Among the digital advertising platforms we use most, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram tend to rank in the top 3 nearly every time, regardless of the campaign’s objection. A high volume of daily users combined with low-cost inventory and a plethora of user data makes Meta a compelling advertising platform for both consumer and business-to-business advertisers. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways of optimizing your performance across Meta properties; in the tens of thousands of campaigns we’ve managed in the last 20 years, plenty of them did not start off performing well out of the gate. Take a note from the lessons we have learned, and follow these three Meta Ads tips to improve your performance on the platform right away.
Tip #1: Stop Optimizing to “Link Clicks”
When you go to set up a new campaign in Meta Ads, you will see that you have numerous objective options for your campaign:
Each of the campaign objectives will bring up different options for the specific event that is to be optimized against for the duration of the campaign. Generally, we alternate between the Traffic and Sales goals for prospecting and remarketing tactics, respectively, and use the Leads objective for any in-platform lead generation we are running.
Within the Traffic objective, advertisers can select between Link Clicks, Landing Page Views, IG profile visits, or phone calls. As many advertisers will be used to optimizing to clicks on other platforms, selecting the Link Click optimization seems like it would make the most sense, right? But there’s an even better option!
Do This Instead
Select the “Landing page views” optimization goal for your Traffic-focused campaigns, and be sure to have a Meta pixel installed on your website. While Link Clicks is certainly further down the funnel than, say, views, the sad reality is that nearly half of the people that click on a link in Facebook or Instagram will never wait around long enough for the page to load.
You read that right: 50%.
So, while Link Clicks might show some intent, if users are abandoning before your landing page even loads, not only do they have no chance of converting, but you likely aren’t even getting the opportunity to cookie them to add them to your remarketing funnel.
The Landing page views goal, however, ensures that Meta is optimizing to one step beyond the click—to the page load itself—meaning that people are sticking around long enough to be pixeled and shown ads later on via our remarketing tactic.
Tip #2: Segment Your Remarketing Audience
We may have mentioned this, but your remarketing tactic will almost always be top-performing in terms of driving conversions for your campaign. With that being the case, advertisers should be doing whatever they can to maximize the opportunities that remarketing has to see success. Unfortunately, too many advertisers miss opportunities on remarketing by grouping all of their retargeting audiences into a single ad set in their Meta Ads account build.
Do This Instead
When setting up your remarketing tactic, Screechy Cat Media recommends creating a campaign-level budget and setting up separate ad sets for each retargeting audience, i.e. site visitors, cart abandoners, Meta followers, and finally, your email database.
Each of these retargeting audiences will then level-up to your overall remarketing budget. Meta will optimize spend on these ad sets based on audience size and performance vs. the optimization goal. As an added step, we also like to include ad set spend minimums on each, to ensure that Meta will not overlook one audience entirely because another contains more people. This option can be found below the date setting, under Advanced Options.
Given these audiences were collected at various points in the customer journey, they may respond differently to our messaging, or may require unique messaging: by separating them from the start, we give ourselves the opportunity to develop messaging and creative that speaks to each audience’s point in the journey, instead of treating them all as the same. This also gives Meta’s algorithm a chance to learn the intricacies of each audience and optimize accordingly.
(Note: you will need at least 1000 users in each audience, after matching, in order to run them as separate ad sets.)
Tip #3: Customize Ads by Placement
Facebook’s standard ad size is 1080×1080. Instagram’s standard ad size is 1080×1350. Reels and Story standard ad size is 1080×1920.
So why are you running ads with one 1200×628 image??
Do This Instead
Develop your ad assets in 1080×1920 size first, then resize to Facebook (1080×1080). Upload both into the same ad unit.
By creating and uploading creative in both 1080×1080 and 1080×1920 sizes, you’ll ensure your ads render properly on all major Meta ad placements.
