It is no secret that Facebook Advertising has become more expensive in 2022 but by following certain rules on best practice, you can give yourself the best chance of success. After spending £000s in ad spend on Facebook, below are some tips based on our findings.
Whether you want Skiddle to run your Facebook Ads for you or you are doing it internally, take a look the tips below for some guidance.
Campaign Objective
We recommend setting your campaign objective as Conversions, which may now appear as Sales in some Ad Managers. Setting this objective for your campaign will ensure that the highest quality traffic is sent to your page i.e people who are most likely to make online purchases.
99% if not 100% of the time, time ticket sales are going to be your goal so make conversions campaign objective.
Ad Creative
Don't get hung up on the video vs image debate. The truth is both can work. But do avoid the below.
No 'Lineup' Event Posters - Don't use these for ads. We've seen them perform poorly enough times to know they don't work well. They're just not attention grabbing enough for a Facebook Ad. We recently ran a test where we changed from an event poster to a simple image of a DJ and ROAS went from below 1x to 6x.
Get Your Sizes Right - If you run an ad with a 1920 x 1080 image or video, you are paying the same amount of money to Facebook to take up less space on someone's screen. Use square (1080 x 1080) for Facebook Feed, 1080 x 1350 for Instagram Feed and 1080 x 19020 for Instagram Story.
Focus On Quality - Quality is key. Ask yourself if the creative will get people's attention? Sometimes a simple image of a recognisable DJ from an event is all you need. If it's a festival you may want a short video that sells the 'experience' more. There are no hard and fast rules and if you can run some A/B tests for a week or two before starting a campaign, then even better.
Less is More - Remember that the purpose of your ad is to get people to click and your page on Skiddle is where you should focus on converting them to purchasing your tickets. Less is more with content. Try and keep videos to 8 seconds and not overload images with too much information. Give people just enough to grab their attention. Give them the rest on your Skiddle event page.
Have a Target
While this is optional, it’s always helpful if you have an idea of what Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) you would like to hit before running an ad. Skiddle will usually consider 3x and above as a strongly performing ad but you may have specific targets you need to hit. Having a target in mind will help you decide whether the ad you are running is 'successful' or whether you should stop it.
Budget
We suggest choosing a Daily Budget in your campaign settings and spending a minimum of £30 per day.
Generally speaking, you’ll need to spend at least this amount per day for Facebook to show the ad to enough people and get enough clicks and see conversions.
Setting a Daily Budget will also give you the most flexibility as you can easily see what you are spending each day and what your total spend will finish at.
It also makes 'scaling' your ad easy which essentially just means increasing budget when it's performing strongly. DON'T increase your daily budget by more than 20%, this will more than likely reset the ads 'learning phase'.
Duration
Ideally you will want to run your ad for at least 1 week. There’s a few reasons for this.
1. A week will give you a better indication of performance as it means you have run your ad on every single day of the week. There are exceptions to the rule. Although Facebook would say otherwise, if after 3 days your click through rate is low, your conversions are low and cost per click is high, it is very very unlikely will start performing well. Turn it off, change, go again.
2. Facebook’s reporting of results is also quite delayed because it relies much more heavily on sales being reported via a Conversion API rather than the Facebook Pixel. If you run the ad for a week, you are much more likely to see a clearer picture of the results. It's not unusual at the moment to turn an ad off and come back to it a few days late, only to see the ROAS has increased.