Facebook can feel like a black-box. Considering facebook is one of the biggest source of quality installs, I figured it’ll be useful to write a guide detailing how to optimise and scale a facebook campaign.
Before we proceed, let’s define quality users = engaged users, users with higher retention rates, users with more actions rather than just users with the lowest cpi.
I’ve broken down the post into
- facebook ads — the basics
- The Facebook Network: Facebook, Instagram & Audience Network
- Fb campaign structure — Ad sets & campaigns
- Bidding strategy — How to bid on facebook
- A/B testing and targeting
- Relevancy, bid pacing
- Deep-linking & Frequency
The facebook ad
A facebook app install ad(single) consists of:
- Title — limit of 90 chars
- Image: 1280x629 image size
- App title — usually the app name, though Haptik has creatively named it as a ‘Must have App’.
- CTA: Download Now, Install Now, Listen Now etc — you can experiment with CTAs
The Carousel Ad: Along with the single mobile newsfeed ad, facebook also allows you to add carousel ads. A typical carousel has 4–5 images.
You can find more information about the carousel format here: https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/help/515741471908766
20% text limit: All images used for facebook ads need to adhere to a 20% text limit. Here’s a tool for checking your ads qualify https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay
Facebook Network:
Facebook, Instagram & Audience Network
Currently facebook comprises of 3 platforms — facebook network, Audience network and Instagram. You can select the ads to be shown on some/all networks based on ad performance.
Audience Network: Third party apps and sites where your ad can be shown. Ideally you get the best returns from the Mobile News feed if you are targeting install ads.
the facebook ad structure
It’s important to understand the facebook ad structure to grasp the meaning of de-duplication across campaigns.
The campaign groups your ads based on the objective. So all app install ads would be grouped in one campaign, all page like ads would be in another, all promote post ads would be in a different campaign.
what’s an Ad-set?
An ad set includes one or more ads, a budget, and a schedule. You can create an ad set for each of your audience segments by making the ads within the ad set target the same audience. So consider you can spend 50k on facebook campaigns and you had to decide on a facebook strategy. You can break down the budget into 10k each for your 5 ad sets. Now that we understand how to create a campaign, let’s understand how bidding works on facebook.
Bidding strategy: How to bid on facebook
There are 3 fundamental ways in which you can bid on facebook.
1. CPA
2. CPM
3. oCPM
CPA: Cost-Per-Action allows you to specify a max amount for a specific conversion and get charged for the conversions. Ex. a mobile app install campaign with a bid of Rs. 50 will get you all the installs under rs. 50 limited by the budget.
CPM: Cost per thousand impressions. In this approach you set a bid for the max amount you want to pay for the ad appearing. You are charged based on the number of impressions for the ad.
oCPM: oCPM stands for optimised CPM. In this approach facebook automatically optimises for targeting, reach based on your goals. You only have to define a daily budget and goal(ex. mobile app installs). Fb charges you for the impressions delivered and optimises the bid bases on the budget. Here’s the fb documentation for the same. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/optimizedcpm/v2.5
These are the 3 basic ways of bidding, we can combine them to create a mixed bidding campaign. Ideally one should try out all 6 combinations to understand what works best for your app.
The logic behind the bidding system is simple. The better the quality of your ad, larger the network of users you can reach out to, the lower the cost of your ad.
Let’s see how the organic value(social reach) of your ad affects the overall cost
Organic value of your ads
Organic value = Chance to get a click + chance to get a like + chance to get a comment + chance to be shared — chance to get negative feedback
So how do one boost the quality of your ads?
Two words: CREATIVES & Relevancy
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Increasingly facebook has become a more visual network. Organically you can see increased engagement on photo shares than your text posts. Similarly for ads, the better the quality(relevancy, size, image quality) the better they perform they would perform. It is a good idea to invest in a good designer to improve the messaging and quality of your ads.
Below are some examples which do really well.
Better targeting
Ensure your ads are targeted for your users instead of running a vanilla campaign including all the users. While oCPM optimises your ads for delivery, using the insights drawn from your analytics framework can go a long way in improving scale via fb.
Options for targeting
Your organic facebook ad score: Relevance score
Facebook assigns a ‘relevance’ score to your ad based on it’s performance after 500 impressions. The relevance score is determined based on the targeting & creative.
Avoid negative feedback:
Facebook heavily penalises you for negative feedback. So a controversial ad which gets more positive and negative feedback would probably result in a net loss for you.
Here’s an example of the budweiser ad: 20k+ likes but a lot of negative feedback too = NET LOSS
Avoid duplication of Ad targeting:
If multiple ads are targeting the same audience, they end up competing with each other, driving up the cost of your ad campaigns. So before you create an ad plan, ensure the audiences for each ad-set are unique.
A/B test your ads
A/B testing can help you improve your returns. It’s quite difficult to predict which ad design performs better.
Possible tests: test your copy, your creative design, your audience.
How do we A/B test for audiences:
An ad-set defines an audience. Suppose you want to check if UK customers perform better or US is better, simply create 2 ad-sets and set the targeting for each ad-set. If you’ve run A/B testing for websites, you know that to get accurate results the 2 ads should get similar mileage. Hence you need to set the same budget/impression target for each ad-set to get conclusive results.
Leverage the Instagram Network:
Instagram has around 400m monthly active users around the world. Since companies are still new to instagram, you can get a niche audience with better returns.
Specifications of the Instagram Ad.
Image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
Image ratio: 1:1
Caption: Text only, 125 characters recommended
Ad-frequency
Facebook provides you with information about your Ad frequency: the average number of times your ad was shown to each person. You can customize the columns to show the ad frequency. An optimal ad frequency is between 2–3 times.
Pace your bids
Based on the ad-budget and installs available in a day facebook decides to show your ads to your users over the entire day. Example if you want 10 installs, facebook decides to get 5 installs in each half to maximise your ROI. This is called bid pacing.
Do not change bids/budget mid campaign
Everytime one changes the budget or bid, facebook takes sometime to recalibrate it’s eCPM bid and expand the reach of the campaign. If your campaign isn’t performing or you need to spend lesser it’s more advisable to pause the campaign and start a new one. — Do this carefully incase your ad has a really good organic score, you shouldn’t touch it!
Refresh your ad creatives if your volume is high for oCPM
oCPM stands for optimized CPM. In this method facebook decides who to show the ad/how often to show the ad under the constraints of your bid.
Let’s assume that your showing ads for ‘Flipkart’ and your target set of users is 5. Out of 5 users, 2 people like flipkart, 2 people are neutral towards it and the last user is disinterested. Fb shows your ads to the all the users, the first 2 readily convert on the first view. Other 2 users aren’t interested, so facebook shows them the ad again. They still don’t convert, so it shows them the same ad again. They convert on the 4th attempt. The last guy even after seeing the ad 5 times doesn’t convert. As you can see the more the number of times you show the same ad to the same user, you increase the probability of the user giving negative feedback and being annoyed. Hence for oCPM, it’s advisable to pause the ad and create a new one in case it isn’t scaling.
What’s ‘ACCELERATED delivery’?
Incase it’s the discount season and you want as many installs as possible during Diwali, you can enable ‘accelerated’ delivery and get as many installs as possible as quickly as possible. In this approach instead of pacing your bid facebook starts showing it as quickly as possible, resulting in a higher CPI.
Implement deferred deep-linking & add deep-links to your ads
Deferred deep-linking allows you to send the user to the relevant information inside the app once he installs it. Suppose your running a carousel ad to sell Salwar kurtas.
If you’ve implemented deferred deep-linking, the ad would take you to the Salwar suit page inside the app after installation, thus allowing you to complete the purpose of your visit.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/app-ads/deep-linking describes how you can set-up deep-linking and deferred deep-linking for your app. If you’ve configured deep-linking for your app, it should work automatically with fb too and no special configurations are required.
Despite the points outlined above getting returns consistently from facebook requires tempering and constantly experimenting with your facebook strategy. Scaling is hard. As we get more users, it becomes more difficult to gain new users since your target market has reduced.
As your reach starts to grow, the cost increases.
In the next post i’ll talk about pulling apsalar information into facebook and measuring your app user quality better.
If you found the article useful, please feel free to hit recommend. I will be happy to hear your feedback on this. Feel free to comment here or tag me on twitter @vernekard or mail me at vernekardinesh@gmail.com
