Alexa Vitrac — February 10, 2017 Episode 1: Account Structure and Creative
This is a three-part series that explores all the things social marketers should do when setting up their ad campaigns. In this post, we focus on making sure your account structure is solid and how to get the most from your creative.
Setting up a social advertising campaign can be a bit daunting. With so many things to consider in reaching your goals, strategy and tactics become crucial.
We’ve developed nine best practices—presented over a series of three articles—to ensure you have a strong foundation for social advertising success. If you’re a Marin customer, we’ve added Marin Tips tailored just for you.
1. Keep a Consistent Account Structure
The key to effective account structure is consistency—the more uniform your account structure is, the better Facebook’s algorithm will perform. We recommend including the following:
- One campaign per placement or targeting (Custom Audience vs. Lookalike vs. Interests). Since each placement and targeting has different behavior, they require different budget and bid.
- One ad set per demographic (gender, age range), with up to six ad sets per campaign. The algorithm will optimize ad sets against each other. Therefore, make sure all ad sets have similar target sizes to make it a fair fight.
- Between two and six ads per ad set, each one testing an different element of the creative (landing page, call-to-action, creatives). The algorithm will find and push the best performing creatives. Be sure to pause the non-performing ads so the others have more budget.
A consistent structure helps you A/B test and understand why some variables trigger reactions and others don’t. From there, you can take action accordingly.
Consider each campaign as a test, where you refine based on lessons learned from each test.
Marin Tip
The Split button allows you to A/B test audiences in a single click.
2. Use Creatives That Resonate with Your Audience
Above all else—be different. Every business has its own identity, so use yours to find your tonality and compose smart ad copy. Here are a few more tips to stand out, get noticed, and stay current.
- Use storytelling to make your ad attract eyes and your brand memorable.
- Stay consistent across channels so customers recognize your brand.
- No matter how good your creatives are, ad blindness and ad fatigue will happen. Keep refreshing images on a regular basis (two weeks on average).
- Make the most of all Facebook ad types to engage with your audience in different ways and maximize conversions: Lead ads, Dynamic Ads, Carousel, Video, Slideshow, Canvas, and 360 photos and videos.
Marin Tip
For brand awareness, use Marin’s Reach & Frequency sequencing feature to control the order in which your ads are delivered—this is great for storytelling! Follow this link for more tips.
3. Use Videos
We all know video’s hot and only getting hotter. Make sure you’re creating killer videos and keeping people entertained, educated, and informed. In addition:
- Keep it short. Facebook best practice is to keep video length between 15 and 30 seconds.
- Make sure the thumbnail is attractive to your audience and relevant to your story. Change it regularly to fight ad fatigue.
- Tell a story. As mentioned, storytelling is a great way to keep people watching all the way to the end of your video.
- 50% of Facebook users watch videos without the sound. So, mention your brand and insert text within the first five seconds.
- Turn on video re-engagement to people who watched your video. Retarget them with a link ad or carousel ad and a strong CTA.
- Don’t have enough budget to develop a video? Slideshow is a great alternative.
Marin Tip
Use Carousel Ads, mixing videos and images and adding different CTAs.
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