Now, if you’re in the Facebook Advertising space, you’re probably familiar with the ol’ classic four campaign 20 adset and 40 ad testing strategy. Because the more you test, the more data you have, right? Well, this article will show you exactly why this is the complete opposite of what you truly need to scale your business and how you can implement these best practices today.
So if the complex campaign structure is a waste of time, what’s better?
The strategy you’re about to read comes straight from the people who know the platform best – Facebook. Yes, I know there are many ‘bro scientists’ and gurus out there who think Facebook just wants us to spend money, and while that is true, they also want us to have the best results and experience as that keeps advertisers coming back to use their platform. And by the time you finish reading this, you’ll begin to realise the impact ‘Power 5’ can have on your time and results.
What is the ‘Power 5’?
The Power 5 is a simple combination of Facebook products that support the machine learning algorithm in finding your ideal customers at the right time and placement for them to convert. It consists of the following: Auto Advanced Matching, Account Simplification, Campaign Budget Optimization, Automatic Placements, and Dynamic Ads. As you can see, it’s heavily based on the Machine Learning Algorithm. But you may be wondering, how exactly will these help me save time and improve results? Don’t worry. You’ll find out how shortly.
How does Facebook Machine Learning understand the customer?
In short, Facebook uses signals to understand the customer journey. These signals consist of: Places people check in with Facebook, things people buy in Marketplace, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, information from Facebook and Instagram profiles, and pages people like.
Furthermore, Machine Learning answers the following questions for you:
- What devices work best?
- Where should you place your ads?
- What placements work well?
- How should you allocate your budget across markets and audiences?
Before we begin, I’ll make the benefits of Power 5 to your advertising super clear:
- Improved performance
- Auto real-time optimization
- Simplified measurement and reporting
- Faster scaling ability
As you read through this article, you’ll understand why these benefits result from the ‘Power 5’ method.
Automatic Advanced Matching
So, to begin with, Automatic Advanced Matching is a tool used to more accurately attribute conversions to Facebook, so you know what is working and what isn’t working. It increases your custom audience size since Facebook will know who is a part of each audience type in more detail. It can even decrease your CPA because Facebook can better identify and deliver ads to those people most likely to take the action you’re optimising for. As people interact with content on their device and complete actions, it creates intent signals utilised by the advertiser. The data collected by Automatic Advanced Matching includes: form field data, context(value, product id), cookies, events – as you can imagine, this gives the algorithm more information to work with when looking for the best customers. So start with turning this on if you haven’t already!
Account Simplification
This can be a real game-changer when applied correctly, so pay attention…
As mentioned before, most advertisers use and have tried launching lots of campaigns, adsets, and ads, but this is not what is recommended by Facebook. There are many reasons why. The most obvious reason is that with too many adsets, you are at risk of audience overlap, which will cause your ads to compete against each other and increase the CPM or decrease the number of impressions you gain. When simplifying the account structure, you get more accurate results since there are fewer adsets and creatives and more data is being collected through these – compared to spreading your spend thin. How you execute this simplified account structure is up to you, but I personally never run any more than three campaigns or adsets. The benefits of this can be seen when I hop on an ad account that is already running campaigns, and with the simple restructure of the account, results are vastly improved within three days. Anecdotal, but give it a try for yourself and see the results.
Automatic Placements
So this can be tricky to imagine at first if most of your sales come from Instagram, for example. It might make you wonder, ‘why would I use other placements if I know the best performer already’ but you could be losing out on a lot more and a lot cheaper sales by not utilising this smart feature. But the reason this is so powerful is that Facebook will shift your budget between the placements where the cheapest or highest value purchases will occur. So even if Auto Placements are turned on, and Instagram still performs best, you can still capture other purchases by showing your ads to a wider audience in more places. The algorithm will always show your ads in the right place at the right time for your optimisation event.
Campaign Budget Optimization
If CBO campaigns aren’t your main plan of attack already, go to your ads manager and turn CBO on now! It will save you so much time on manual budget optimization and increase the performance of your campaigns. It works in a very similar way to how Facebook spends your budget on the best performing creatives on the ad level. However, CBO will spend your budget on the adset that will get the best results. One of the things that confused me on CBO’s at first was that I saw Facebook spending more money on adsets with a higher CPA and lower ROAS. So I switched back to ABO. However, with more knowledge and understanding of the algorithm, I learned that it predicts where the most opportunities are for a purchase (using intent signals) and shifts your budget there. For example, one adset may have a single purchase at £3, but finding another one at that cost will become a lot more expensive than the initial purchase cost, which is why the budget is spent elsewhere.
Dynamic Ads
The interesting thing about the algorithm is that as well as looking at the most obvious data points, Facebook also looks at what products you have purchased or viewed that are complementary to another product. For example, if you bought a bike, you may see ads for a tyre pump. So with Dynamic Ads, you can display your entire catalog and only show products that are super relevant to your customer. When retargeting, this does include products they have viewed. The obvious benefit here is improving your CPA as ads are shown specifically to people interested in them. You’ll also have much more simplicity when advertising as you only have to upload one catalog instead of making a new campaign for each product.
So by now, you’re aware of the rewards you will reap from utilizing Power 5. You’ll save time, effort, and money. It answers questions that advertisers have daily and automatically optimizes your campaigns.
What was your ‘aha’ moment while reading this article?
By Joshua Simpson
Sounds too good to be true?
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