Blog.

How to improve your Facebook marketing with audience testing

If you’ve started the new year with a Facebook ad campaign and it’s not giving you the results you need then try these tips to help improve your results.

Set up a CBO campaign

In most cases I always recommend setting up a campaign as a CBO campaign (Campaign Budget Optimisation). Yes, there are occasions when you don’t want to run a CBO campaign, but, generally speaking, for most advertisers letting Facebook do the hard work of allocating your budget to the best performing ad set will work out better.

Test your audiences

If your target location is small then you may only have one option to run one ad set. And if this is the case you’ll therefore need to be testing the creative to help improve your campaign (that’s for another blog!).

But if you can run multiple ad sets targeting different audiences.  Generally, I like to run between 3-5 ad sets as per below:

Ad set 1 – Hot audience

Hot audiences are your existing customers who have given you permission to market to them.  Marketing to them goes without saying and they should in theory provide you with the best results.

Ad set 2 – Warm audience

This category covers those people who have shown interest in your brand or business, e.g. website visitors, eshot sign-ups, Facebook followers.

Ad set 3 – Cold audience

Probably the most exciting of audiences is your cold list.  These are people who as far as you know have never done business with you.  This is where you use the Facebook Audience finder and requires you to focus on a certain location, demographic, or interest. To begin be as broad as possible.  So, if you advertise in the UK, select the UK as a whole, so you create a baseline.  Then begin either testing locations or interests.  After that you can test demographics. But remember only select one interest at a time, not multiple interests as otherwise you’ll never know which interest works the best.

Ad set 4 – cold ‘lookalike’ audience

A lookalike audience is a great way to find new customers on Facebook.  You basically tell Facebook the hot or warm audience you want them to use and they will then find potential customers who look like your hot or cold audience. A good audience to use as the basis to your lookalike audience is your website visitors or visitors to a certain web page.  It’s simple to do on Facebook. Just visit the audience section and it will guide you through.

Following these simple steps can really help bring structure to your Facebook campaign and help you focus your campaign.  In my next blog post I’ll discuss some of the best Facebook metrics to use and how to test the actual creative.

If you have any questions or want to bring to life your email marketing campaigns, get in touch today.

Author:

Chris Baines.

Head of Marketing