5 Things to Try When Your Facebook Campaigns are Underperforming

. 3 min read

Written By: Nick Appalucio | Media Manager

Have you ever feel lost or helpless when it comes to Facebook ads when performance starts to take a downturn? Try these 5 things to immediately change the performance of your accounts for the better.

  • Creative refresh

Sometimes marketers will cycle through 100 audiences, and when nothing works, they give up and assume that their product won’t sell. On a few accounts we have ran the same audiences for months, and simply by testing new creatives, we’ve seen up to 50% drops in CPA.

  • Large, High Intent Lookalikes

With Facebook advertising, what works today sometimes won’t work tomorrow. Recently we are seeing amazing results with 5% or 10% broader lookalikes for high intent audiences (such as high value purchasers). These are even outperforming smaller 1% lookalikes, which used to be our top audience due to their similarity to our current converters. This is due to the fact that Facebook’s algorithm recently is rewarding broad targeting over super niche targeting. It gives Facebook the ability to find you the right customers as opposed to you telling them who your customer is. And let’s face it, with all the recent news about Facebook and the data they mine, they know your audience better than you.

  • Intra-Day Scaling

Recently Facebook has added a very powerful tool to their UI. They show you when an ad set is ‘Learning’ versus when it is ‘Learned’. It takes 50 conversions per week for an ad set to become ‘learned’. One issue marketers have run into is keeping their ad sets learned while also scaling ad set budgets to higher levels since the learning period will reset if you shift too much at one time. We are seeing that once an ad set is learned, we can do multiple intra-day budget increases of up to 30% to 40% and the ad set will stay learned and optimized. We have scaled multiple ad sets from $2,000 → $10,000 per day using this method while seeing stellar results. One budget bump of $8,000 would have caused this adset to go back into learning, but doing this incrementally over the day keeps the ad set learned and optimized.

  • Duplicating and Relaunching Ad Sets

For reasons even we can’t explain, sometimes ad set performance tanks randomly. Creatives may be working on other audiences, but for some reason, an ad set that was performing well may just tank over a few days. We find re-launching these type of ad sets brings us back to the initial performance of the ad set before everything got out of hand.

  • Dynamic Creative Optimization

More recently, this has been an amazing tool for us to use. This works when you have a decent amount of creatives ready to be tested. We simply throw all of these creatives into our best performing ad set, and using the Dynamic Creative Optimization tool within Facebook, give Facebook the ability to feed permutations of different creatives to different users. These ad sets tend to be our best performers for up to a week, and then begin to die off. The real power in this is that now we are able to look at our creative breakdowns to see which combinations performed the best. We can then make new creatives using these combinations and put them into newer ad sets in our non-DCO campaigns.

Facebook advertising is similar to baseball. If a baseball player gets a hit 3 out of every 10 times they go to the plate, they are paid millions of dollars. One successful Facebook campaign will make up for all of your failed tests. Keep testing and add these strategies to your arsenal.