Every skilled marketer wants their campaigns to perform well and connect with their target audience. How can you achieve success in social media marketing? We will help you find the best practices for optimizing your performance, covering the steps from setup to delivery.
- Prepare yourself: Signals
- Define your objective: Targeting
- Empower your ads: Creative
- Plan your marketing route: Bidding and budgeting
- Navigate towards your objective: Mid-campaign adjustments
Here are current recommended top choices for achieving success.
1. Prepare yourself: Signals
Before setting up your campaigns, the crucial first step is to establish suitable measurement solutions that provide insights on ad performance. The signals obtained from these solutions play a vital role in unlocking the potential for effective targeting, optimization, and measurement, by creating an understanding of user intent and interactions from various sources, such as your app and website.
Make sure you:
Link signals to ad performance. If you are a web marketer, choose between Pixel and API integrations based on your technical capabilities and business requirements. If you are an app advertiser, connect with your preferred ad platform and test their Events API or SDK solutions directly.
Provide complete funnel event information from your website or app. Signals throughout the funnel can benefit both upper and lower funnel objectives. If your focus is on lower-funnel objectives, the platform’s machine learning systems can leverage your upper-funnel events to enhance conversion rate predictions and optimize accordingly.
When sharing all event data is not feasible, it is suggested to share at least three events, covering the upper, mid, and lower parts of the funnel. Include all unattributed event data from your website and app. This provides the system with more signals for optimizing ad delivery and allows for creating retargeting audiences.
2. Define your objective: Targeting
What strategies can you employ to discover the appropriate audience for your marketing campaigns? Improving performance hinges on engaging the audience most likely to take action. While marketing provides various tools to define your desired audience, it is recommended that you start with a broad approach, then gradually narrow down, leveraging smart targeting features.
Here’s the order of steps to take:
Start with a broad target audience. To determine the ideal audience for your call-to-action, ad auctions require preliminary learning. Thus, having an ad group with a broad or balanced audience size allows marketing systems greater leeway in exploring audiences and optimizing ad targeting. You can also experiment with Automated Targeting, which makes automatic and dynamic audience targeting adjustments for you.
Expand targeting if you face difficulty getting past the learning phase, if there is a decline in budget consumption, or if the CPA is too high. Adjusting target settings will allow the system to explore new audiences that are more likely to convert. If you are unsure how to adjust your reach, expanding your target can help find better audiences.
Employ any “exclude audience” features to eliminate individuals who have already completed the desired action. Optimize your budget by focusing on individuals who have yet to perform the desired action. For instance, exclude individuals who have already installed your app from an ad group optimizing app installations.
3. Empower your ads: Creative
Ad fatigue is a significant factor that reduces the longevity of an advertisement. Naturally, achieving creative success requires both art and science. To assist you in perfecting your ad, we have compiled essential guidelines for enhancing your creative output to improve ad performance.
Craft captivating ads by embracing successful trends and collaborating with creative partners. Ad engagement is crucial for auction performance, and what better way to achieve inspiration than by exploring the most engaging video styles and trends at present? Keep abreast of the latest trends and identify your next creative. Advertisers can utilize Dynamic ads to produce ad variations grounded in existing ad creative.
Refresh ad groups by refreshing creatives before resorting to creating new ones. The longevity of your ad groups largely depends on fresh and engaging creatives. Don’t rush into forming new ad groups when you sense creative fatigue. Instead, try to revive your current ad groups by incorporating new creatives and fine-tuning settings. If an existing ad group still underperforms despite efforts to optimize its creative, it may be time to create a new ad group and introduce new creatives.
Leverage marketing tools like Insights and Split Test to optimize your creatives. Insights provides valuable insights on engagement and performance in your ads, inspiring creative enhancements, while Split Test enables you to carry out controlled A/B tests. With automated optimization, you can automatically produce new ads and select the most successful creatives as you expand your campaign.
4. Plan your marketing route: Bidding and budgeting
Your bidding and budget settings can influence ad delivery and scaling, so it is important to know how to optimize these parameters before launching your campaign.
Always input the highest amount you are willing to pay for conversions. This allows the system to have more opportunities to identify the appropriate audience for your ads and enhance your competitiveness in the auction. If your campaigns are designed to optimize towards conversions and you have chosen Cost Cap as your bidding strategy, set the highest acceptable cost per action that you can accommodate. Alternatively, if your campaign optimizes for Value, you can specify the lowest acceptable ROAS value.
To establish a reasonable bid, employ historical benchmarks and try the following:
When determining your bid, consult historical benchmarks for relevant ad groups.
For Cost Cap ad groups: Review the actual CPA for ad groups targeting the same audiences, promoting the same products, and optimizing against the same goal.
For Minimum ROAS ad groups: Review the actual ROAS from the previous seven days for ad groups targeting the same audiences, promoting the same products, and optimizing towards completed conversions.
In the absence of such benchmarks, run ad groups using the Lowest Cost or Highest Value bid strategies. Once they have been active for several days, you can use the actual CPA and ROAS as reference points for future bids.
Maintain an open campaign budget and use a daily budget for ad groups. To prevent a sudden halt in the delivery of your ad groups, set a daily budget for each ad group rather than for the campaign as a whole. We also recommend utilizing a daily ad group budget as opposed to a lifetime budget to ensure delivery on a daily basis. Employ a daily ad group budget that is at least 10 to 50 times your target CPA. You can use Campaign Budget Optimization to assist with optimizing budget allocation between ad groups.
5. Navigate your objective: Mid-campaign adjustments
To achieve optimal performance, monitor your ad campaign and make adjustments based on data insights and indicators. Keep an eye on the metrics and make necessary changes when certain signs are apparent.
Concentrate on tracking the metrics that are most significant. By defining your goal metrics, you can determine when to enhance performance and what adjustments to implement. For instance, if your objective is to generate sales and your ROAS is strong, avoid making changes based on high CPM outcomes.
When adjusting your ad group, only alter one setting at a time and wait at least 2 days before making any additional changes. Modifying an ad group significantly can cause the learning phase to restart, both during and after the learning phase. When your actual CPA/ROAS does not meet your objectives, do not immediately reduce your CPA bid or increase your ROAS bid, as this can lead to an abrupt decrease in budget consumption.
Adjust your budget based on your CPA and ROAS expectations. Increase your budget when your budget consumption rate exceeds 90% and your ads meet your CPA or ROAS expectations. To control CPA and ROAS when employing the Lowest Cost and Highest Value bid strategies, reduce your budget.
While the guidelines mentioned above are strongly recommended foundational principles for marketing, specific campaign adjustments may differ and be highly dependent on the performance metrics you observe while advertising.
Stay on course to succeed in the auction.
To succeed in the ad auction, maintain a test and learn attitude and experiment to find what works best for your campaign. The top three things to keep in mind are to integrate the right signals, start broad for targeting, bidding, and budget, and avoid creative fatigue by exploring and leveraging different creative optimization tools. Connect with a Carolina Shoreline Marketing representative to learn more about achieving success in your ad auctions.
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