Step 11. Analyse and optimize your campaigns
To make your ads even more effective, we analyze and optimize your ads. In this article, we’ll tell you how to improve running ads.
For this purpose, we’ll study data on those people who clicked on our ad. Further in the text, we’ll use the word ‘optimization’ that means the improvement of advertisement to get better results.
So, let’s say that you launched a Facebook advertisement several days ago.. How to understand if it’s effective or not? We’ll tell you how!
Step 1. Go to Facebook Ads Manager and find your ad
Reminder – we chose the following settings for our targeted ad:
- Countries – United States
- Age – 18-34
- Gender – All
- Placement – All devices
- Platforms – Facebook Feeds
- Mobile Devices – All mobile devices
You’ll see the basic statistic data on your ad performance:
- Results
- Reach
- Impressions
- Cost Per Result
- Link Clicks
- Amount Spent Today
There are even more data parameters though – add them if you like by clicking ‘Customise columns’. But basic statistics are surely enough.
First of all, you need to get what’s a ‘Result’. Well, results show that the objective you set for your advertising campaign is reached.
Our example is represented by a campaign with ‘Traffic’ objective. It means that a result is a number of clicks.
If we had had another objective – let’s say, ‘Conversions’ – then the result would have been a number of conversions (purchases at your site).
What are the takeaways of the presented statistics? Well, it shows that:
- In 2 days our ad got 224 clicks
- Click cost was $0.08
- We spent $17.44
For the niche we’re in, these results are great!
Launching an ad, you have to estimate its effectiveness by the number of sales it brought and profit it provided.
Where to look next?
Step 2. Put the tick next to the ad and click an arrow button
You’ll see 3 tabs:
1. Performance
This tab shows how many clicks your ad got for a chosen period and of what cost
2. Demographics
Demographics tab defines what type of audience reacts to your ad most actively.
As we’ve chosen women and men of 18-34 as our audience, our ad was shown exactly to them.
3. Placement
‘Placement’ tab lets you see where people click on your ad most of all.
As our ad was shown only on Facebook, there are no statistics for other places. Now let’s see who’s clicked on your ad and from where.
Step 3. Close the diagram and click on ‘Breakdown’
There are many parameters, but ones of our interest are:
- Age and Gender
- Country
- Impression Device
Why do we need those parameters?
Well, with their help you’ll see who and from what device has interacted with your ad best/worst and turn off/strengthen these segments. Or create another ad for this or that segment.
Let’s analyze these parameters one by one.
Age and Gender
Click ‘Breakdown’ and choose ‘By Delivery’ filtering option. Choose ‘Age’. We targeted our ad at men and women 18-34 y.o. To check people of what gender and of what age would react to our ad best of all.
From out ad, we see that women from 18 to 24 y.o. Interact with our ad more actively than women 25-34 and men 18-24 and 24-35.
If you’ve received similar results and still want to deal with the older audience, make a suitable ad for them – with another caption and pictures. For example, give them a discount promo code or offer them to buy a gift for their children.
As we see from received statistics, it’s better to target our next ad to women 18-24. But we also can make a separate advertising campaign for women 24-35 and see what results it would show.
In other words, when optimizing your campaign, choose that gender and age of your audience that prevailed in the statistics of your ad before.
Country
Click ‘Breakdown’ and choose ‘Country’. This parameter shows how people of each chosen country react to your ad.
Our ad was supposed to be shown only in the USA, so we’ll have the data only on the behavior of this country. But if you target your ads to several countries at once, you’ll see that people of one of them interact with your ad better than others.
Impression Device
‘Impression Device’ tab lists the devices from which people saw your ad – so you can define the most popular device for your ad. As for our advertising campaign, it was clicked mostly from iPhones. We spent $11.58 for that (and $5.56 for Androids with much fewer clicks).
The cheapest clicks were from Android Tablet ($0.05) but there were very few of them. Yes, we can launch separate ads for tablets but we’re sure it won’t be a success – people prefer to do Facebook on phones and computers, not on tablets. In addition, we see that there are absolutely no clicks from desktops or laptops – probably there’s the sense in showing our ads only on mobile devices.
So, we can draw a conclusion now: as a part of optimization, we decide to show our ads only on iPhones. As you see, the gist of optimization is to improve a running ad by turning off all targeting segments that don’t work.
NB: To optimize an existing ad, create its duplicate, change settings of this duplicate and launch it.
General conclusions on analysis and optimization of advertising campaigns
ALWAYS analyze your ad results and optimize them! If your ads perform great, increase your daily budget. And the most important thing is to try to understand WHO is your target audience (the ideal volume of which is about 400K-2M) – this will be of much help when creating advertising pictures and writing captions.