Spending all day in clients’ accounts, we know that even quick changes or adjustments can make a huge difference to the performance of your Meta Ads on Facebook and Instagram. Here are 5 quick ways you can optimise your campaigns 👇

1. Make sure you’re excluding purchasers

You know how frustrating it is to see an ad for a series you’ve just watched? That’s what happens to your customers if you’re not excluding purchasers from your ads.

If someone has already gone through that sales funnel, your budget shouldn’t be wasted on showing them an ad for the thing they just bought.

Custom audiences allow you to exclude individuals who have performed a certain action on your site within a certain time period, such as purchased, add to cart or page view. The time period you set will depend on the product, but we tend to go for between 30 and 180 days.

2. Format your creative for all placements 

One mistake we often see is creatives that haven’t been sized correctly to fit their placements, especially for Reels and Stories. Meta recommends 1:1 size for in-feed placements (we use 1080 x 1080px) and 9:16 for Stories and Reels (1080 x 1920px). 

You also need to take into consideration the safe zone for your 9:16 creatives. This is the space where you should not put any text or logos to avoid having these covered up by things like usernames and buttons. As a rule of thumb, avoid the 250 pixels at the top and bottom of your story size. 

3. Utilise your creative for different ad formats

If you’ve spent time making a killer creative, you’ll want to get the most possible use from it. Well, it’s easy to take a single image or video and get yourself three separate ads.

Meta has four different formats for ads – single image/video, carousels, catalogues and collections. A square 1:1 image or video can be used as an ad by itself, as an intro card to a carousel of catalogue products, and as the header to collection ads. Different audiences will respond better to certain ad formats than others, so testing these out to see how each version performs is a quick and easy way to optimise performance. 

4. Optimise campaigns for the right event

Meta offers several events you can optimise your campaigns for, but choosing the wrong one will limit the chance of achieving your goals. Choosing add-to-cart as your optimisation event might increase certain metrics when compared to optimising for purchases, which is a smaller pool of people. But if purchases are what you want, then you’re not likely to achieve that with the audience Meta will send your way using the add-to-cart objective. 

For e-commerce businesses, your best bet is usually to optimise for purchases. However, don’t be put off from using other optimisation events when they might work better. This is all about what you want to achieve with your campaign, not arbitrarily increasing all your metrics!

5. Make sure 30% of your budget is going on retargeting – no more, no less

Your main focus should be on acquiring new customers in order to grow. But you don’t want to neglect those individuals who are already aware of your brand, as sometimes they just need an extra touchpoint in order to convert. We make sure our budget split goes 70:30 for new customers to retargeting existing audiences. This gives you the best chance to achieve conversions at both the top and bottom of the sales funnel. 

We hope this has given you an understanding on how to boost your performance on Meta Ads. Need further help with optimising your campaigns? We’d love to chat, get in touch today.