Simplify & Optimize Your Facebook & Instagram Advertising

Rocket Science Web was recently invited to attend an all day training seminar on the Meta products, where Meta introduced their Performance 5.  In today’s dizzying array of digital marketing tools, it’s always good to keep an eye on what’s most important and fundamental to advertising success.  Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp etc. has made that task more manageable with their Meta Performance 5. These are 5 key parameters on which digital advertisers should focus, for optimal performance. Note that the headings were created by Meta, but the  descriptions are the interpretations of RocketScienceWeb.com.  

Simplified Ad Sets

​An old engineering adage is ‘Keep It Simple’.  In our zeal to produce ever-better results, many of us over-complicate things by creating an unmanageable set of Ad Sets, Meta’s term for a single, measurable advertising concept.  So keep the number of ad sets in line with the advertising budget as well as the required campaign complexity.

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Broad Targeting

​Hooray, Meta offers a stunningly granular set of audiences.  But did you know that the unit cost goes up, the smaller the audience?  So you might be better off targeting a broader audience, even if that audience is less focused. Remember the rules of supply and demand?  The less the supply (more targeted audience), the greater the unit cost.  RSW believes that the Meta platforms amplify this effect substantially, making it harder to achieve that all-important frequency (the number of times that each member of the target audience saw the ad) , for a given reach (number of people who may have seen the ad, at least once), without spending more money on  multiple ads.

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Mobile-Friendly Video

​Most of the action, especially on the Meta platforms are portrait or vertical, as opposed to landscape, or horizontal.  Meta has basically told us to forget about creating landscape video or still shots. Furthermore, as human attention spans decrease, the advice is to focus on the very fleeting 15 second video.  RocketScienceWeb.com says that regardless of video length, video must convey at least three concepts.  1) what the business does  2) what the business does better than anyone else  3) branding,  Also, don’t forget, the first three seconds of a video must captivate, otherwise, your audience will be as lost as Gilligan and The Skipper.

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Ad Testing

​Do real A/B testing, as supplied by the Meta platforms, not just something that looks like A/B testing.  Then start a Darwinian process to see which content survives the ad pool.

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Conversions AP

​You may have heard that Apple has stopped playing nice with Facebook, meaning Apple is no longer supplying Meta with tracking data on the iphone and other devices, which is vital to Meta’s advertising.  Google Chrome will soon follow. To help combat this, Meta has introduced its Conversions API, which should be installed on websites, along with the Meta Pixel.

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Make these 5 concepts part of your checklist, and your digital advertising should produce better results. You'll also know that you're employing best practices on the Meta Social Media Platforms.