What key factors should you know about conversion optimization on Facebook Ads?
The article explores the significance of crafting a well-defined Facebook Ads strategy that centers around establishing a campaign goal that is aligned with specific objectives. It stresses the importance of selecting a goal that corresponds to the desired action, such as boosting sales for an e-commerce platform or capturing leads through form submissions.
However, a crucial point raised in the article is that conversions may not always be the most suitable goal for campaigns. It highlights the necessity of leveraging historical data to make the most of conversion goals within Facebook campaigns. The piece delves into the learning phase that each campaign undergoes and the criteria for successfully exiting this stage, including reaching 50 events in a span of seven days.
Furthermore, the article offers insights on assessing if conversion goals are appropriate for a particular strategy by analyzing the volume of conversion events achieved over a set period. It also provides alternative tactics if the data volume is inadequate for conversion goals to operate effectively.
In summary, the article underscores the significance of anchoring Facebook Ads strategies in robust data to enhance conversions efficiently.
The first step in a Facebook Ads strategy is to establish your campaign goal. This is a crucial choice that will influence how Facebook views you in its auctions down the road.
At this stage, Facebook recommends choosing a goal that is aligned with your intentions. Facebook isn’t alone in making this recommendation. This is the basis of marketing: always steer your communication efforts towards accomplishing a specific action—preferably a value-added action to grow your business. If you want to promote your e-commerce site to generate sales, then in theory, you would choose a conversion goal. If you want to acquire leads, you should push your ads towards a form submission.
But there is one caveat.
Conversions may not always be the best goals for your campaigns
While this is true, it may not necessarily be the most strategic choice for you. Facebook’s conversion goal is known for generating good results. These results don’t come for free, and depending on your strategy, your campaign can be a success or a disaster. In order to avoid this, let’s go into a little more detail into how it works.
Every campaign you post on Facebook will automatically go through a “learning phase,” during which your ad will be tested to determine its appeal to your audience. It is important to get out of this phase as quickly as possible so that Facebook stabilizes your delivery and offers you more regular performance that is close to your strategy.
Completing this learning phase requires that each of your ad sets gets 50 events in 7 seven days. This means that if you choose a conversion goal for online shopping, you should have 50 transactions recorded in a week. Not everyone will obtain that many purchases in such a short time. If your campaign does not drive 50 purchases in a week, it will remain in the learning phase until this milestone is reached, leaving your campaign prone to reduced and minimal delivery.
Conversion goals require historical data to be effective
This brings us to the heart of the matter. In order to properly use the conversion goal in your Facebook campaigns, you need to have enough data from the start. This is because Facebook’s conversion goal is only effective if it already has good volume. This goal does not become powerful and successful overnight. It needs to analyze the behaviours on your website and compare it with its audience catalogs to subsequently deliver relevant results.
How to accomplish this? You first need to have tracking that works on your website. Your pixel must be installed properly. Your conversion events must be configured. Make sure you can view data from Facebook as well as Analytics and Tag Manager, if that is the tool you use to implement your events and website conversions.
Are conversion goals right for you ?
Go to your Facebook pixel interface to see how much conversion volume you achieved over the past 30 days. This number will determine whether or not you can use the conversion goal for your Facebook strategy.
1. For example, if you have over 10,000 conversion events in 30 days, you can use the conversion goal.
2. If you have less than 10,000 conversion events (but more than 500), you can begin using the conversion goal with optimizations other than conversion. It is recommended that you use page clicks to optimize your campaign.
3. Let’s say you have less than 500 events. By Facebook standards, there isn’t enough data on your site for the conversion goal to function properly and for your campaigns to pass the learning phase smoothly. In this scenario, you are better off using the traffic goal and optimizing for page clicks. This will help you to build the necessary foundation to use the conversion goal in the near future.
A conversion goal works best if the conversion for which you want to optimize your campaign is fed on a regular basis and if the volume of traffic is high enough—with or without advertising. It may therefore be good to consider running awareness campaigns to constantly provide information that is useful to Facebook.
You may ask: Which conversion is best? In an ideal scenario, you would have enough conversion data that is valuable to you. Let’s continue with our example of selling online. What if you do not achieve at least 500 online purchases per month? In this case, you would have to choose the event that most closely matches it in terms of the value sought. In other words, go one step up the funnel. For our example, this could be to start online payment. If there is still not enough volume, add an item to the cart.
As you move up the funnel, you move towards higher volume, but lower value actions. If at the top of the conversion funnel you don’t have enough volume, you have the option of turning to the action of visiting a product sheet, which amounts to optimizing your campaign for traffic and not purely conversion.
Using a conversion goal is a choice that is not made lightly. It must be based on real data. It is only with hard data that you can improve your conversions on Facebook.
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