Facebook Ad Winner...Or Is It? - TribeTalk EP 77

This just in: Facebook throws us another curveball. Growth specialist, Anuroop, breaks down 3 strategies for preventing Facebook from wasting your ad spend.

It’s a typical Monday morning. You’ve got your coffee to your right, your backup coffee to your left, and your cat is walking on your keyboard. You move your cat so you can work (while ignoring the meows) and sign in to Facebook.

Great news! Facebook ads manager is telling you that they’ve identified your winning ad. Phew, that was easy enough, right?

Wrong! It turns out Facebook has been choosing winning ads too early. That winning ad? It’s probably only winning in spending your money. Here’s the problem we’re seeing in a nutshell: Facebook’s optimization algorithm isn’t currently giving the other ads a chance to perform. The data that’s helping make the determination isn’t actually statistically significant enough to show that your winning ad is actually, well, a winner. 

What we’re seeing: Facebook is not giving equal opportunity for all ads in an ad set to learn and optimize. Your consolidated ad sets are not giving you an accurate representation of performance.

What this means: Ad buyers are faced with a lot of complications due to this change, especially those who rely on efficient ad-buying tactics—like rapid testing—to develop high-performing strategies.

What you can do: All hope is not lost! In fact, for many of us, it’s just another day in Facebook paradise (limbo) and a stark reminder that you can’t get complacent about managing your ads. Here are three tactics for combating Facebook’s “winning ad” snafu. 

1. Ditch the blind faith in Facebook (if you still had any!) and try split testing with variants instead. This is more of an oldie but a goodie that lets you apply equal budget to variants, such as creative, and compare the results after they’ve run. 
2. Use dynamic creative testing to put all of your creative variants together. Based on the delivery, you’ll get an idea of which sets are delivering the best results. 
3. Pick an audience that you can target throughout your entire campaign and set that campaign up with campaign budget optimization (CBO). Use multiple ad sets to split up your creative variants that will be delivered to the same audience across the board. Now you can let the system optimize for whichever one is doing better.