Now that you’ve learned how to track your ads performance, and which metrics to measure each day, its time to discuss which route to take during the test phase.
Will we kill, keep, or scale our ads?
I’m going to show you a quick ad easy way to determine how to manage your ads and how to revive the ads that you do kill off.
You Need To Take Quick Actions While Managing Facebook Ads
As mentioned so many times throughout this series, you want to make sure you’re ads are as profitable as possible.
Yes, running ads on Facebook can be cheaper than the way ads were once run – but only if they’re managed properly.
Making sales overrides everything, but you also need to make sure you’re making a return on those sales.
If your cost per purchase is astronomical, you can still be in the negative, which is why I’m about to walk you through an easy-to-follow roadmap that you can use every time you launch and test new ads.
Metrics That Will Determine Which Actions To Take
There are 4 key metrics to glance at each day to determine how to proceed with your ads:
- Cost per link click
- Cost per purchase
- Budget
- Amount spent per day
The cost per link click and cost per purchase are going to be the two metrics that really navigate how you proceed.
I know, you must be wondering about your cost per thousand impressions or CPM … and while it is an important metric to take into consideration, it’s not mandatory since it positively correlates with the data shown with your cost per link click and cost per purchase.
Your budget and amount spent per day are good benchmarkers for a bit of perspective. If your cost per purchase or cost per link click are underperforming, you can backtrack and see if Facebook just needs to optimize your budget better.
When To Keep, Kill, Or Scale Your Ads
When to Keep an Ad
Let your ads run for at least 24 hours before you check in on them. You need to give Facebook’s algorithm enough time to optimize
Once that 24 hours is up, check the link click costs.
Keep the ad if you’re making sales – even if your cost per link click is a little higher than you’d like to see it, keep it.
You want to test your ads for a full 3 days (72 hours) so you still have 48 hours for it to prove its worthiness in your ad arsenal. The campaign may not be as profitable as you’d hope, but you can find ways to optimize it over the 3 day period for your next go around.
However, if there are no sales after the 3-day window… kill it
Why 3 days?
Facebook needs time to optimize and place the ads in front of the right people, if you cut it too soon, then Facebook can’t work to its fullest potential.
When To Kill an Ad
Let your ads run for at least 24 hours before you check in on them. You need to give Facebook’s algorithm enough time to optimize
Once that 24 hours is up, check the link click costs.
If the cost per link click is above $1 and you have no sales… kill it.
The reason I chose this $1 marker is that you’re selling impulse products. These products typically cost around $50, give or take a few, so $1 is pretty high for a product that cheap.
When to Scale an Ad
At the end of your 3-day testing window, you want to check the profitability of whichever ads you didn’t kill.
If your cost per link click and cost per purchase are in the green, then scale your campaigns by 20%.
Relaunching Killed Ads
It’s normal to kill off the majority of your test ads, especially when you first start running Facebook ads.
You have a premature pixel and you still may be getting used to targeting.
But don’t worry your efforts weren’t in vain!
We can take what we’ve learned from our failed ads to recreate and launch new and improved ones.
When you kill an ad off, it boils down to two reasons:
- It wasn’t making sales
- The cost per link click was too high
So now we can examine a few situations to determine how to remedy and relaunch.
Situation #1: The cost per link click was too high
Potential threats:
- Targeting
- Your targeting is either too broad or too narrow (love the generalities, right?)
- You may not be properly matching your product to an audience
- Go back to the Defining Your Audience chapter *link* in the Launching Your First Ad section *Link* and review
- Ad copy
- If your targeting is on point then you’re ad copy could be to blame
- Make sure your call to action is clear and visible
- Are you drawing on emotion and connecting with prospects, or are you generalizing with a flat “high-quality beauty blender!” – Specific emotions sell!
- Are you layering on too many calls to action? There should only be one
- “Tag a friend!”
- “Buy Now”
- “Learn More”
- “Comment below!”
- Avoid long-form copy, it can confuse your customer or lose their interest if it drones on
- If your targeting is on point then you’re ad copy could be to blame
- Product image/video
- Is the product easily visible? Are there too many distractions within the ad?
- Is there context to the ad? Does the position of the product within the image or video make sense?
Situation #2: You made no sales
Potential threats:
- Price
- Are you pricing your product too high? Make sure to do market research and price your products competitively
- If you’re using higher-quality materials then state that! Don’t just say ‘high-quality- because that’s boring and too general… describe what its made out of, make the people drool, remember – specifics sell!
- Does your site need to be optimized?
- Nothing will make a visitor run and never return like a site that doesn’t look like it can be trusted … simple, sleek, intuitive designs are you’re go-to – no distractions!
- A disconnect between the product and landing page
- Often, the product variant from the image ad is different from the variant on the landing page… make sure there’s an equal crossover between what’s in the facebook ad and what’s on the landing page.
- International traffic
- An unfortunate truth is that international traffic is cheap and unlikely to convert. So you get high link clicks and no sales. When you open your store try to focus on selling to the US only. Once that market is proven to win for you then you can branch out to the other 3 larger countries: Canada, UK, Aus, and then branch from there
- Problems in your funnel
- in your Shopify admin dashboard, it shows you how many people added to cart, reached checkout and sessions converted. An optimal loss is having ½ of add to carts proceed through the checkout – if you have more than that, then there may be a potential threat in your funnel.
Tying It All Together
Now you know how to track the metrics of your ads and what actions to take based on the reports.
I also took you through an overview of how to revive failed ads, however, in the next section we’re going to really drill down on exact steps to take to diagnose and fix your failing ads.
