Paid advertising, especially in this IOS14 world, is a tricky thing. There’s a lot of trial and error that has to happen, and while you hope to strike gold right off the bat, it’s not a realistic expectation. If you have an ad that isn’t performing the way you’d hoped, you can still get valuable information from it. By taking the time to analyze the details, you can plan for a better launch next time around.
To begin, open up Ads Manager and click on the “view charts” button under the ad you’d like to review. You’ll see tabs for performance, demographics, platform, and delivery. I like to start by going to demographics.
Demographics
The reason I like to start with demographics is because it tells you a lot about who your ideal audience is. When you are viewing demographics – results, it tells you who took ACTION on your ad. If someone is taking action now, they are showing you that they are very interested in what you have to offer, even if they didn’t choose to follow-through by purchasing, signing up, etc. Next time around, consider narrowing your audience to the gender and age range that performed the best.
Platform
Assuming you had “automatic placements” set, the platform tab shows you where your ad performed best both with reach and results (these go hand in hand). For example, my ads always do best on Facebook, okay on Instagram, and awful on Audience Network and Messenger. Because I know this from previous ads, I choose manual placements and eliminate those as options so I don’t waste any money letting my ads run there.
The Audience Network is a collection of Facebook-approved apps and websites where your ads can be shown. It’s intended to increase reach and allow an ad to move from site to site as the user browses the internet. There can be a lot of benefits to this. I choose not to use it because of previous data I gathered.
Performance
Because your ad performed poorly, this is going to be the most unreliable data in your account. Plus, it depends on what your result was (link clicks, conversions, video views, etc). The goal is always to have a low cost per result, but if you don’t have much or any results to show, then you have nothing to analyze. Ideally with a couple tweaks above, you can see a result with your next ad.
Retargeting Abandoned Customers
This next part is not something you can access within Facebook, but it might be a game changer for your business. One thing I absolutely love about SamCart is its cart abandonment feature. When someone lands on my sales page and leaves before completing the checkout process, I can still see their information. With this information I can add them to a segment of my email list and remind them about their cart, offer a special promo, and more. If my ad results performed poorly but I had a lot of cart abandonments, that tells me something threw them off, like the price. Sign up for a free demo here.
If you are still stuck on what’s going wrong with your latest ad campaign, schedule a one-on-one coaching call with me so we can go over it together.