4 Things You Need to Stop Doing With Facebook Ads in 2021... (I can't believe I used to do this)

hey it's andrew welcome back to the channel in this video we're going to talk about how facebook ads have evolved over time i'm going to share things that i used to do and that i used to recommend with facebook ads and i'm going to explain why i don't do them anymore and what i do now instead so this is kind of a video about advice i've given in the past that now is bad advice and the reason for that is because you might be reading blog posts you might be watching videos trying to learn about facebook advertising and what lots of people don't realize is that if a post is one two three years old or even six months old that information could well be outdated and may actually be bad advice so you need to make sure that what you're consuming and applying is new it's up to date and it's still relevant and hopefully what i'm about to share in this video helps you do that now if you enjoy the video or ask give it a like and if you want to hear more from me hit subscribe hit that little bell and you'll get notified whenever i release a new one alright let's talk about the first thing that i used to do but i don't do any more and that is single interest ad sets so i used to recommend setting up different ad sets and inside each ad set you would put one very specific interest so let's say you were targeting people who were interested in health and fitness well you would find 10 different health and fitness interests let's say and you would create 10 different ad sets and in each ad set you would have one interest and i would often be happy if that interest had 500 000 or more people in it then that would be fine to target but now in 2021 that just doesn't work anymore facebook likes larger audiences and the algorithm has become so good that within a big broad audience facebook will actually be able to find your target market better than you could by separating out single interest and trying to get really really granular with your targeting and you can imagine the mess that it creates when you have a different headset for each interest not only are campaigns very messy when you structure it like that but it also limits the amount you can spend i mean you've got to allocate specific budget to each of those ad sets and it's just ugly so now what i do instead i'll leave a bunch interest together so i'll come up with a bunch of interest let's say i'm targeting people who are interested in health and fitness and i have 10 interests that i want to target i'll bunch those all into one ad set and the other thing that i do is just target really broad interests so instead of finding 10 small interests and bunching them together i'll also test choosing one big broad interest like health and fitness for example and targeting that these big broad audiences seem to be what facebook prefers now and i'm seeing much better results when i do that versus smaller single interest-based ad sets now the reason this actually made it into the video is because i sent out my weekly newsletter last week and it was one of the pieces of advice i included in there was try broad interest targeting where instead of trying to get really specific with your interests you just take one big broad interest like health and fitness and target that and within a day of me sending out that newsletter somebody said they tried it they just went with one big broad interest in an ad set and they were getting amazing results they were absolutely crushing what they were doing previously so i guess that's just one more piece of evidence that this does work and to say if you're not on my newsletter make sure you get on there the link is in the description of this video if you want to jump on the newsletter and get these kind of tips delivered in your inbox every week all right next up kind of along the same lines is one ad per ad set so i used to run all these different ad sets and then i used to have a single ad in each ad set and the logic there was that if you had multiple ads in an ad set facebook wouldn't distribute the budget evenly between those ads so let's say you had a 50 budget on an ad set and you had five ads inside that ad set well facebook wouldn't allocate ten dollars a day to each of those ads it might spend forty dollars on one ad and then the rest of the budget split between the other four now that was not ideal when you wanted to run efficient tests and so to get around that what i would do and what a lot of others would do was create separate ad sets with one ad in each and then they would allocate a small budget to each ad set that would ensure an even distribution of budget across all of their ads and that used to work just fine but that is something that i haven't done for quite a long time now and i don't recommend you do there are a few reasons for this essentially facebook's algorithm has got better over time it's better at optimizing it's better at spreading out our budget but the other reason for it is because facebook actually goes through a learning phase now and they like to have 50 conversions per ad set per week before you start to see some stability there and before the ad set starts performing as well as it can now obviously if you have a set budget and you split that budget over multiple ad sets then you are going to get fewer conversions per ad set than if you just had let's say one ad set so it's going to take you longer to get out of the learning phase if you've got a hundred dollar budget split across 10 ad sets versus if you've got a hundred dollar budget on one single ad set in the former case you would have 10 ad sets spending 10 dollars a day each and that might take you a week to get to 50 conversions on each of those if you have one it might only take you one to two days we also know that facebook learns at the ad set level so giving it more budget on fewer ad sets helps the algorithm optimize and helps you get better performance out of your ads so the lesson here is we're using anywhere between three and five ads per ad set now or even using dynamic creatives is a better option in the vast majority of situations versus running a single ad per ad set right that brings me to number three now which is running engagement ad campaigns in order to boost social proof on our ads so some people went extreme with this and they used to run engagement campaigns and target very low cost countries to run ads to so they would choose countries like bangladesh for example run engagement ad campaigns to those countries and get a bunch of likes and comments on their ads before they would take those ads with all the social proof and run them via their conversion campaigns i never went that far i never targeted countries outside of our main target audience because i didn't like the damage that that did to the page in the long term but i did run engagement campaigns to our main target markets like the us canada uk and australia to build social proof on our ads then take those ads with social proof and run them through our conversion campaigns now that strategy did work back once upon a time because that social proof helped increase our click-through rates which help bring our costs down overall but now it just doesn't seem to give any benefit the added cost of running the engagement campaigns and the lack of engagement that you actually get from them the results aren't great doesn't result in a big enough benefit when you flip them over and run conversion campaigns to actually justify the cost so that's just something we don't do anymore if you're still doing that i would recommend stopping unless you're seeing really good results from it and you know that that's the cause of your better results all right next up something i used to do but don't do anymore is separating out placements so i used to have different ad sets and in each ad set i would actually target a different placement let's say i would have one ad set and it would target the facebook news feed i would have another ad set that would target the instagram feed and another ad set for stories and they would essentially have the same content but the placement would just be different and the reason i did that was because one i could customize the ad for the placement so it's a click learn more to get the thing in an instagram ad where in the facebook ad i would say click here and i would put a link directly in the copy i would also customize the creative for facebook and instagram and then instagram stories would have its own separate creative as well so it would have a special 9x16 creative for instagram stories for example and that allowed me to get better performance because my creative looked native for wherever i was running it the other thing that having separate placements allowed me to do was to easily optimize based on which placement was working best so if i saw the news feed was working better than the instagram feed i could turn off the ad set that was targeting the instagram news feed and this worked well for quite a long time but again facebook has evolved over time and now i find myself using the all placements option 99 of the time the first reason for that is because we can now customize our ad creatives at the ad level meaning we can create one ad inside an ad set and for that ad we can upload different creatives for different placements we can customize the copy and the headline for different placements or within the one ad inside an ad set we don't actually need to have separate ad sets in order to customize our ads and the other reason is something facebook calls the breakdown effect and the breakdown effect is basically what happens when specific placements become exhausted or when they don't have as much inventory as other placements so if you get too specific and you don't allow facebook to target all placements the breakdown effect will actually cause your cost to rise where if you choose all placements facebook can show the right ad in the right placement to the right person at the right time using its algorithm and using the data available to it let's say one placement is more expensive one day than another or let's say facebook goes into an auction to show your ad to a user who generally likes instagram well if you choose the all placements option facebook can simply put your ad in front of that user at that time but if you were targeting let's say the facebook news feed specifically then you wouldn't even be considered for that auction all of this to say if you give facebook less freedom and less flexibility to do its thing it is going to push your ad costs up over time and this just gets worse as you scale so if you want to run at any kind of scale all placements outperforms separating placements in the vast majority of cases so i look back at these now and it's kind of funny and a little bit embarrassing to think that i used to do some of these things but look they worked at the time and you have to keep evolving and keep moving with the platform as it changes and so the best practices now are very different to what they were in the past so i hope that this video has helped you and if you've been doing any of these things that maybe you change them and get better performance out of your ads if it has give the video a quick like that really does help me helps the channel grow and get these videos in front of more people and i hope the other thing you've taken away from this is to just make sure that the information that you're consuming and what you're applying with your facebook ads is up to date it's really easy to watch things read things that aren't necessarily up to date and that will actually hinder your performance if you don't catch that alright good luck with your ad campaigns hope this video has helped you and i'll see you in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Andrew Hubbard

Views: 13,536

Keywords: facebook ads, facebook marketing, facebook ads 2021, facebook marketing 2021, facebook advertising ios 14.5, facebook advertising, facebook marketing strategy, facebook ad strategy, marketing strategy, facebook ads strategy, ad strategy, ads strategy, ads, paid traffic, social media advertising, facebook advertising for beginners, how to run facebook ads, facebook ad mistakes, instagram ads, instagram ad strategy, instagram advertising, IG ads, Instagram marketing

Id: 5M--Dlx-riE

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021