Campaign Objective
When setting up campaigns, its a good idea to know what the purpose of your marketing is going to be on Facebook. Luckily, Facebook allows us to choose from several different marketing objectives when setting up new campaigns. While you should be strategically picking the right objective right off the bat, it’s a good idea to go back and double check any live campaigns so they have the correct objective. Are you trying to gain sales? Pick conversion objective. Need traffic to your website? Pick the traffic objective. It might sound pretty logical to make sure you are using the right objective, but it’s an easy mistake to make picking the wrong campaign if you are in a hurry.
Ad Set Optimizations
Along with making sure you have the correct campaign objective, you should be making sure your ad set settings mirror that. If you have a campaign objective of conversions then you need to have a pixel set up on your website with events set up. Then you should be picking the correct event on the ad set level. Make sure you are optimizing for a purchase and not a newsletter sign up if you want sales to come from your ads.
Keeping in line with the correct pixel event, you should be optimizing your ads to your objective as well. Unless you have a very specific optimization strategy, you should be optimizing for conversions under optimization for ad delivery. This will ensure Facebook is serving your ads to people who are most likely to convert.
Geographic Targeting
When setting up or auditing your geographic targeting, make sure you are checking how you are targeting an area. Facebook will default to everyone in this location, which means you could be spending money on travelers or vacationers who are in the targeting area. If these people will never purchase or sign up for your services, make sure you pick people who live in this location. An easy way to prevent wasted spend.
Placements
Facebook will recommend that you opt in to automatic placements. While it is a good idea to opt in to multiple placements to give the Facebook algorithms a lot to play with to find the best placements to advertise on, you should be practicing some brand safety that is only available when you manually edit placements. This is especially true if you plan to use the Audience Network. By editing placements manually, you can do everything automatic can, but apply some content exclusions and blacklists as well.
Analytics Tracking
One last tip for making sure your Facebook campaigns are effective is monitoring traffic through analytics. A very easy way to see traffic in Analytics is adding parameters to your URLs under the tracking section of your ad. Under URL parameterss (optional) you can add things like source, medium, and campaign.
