If you’re asking yourself, “How do I know when to optimize my Facebook/Instagram ads?”, then look no further. Facebook / Instagram is more of an art than science often times, and as the engine has matured, we’ve gotten more tools for our arsenal to understand when an ad is fatiguing.
Follow the steps below to optimize your Facebook ads.
Look At Week Over Week Progress
If you’re looking at the monthly view – it’s easy to neglect to understand your ads are fatiguing. That’s why it’s so important to always try to measure how you’re doing day-over-day, week-over-week, and month-over-month.
Related: Are You Selling Yourself Short On Your Facebook Reporting?
Facebook recently released the Comparison tool which allows us to quickly pull percent differences between time frames.
To get here:
Click on “Compare”
Choose the Time Frame
Find your metrics you want to compare then expand them.
Performance Metrics
- Cost Per Result (Lead or Sale Depending on What You’re Measuring)
- ROAS (E-Commerce, or scored leads)
Engagement Metrics
- Relevance Score
- Social Reach – The number of people when people’s friends have engaged with or responded to your business content.
- Social Impressions – The number of times your ad is viewed when people’s friends have engaged with or responded to your business content.
- Social Clicks – The number of clicks when people’s friends have engaged with or responded to your business content.
- Comments, Shares – When people share or comment on your ads.
- Website Clicks – People clicking over to your website.
Example:
As mentioned in the metrics.
Delivery Insights
If you’re not familiar with Delivery Insights, that’s because it was a pretty low-key roll out. Choose “Delivery” in your columns and hover over the metric on your reporting to see the option to click on Delivery Insights.
Once you click on that you will see a pretty big dashboard:
Look at the metrics: “First Time Impression Ratio” and “Audience Reached” Ratio.
Facebook wants to serve the best content to its users, so if people are engaging heavily with an ad at first, you’ll see that the First Time Impression Ratio is high. Basically what that means is, Facebook deems your content as interesting and wants to show this to as many people as possible.
Related: Which Social Advertising Channels Should You Invest In?
If you see a lower first time impression ratio, like the one in this screenshot, that means it’s time to try a new ad. You want to ideally be at an 85% + First Time Impression Ratio.
The Audience Reached Ratio will let you know what % of users you’ve reached out of your total potential reach. Ideally, you want this number to be low if your ad is performing well because that means there’s plenty of room to scale as there’s plenty more people to reach.
Click on the Auction Competition Tab.
Auction Competitiveness is something else to take a peek at when looking to optimize your ads. There’s a good chance if you see all of your metrics declining that it’s starting to fatigue from staleness. With that said, if those metrics aren’t decreasing significantly but your performance metrics are, that means more competition has entered the space.
Related: Facebook Breakdowns: Taking A Deeper Dive Into Your Conversion Data
You can now go to the Auction Competition Tab to see how the competition is for the group you are targeting.
Things To Look At For Improvement
- When’s the last time you’ve refreshed your ads?
- When’s the last time you’ve adjusted bids?
- When’s the last time you’ve done comment control?
Any Tactics I Left Out?
As I’ve mentioned, optimizing Facebook ads is typically more of an art than a science. With that said, we are getting more ways to get insight on how to improve delivery and return.
What’s your best way to identify fatiguing ads?
