Facebook’s Advanced+ Shopping Campaign (ASC) is designed to pick up where campaign optimization and pixels left off. With other campaign types not working nearly as well as they used to, I.E. look-a-like (LAL) audiences, interests & affinity and even retargeting, Facebook created the ASC campaign.
ASC is designed to be super broad and optimize to those most likely to take some converting action. It’s also designed to be a full funnel, which means it handles retargeting too.
It’s definitely worth considering when setting up a new Facebook campaign. Here are 5 tips to keep in mind when you set it up next.
- Make sure you prime your account with previous customers. Since Facebook only includes a 180 day look-back window, depending on your product and sales cycles, we might also suggest uploading a customer list that may include a longer lookback window.
- Make sure your budget is big enough to match your audience. And make sure your audience is big enough. In this case, the audience is fairly broad at about 250M people.
Then, look at your budget and how you think it will perform. As we all know, larger budgets accelerate more quickly, learn faster and can generate more sales. But, of course, it has to be a budget you can afford. Is $200/day enough? Too low? Too high?
- Give it at least 10 different ads. The system wants a lot of creative to choose from. If you can give it up to 15, and can increase the budget, that can help. When it gets out of learning phase, then look at the ads to see which ones are performing and which ones aren’t. At this time, you can start to pause underperforming ads and replace them with new ones.
At some point in the learning process, when you go to edit your campaign, Facebook will show you other ads that have performed well in other campaigns (if you have some running) and give you the opportunity to copy them into your ASC campaign. This can be an easy way to migrate ads, but make sure the ads are for the right audience. Unfortunately, you can’t easily copy ads or IDs from regular campaigns into ASC campaigns – yet. I’m told they’re working on it, but haven’t heard a date. - Look at how much retargeting you want to do. If you want to use this ASC campaign for retargeting existing customers, you can define what percentage of your spend will go towards these existing customers to get them to buy again. This section, called Existing Customer Budget Cap is where you define a percentage. In this case, 10% of the total budget of $4,910.00.
- Choose the right Bid Strategy. Like any campaign, you want to make sure to choose the go with control for you. I tend to like using Highest Volume or Value to start so that the campaign is unrestricted to start.
When it comes to setting the Advantage Campaign Budget (formerly CBO), it doesn’t really matter unless you have more than one ASC Adset, and it’s not recommended to have more than one ASC Adset since one Adset should do just about all you need.
While ASC campaigns aren’t brand new, not everyone is using them yet. If you’re struggling with them or ads in general, give us a call. We’d love to help.
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Mark Peesel has 25 years of marketing and Online Advertising experience. As owner of Summit Communication Design, Inc, he’s managed millions of dollars in ad spend over the years, consistently providing value and knowledge to everyone with whom he works. As a former outdoor instructor and educator, when you work with Mark, his goal is to share his knowledge with you and tell you everything he knows so you know what’s happening every step of the way. Contact him at mpeesel@backleft.com
