Meta Ads are undeniably one of the best ways to get your brand out there. With 3.065 billion active monthly users on Facebook and 2 billion on Instagram, there’s certainly no shortage of potential customers on these platforms. Setting up Meta Ads is simple - but making a good return is another story.
That’s why we’ve pulled together a list of the most important factors to consider in order to maximise your ROI with Meta Ads.
Set Clear Objectives
The immediate answer may simply be “revenue!” But there’s more than one way to go about it.
Are you focused exclusively on sales? Do you want to feed users into your email marketing campaigns? Do you want to raise brand awareness to retarget further down the sales funnel?
You can fully optimise your campaigns, but if they’re not contributing to your overall marketing strategy, you might not be making the best use of your budget. Having clear objectives in mind before you get started will help steer your ad content creation and ad targeting, ensuring every penny spent is helping you achieve your aims.
Audience Targeting
The way in which you can target specific audiences using Meta ads has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with recent legislation around the world limiting detailed targeting options and increasing user control over data collection. However, the platform still offers you plenty of options for finding your customers.
Demographic Targeting: Age, gender, education, and more.
Location Targeting: Select by country, state/county, city, or within a radius around a particular location
Interest Targeting: Target users who have shown interest in relevant topics, such as hobbies, brands, public figures, and more.
Behaviour Targeting: Target users based on their online behaviours and purchasing actions.
Custom Audiences: Use existing customer data, such as social media engagement, email lists and web activity to retarget audiences, or exclude them from seeing your ads (e.g. recent purchasers)
Lookalike Audiences: Find audiences similar to your existing customers and social media engagers based on levels of similarity.
Meta now recommends using Advantage+ audiences, which uses Meta’s machine learning algorithms to find relevant users using optional detailed targeting suggestions. With this audience type, you can still set delivery restrictions for location and age, plus any custom audience exclusions.
Craft compelling ad creatives
Even if your ads are being delivered to the right audience, you’ll get nowhere if your creatives are lacking. With such a bombardment of ad content on user feeds, your ads need to capture attention, communicate concisely, and have a clear call to action.
Consider the different motivations your customers might have for engaging with your product so you can vary your creatives to suit the widest possible range of audiences.
Short-form video content has been growing in popularity on Facebook and Instagram thanks to their Reels platform, which is Meta’s answer to TikTok. Ads on Reels are a great way of reaching (often younger) audiences who prefer to engage with video content. We’ve got a handy guide for creating compelling Meta Reels ads in 2024.
Budget Allocation and Bidding Strategies
Knowing how to allocate your budget is key to maximising your ROI. Our top tip is that you want your prospecting-to-retargeting ratio to be 70:30. This channels most of your budget towards cold audiences, whilst continuing to nurture customers further down the sales funnel.
Budgets can be set at either the campaign level (Meta Advantage campaign budget) or ad set level. Using the former will automatically distribute a central budget across multiple ad sets, allocating spend where Meta’s algorithms find the best opportunities. Ad set budgets can be effective when you want to spend a set amount for a particular audience.
Daily vs. Lifetime Budgets: Choose between daily budgets for consistent spending or lifetime budgets for flexible spending over a campaign’s duration.
Bid Strategies: Usually, you’ll want to optimise using Lowest Cost, but using the Target Cost option can also be effective for keeping results under a particular threshold.
Testing and Optimisation
To make the best returns, continuous testing, adjusting and optimisation are a must.
Creative variation: Testing different aspects of your creative can help you further optimise top-performing ads. Regularly refreshing your Meta ads with various headlines, primary text options, imagery and messaging will help your ads thrive within Meta’s algorithm and increase ROI.
Review performance: If a campaign, ad set or ad isn’t receiving the results you’d hoped, it’s often best to switch it off and relaunch with different creative or audience targeting options. The metrics you’ll be looking at will depend on your goal, but typically if engagement is low, or the ad isn’t receiving any budget, it’s a sign that you need to switch things up.
Conclusion
These are just some of the many factors that contribute to your ROI on Meta Ads. The platform is forever shifting in its approach to detailed targeting and data use, implementing new tools and services to make ad optimisation as easy as possible. By following these tips, you’ll be well on your way to getting the most out of your Meta Ads.
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Still interested in how you can get started with Meta Ads? We’d love to chat about how you can use paid social marketing to grow your business. Get in touch with our Newcastle digital marketing agency today for a no-obligation call.