Systematically testing with FB Ads

[adamcirstea]

You know your best selling products but have a new ad account and a new pixel. You have a few creatives to test and you want to find the best targeting/demographics to use. Note: This campaign structure is great for new ad accounts that don’t have much pixel/conversion API data.

• CBO Campaign
  • Targeting #1
    • Ad #1
    • Ad #2
    • Ad #3
  • Targeting #2
    • Ad #1
    • Ad #2
    • Ad #3
  • Targeting #3
    • Ad #1
    • Ad #2
    • Ad #3

Steps

1. Create a Sales Campaign > Manual Sales Campaign > Turn on Advantage Campaign Budget (aka CBO). Since there is more than 1 ad set, each ad set will compete for the budget.
2. In the Ad Set level, input your first interests/targeting/demographics that you want to test.
3. On the ad level, create one ad with 1 picture/video/carousel/catalog, 5 headlines, 5 descriptions, and 5 primary texts.
4. Quickly Duplicate the ad by clicking on the “...” next to the ad on the left sidebar.
5. Simply replace the picture/video/carousel/catalog for the newly duplicated ad.
6. Repeat until you have 5 unique ads with the same copy.
7. Double check to make sure all your ads, creative, copy, and links are exactly as you want them before we duplicate.
8. Quickly Duplicate ad set 1.
9. On the newly duplicated ad set, change the targeting to the second targeting/demographics you want to test. Keep the ads below it exactly the same.
10. Duplicate the ad set again, change the targeting on ad set 3.

Note: When doing this strategy, make sure you keep the audience sizes similar. If you do one ad set narrowed by demographics and interests, and another broad, the algo will tend to spend towards broad so the test won't be that useful. Understand that the more ad sets and ads that you create, the more the budget will be split up between the ad sets and ads. Enabling the CBO option makes the interests compete against each other. Facebook’s algorithm will decide which ad set is the winner and give it most of the spend.

Optimization: After 24-72 hours, inspect the metrics for each ad set. Close the low performing ad sets and keep the performing ad sets. Understand that this will liberate the budget to the remaining ad sets. If you close many ad sets, it could disrupt the balance of the overall campaign because it will force the remaining ad sets to spend more when they may not want to. You can offset this by lowering the campaigns budget slightly. You can inspect the metrics for the ads as well and close any low performing ads.