So you have a campaign goal. You’ve chosen your ad types and dispersed your budget accordingly. Now how do you make the most of your ad dollars while your campaign is live?The answer is: there is no one answer. You plug things in. You find out what works. You experiment…and then, you optimize.Optimizations can come in many shapes and forms. They can be manual optimizations or automatic optimizations that are performed by a third party platform. In this article, we will be focusing solely on manual optimizations.

The capacity to optimize is based on various pieces of the initial campaign setup. Two of the key elements for optimizing manually are targeting and creative. Strategic planning in both of these areas is an important preemptive measure that will increase opportunities for optimization later on in the campaign. To better understand these elements let’s examine the following example:You are getting ready to launch a campaign for Bling.com, an online shopping website. The goal of the campaign is to increase the number of fans on the Bling.com Facebook fan page through the use of Facebook Like Ads.

TARGETING

Effective advertising focuses on reaching the people who are most interested in your brand. The more precise your targeting, the more successful the campaign will be.

Bling.com’s target audience is females ages 25-45. The Facebook target audience size for this demographic is 40,000,000 users. You may think, perfect! An audience size this large will surely generate fan growth. This is a common mistake in Facebook targeting. Remember, your goal is to find quality users who will be most interested in the Bling.com brand. Instead of wasting dollars promoting ads to random users, you should narrow your focus to users that are interested in the characteristics of your brand.There are several ways to hone in on potential fans. Targeting can be refined by delivery location, age, gender, geography, language, various psychographic options like Facebook’s broad & partner categories or more specific keyword lists created by a third party technology.Let’s dive a little deeper and take a look at interest keyword targeting as an example. To create a keyword list for Bling.com, you must first answer a few questions:How would you describe a Bling.com fan? What do your fans love? What kind of music, movies or other entertainment are they into?What kind of activities are they most involved in?We know the Bling.com fan is a female between the ages of 25-45 years old (assuming the target audience is an accurate representation of the demo of the current fan base). We can safely assume they like to shop. You might also know that they love chick flicks and yoga. Details like these can be used to craft a number of keyword lists that can be tested throughout the campaign.If you want to create a “Shopping Keywords” list, you might choose to use the following interest keywords: #Piperlime #ShoeDazzle #Nordstrom and #Bloomingdale’s. By overlaying these four keywords, the target audience size is reduced to 4,800,000 users. At the same time, the relevancy of each impression served has become more valuable. The likelihood of a user clicking on the Bling.com ad (CTR) has increased and the cost per fan acquired has now gone down. The more niche your brand, the more specific you will want to be with precise interest keywords and therefore, the smaller your target audience will be.

Best Practices:

• When setting up your campaign, break out targeting categories on a more granular level. For example, break out the age range to (25-30), (31-45) and (46-54). By doing so, you are able to test various combinations of targeting to optimize towards the best performing parameters.

• Consider testing brand related keywords, competitor keywords and keywords related to the demographic you are trying to reach.

Based on the goals of your campaign, determine whether or not you will be targeting current fans, or non-fans and friends of fans. For Bling.com the goal is fan growth so you will want to target non-fans and friends of fans.

Creative

The next piece of the puzzle is the ad itself. Your targeting can be right on point but very useless if your ad doesn’t utilize the brand’s content appropriately to attract clicks. Therefore, the three variables you must consider in ad creation are title, copy and image.

Title

The title character limit is 25, but do not feel required to use all 25 characters. Get creative and test various titles. Try the brand name, applicable slogans or a Call to Action.

Copy

Facebook Like Ad copy is limited to 90 characters. For most campaigns, ad performance usually peaks between 70-80 characters. Copy is an important vehicle for testing your brand message. Experiment with messaging techniques as you draft your copy. Use copy to highlight specific promotions or features of your brand. Test capital letters to draw attention to key words or phrases. Include incentivized terminology in the Call to Action like “download” and “win”. Engage fans by asking a question, using trivia or other exclusive content. Attract users to your ad by incorporating time sensitive messaging such as “In TWO DAYS…”.

Images

Use bright, clear images that display the product or model. The use of close-up images is typically the most attractive. Whenever possible test a familiar image or well-known character. Avoid using generic images. Finally, it is always a good idea to test the brand logo.

Best Practices:

• Testing multiple versions of each variable at the beginning of the campaign to see what works creates the most opportunities for optimization. By the end of the campaign, it should be clear which title, copy and image are best received by your target audience.

• When possible, play on the popularity of images and phrases that your target audience can relate to.

In a nutshell, you need to know who your fans are and what they like in order to find them online and increase the value of your ad impressions. Begin by strategizing the best ways to reach your fans and then as the campaign progresses, pause out the variables that are not working.If you are interested in understanding your fans better, try our new social intelligence tool – Qu. Click here to learn more.