When building audiences for Facebook ads one of the first things to remember is that the same audience set up that works for one client, may very well not work for another client. In other words, you can’t always replicate success.
Conversely, if you have an audience that isn’t working for one client, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try that same audience set up for another client.
Below we’ve got some broad strategies for creating and managing Broad Audience Campaigns.
Broad Audiences
So, how do you define a broad audience? Simple, it’s an audience without any limiting factors like interests, locations or demographics. These days, this type of audience seems to be working really well in Facebook. But last year, they didn’t work as well as other audiences. Times change…
When you build a broad audience in Facebook, it looks something like this:
The details:
- – We’re going after all of the US
- – Using the default broadest age range of 19-65+
- – All genders
- – No interests
- – No exclusions
Notice the potential reach of 230M people.
Why would we set this so high? Well, we’re letting Facebook use its complex algorithms to match your ad and product to the best potential audience. Essentially, Facebook is a pretty good matchmaker, and given time and a good budget, with quality ads and website, Facebook usually does pretty well finding good audiences that will deliver conversions.
In this Broad Audience, you’ll want to use 5 ads. 3-5 is recommended depending on the campaign, but for larger audiences like this, use 5. Also, they need to be a variety of ads so Facebook can deliver the right ad to the right people.
We like to see some movement in an ad or two, whether it’s a short movie or animation, moving things catch people’s eye. Then at least one carousel ad of your products. This almost lets you have multiple ads in one and Facebook will deliver the carousel image that it thinks will perform best. We also like to see a static ad or two creatively showing off your product and how it’s used.
If you have a product feed set up with Facebook, then you can also try a dynamic product feed which essentially shows your products form your website in a dynamic carousel.
Of course, you also need good copy for your ads. Make sure your headlines fit in the mobile length space and keep to the point with clear benefits and your offer. For Primary text, we think some long content is good, while Facebook says to try to keep it short so the “Read more” link doesn’t show. We’ve found both can work really well and we recommend testing to find out what works for you.
How long do you want to leave this new Broad audience running? Well, the answer to this and pretty much any question you ask is “it depends”. But, you need to let it run at least 1-2 weeks to get out of learning phase and let it mature. If your budget is low, you might need to let it run longer.
You might be tempted to make changes to ads or audiences or budgets, or to pause them too soon. Be careful about this. Sometimes, if you’ve been running ads long enough, you can tell if they’re going to work or not in a few days, but mostly you can’t know in a few days if it’ll work in a week or two. However, you should still be seeing sales come in and hopefully, have a positive ROAS.
When it’s long enough out of Learning Phase, and hopefully driving even better conversions, it’s time to look at more data.
Your campaign may be performing so well that you don’t want to touch it except to increase the budget 10%/day (more on this below). Or, you may look at your data from several weeks – at least 2 or more, and see something like this:
This graph tells us several things.
- Obviously, many more women purchase than men.
- Women cost ~$14 more per purchase than men.
- Men cost ~$14 less per purchase than women
- Women, 35-54 are the largest audience.
- Men, 35-54 are the largest audience for men.
- The Reach is also much larger for women.
What might you do about this? Again it depends, but it definitely takes more research into the AdSets, ads and delivery. more research will tell you more about what’s costing so much and which ads are best.
Some ideas:
- You might consider duplicating this campaign and changing your audience to women, 35-54 only and leave on the best performing ads with lower costs per result, higher ROAS and lower CPMs. These are ads you want to consider leaving on.
- Depending on how many you turn off, it might be time to test a couple new ads for this duplicated campaign.
- Then, you might consider duplicating it again and doing similar for another smaller campaign directed to men.
- You can also duplicate the campaign as is and just swap out ads. If these Broad audiences are big enough, and the ads different enough, then you shouldn’t have much of an audience overlap issue. More on this Creative Sandboxing below.
- Or, maybe you do nothing with the campaign and just review the ads and see if you’ve got any bad ones that are driving the cost up. Then you can turn those off and see about bringing the costs down, and maybe swap in some new ones from a creative sandbox test.
Because Men are cheaper in this AdSet, I think it’s ok that they’re mixed in here and wouldn’t necessarily split them out in this case. In fact, more men purchasing might be better. If the numbers were reversed and men were a lot more expensive, then I’d probably remove the men through duplication.
Note: We mention duplication a lot. They reason is that Facebook doesn’t seem to handle changes within campaigns very well. So rather than make big changes that will send a campaign back into Learning Phase, we duplicate it and make changes in the new campaign. This doesn’t work in all cases, but if audiences are big enough, or there’s room for a smaller test, then duplication can work.
Creative Sandboxing
This is a way to test new creative. You’d use it on a Broad campaign as we’ve been talking about, because you need a large audience pool.
How it works is pretty simple at its core. First, you’d duplicate the Broad Campaign as is, and then second, change your ads to test new creative and/or messaging. Third, turn off the duplicated ads and add new ones. These new ads might be testing copy or creative. For instance, you might try 3 ads with the same image and different copy or 3 ads with the same copy and different images, or 3 completely new and different ads.
You’d want to let this run for up to 2 weeks again, and then when you have a winning ad or 2, duplicate as is into your main Broad campaign to keep all the social proof the ad gained in testing. Then, maybe try it again.
Budgets
Above we mentioned increasing budgets 10%/day. Facebook says you can increase 20%/day without resetting back into Learning Phase. But any increase (or decrease) in budget will effect learnings. Even 20% that won’t reset you into learning phase, will cause Facebook to have to learn how to deliver to a higher budget which will impact conversions. We’ve seen campaigns stall and even crash when trying to scale budgets too much or too fast, so we recommend only increasing about 10%/day. This will increase your budgets gradually and should scale more easily.
The problem lies in trying to scale faster, to get more sales quickly for say the holidays . Increasing 10%/day won’t scale very quickly. This is where duplicating campaigns can help. Also, having different kinds of Prospecting audiences is key. We’ll talk about those in another post Interest AdSets and Look-a-Like (LAL) AdSets in other posts.
