HeroConf LA - "How to Scale Facebook Ads with Automation", session with Sahil Jain, CEO of AdStage
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Facebook provides incredible reach for advertisers to find, engage with, and influence their ideal target audience. However, managing Facebook Ads has become increasingly more complex with new objectives, ad placements, and creative types emerging continually – placing strains on marketers’ already thin bandwidth. In this session we’ll cover how to apply elements of marketing ops and automation in order to create robust Facebook systems that drive better results, without the need for continual manual actions. You’ll learn how to: 1. Automate your most tedious & manual Facebook optimization tasks, freeing you up to think about strategy, audience refinement, and creative. 2. Create a set of rules to monitor and optimize your ad campaigns 24/7 based on the KPI metrics you care about. 3. Align your campaigns to be in better alignment the customer journey, showing the most relevant ad creative based on time or a sequence of actions. Sahil Jain, CEO of AdStage's session presentation at HeroConf LA 2017
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HeroConf LA - "How to Scale Facebook Ads with Automation", session with Sahil Jain, CEO of AdStage
- 1. How to Scale Facebook Ads with Automation Sahil Jain CEO, Co-founder
- 2. You’ll learn how to: Automate your most tedious & manual Facebook optimization tasks, freeing you up to think about strategy, audience refinement, and creative. Create a set of rules to monitor and optimize your ad campaigns 24/7 based on the KPI metrics you care about. Schedule your campaigns to be in better alignment the customer journey, showing the most relevant ad creative based on time or a sequence of actions.
- 3. About Me Sahil Jain is the CEO of AdStage, a leading cross-channel online advertising platform. Previously he dropped out of High School to be an Engineer at Yahoo!, left UC Berkley to join Corp Dev at AOL and co-founded YC backed Trigger.io
- 4. About AdStage AdStage is a powerful cross- channel advertising platform, helping digital marketers easily report, automate, and manage paid search & social campaigns all under one roof.
- 6. The Case for Automation
- 7. What Are Facebook Automated Rules? Automated Rules allow marketers to turn previously manual and mundane optimization tasks into automated jobs that run in the background. This allows for continual monitoring and optimization of ad accounts, campaigns, and ad creative without the need for manual action.
- 8. Full vs. Rule-Based Automation Full Automation An advertiser opts into a black box algorithm that optimizes the campaign without input. Rule-Based Automation Advertisers select the KPIs, conditions, and thresholds they care about over a certain time range; self-determining what should be optimized.
- 11. Performance Alerts Receive an email alert with a list of the affected campaigns, ad sets, or ad creative that are experiencing positive or negative performance trends.
- 12. Performance Alert Examples Track Underpacing Ad Sets Apply rule to: Ad set(s) Conditions: If lifetime spend is < $70 Time Range: 7 days Action: Send notification only
- 13. Performance Alert Examples Track Overpacing Ad Sets Apply rule to: Ad set(s) Conditions: If lifetime spend is > $110 Time Range: 7 days Action: Send notification only
- 15. Ad Set Scheduling Schedule your ad sets to show at peak conversion rate or cost per conversion times.
- 16. Pulling Performance by Day of Week & Hour Option A: Create a Custom Report in Google Analytics
- 17. Pulling Performance by Hour Option B: Select from the Breakdown data in FB Manager or Power Editor
- 18. Scheduling Your Ad Sets In Facebook Manager: 1. Create a new ad set 2. Select a lifetime budget 3. Select “Run ads on a schedule” 4. Pick your scheduled time ranges by day *Scheduling is only available for lifetime budget ad sets.
- 19. Scheduling Your Campaigns & Ad Sets Through the Ads API 1. Select your scheduling at the campaign or ad set level 2. Choose your account 3. Choose your campaign(s) or ad set(s) 4. Select the day of the week, and time range from the picker. *Scheduling is available for any budget type – at both the campaign and ad set level. Even in bulk.
- 21. Optimization Rules Make optimization edits to your campaigns, ad sets, or ad creative automatically by selecting the conditions when an action should happen. Ex: Pause/play ad sets or ads, increase or decrease budgets or bids.
- 22. Rules to Try Pause High CPA Ad Creative Apply rule to: Active ads in 1 campaign Conditions: IF Lifetime Spend is greater than $200.00 AND CTR (link click) is < 1% AND Cost per Lead (Facebook Pixel) is greater $100 *Time range: Last 7 days Action: Turn off ad Note: Cost Per Lead can be replaced by any cost per website conversion metric you prefer
- 23. Rules to Try Boost Low CPA Ad Set Budgets Apply rule to: Active ad sets in 1 campaign Conditions: IF lifetime spend is > $200.00 AND Results are > 5, AND Cost Per Lead (Facebook Pixel) is < $45.00 Action: Increase daily budget by 5% Maximum daily budget cap: $90 Note: Cost Per Lead can be replaced by any cost per website conversion metric you prefer
- 24. Automation Type #3: Ads & Audience Testing
- 25. Ad Creative Testing Test different creative elements, performance triggers, and timing to reveal the right ad to your audience that generates the best desired result.
- 26. Ad Testing Types I. Multivariate II. Ad Rotation III. Ad Flighting / Sequencing
- 27. Multivariate Testing Testing different headlines, description copy, images, CTAs, and destination links against the same targeted audience. With the end goal to increase your conversions or decrease your cost per conversion.
- 28. Elements of a Facebook Ad Things you can test: 1. Post text 2. Headline 3. Link description 4. Image or media 5. Call-to-action button 6. Display link 7. Destination URL
- 30. Examining the Results Conversion Rate Analysis: The Ad Variation #1 ad has a better Conversion Rate than the Ad Variation #2 ad. The Ad Variation #1 ad's Conversion Rate is 60% greater than the Ad Variation #2 ad. Source: CardinalPath’s PPC Ad Testing Tool Ensure your results are statistically significant.
- 31. Split Testing in Facebook Manager When creating a new campaign, FB reveals the options to test different delivery strategies, audience targeting, and placements.
- 32. Automation Type #4: Ad Rotation & Sequencing / Flighting
- 33. Ad Rotation Rotating ads by time duration or performance metrics with no set order as to which group is queued up next.
- 34. Ad Rotation
- 35. Ad Flighting / Sequencing Schedule a group of ad creative to show in a logical series of steps, based on time. Advertisers choose the exact order in which to show ad creative groups.
- 36. Sequencing / Flighting Example Step #1: Sponsored posts featuring best fit blog content. Step #2: Sponsored posts highlighting best fit, email gated whitepapers. Step #3: Sponsored posts highlighting upcoming webinars. Step #4: Dark sponsored posts that lead to a demo request page for your service. Example: Show your targeted audience a group of ads by step.
- 37. Ad Sequencing in Power Editor 1. Create a new campaign with a Reach objective type. 2. Create a new ad set, and accompanied ad creative. • Ensure the new ad set and ad creative are posted. 3. Revisit the ad set and, if unlocked, the delivery settings will reveal the option for “Sequencing.” 4. Select the order of your ads to show, then save and take it live! Note: In a closed beta with only select advertisers. Typically, non-US. If unlocked, follow these steps to set up sequencing:
- 38. Ad & Ad Set Flighting Through the API How to create a flight: 1. Choose your flighting at the ad or ad set level. 2. Select the ads and ad sets you’d like to create a sequence for. 3. Assign a step for each. 4. Finally, create a schedule for each step using the date picker.
- 39. Takeaways & Tips Move your spend pacing and high CPA monitoring to performance alerts. Prioritize optimization time from your daily curated emails. Schedule your ad sets to run during the best performing times. Test different ad creative elements to increase CTR and conversion rates against the same audience. Build a sequence that will reveal cluster of ads in a series of steps that better compliments the buyer journey. What you should be automating Create automated optimization rules to pause underperforming ad creative or entire ad sets.
Editor's Notes
- Automation is both a hot trending topic and often the source of much apprehension within the PPC community. To be honest, many either don’t quite understand where it fits within their workflow, or their just plain scared on handing over control to a computer. It wasn’t so long ago that ATMs actually paid the customer to be used at first in order to build trust. Let’s break down what Automation is, and smart ways to apply it to your ad accounts.
- Why should we even consider automation? For many it brings up the nostalgia, “everything is better when it’s hand crafted”, such as watches and cars. The same could be said for a PPC account – where no amount of technology can quite make up for the savviness of a battle tested advertiser with extensive experience. However, we need to be honest with ourselves. How much of our time is spent on strategy and optimization? Many of us would like to speak of ideal worlds, but the reality is that most of our time is spent in meetings, communicating with our bosses or clients, or pulling, compiling, and reporting on data. Optimization time can sometimes feel like a guilty pleasure – to be snuck in during a busy day. HubSpot 2 years ago polled a long list of marketers and asked them what their biggest time sucks were on a recurring basis. The results revealed that analyzing and reporting on data was the biggest time suck. Looking at the image to the right represents the various systems and workflows of the typical PPC marketer – and it continues to only get more complicated with new channels, mediums, and technology being added to our plate. Automation can act as a second set of eyes, and can be used as extra bandwidth to scale tasks we simply don’t have time to do the right way. Let’s talk about what Facebook Automation means.
- Automated rules turn previously manual and often mundane optimization tasks into automated jobs that run in the background. This allows for continual monitoring and optimization of ad accounts, campaigns, and ad creative without the need for manual action. Automation falls into two main categories: let’s dive into each.
- Full Automation: this is usually what first comes to mind when thinking about Automation. An advertiser simply checks a box and all the optimization happens in a black box without the advertiser understand the full logic and conditions being used. One of the most common types are automated bid algorithms. Rules-Based Automation, however, allows the advertiser to pick the exact metrics, conditions, and time range when and how something should be optimized. With the advertiser having full control over the process. You can essentially view this as a way for non-technical marketers to create their own algorithms without needing to submit any lines of code.
- For Facebook Ads specifically, let’s cover the main Rule-Based Automation types
- Type #1: Alerts
- Performance alerts will trigger email notifications when certain trends happen at the campaign, ad set, or ad creative level – such as high/low CTRs, budget pacing, or Cost Per Conversion trends, for example. Instead of an advertiser needing to comb through their account and examine every nook and cranny from the account level down to the ad level. Instead, they can receive a curated email with the campaigns they should prioritize and take action upon in their next optimization sweep.
- Let’s take a look at an example to trigger an alert when an ad set is underpacing. In this example, assume a total $500 monthly budget for each ad set within a campaign. With this rule, you’re saying that you want to be alerted if any of the selected ad sets have spent less than 60% of their total daily budget ($70), over the course of the last seven days. This will allow you to go in and expand the targeting, increase the bids, or kick off a fresh ad set to better pace towards maximizing the total budget.
- Using the same example of a $500 monthly budget for all ad sets within a single campaign, I also suggest creating an overpacing alert to notify you when certain ad sets are risking overspending their total budget. With this rule, you’re asking to be alerted if any of the selected ad sets have spent more than 95% of their total daily budget ($110), over the course of the last seven days.
- Type #2: Scheduling
- Ad Scheduling allows you to conserve your budget and reach a greater audience during peak conversion rate or cost per conversion times. Before approaching the scheduling step, it’s first important to pull a report to understand historically the peak times of the week, and hours of the days driving the most conversions (leads, sales, etc).
- My favorite option to reveal performance by day of the week & hour is to create a custom report in Google Analytics. Select the metrics you care about the most, including your conversion goals. Then, select Source/Medium => Hour AND/OR Day of the Week from the drill down.
- Performance by time of day can also be revealed directly within Facebook Manager on a campaign or ad set table using the Breakdown metrics tab, and selecting “Time of Day” as the breakout.
- Within Facebook Ads Manager, scheduling is restricted to the ad set level, and only for lifetime budget types. Once a lifetime budget is assigned, the ability to “Run Ads on a Schedule” appears, and allows you to create a scheduled run calendar using an easy drag and drop experience. Using the insights revealed from your custom Google Analytics report, select the best times of the week and times of the day that have generated in historically strong conversion volume and conversion rates.
- If you’re potentially exploring an Ads API or full fledged Facebook Marketing partner solution, the API provides more flexibility for scheduling. Including the ability to set a schedule globally at the campaign level, or across one or multiple ad sets, without the need for a lifetime budget type.
- Automation type #2: Rules
- Optimization Rules allow marketers to select the exact conditions and desired optimization actions that should happen, making edits to your campaigns, ad sets, or ad creative automatically when those conditions are met. Some typical use cases are pausing or playing ad sets or ad creative – or increasing or decreasing budgets or bids – based on performance over a period of time.
- Let’s explore some performance rules to implement, starting with automatically pausing any ad creative with his cost per conversion (CPAs). In this scenario, we want to monitor all ads within a single ad set, but you can easily apply this to many ad sets. Under the conditions, add a historic spend to ensure you’re not pausing something too early without historic data. In this case if the CTR is low, and the Cost Per Lead (from the FB pixel) is greater than $100, with a 7-day lookback window, turn off the ad.
- On the opposite spectrum, you want to reward great performing ad sets with additional budget to drive additional, cost-effective conversions. In this scenario, create a rule that if the lifetime spend is > $200 AND there has been a good base of historical results (enough to reveal a trends), and the cost per lead is low ($45 or less) then increase the daily budge by 5%, but add a ceiling cap of $90.
- Without changing budgets, some of the most effective optimization techniques is to test your ad creative messaging and audience targeting. Let’s dive in.
- Creative testing is the process of testing different elements in order to provide a lift in the performance metrics you care about – such as CTR, conversion rates, and avg. cost per conversion.
- There are 3 main types of ad testing available for FB: Multivariate Ad Rotation Ad Flighting / Sequencing
- Multivariate testing is the process of testing different elements of an ad: such as the copy, headlines, images, CTAs, and destination pages against the same targeted audience. With the end goal to increase your conversions or decrease your average cost per conversrison
- Let’s examine all the available layers to test on a Facebook Ad. There are 7 possible combos to test. Note: The Link Description will not show on the Right Rail placement. Next, I’ll show you how to quickly test these elements.
- Facebook has quietly rolled out their ad testing offering to a select group of closed beta users. Previous to that, ad testing was only available through a Facebook Marketing Partner. The Ads API provides a great deal of functionality, with the ability to add/test a variation for any of the ad creative elements. Within AdStage, we call this our scrambler, which can quickly spin up many variations of ads based on these criteria in a library, where an advertiser can select and choose which variants they want to actively launch and test.
- When evaluating the impact of a test it’s important to ensure there has been enough data collected to reveal a statistical significance with a high degree of confidence. In lamens terms, we often jump to optimizations early, pausing ad creative within the first few hours before it has a chance to properly display and rotate. Using tools like a Statistical Significance calculator will help you determine if there is a clear winner or if the experiment should run for longer before a winner is selected. While there are a wealth of amazing tools to do this, I like CardinalPath’s version which is adapted specifically for testing PPC ad creative (as seen here). In this case, it was revealed the historical data has a high enough statistical significance to determine that Version #1 was the clear winner in the test.
- A newer edition to the Facebook offering is the ability to split test elements at the ad set level such as the delivery type, audience, or placement. Testing the same ads against different audiences is a great way to hone in on which medium and messaging best resonates with which group.
- The very last type of ad automation are ad rotation & sequencing which control when ads show.
- While in AdWords you can get away with not updating your creative for 30 – 45 days, often without noticing too much of a CTR wane – Facebook Ads tend to expire in days to weeks, not months. In order to keep ad creative fresh against the same audience, it’s important to cycle in new content and creative that doesn’t cause banner blindness and annoyance for your target audience. We all remember horror stories of retargeting campaigns that were a bit too heavy handed and displayed the exact same creative – over and over – day after day, and often resulted in backlash in the form of dislikes or negative comments, or flagging ads.
- Unlike Google AdWords which includes options to rotate ads evenly indefinitely or over the course of 30 days or so, Facebook optimizes aggressively towards CTR and objective type in a few mere hours. Using 3rd party solutions, the advertiser can control how many ads should be displayed, for how long, or until a performance metric is reached. For example, cycle out a set of 4 ads every two weeks or until average frequency hits 10+ over the course of the last 7 days. While Ad Rotation is a great solution to introduce new creative, often you may find yourself wanting to take a prospect through a customer journey funnel and reveal new ads in more of a consistent narrative format. Which leads us to Sequencing.
- Picture ad flighting / sequencing like running a marketing automation campaign. Sending your audience messaging that best resonates to where they are in the purchase funnel – such as awareness, engagement, consideration, purchase decision and advocacy. Let me show you an example.
- In this example, we want to align cluster of ad creative based on steps. First, we’ll introduce very low friction, altruistic content to establish ourselves as thought leaders, and educate help our audience become better marketers – not introducing our solution yet. Second, we may promote high value whitepapers or guides to grab their contact info and get them into our CRM or MA system. Then, we may promote our timely, upcoming webinar. Based on if they registered and/or attended, finally we’ll reveal a request for a demo or free trial.
- Unknown to many, Facebook does offer Sequencing on the Reach objective type, to a very small group of select beta testers (many outside of the US).
- While a cool offering, the restriction of reach objective campaigns can be limited. Not allowing you to create sequences and assign them to select objectives and bid types. The API provides a lot more flexibility to Flight either full ad sets or cluster of ad creative in steps based on select calendar dates.
- Wrapping up, here are the key takeaways about Automation I’m hoping we drove home and you can apply to your ad accounts.