One small change in your ad, one giant leap for your Facebook campaign

Facebook marketing is a vital part of any social advertising strategy, and is critical to building a valuable fan base. The deluge of information on best practices, tips and trends can be overwhelming – but equally as important are the actions that need to be avoided. When it comes to social advertising campaigns, a few minor adjustments can often have a major impact on your Facebook advertising success! The following are four items to watch out for when you are setting-up and running your Facebook campaigns. Use them to optimize campaigns not only toward immediate results, but more importantly for long-term engagement and lifetime return on investment goals. And with proper optimization, ensure the performance you drive is directly attributable to those campaigns. 1. A/B Testing and Analysis of the Right Metrics It's now common practice to create 100s, even 1000s of ad variations when launching a campaign on Facebook, and then A/B testing them to find the right creative and targeting combinations that lead to the best results. However, it is often difficult to immediately know which ads are actually best performers during the initial campaign. Clearly those that do not result in almost immediate conversions and engagement aren't going to become campaign stars. However, some ads that initially drive a lot of traffic may in fact be distracting from those you should actually be pushing. So focus on metrics, such as the following, to better predict the success level you can expect from individual ads and campaigns while multivariate testing: Day-Two Retention, Session Time, and Point/Level Reached within a Game or Application. Testing for ads that lead to higher retention rates, longer session times, and users that reach a certain point within your app early on in your campaign will help you acquire loyal and engaged long-term users and campaign optimization for lifetime ROI, rather than clicks and conversions. Failing to measure these indicators may mean that you end up with large quantities of traffic that don't hit your quality and LTV goals. 2. Watching for Ad Fatigue A/B testing the right metrics can help create ads that optimize towards current and future lifetime value and ROI goals. Unfortunately, great ads can become exhausted just as fast as they were created, meaning they need to be frequently refreshed with new creatives. Changing up the images and text can prevent a steep drop-off in engagement and conversions from occurring after a very successful initial campaign launch. Keep potential customers on their toes with strong calls-to-action and intriguing visuals on a regular basis, and avoid a scenario where they eventually become immune to your message. Even the tiniest changes in image color, shape or copy can make a huge difference in your audience's reaction to your Facebook advertising. 3. Be Consistent Ensure that your ads are not only appealing but truthful to your offering. While pictures of beautiful women may generate many clicks, they most likely won't attract loyal and highly-monetizing customers if you are actually advertising financial services. Facebook advertising has the ability to drive some of the highest quality traffic in the display advertising industry. By keeping ads consistent with the product, app, or offer you are promoting, the benefits will be two-fold: 1) They'll drive the high-quality customer acquisition that Facebook is known for, and 2) You will preserve and grow your brand's identity and reputation among your customers. During a recent campaign, SocialClicks saw the average quality of long-term users (determined by extent of application use and deposit amount) increase by up to 220 percent based on the relevance of the images used. And we have all seen examples of poorly executed or misleading ads resulting in backlash from customers believing they were receiving an entirely different product or service than what was advertised. 4. Getting Landing Pages Just Right When creating a new campaign, marketers and advertisers often focus solely on creating appealing ads that reach the right target audience, and not enough on landing page optimization. This results in potential customers being driven from appealing ads straight to a landing page that isn't optimized to guide them smoothly through the conversion process, often turning them off and away. To help lead people who click down your user acquisition funnel, follow these tips to greatly improve conversion rates and the quality of users acquired. When selecting creative make sure your landing pages are filled with vibrant images, and include only the text relevant to what you are offering in that specific ad. The combination of visuals and text on a landing page should clearly and concisely convey what the user will get after they convert. Avoid misleading users with irrelevant materials, and make sure they are tailored to the specific advertising message delivered by your Facebook campaign. This may seem obvious but all too often users are sent to the homepage of a site or more general landing page after clicking on an ad, which leads to confusion and them leaving. Once the content is right, take a look at how many steps there are in the conversion process, and remove as many as possible. For example, if your users are driven off of Facebook from your ads, but can register for your site or app via Facebook Connect, make sure that it is a very prominent feature on the landing page. Often this is preferred by users as it is quicker and less invasive than filling out a form with their e-mail, name and additional details. Also try to avoid using features such as a captcha. While they do provide the recording of false conversions, we've seen campaign conversion rates increase by up to 10 percent when they are removed, as users often leave if they don't get it right on their first try. Avoiding just a few simple actions can help you drastically improve the immediate results of your Facebook campaigns. And more importantly, these actions will greatly improve your long-term performance by shifting your focus toward metrics that are proven indicators of lifetime ROI. Once you create a clear and consistent advertising and conversion experience that enables potentially high-quality users to convert with ease, make sure that you constantly update your campaigns with fresh images and copy, and then track the right metrics to ensure your Facebook campaigns continually drive loyal new customer bases to your product. Leah Na'aman (leah@socialclicks.com) is the Marketing Director for SocialClicks. SocialClicks provides a technology-based social advertising an analytics platform to some of the world's leading marketers, helping them fully optimize lifetime ROI from their social advertising. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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One small change in your ad, one giant leap for your Facebook campaign

Leah Na'aman.

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Leah Na'aman.