Keeping Facebook Campaigns Profitable Longer
Once you have the basics of Facebook advertising down, you will see that you're starting to make money. Once this can be done consistently, then you can start thinking about scaling up your campaigns to drive more profit into your pocket. If you know what you're doing and are willing to put the time in, all you need is some persistence, knowledge, and coffee; the rest just comes together after that. Even with all the changes, banning, and updates to their platform it's still one of our largest internal sources and proves:
1. Always track your campaigns. You cannot make something better if you don't know what it's actually doing. Keeping a close eye on your various campaigns will allow you to quickly separate the poor converting ads from the strong ones. You can dump tactics that are not working and focus on making the ones that are working work even better. I've made changes to single words and abbreviation to see changes in profit, all done through tracking.
2. Split test as much as you can. Your budget may not allow for much of this in the beginning, but you should always split test your ads for the same offers as much as you can afford to. Use different images and different copy for the same offer in at least two different ads so you can see what works better. Then dump the loser and make a new ad using what you've learned, and test it against the previous round's winner. Rinse and repeat.
3. Try smaller targeted groups. If your target demographic is quite large, think about ways you can narrow it down more, whether it's by age or location or profession or what have you. The more targeted your ads, the better your results - you can even split things down so far as by state and by city if you're trying to get every last cent out of it (usually over targeting is counter-productive). Just make sure you track everything so you can jettison what isn't converting as well to focus on what is.
4. Increase volume with duplicate ads. They can be exact copies, or they can have small differences. Running two of the same ad is not going to double your volume, of course, but you may find that it increases it. So multiple ads are a good way to scale up your volume, when your budget allows. We've also scaled campaigns across multiple advertising accounts and we've seen massive influx of traffic from doing this.
5. Don't use the same ads forever. This causes what some folks call "banner blindness" - when users in a specific demographic ignore an ad simply because they've seen it so many times. Banner blindness is a big issue on Facebook, simply due to the fact that people spend so much time using it. You can beat it, though, by keeping things changed up. Swapping out images is a quick and easy fix, but you can also experiment with things like adding borders to your images and changing the headline completely. You should also consider running at least one more variation of an ad at all times, even if it doesn't perform as well as its older brother - a lower performing ad is often really worth it if it keeps banner blindness at bay for the higher performing ad.
6. Keep it sexy. It sounds corny, but sex really does sell. If you have an image with people in it, try to find the most attractive people possible - they attract more attention on Facebook ads just like they do on the street. Push the limit and keep submitting those ads.
There are many other tactics that you can use to keep your campaigns going, but you will discover them as you go along - there is no way we can pack everything into one guide because some things are dependent specifically on your style and your offers. Remember: the more creative and persistent you are will determine how profitable your campaigns are. Are you going to create 100 pictures, or 1000 to split test? You're competing with EWA affiliates and they're out for your money, so put in the extra work and hours to make it happen.
