, optimized placements, and exceptional care for the target audience.
One crucial point emphasized in the article is the alignment of campaign objectives with audience preferences. Marketers are advised to select objectives that best fit their goals, whether driving traffic, engagement, or conversions, by understanding the options recommended by Facebook. The article also stresses the importance of flexibility in audience targeting to strike a balance between specificity and reach.
Furthermore, effective use of bid strategies is highlighted, including setting thresholds to provide Facebook with necessary auction information without limiting flexibility. The article warns against excessive reliance on the conversion objective, particularly for campaigns lacking sufficient conversion data.
In terms of ad placements, marketers are encouraged to test automatic placements initially to allow Facebook to optimize campaigns before manually selecting placements that deliver the best results. Lastly, the article emphasizes the significance of understanding and catering to the target audience by analyzing demographics, interests, behaviors, and preferences to tailor campaigns appropriately.
Overall, this article offers valuable insights and practical advice for marketers seeking to boost their performance in Facebook campaigns through a comprehensive understanding of Facebook auctions and strategic implementation.
Facebook campaign results are not only achieved through engaging visuals and persuasive text. Other key factors are involved, such as your strategy and how you carry out your campaign. These, along with the quality of the ad and the competitiveness of the strategy, makes up a Facebook auction. Once you understand how Facebook auctions work, it is easier to determine the actions that can help you win them more easily.
One of the ultimate goals to be more competitive during Facebook auctions is to have a clear and flexible strategy as well as good-quality ads. When creating or modifying a campaign, it is always useful to refer to the estimated daily results for each auction group. It will estimate the total number of auctions that could be won per day. It is also a useful tool that helps you understand how certain changes could positively or negatively affect the results of your campaign.
1- Choosing a good campaign objective
Facebook’s system constantly learns about your ads, their audiences and the results to be measured for them to be posted. Therefore, it is essential to correctly align the campaign objective with what your audience really wants. It is important, however, to keep a critical eye on your ads, especially if your goal is conversion.
Try to better understand the ins and outs of each objective recommended by Facebook and determine if the objective is in alignment with what you are trying to achieve. For example, in the case of a video: are you trying to attract the attention of your audiences with a video so that they click on the link (traffic objective)? Are you looking to have your target audiences watch the content of a video as long as possible (video objective)? Do you want viewers to leave a comment on your video (engagement objective)? Each objective has its own bids. Once you know precisely what you want, hopefully your strategy will be clear for Facebook Auctions.
2- Use bid strategies to your advantage
Bid strategies are used to set your maximum bid Even if the best strategy remains automated to give Facebook the full flexibility it will need to be competitive in auctions, it is sometimes a good idea to set thresholds. With thresholds, Facebook will have more information about your intentions and budget for auctions. However, make sure to not limit the system too much with too low thresholds as this would have the opposite effect.
3- Be flexible with your audiences
According to Facebook, your audiences must be specific enough to be eligible and relevant, but wide enough to not become a niche market. This balance is not always easy to find. For this reason, it is useful to allow Facebook to extend your targeting if opportunities are there.
In this way, by going a little beyond your basic criteria, Facebook is not forced to distance itself from certain auctions that may be good for your campaign. However, this option is not available for Reach and Notoriety objectives, which require that audiences be broad and inclusive from the outset.
4- Be careful when using the conversion objective
It is not uncommon to hear that the conversion objective is the most powerful option in Facebook. The platform itself confirms this fact. Nevertheless, true to the brand, Facebook offers certain restrictions. The use of the conversion objective requires a fairly high regular volume of conversions.
For example, if you are looking to sell, you would need at least 500 sales in the last 30 days for Facebook to have enough information. Not everyone can claim that volume. If your intentions are to use the conversion objective, you need to choose a conversion that has enough data and is as close as possible to your final conversion. With the above example, if you don’t have enough purchase volume, maybe you will have enough additions to the shopping cart for your Facebook strategy.
5- Add as many placements as possible to your ad
Ideally, it would be better to use automatic placements. However, its advantages are limited in time. It may be a good idea to test automatic placements in a first phase to let Facebook “manage” your campaign.
Once this phase is complete, you will have concrete data on which to base your campaign’s most advantageous placements—namely those that are effective at the lowest cost. From there, it is then preferable to manually add as many placements as possible that make sense for your ads and overall strategy. This way, you will always have good visibility while optimizing your budget and avoid unnecessary expenses on investments that have no value.
6- Provide the best possible care for your audience
We’ll never say it often enough: pamper your audience. Creating and defining your audience shouldn’t be done too quickly. Instead, take the time to explore, discover and understand your audience. Consider the following:
- Where exactly is your audience? In which cities and areas ?
- What are your capacities to satisfy your audience ? Do you have a specific delivery area or service ?
- What are the socio-demographic criteria of your audience? What age range ? What are the common interests or behaviors?
- What language does your target audience speak ?
- Have you considered excluding certain people from your audience? Is there anyone you absolutely don’t want to reach ?
Rely on your knowledge of your personas, statistics on Google Analytics and your Facebook page as well as the Audience Insights tool to guide your analysis.
In addition, when it’s time to optimize or analyze a campaign, Facebook recommends basing your analysis on its relevance recommendations. This helps you see where changes need to be made to be more competitive in the auctions. Should you improve the overall quality of your ad, review the targeting of your audience, or optimize your landing page?