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Last month, Facebook hit a new record of 2.6 billion monthly users. Research is also showing that 47% of consumers have increased social media usage during the pandemic. With more people online, and data suggesting that PPC accounts are rebounding after the initial impact of COVID-19, it’s time to start thinking about your strategy for reactivating Facebook advertising.
We can’t predict when the pandemic will end or when the economy will rebound, but we do know how to prepare your online advertising accounts to respond to the current state and then how to ramp back up (when you’re ready). Today, I’ll be focusing on Facebook advertising, and here’s what I’ll cover:
If you read my previous blog post on Google Ads recovery, you’ll notice that the steps to Facebook ads recovery follow a similar process—but just because the steps look similar doesn’t mean the details are. As an advertiser, you know that these are two really different platforms.
So let’s get started with the Facebook-specific account recovery.
Consumers are using social media more during the pandemic, and this shift in behavior has led to a record-breaking active user count on Facebook, which is evident in their Q1 earnings report.
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While active user counts grow, advertising revenue has declined.
The opposite trendlines in active user count and revenue shows us that advertisers are pulling back their investment in Facebook advertising as they navigate this time—which is a common trend across advertising platforms.
However, while ad spend is reduced and user activity has increased, advertisers are seeing a reduction in their cost KPIs during this time. This trend is beginning with a decrease in CPM (cost per one-thousand impressions)—we’re seeing a 35% reduction within our customer base. In tandem with CPM, CPA (cost per acquisition) is decreasing for advertisers; we’ve seen a 23% decrease in CPA.
So what does this mean? It means that if you’re able to continue advertising on Facebook during this time, you can generate more results from your investment today.
While the current trends and uncertainties are outside of our control, let’s focus on what advertisers can control during this time—the actions you take in your account to maximize ROI from your ad spend today.
Use this checklist to identify quick-win opportunities in your account.
Once you feel like your account is in good health in its current state, let’s shift your focus toward ramping your account back up.
To reinforce the importance of these next few steps, let’s use a quick analogy to running a marathon.
Say you ran a marathon six months ago, and since then, you’ve decreased your weekly mileage by 70%. Now, you’ve decided you’re ready to take on another marathon. Would you be prepared to complete this marathon at the same or better time if you tried to tomorrow?
Highly unlikely. You would need to take the time to check in on your current fitness level and devise a plan to scale your mileage back up to run well in your marathon.
The same process goes to ramping your Facebook advertising spend backup—you should check in on your current state and devise a methodical plan. These next steps will walk you through the crucial steps to ensuring that you can scale up your Facebook advertising while maintaining (or even improving) your account’s benchmarks and KPI performance.
The first step in this process is auditing your account foundation and making sure you’re following current best practices.
The key components in this phase are:
Let’s talk more about what you need to check in on these components.
I listed this step first because conversion tracking is pivotal to your success with Facebook ads. Why? Because conversion tracking tells the algorithm what success looks like in your account. Having accurate conversion tracking allows you to provide the signals that Facebook needs to optimize the delivery of your ads toward your objective and goals.
To get started, you need to confirm that your pixel is firing properly. To review your status, navigate to the events manager.
And within the data sources section, you should look for an active signal, like this (in yellow):
Once you’ve confirmed that your pixel is firing, navigate to “custom conversions” and audit your existing conversion actions.
After laying out all of your current conversion actions, you should ask yourself:
Use your audit to prioritize any changes you need to make to your conversion tracking moving forward.
While conversion tracking tells Facebook what success looks like in your account, your objectives tell Facebook what your goal is (AKA what you’re looking for the algorithm to accomplish for you). When it comes to delivering to your selected goal, I can confidently say that the Facebook algorithm is a great listener—which is why selecting the right objective is important.
Facebook’s options for objectives when setting up your campaign
As you can see above, Facebook offers a wide range of options for advertisers to select depending on their goal. While reviewing your existing campaign objectives, you should look for alignment with your marketing funnel and goals.
Not only should your objective be aligned with your marketing journey, but it should also line up with your business goal in each stage. To help you get started, here are a few examples of objectives pairings.
While each business is unique with different objectives and goals, this should help guide you as you check in on the strength of your current objective selections.
The final piece to equipping the algorithm with the information it needs to deliver to your goals are your conversion event and optimization for ad delivery selections.
While conversion tracking lays the groundwork for information gathering, the conversion event tells the algorithm the key indicator for success in your ad set. And your optimization for ad delivery selection informs the algorithm how to optimize ad delivery according to these signals and objectives.
Just as you did with objectives, use this time to audit your current settings and ensure that they are in line with your goals.
For more on your objectives and settings, check out Facebook Campaign Objectives: What Every Advertiser Needs to Know.
Your ad creative can make or break your Facebook advertising success. If your ad creative isn’t scroll-stopping, you’ll never have the opportunity to engage your target audience to take action on your ad.
Take this time to audit your existing ad creative and understand where you can improve to achieve creative excellence. Here’s how to get started:
For more on ad creative best practices and examples, check out these resources:
While I reviewed the foundational best practices in the first four steps, this stage should be the cherry on top for your Facebook account.
Okay, now that we’ve reviewed what to do now and how to check in on your current foundation, it’s time to prepare to ramp up.
Once you’ve confirmed that your account structure is correct and up-to-date, there are three steps to preparing for ramping up. You’ll need to:
Let’s go over why each of these are so important and how to prep your account.
Whether you’re preparing to increase your spend or not, you should be reporting on where your Facebook ads account stands today and how that’s evolved during the pandemic. As a spreadsheet-loving marketer, I can get carried away in this stage—pulling every metric possible and plotting each and every trend. This isn’t the best use of my time or yours. At the end of the day, we want to tell a clear story of how performance has evolved on Facebook. To accomplish this, I’d recommend focusing your initial analysis on the core platform metrics:
How has spend evolved:
How are prospects engaging with your ads:
How have your costs evolved based on new trends:
By grouping and comparing these KPIs over time, you can start telling the story of how your account has evolved. To help you dig in further and analyze your Facebook advertising results, check out these resources:
As you review the changes you’ve made and how performance has evolved, you should look at how your competitive landscape may have impacted your delivery. You can use the Facebook ad library to search your competitors, see their offers, and review their most recent ad activity.
Here’s an example of what it looks like if you search Instacart.
While your direct competitors’ strategies have an impact on your performance, it’s also important to note that you’re competing for ad slots with all advertisers that overlap with your targeting. And while you prepare for your Facebook ads recovery, keep in mind that other advertisers are doing the same. As advertisers ramp their spend back up, competition in the auction is likely to increase. This means that the drop in CPM (shown earlier) is likely to revert, making it crucial that you follow the right steps to your account recovery during this period to maximize ROI.
Google Ads makes this stage a bit easier for advertisers—with labels and change history, you can quickly review your most recent and significant account changes. While you can’t access a change history on Facebook, you can look at how your account makeup has evolved. Get started by adjusting your date range with a comparison.
Here, you should be looking for newly paused campaigns or ad sets and significant changes in spend. As you identify the largest changes, ask yourself a few leading questions:
Was this change applied because your campaign is limited by budget?
Was this change implemented because it was an outlier in performance?
That means we’ve reached the final step of this process: actually ramping up your spend.
This might be the final step in the process, but that doesn’t mean it’s as easy as boosting your spend and getting back to normal. There are few more things you need to do in order to ramp up spend:
Here are a few key ways you can set your account up for scale:
Communicating and setting clear expectations is extremely important as you navigate this ramp-up period—especially as you experience some disruptions to performance during this time. While setting expectations during this period, you should:
Getting your Facebook ads account back up and running will take time, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Follow these steps to ramp your Facebook ads account back up when it’s ready:
As the trends continue to evolve, we’re here to provide strategic guidance and resources for navigating online advertising during this time and beyond. For more information, you can visit our COVID-19 resource page and stay up to date with our blog for new content posted daily.
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