Facebook Advertising is generally looked at as an easy thing to do… How many times do we hear; “Oh I’ll just click boost on the post!” and then the likes goes up from the 4 organic the post received to 100 because of the paid amplification. But you are making a serious mistake if you aren’t actually reviewing the Facebook Ad Platform’s campaign details every time your campaigns end and then optimizing the next before you just click “Boost” and spend your budget.
Facebook makes it too easy for you. If you don’t look at the data you are simply wasting money. It’s really that simple. No matter your objective and targeting, ie you could be retargeting visitors of your website who started filling a cart but abandoned before they clicked “check out”, or just trying to acquire new Facebook likes on your page for more brand awareness. The data is there every time you pay to amplify the reach of your content on Facebook and you can utilize that data the next time you run a campaign to ensure you are hitting the right target.
My governance of this and how I determine if I am executing Facebook ads properly is by the cost per engagement. Think about it logically. You pay more to granularity target your potential consumers, but then pay less per engagement if your ads are being shown to the right people and you have an excellent ratio of action : view. By that I mean, if 10 people see your content through paid promotion and 9 of them engage in some sort of action, Facebook is charging you significantly less per interaction. And your ROI is much higher because you are paying less and targeting people that are for reasons you have identified, interested in your brand. Which hopefully, should translate to some sort of conversion (sale or sign up).
Michael Leander does a good job of explaining Facebook engagement on your Facebook page in this article if you are interesting in learning more. Here a bunch of Redditor’s debate the relevance of Cost Per Facebook Engagement on paid content, and lastly, Ad Expresso walks you through the entire Facebook Ad optimization details in this article.
For me, it’s a routine that I run through every time a campaign ends. No matter the content or the campaign, its critical in my optimization process to analyze the data that Facebook provides.
Facebook provides you with some very clear data on who most engaged with your ads:
In the campaign above it was clear that the content was most relevant to Men aged 25-34. I looked at which content performed best across both Facebook and Instagram, and then created a matrix of sorts to identify the key placements that created the most conversions based on pixels I configured in Facebook Ad Manager.
Either way, my next campaign eliminated the demographics that were not relevant and engaging with the content. The Cost per Result went down a cent and I was one cent closer to an even better ROI.