Top Facebook Ad Hacks and Tips for a better result!

If you wondered if there are any Facebook ad hacks and tips that you can follow to get more ROAS out of your Facebook Ad campaigns, then cheers. I’ve picked up my top favorite and effective Facebook Ad hacks that should give you a better result. Understanding each one of these and know how or when to apply is bound to take your Facebook Advertising on a different level. Let’s no waste anymore time and dive in.  

Facebook Ad Hacks 1: Use Video Ads

You may be surprised It’s not the “targeting” on top of my Facebook ad hacks list which can be seen on every other articles out there. Yes, you’re right, It’s all about video and it is the future. Social media video are thriving harder than ever . Your audience might not have time or interest to read but they can still watch a few seconds of video. It’s the top of Facebook Ad Hacks to get a good result from your next Facebook ad campaign.

Even if it’s being emphasized many times I’ve seen still people use the same boring single picture with 5 lines as a description with next to no variety and expect a successful campaign. It doesn’t always work. Don’t you think people are tired of seeing ads from a million of companies every day? Use video ad whenever it fits no matter what type of business is yours.

People love to watch videos. You can check out 6 Biggest Social Media Trends in 2020 to understand why video is going to be so important and relevant in future. To give you a rough idea, 70% of video ads are fully watched until completion and Facebook in-stream video ads seem to have seen a view-through rate over 85%. 

If you decide to try a video ad, there are some basic things you should keep in mind such as: 

• Use the ideal video size and ratio.  
• Don’t use too much text or pillar boxing (black bars) in your video
• Don’t use a thumbnail that contains more than 20% of text cause it might reduce your video delivery rate.
• Keep it as short as possible so that it can be placed in Facebook in-stream video as unskippable. 

Here is a great chart for you to know about different video requirements across different ad placements.

Facebook Ad Hacks 2: Refined Targeting

Almost everyone emphasizes about targeting, refining audience with location, age, interest etc. However, many of us often forget the subtlety of understanding and then creating an audience for a facebook ad campaign. Facebook has an amazing tool called Audience Insight.

If you are not using it yet, then you are missing something big. To me, this is a must for anyone to use and have a good mastery to understand everything about the audience in any particular niche before launching a campaign. Once you get a good idea, then you can create an audience from itself too.   

There are some other ways you can create an audience for your ad. For example, you can create a custom audience in many ways, such as:

Website traffic: Create an audience using the data gathered from your website by the Facebook pixel.

Customer file: If you have a customer list or data saved already, you can upload that information to create an audience. You will need to upload it in .CSV or .TXT file format.

App activity: If you have an app or game, you can create an audience from users who have engaged in an activity using the app. You’ll need to register your app, set up app events and use the Facebook Android or iOS SDK.

Offline Activity: Facebook lets you create an audience of people who have engaged with your business in offline channels. You need to use Facebook’s offline events and offline conversion measurement solution to create an offline event set. 

Video views: You can create an audience of people who have previously watched one of your videos on Facebook or Instagram.

Facebook Page: This is a very effective one. Creating an audience of people who have engaged in any activity on your page or liked/followed in a specific period. 

These are a few important ones among many other options.

You can also create a lookalike audience that you can use for targeting. These are the prospects that are similar to your custom audiences but they haven’t interacted with your brand or business before. The ultimate tip is to experiment and have a good strategy in the mind and it won’t be too hard to target. 

Facebook Ad Hacks 3: Display Social Proof

If you are wondering what is Social proof in Facebook Ads? Don’t sweat, it’s easier than you may think. It’s the positive influence that’s generated when people find out that ‘everybody’s doing it. Simply displaying engagement (likes, shares, comments) on an ad so that your audience thinks your ad or business has some credibility along with a matter of Interest thus it works as social proof.

Let’s say if you see an ad with a hundred likes and fifty comments for the first time, It should make you think the ad is liked by people. It may draw your interest that it has something interesting to have such engagement and ultimately make you check on it too. On the other hand, if you see an ad with no engagement, then you may think it’s probably not liked by people so it’s not worth your attention either. It works the same way for everyone. 

You want to show social proof to your audience that your business is worth their attention and it has already gained the trust of people like them. It’s no surprise if any ad got 200 likes and 100 comments, people want to know why? what’s in it that got others to like the Facebook ad? There are also other ways to display social proof such as showing authority figures, celebrities, or big brands engagement with your business. 

Wondering how to use an existing post as a Facebook ad for social proof? It’s simple either select a post or enter post ID on use existing post option while creating an ad. You will find “select post” option there. Facebook should show you all the available posts of the selected page where you can also search with a name and ID.

 Remember each post has a unique ID which you can find on its URL or simply by going to Facebook Business Manager. Then select the option “Page posts”. There you can find all your posts. Click on the post name you want and you should see its ID on top. Copy the ID and enter it on the “post ID” option. 

Facebook Ad Hacks 4: Use your Competitor

Do you know that you can use your competitor to find audience interest to target more precisely? Let’s see what did I mean by that. Here in the pic below you can see, I’ve used a (demo) competitor name in detailed targeting option and Facebook is suggesting Its audience “behaviour” and “demographics” which I can use for my Ad. Besides interest, you can also spy on your competitor’s active ads and probably get an idea if those ads are successful.

let’s say you have a digital marketing tool to offer and you want to advertise it to customers through Facebook ad and Semrush is your competitor. Now you can check what ads they are running currently to gain an insight.

Simply just go to your competitor page and click “see more” in page transparency section. You will be told if any active ads are running under the “Ads From This Page” option. If It’s yes, click on it and you will see all the current ads of your competitor. You may gain a good insight upon inspecting their ads and also the ad structures which you may use for your advantage later.

Facebook Ad Hacks 5: Try Messenger Ads

This is one of my favorite Facebook ad hacks for some good reason. Almost 1.3 billion people use Messenger and 20 billion messages are exchanged between people every month. That means if your ad is placed on messenger there’s a surety of your ads being noticed and generate good impressions. Especially, if your business is new then you probably want people to recognize your business name.

Facebook messenger ad is very effective in this aspect. Its the secret sauce that Many is still missing. Facebook’s sponsored messages almost work like Linkedin sponsored in-mail ad. For instance, popular toy brand LEGO found that the click-to-Messenger ads drove 3.4 times as much ROAS, compared to normal Ads that send traffic to the website. 
Interestingly, ads that clicked-through to Messenger were even 71% cheaper. Learn more about messenger ads.

Facebook Ad Hacks 6: Have a good Ad structure

One might argue it’s not that essential hack, however, having a good ad structure is extremely important in case of A/B testing and future usage. If have not noticed, you can control your Facebook ad budget on ad set level which is why having a good structure is crucial. A simple ad structure should be something like as below.

Besides, you want to know which set of an ad or which ad of an ad set is performing well or needs optimization once you run your Facebook ad campaign. Instead of running a normal image ad and video ads under an ad set, you can even separate them on a campaign level which may help you keep your ad account cluster free. 

Facebook Ad Hacks 7: Retargeting and Remarketing Ad

Isn’t it better to target your customers who had already shown interest in your business in any way rather than targeting randomly and hoping they would convert as if throwing stones in the dark? 3 out of 4 customers notice retargeted ads and If you implement retargeting properly along with other channels, you can sell 50% more.

It just works better. A study shows Website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are more likely to convert by 70%. Besides, the click-through rate (CTR) of a retargeted ad is 10x higher than the CTR of a typical display ad which is another reason you should strongly consider implementing it on your next campaign.

One thing to notice, you can’t just use retargeting ad normally. To do that you need to collect data from your website by implementing Facebook pixel first. Check the instruction if you don’t know how to set up a Facebook pixel on your website. You can also use facebook dynamic remarketing ads which is an almost similar term. The idea is to find out which one gives the best result for your particular business.

Facebook Ad Hacks 8: Use ad variations and run test campaign

Whether you admit or not, many dislike ads. Nowadays people are using ad-blocker more than ever. So how can you make your ads look not so boring and attractive? There is no solid answer to this question but we can always follow facebook ad hacks to improve the experience. I always think one should create at least one variation of an ad set and ad copy for any Facebook advertising campaign.

You can use Dynamic creative to enhance your ad. Why? A study shows people watching an ad too repetitively often have a rather negative impression on the brand. They do as much as hide the ad and sometimes even provide negative feedback on Facebook to not to be shown the particular ad/page in future. No way you want your customer to be that annoyed to hide your ad or page from their feed.

Thus it is always a good practice using multiple images or descriptions in an ad to keep it refreshing to your audience. when you use dynamic creative, facebook automatically create variations of your ad and show result which combination is more popular.  

Running a test campaign is also a great idea before you spend your whole budget without prior understanding. Suppose you have a budget of $1000 to spend. Run a test campaign first with multiple ads or ad sets for a week with a small amount. It will let facebook have an insight about your business and target audience. In case any ad performs very well generating good engagements, you can reuse it to run with an increased budget or along with a different campaign.

Facebook Ad Hacks 9: Choosing the right objective and goal

You have no idea how many people make this mistake by selecting wrong objective and wonder why their ads are performing poorly. You need to understand which goal and objective are suitable for your ad as well as business.

Suppose, your business is fairly new and nobody knows much about you. Your goal should be getting your business known to people and gain followers. Meanwhile, your objective should be one that helps you create brand awareness. Although there is an objective called “brand awareness” that you can select for your campaign I’ve seen “reach” and “engagement” generally perform better.

Use the “conversion” objective when you’ve already run a few campaigns and Facebook has gathered insight about your business to give you a good result. For video ads, “reach” and “video views” both work. Always experiment what works for your business. Remember what works for other business might not work for yours. Learn more about objectives here.

Facebook Ad Hacks 10: Don’t optimize too early

Often new advertisers tend to edit and try to optimize very fast before Facebook can learn to deliver and drive conversion properly. The ideal would be to run a campaign at least for 48 hours before you start to optimize it. There are many mistakes people make when about scaling and optimizing ad campaign.

Never raise your ad budget too quickly just because your ad is starting to perform well. Remember if you raise it significantly high just when the ad is having good conversions, it might destabilize the algorithm and end up hurting rather than earning a good result. Another important thing to keep in mind, don’t make changes in an ad’s creative or its ad set at the same time.

If you make more than one changes then you won’t be able to pinpoint which change has given you a positive or negative result. So when you are running a campaign with A/B tests or different ad sets and ads, try to make one big change on ad set level. Otherwise, you may turn your Facebook ad campaign into a big mess.

Facebook Ad Hacks 11: Optimize your landing page

If you are running a Facebook ad campaign to drive traffic to your website whether to generate leads or sales, you have to make sure your landing page is properly optimized for different devices and also for conversion. For instance, if you are running a Facebook ad campaign that has a great CTR but not many conversion then it may indicate your landing page is not properly optimized or it’s not attractive to your visitors.

You should always test how is the landing page experience on different devices and how fast it is loading. Not everyone might be on the fastest wifi, so you want to make sure the experience is optimum for visitors that may use slower cellular data. If your website has pop up for email sign up or ads, probably it’s wiser that you don’t distract your visitors with those once they land on your landing page.

At last, I would like to mention that, there are no guarantee that your ad campaign will be always successful but you can always learn Most Common Facebook Ad Mistakes to avoid . It always take a bit of time before Facebook ads start to show result. The key is to learn and find out why and how can scale better. Applying these Facebook ad hacks definitely increases the chance of getting positive result, however, never stop searching for own hack and trick to take your Facebook advertising into the next level.