The two things all successful Facebook advertisers have in common

Having worked with hundreds of Facebook advertisers during the past 8 years, I have learned a lot about what works on Facebook (and what doesn’t). One thing that I have noticed, is that there are two things that every single advertiser with long-term success have in common. I say long-term success, because you might be able to see short-term success by following another approach, but at some point you are bound to see that strategy fail to bring value to your business. 

The first aspect might seem like common sense, but I constantly encounter companies not following this approach. Alternatively, they say the they do, but in reality they are looking to have the cake and eat it too. The first thing that successful advertisers have in common is this: 

They have one single clear goal for their advertising campaign 

Many new advertisers might start with a clear goal in mind; such as online sales for example. But once they are starting to scale their advertising their minds get pre-occupied with secondary goals or proxies such as clicks, traffic, likes, shares and comments. Alternatively, they get pressure from management or investors that are not as knowledgeable when it comes to online marketing to improve those alternative metrics. 

The main reason for having one single goal is this: Facebooks ad algorithms only optimise for one goal at the time, and you will reach different people depending on what you choose.

As an example, your common path to purchase might look something like this: An impression > leads to a click > leads to a landing page view > leads to an add to cart > leads to a sale (although this is more likely to happening over a longer period of time, with some device-switching in between, but that is a whole different topic). With this in mind, it might seem logical for you to optimise your campaign towards any of these actions in order to set the customer off on his or her journey towards a purchase. Wrong. 

By optimising for a click, you tell Facebook that you are looking for the most amount of clicks for your budget. By optimising for a purchase on your website, this is what Facebook will try to achieve for you. You will reach different people depending on what objective that you choose, as the people who are very likely to click on your ad are not necessarily the same ones as the ones that are the most likely to make a purchase. This discrepancy between optimisation goal and outcome is of course even larger when optimising your campaign towards for example engagement while actually looking for traffic or online sales. 

To make matters worse, there are also often conflicts between your different goals; some more obvious that others. Several times, I have encountered advertisers trying to maximise both reach and CTR for their CPC-campaigns. This is of course impossible as the simple calculation below shows:

Assumptions: CPC: €1, Budget: €100 

Under these assumptions, a  CTR of 1 % will give you a potential reach of 10,000 for your target CPC of €1 (10,000 impressions x 1 % CTR = 100 clicks / €100 = €1 CPC). If your CTR goes up to 2 % (perhaps you are switching the image or copy you are using, or manage to find a more relevant audience for your product or service), you might still achieve your CPC of €1, but you are now only able to reach 5,000 people. 

More commonly, I talk to advertisers worried about the fact that their traffic is going down, even though their ROAS or cost per acquisition stays the same while optimising for online sales. This, of course, is a result of your site conversion rate going up which can in fact be considered a metric of success.

So, decide on the ultimate goal for your campaign - and keep your eyes on the price! But how do you decide on what goal to choose for your campaign? That question leads us to the second thing that successful advertisers have in common: 

Their goal is a real business outcome 

As I already mentioned, there is often less correlation than you might think between a click (or a like, video view or share) and a conversion. As a recent study from Facebook showed, relying on proxy metrics such as clicks, will see less lift in performance and higher costs on average. This study indicates that advertisers lose about 10 % of the efficiency in their campaigns when optimising for these non-business outcomes that act as a proxy for a real business goal. 

The objectives you can choose between for auction-campaigns in Facebooks Ads Manager

I understand that you might want to occasionally run a campaign focusing on video views, post engagement or perhaps even page likes (it is always a bit of a thrill to see the likes roll in) but be aware of the fact that this is not the best way to drive sales or to achieve the long-term success that I am talking about, and that the money invested in this campaign would most likely be better spent by focusing on the metrics that matter. 

To summarise, my advice to you is: Build a campaign strategy that allows you to focus you effort on one main goal. Make sure that this goal is a real business outcome, something that brings direct value for your business. 

If this goal is an online action (such as an online purchase, a lead, or an app install) a pre-requisite for you to be able to follow my advice is that you have the Facebook pixel on your website, and the correct events and parameters implemented. I will discuss the importance of signals in an upcoming post - stay tuned.