How To Run Facebook Ads
Introduction 3
Audience Testing 8
Creative Testing 13
Reading Testing Data 16
Testing Goals 17
After Testing Options 18
Moving Tests Scaling Campaigns 20
Top, Middle, Bottom Of Funnel Overview 23
Middle of funnel 24
Bottom Of Funnel 25
Top Of Funnel Structure 26
Middle Of Funnel Structure 26
Bottom Of Funnel Structure 26
Middle Funnel Examples 27
Bottom Funnel Examples 29
Managing And Optimizing Campaigns 31
TMB Considerations 34
TMB Managing The Scale 36
Final Notes 39
Introduction
You’re here because you want to successfully run Facebook ads with a consistent, predictable return, and scale your business while making good profits, right? And so far, for whatever reason you haven’t quite been able to come up with a plan or system that is delivering the results you want, so you’ve purchased this guide hoping to get real clarity and insights into how to best run your Facebook advertising.
First of all, I’m so glad to know that you are taking the first step towards improving your campaigns and getting more return from your Facebook ads. So many people give up right away and it’s nice to see someone who is determined to make their business thrive. I’m so excited to show you all of the things we have learned in our 10+ plus years of running ads as marketers.
When we first started out with Facebook advertising, we wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars testing and trying things that just never worked, and over the years we’ve been able to develop a system that consistently produces results and allows us to get the maximum return on our ad spend. So…
In this guide we’re going to show you exactly how you can use Facebook ads to significantly grow your business, with a proven framework and campaign structure that continues to work even with all of the Facebook updates, iOS changes and more.
Now I know you’re even more excited to get started, right? Ok before we do…
Let me be very straightforward with you, this guide is NOT filled with fluff. It’s NOT a long drawn out guide meant to make you feel like you got more value, it’s meant to be short, to the point, and value packed. I respect your time and energy and I know you want something you can read fast, and implement immediately, right?
This is an actionable guide filled with strategies that have helped us run millions of dollars in ad spend for some of the world’s top education companies, e-commerce companies, non-profit organizations and even our own projects and affiliate projects. This system works!
Oh, and you’ll notice the formatting of this guide is broken down into sections with lots of blank space, we do this to make things easier to read and scroll to. The best way to move quickly between sections of this guide is to use the table of content above.
After reading this guide, you might want help taking your ads to the next level. And if you do, we encourage you to book a free strategy session with one of our in-house experts so you can learn more about Facebook ads as they relate to your business. And I’ll be forward with you, we will invite you to learn about more opportunities to grow your business with us, through our exclusive programs.
In addition to the free strategy call please join our free Facebook Group where we (and the members of our community) share Incredibly valuable insights and strategies on a weekly basis. It’s a great place to be if you want to surround yourself with like-minded entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses with Facebook ads
Ok, now that we’ve done a little bit of housekeeping, let’s jump into it.
Facebook Ads General Concepts
Obviously Facebook has developed one of the most advanced advertising and customer targeting technologies on the planet. However, just because Facebook is incredibly powerful and effective does not mean that you can just create campaigns and ads and scale them to the moon with no effort or strategy. If that was the case we’d all be millionaires and maybe even billionaires. So here’s how it works.
Facebook operates on 3 main concepts
- Objective
- Audience
- Creatives
If you’ve run Facebook ads before, then you’re familiar with all three of these concepts above but let’s take a quick look at them to clarify what they mean and why they are important.
- Objective: When creating a campaign on Facebook we have the opportunity to tell Facebook what our “Objective” is. The objective is literally the outcome we want Facebook to achieve with our campaign.
If you choose the “Traffic” objective, you’re telling Facebook to find people who are likely to visit your website, but not much else. The algorithm does only what you tell it to do, so asking for traffic is just going to get you traffic and not necessarily conversions.
If you choose the “engagement” objective you’re telling Facebook that you want people who are post likely to engage with your posts. Again, the algorithm will just target people who like and comment on posts, but not people who are likely to convert.
And if you choose the “conversions” objective, you’re telling Facebook to find people who are likely to convert on your site. With very few exceptions, you’ll almost always want to choose conversions…
It’s pretty straight forward but there are a few specifics within “Objective” that we will be going over later in this guide.
- Audience: When creating a campaign, Facebook allows you to choose different audiences and even audience combinations – to target your ads to.
You have quite a few options when it comes to audience targeting like targeting interests, behaviors, genders, age groups and more. But again, there are some specifics when it comes to audience targeting that you should be aware of, but for right now let’s just understand the concept of “targeting an audience” which may be interested in your products or services.
- Creatives: In your Facebook campaign the last thing that you add is your “creatives” or the actual advertisement itself. The creative consists of copy meaning your primary text, your headlines, your images, videos, slideshows and different formatting options for all of the above.
Okay, so… with this in mind, the way that we need to approach Facebook advertising is to test our 3 options to find the right combinations that produce the best results.
And just to be straight forward we really don’t need to worry about “objectives” quite yet.
So conceptually, we really only have two “levers” to pull.
Audiences and Creatives
Our only goal in the beginning is to find the audiences that purchase our products and services.
And to find the creatives that attract our ideal customers or clients
Once we identify the right audiences and the right creatives that actually produce the results we want, we’re almost home free, and we can let Facebook do the majority of the work for us.
The way that we find the right audiences and the right creatives is to test.
And testing means we essentially need to do a shotgun blast of multiple creatives tested against multiple audiences so we can see which audience and creative combinations produce the results we need.
However, in order to properly test Audiences and Creative we must follow a proper testing procedure that allows us to clearly identify winners and move them to the next stage.
Audience Testing
To test audiences we’ll need to first create a properly structured testing campaign.
Let’s imagine that we are using Facebook ads to get more sales from our ecommerce store.
Our testing campaign example will focus on e-commerce but the structure and principles can be applied to lead generation, info products, coaching etc.
Our campaign will be set up as follows…
Create a new campaign called “Audience Testing Campaign”
Campaign > Objective > Conversions
Under your campaign you’ll create your first Ad Set…
Ad Set Conversion Event > Purchases
Ad Set Audience Exclusions > Purchase 180 Days > Web Visitors 180 Days, Engagement 180 days
Detailed targeting > Choose interest
This is the basic testing structure for an audience testing campaign, so now let’s look at this structure in a bit more detail.
The campaign is set up to advertise to people who are most likely to purchase from your e-commerce store that’s why we select the purchase conversion event.
At the same time, the Ad Set is designed to continually deliver deeper and deeper into the designated audience by excluding any previous engagement, web visits or purchases.
If you don’t exclude these custom audiences then your ads will show to the same people over and over again and you’ll never really know if you can scale the audience down the line when you need to.
And then all that’s left to do is choose your detailed audience targeting.
I recommend choosing only 1 interest to target at a time.
For example, target “Fashion” only targets the “fashion” interest.
You might be tempted to select more than one interest to target, for example…
“Fashion” “Blogger” “Clothes” Shopping” “Makeup”
The problem here is that Facebook will show your ad to all of these audiences, and when your ads start to get results, you won’t know for certain which interest, or interests the results really came from.
So, you won’t know if the “fashion” or “blogger” interest/audience was the audience that actually produced the result.
When you test audiences individually, you’ll find out with 100% certainty that one audience works vs another, and then you can start to develop a list of highly targeted audiences that you know deliver results for your campaigns.
Insert your creatives
Once you have set up these basics of the campaign, you’ll want to add your creatives.
As a general rule of thumb, we test our best creatives against new audiences.
So if you already have some ads/creatives that have performed well, you would take your best performing creative and drop it into this campaign.
But here’s the trick, you must duplicate your top performing creative so that you have two of the exact same ad running to one audience.
We duplicate our creatives in order to take advantage of the different “pockets’ of an audience that an ad can hit within an audience.
By running two of the exact same ad we virtually ensure that at least one ad will hit a good pocket of the audience we’re testing.
So the audience testing campaign structure would look like this…
Audience Testing Campaign
– Ad Set1 (target interest: fashion)
- Ad 1
- Ad1 copy
If you’re just starting out and you really don’t have any proven ads or audiences you’ll have to test your new creative ideas to new audiences at the same time, until you start getting results and can move into the methodical testing method we’re describing here.
To test multiple audiences we’ll create multiple Ad Sets within the campaign that each target only one interest. And in the audience testing phase, we manage the budget at the Ad Set level, so each Ad Set runs as it’s own little campaign.
The structure will end up looking something like this….
Audience Testing Campaign
– Ad Set1 (target interest: fashion)
- Ad 1
- Ad1 copy
– Ad Set2 (target interest: makeup)
- Ad 1
- Ad1 copy
– Ad Set3 (target interest: yoga)
- Ad 1
- Ad1 copy
– Ad Set4 (target interest: farming)
- Ad 1
- Ad1 copy
– Ad Set4 (target interest: fitness)
- Ad 1
- Ad1 copy
As mentioned before each of these Ad Sets above will have their own daily budgets and they’ll run independently from each other. It’s our recommendation that you spend whatever the break-even point is for your product per day on each Ad Set for 3 days before analyzing the results and making any decisions about the effectiveness of the audiences and or ads.
If you sell a product for $50, and with no ad spend you make $30 on a sale of that product, you have $30 to spend to try to sell that product at a profit. Therefore $30 is your break even point.
If your break even point is too high of a daily budget for your tests, you can spend $10-$20 per day and compare your tests against each other.
Facebook will need at least 3 full days of running the audience testing Ad Sets to be able to optimize and find success within an audience. And although it is not fun to lose money on testing, it’s better to spend a bit more to find out what actually works then to spend less and miss out on opportunities.
More often that not, an Ad Set will start producing results in the second or third day, sometimes even the 4 or firth day, and cutting off your testing early will stop you using an audience that had huge potential to scale (which could cost you way more in the long run)
Let’s recap the audience testing method.
First we create a campaign called “Audience Testing Campaign” that uses the conversion objective.
We then structure our Ad Sets to optimize for the purchase event.
And we exclude previous purchasers, web visitors, and engagers
Then we select one interest to target.
And we insert our top performing creative / advertisement and duplicate it in the Ad Set.
Every time we want to test a new audience we duplicate our original Ad Set and ads, then change out the detailed interest targeting (select a new interest to target) and let the new Ad Set with new interest targeting and our top performing ads run.
We spend $5 – 20 a day per Ad Set for three days and then we read the data and then keep the successful Ad Sets and ads on and turn off the unsuccessful ones.
Creative Testing
Testing actual ad creative is going to be one of the most important things you can do when running Facebook ads. As a general rule of thumb audiences don’t fatigue, ads do.
In other words, once you find an audience that buys your products or services, that audience will almost always work, you’ll just need to refresh your creatives to that audience.
That being said, having fresh new creatives will be crucial to the long term success of your Facebook campaigns especially as you begin to scale upwards of $1000 a day in ad spend.
So how do we test creatives? It’s actually almost exactly the same as audience testing except reversed.
What we do is test new creatives to our best audiences and we follow a very similar structure.
First
Create a campaign called “Creative Testing Campaign”
Campaign > Objective > Conversions
Under your campaign you’ll create your first Ad Set…
Ad Set Conversion Event > Purchases
Ad Set Audience Exclusions > Purchase 180 Days > Web Visitors 180 Days, Engagement 180 days
Detailed targeting > Insert Proven Interest
Ok so let’s add some clarity to this structure.
Just like in audience testing were creating the basic structure by choosing the conversion objective, optimizing for purchases, and excluding previous purchases, web visits and engagement.
Except in this case we are choosing an interest/audience that we already know gets results.
And we’ll be making new creatives / ads to serve to this audience. But each new ad we create, we’ll duplicate in the adset so we can test for the different pockets of the audience once again.
So the campings structure breakdown will look like this…
Creative Testing Campaign
– Ad Set1 (target interest: ‘fashion” ← proven audience)
- New Ad 1
- New Ad1 copy
And for every new creative we want to test, we’ll duplicate the Ad Set and change out the ads with new ones. So you’ll end up with a campaign that looks something like this…
Creative Testing Campaign
– Ad Set1 (target interest: ‘fashion” ← proven audience)
- New Ad 1
- New Ad1 copy
– Ad Set2 (target interest: ‘fashion” ← proven audience)
- New Ad 2
- New Ad2 copy
– Ad Set3 (target interest: ‘fashion” ← proven audience)
- New Ad 3
- New Ad3 copy
– Ad Set4 (target interest: ‘fashion” ← proven audience)
- New Ad 4
- New Ad4 copy
– Ad Set5 (target interest: ‘fashion” ← proven audience)
- New Ad 5
- New Ad5 copy
The rest of the testing elements remain. Each Ad Set will spend $5 – $20 a day for three days or more before we analyze the results of the tests and move on.
So to recap, in creative testing we test brand new creatives to our best audience or audiences.
First we create a campaign called “Creative Testing Campaign” that uses the conversion objective.
We then structure our Ad Sets to optimize for the purchase event.
And we exclude previous purchasers, web visitors, and engagers.
Then we insert our proven audience/interest
And we insert our new creative / advertisement and duplicate it within the Ad Set.
Every time we want to test a new advertisement / creative we duplicate our original Ad Set and ads, then change out the ads/creatives and let the new Ad Set with new ads run.
We spend $5 – 20 a day per Ad Set for three days and then we read the data and then keep the successful Ad Sets and ads on and turn off the unsuccessful ones.
Reading Testing Data
There are a few things you’ll want to understand when looking at your testing results and the data that you’ve gotten back. You can get very deep into this stuff but here’s what we look at the most in determining how to qualify ads or audiences.
- CTR (Click through rate) when you have a click through rate above 1% you’re in decent shape. But the click through rate is a good indicator of how well your audience is receiving your advertisements. If your ads have a high click through rate (2% +) then your ads are resonating with your audience and you’re on the right track.
- ATC (Add to cart) depending on what you are running ads for you’ll have different events set up to track certain actions. Add to cart is typically used in e-commerce however we’ll use Add To Carts in other ways to. Usually we use the Add To Cart event to represent when someone clicks a button on our landing page that takes them to a form fill out page or checkout page. The button signifies our web visitor taking the first step towards our desired action.
So in most cases the Add To Cart event is very significant when looking at your data because you could have a high CTR and low click costs but no Add To Cart events means that people weren’t really interested in your offer. This suggests that your advertisement was good but your offer was not resonating well.
On the flip side, you might have low CTR and high cost per click but you had a good amount of Add To Carts. This would suggest that your ad wasn’t that good but your offer was. In any case, Add To Carts are a great indicator that you’re on the right track with your campaigns.
- Purchase (or lead / desired action) Obviously if an ad or audience is producing your desired result like a purchase, especially for the right price, this is the ultimate indicator that you’re on the right track. As a general rule of thumb look at your purchases first, if you don;t have purchases, look at your add to carts, if you don;t have add to carts, look at your CTR when determining if your ads or audiences are worth additional testing or worth moving to the next phase.
Testing Goals
When testing ads and audiences our goal is to identify 3 – 4 audiences that produce results and 3 – 4 advertisements/creatives that produce results. This is the best starting point for developing campaigns that can scale. As we move ads and audiences into scaling campaigns we will always want to spend a portion of our budget testing for new creatives and new audiences so we always have plenty of assets to build bigger and better campaigns with.
After Testing Options
After you have identified audiences and ads/creatives that produce your desired results, it’s time to start increasing your spend to start getting a higher volume of results. Here you have two options…
- ABO campaigns: This is where you’ll continue to manage your campaigns from the Ad Set level. And this is best suited for budgets of under $200. In an ABO campaign you’ll spend your daily budget on just one Ad Set across the ads within your Ad Set. I’ve had lots of success with ABO campaigns on a lower daily budget but if you want to scale you’ll have to scale horizontally, meaning have a bunch of ABO campaigns running at $200 a day or less.
Here’s what a campaign with multiple ABO’s would look like…
ABO Scaling Campaign
Ad Set 1 (daily budget $199)
– Ad 1
– Ad 2
– Ad 3
Ad Set 2 (daily budget $199)
– Ad 1
– Ad 2
– Ad 3
Ad Set 3 (daily budget $199)
– Ad 1
– Ad 2
– Ad 3
- CBO campaigns (recommended): This is where you manage your budget from the campaign level, and the daily budget gets distributed across all of the Ad Sets and ads within your campaign. CBO campaigns are best for spending your budget more efficiently and for scaling faster and more predictably. In short, a CBO campaign is going to allow Facebook to spend your daily budget on whatever Ad Sets and ads it can get the best results on, so your daily budget has more ability to optimize for the best purchase price (or desired results price) because it has more options. A CBO campaign structure would look like this.
CBO Scaling Campaign ($499 daily budget)
Ad Set 1 (interest targeting: fashion)
– Ad 1
– Ad 2
– Ad 3
Ad Set 2 (interest targeting: yoga)
– Ad 1
– Ad 2
– Ad 3
Ad Set 3 (interest targeting: health)
– Ad 1
– Ad 2
– Ad 3
Moving Tests Scaling Campaigns
Let’s say we have 3 audiences/interests and 3 creatives/ads that have proven themselves out. How do we move these into a CBO campaign set up to scale?
The first thing we’ll do is create a new campaign called…
“Top Funnel CBO Campaign”
The structure will look like this…
Campaign objective > conversions
Campaign budget (campaign budget optimization)
Ad Set > exclude web visitors, purchases, engagement
Ad Set > include proven interest / audience
Ads > include top performing ads
Basically we’re going to copy the exact structure from the Ad Sets we used in our testing campaigns and apply them to this new CBO campaign.
And this new CBO campaign is called a “Top Of Funnel Campaign” because we are excluding any previous web visitors, purchases, or engagement, which means this campaign will continue to reach new people within its audiences. We’ll use retargeting to advertise to engagaers and web visitors later (more to come in this guide) but for now let’s focus on the Top Of Funnel CBO campaigns.
With this campaign structure we’ll insert all of our top performing Ad Sets / audiences and we’ll insert all of our top ads/creatives.
When the Top Of Funnel CBO Campaign is set up with all of the exclusions and inclusions it will look something like this…
Top Of Funnel CBO Campaign ($499 daily budget)
Ad Set 1 (interest targeting: fashion)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Ad Set 2 (interest targeting: makeup)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Ad Set 3 (interest targeting: blogging)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Now that you have the fundamentals of Top Of Funnel CBO Campaign set up, you’ll want to know some things about how to scale this campaign.
With a campaign structure like this, Facebook has three Ad Sets and nine total ads to spend budget on. So choosing the right initial daily budget is crucial to your success in scaling but also in understanding the data.
If you choose a low daily budget (under $100/day is low for a CBO) to start, you must realise that it’s going to take longer for Facebook to spend the budget evenly across all the Ad Sets and ads. What Facebook will do is spend the budget on whatever Ad Sets and ads it thinks will get the best results, so in the beginning your spend will look very uneven and your data will seem a bit funky – especially within the first three days.
If you choose a higher daily budget ($199 and above) you’ll notice that money will be spent quickly and unevenly and things may look a bit weird again for the first three days or so. With CBO campaigns no matter the daily budget, they do tend to take some time to optimize and they take at least 3 days and sometimes up to 7 days to even out and really give you the data and insights you need.
But here’s one key insight you must really take into account.
Where you start your budget determines how fast you can scale
When you have a camping that performs well, you need to be delicate with your changes or updates to the campaign. If you increase your budget too quickly by too much, then the campaign will literally fizze out and die.
So the rule of thumb is to only increase your daily budget by 20% a day or less. By increasing at this rate, you do not disrupt the Facebook algorithm and you keep your campaign in high performance while adding more budget and getting more results.
It’s crucial to understand this because a starting budget of $99 a day on a top-of-funnel cbo campaign only allows you to add about $20 a day to your budget. Which means it will take you around 50 days to scale to $1000 a day in ad spend.
And if things are going well, trust me, you’ll want to spend $1000 a day as fast as possible and it’s going to be painful to slowly grow.
If you start your budget at $299 a day, then you can increase your daily budget by about $60 a day which means you’ll be able to spend $1000 a day in just 16 days time. With that in mind you’ll obviously want to consider how much you are willing to spend on a campaign daily to start while also considering where you want to get.
Another option is to duplicate your top of funnel cbo campaign and just give a higher budget to the duplicate as a starting point. And then any time you want to significantly increase budget you can duplicate the campaign and give it a higher budget. For example: you could take a $99/day campaign and duplicate it and give it a $500/day budget and then focus on scaling the higher budget one.
Top, Middle, Bottom Of Funnel Overview
So we’ve talked a bit about the top-of-funnel because I’ve wanted to move you along the process of getting your testing done and your initial top of funnel campaigns set up. But it’s important to take a step back and look at the top, middle, and bottom of funnel structure as a whole, so we can understand why it’s so powerful and how it can help us scale to large ads while maintaining profit.
So as we mentioned above the top of funnel campaigns are meant to do two things…
- Convert cold traffic
- Keep pushing deeper into an audience while constantly reaching new people
And if we don’t use the proper exclusions in our top of funnel campaigns, Facebook algorithm is going to keep harassing many of the same people over and over again until they convert (or don’t) and you’ll miss the opportunity to reach more new people within the audience.
What we really want to do is show our ad to new people once, and if they don’t convert, we need to push them down the funnel to the next step.
As you begin to familiarize yourself with the idea of top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel, and you put these things into practice, you’ll start to see opportunities to change and edit these structures to fit your needs. .
But for now let’s nail the basics.
Middle of funnel
Since we have excluded almost every engagement with our ads in the top of the funnel, we need to structure our middle of the funnel campaign to retarget the people who have initially engaged with our ads, but did not make a purchase or convert.
So the idea for the middle of funnel campaigns is to retarget anyone who has engaged with an ad on Facebook or Instagram (that means liked, saved, clicked, commented, watched etc.) with more ads. And to retarget web visitors (that means anyone who clicked an ad and spent time on our website)
The middle-of-funnel is meant to capitalize on the fact that we have people who have expressed some interest in our products or services but have not yet made the commitment to purchase or sign up. And these people are considered “warmer” traffic as compared to the “cold” traffic we’re reaching in the top-of-funnel ads.
And because these people are “warmer” prospects they convert at a much better rate than our top of funnel campaigns. Usually middle of funnel campaigns convert 2x better than top of funnel campaigns.
If you’re getting 2x ROAS on your top of funnel campaigns you should expect to get 4x or more ROAS on your middle of funnel campaigns.
(we’ll explain how powerful this can be in just a bit)
I want you to grasp the top, middle and bottom of funnel campaign structure conceptually before we go into specifics on how to create them so, we’ll revisit these concepts with real structural examples a bit later on.
But for now let’s look at the…
Bottom Of Funnel
Bottom of funnel retargeting is just one more step down the funnel from the mid funnel. In these campaigns we are targeting people who have added to cart or initiated checkout but did not make a purchase or convert.
In other words we’re not retargeting engagers or visitors we’re targeting people who were just about to purchase but backed out, or just about to fill out a form, then backed out. And these people are the HOTTEST prospects you can retarget. Bottom of funnel campaigns usually convert 2x better than the mid funnel campaigns and 4x better than the top of funnel campaigns.
Now that you grasp the concept of the top, middle and bottom of funnels strategy, lets take a look at the actual structure and exclusion of each.
Top Of Funnel Structure
Campaign > Objective > Conversions
Ad Sets > Audience Exclusions > purchase, engagement, web visitors
Ad Sets > Audiences Inclusions > proven interest targeting
Ads > proven creatives
Middle Of Funnel Structure
Campaign > Objective > Conversions
Ad Sets > Audience Exclusions > purchasers, add to carts, initiate checkouts
Ad Sets > Audience Inclusions > engagers, web visitors,
Creatives > proven ads
Bottom Of Funnel Structure
Campaign > Objective > Conversions
Ad Sets > Audience Exclusions > purchasers
Ad Sets > Audience Inclusions > add to carts, initiate checkouts
Creatives > proven ads
Middle Funnel Examples
Typically we break out our middle funnel CBO campaign into three Ad Sets each targeting a certain sector of the mid funnel. But there is some flexibility within the middle of funnel structure so let’s take a look at some examples.
Mid Funnel CBO Campaign (structure 1)
Ad Set 1 (targeting: Facebook engagers)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Ad Set 2 (targeting: Instagram engagers)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Ad Set 3 (targeting: web visitors)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
This is a very powerful and common mid funnel structure that clearly separates Facebook engagers and Instagram engagers and website visitors into their own Ad Sets. In this structure we let Facebook optimize for the best results between these three Ad Sets and what we typically see is good performance all around. The web visits Ad Set usually performs the best in terms of ROAS just because the audience has at least seen your website before.
This structure above works well for people who are spending at least $300 a day (in total) on their Top Of Funnel Campaigns.
If you’re going to be spending less than $300 a day on your top of funnel then you’ll want to consider a different structure that combines all Ad Sets in the typical mid funnel. The structure would look like this…
Mid Funnel Campaign (structure 2)
Ad Set 1 (targeting: Facebook engagers, Instagram engagers, web visitors)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
The reason why we would want to combine all three Ad Sets into one, is so our mid funnel has plenty of “off shoot” traffic to capitalize and in a way it gives our lower budget more opportunity for conversion vs separating it out. When dealing with starting budget or lower budgets in general, you want to be more conscious of how combining Ad Sets can create more opportunity for conversions.
And finally here is one more mid funnel campaign structure that works well with both large and smaller top of funnel budgets while leveraging combining adsets.
Mid Funnel CBO Campaign (structure 3)
Ad Set 1 (targeting: Facebook engagers, Instagram engagers)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Ad Set 1 (targeting: web visitors)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
One of the major benefits of separating engagers from web visitors is that web visitors have been to your website and most likely read some of your messaging and seen your product or service, engagers have not. When you separate the two, you can create ads that speak differently to your web visitors and use that information to increase conversions and ROAS.
As you become more advanced with Facebook ads you’ll see how powerful separating web visitors from the rest of the mid funnel can be. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it until you have your top, middle, and bottom system running and producing good results.
Bottom Funnel Examples
The bottom-of-funnel structure is really straightforward and really only has two structures. Let’s take a look at the most common bottom of funnel structure.
Bottom Funnel Campaign (structure 1)
Ad Set 1 (targeting: Add To Carts, Initiate Checkouts)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
The example above is simple, all we are doing is retargeting people who have added an item to their cart, but not purchased, and initiated a checkout but did not purchase. This structure is great for top-of-funnel ad spend over $300 a day. Anything under $300 you might want to consider a structure like this..
Bottom/Mid Funnel CBO Campaign (structure 2)
Ad Set 1 (targeting: Add To Carts, Initiate Checkouts)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Ad Set 2 (targeting: All Engagers)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Ad Set 3 (targeting: Web Visitors)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
In the example above, we are actually combining the mid funnel and bottom of funnel into one CBO campaign in order to leverage all possible reategting opportunities while maximizing our budget. This structure can work for higher ad spends as well but most sophisticated advertisers want to see a clear division between mid and bottom of funnels so they can have clear ROAS representations for their long term data analysis.
As you become more knowledgeable with the Facebook advertising platform, you’ll start to see opportunities for mixing and dividing Ad Sets within the middle and bottom of the funnel and even new opportunities within the top of funnel campaigns. But it all starts with executing the basic structures and so you can see how they function and feed each other. Once you master these structures you can get more creative.
Managing And Optimizing Campaigns
When you get your CBO campaigns up and running you’ll notice that the ads and Ad Sets don’t exactly perform the same way that they did in testing. This is totally normal because you’ve placed your ads and Ad Sets into a different optimization structure so managing and optimizing the new structure is something you’ll want to do on a 3 – 7 day basis.
What do we mean by optimizing and managing the CBO structure?
Let’s say we’re running a Top Of Funnel Campaign with three Ad Sets and three ads in each Ad Set. The campaign would look like the example below.
Top Of Funnel CBO Campaign ($499 daily budget)
Ad Set 1 (interest targeting: fashion)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Ad Set 2 (interest targeting: makeup)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
Ad Set 3 (interest targeting: blogging)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
But the CBO campaign isn’t just going to get results for all ads and Ad Sets evenly. Some ads will get higher costs, some lower costs, and same with Ad Sets. And sometimes CBO campaigns can get poor results even though we’ve proven out thee ads and Ad Sets and technically the CBO should be a winner. So what do we do to keep a CBO campaign from straying and going down the wrong path?
Here’s our method for managing and optimizing CBO campaigns.
We always look at our ads/creatives performance first and we determine if the cost per result based on the advertisement is acceptable or not. If the cost per result for an ad is consistently too high and causing our ROAS to decline, the ad simply might have hit a bad pocket. If that’s the case, we can duplicate the ad (because we know it performs) until the ad hits a good pocket and performance stabilizes. We would go through every ad in the campaign and apply the same method of duplication until we end up with ads that are performing within our desired range.
It’s important to note that you should make changes all at once and then wait at least three days before analyzing the results again.
Here’s a look at the structure of a campaign that’s being managed and optimized.
Top Of Funnel CBO Campaign ($499 daily budget)
Ad Set 1 (interest targeting: fashion)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3 – underperforming
– Proven Ad 3 (duplicate)
Ad Set 2 (interest targeting: makeup)
– Proven Ad 1 – underperforming
– Proven Ad 1 (duplicate)
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3 – underperforming
– Proven Ad 3 (duplicate)
Ad Set 3 (interest targeting: blogging)
– Proven Ad 1
– Proven Ad 2
– Proven Ad 3
That’s how we manage and optimize ads in an Ad Set but what about the Ad Set itself? Do we ever turn off Ad Sets that constantly under perform?
As a general rule we always try and optimize our ads first, we do everything we can in terms of duplications with our ads to get the desired result. But, sometimes the Ad Set as a whole still underperforms and it becomes a drag for our entire campaign.
If that’s the case we can simply turn off the underperforming Ad Set and let the budget spend more efficiently on the remaining Ad Sets that are producing the desired results.
This method of optimization applies to all campaigns at all levels of the funnel.
TMB Considerations
The top of funnel campaigns are what feed the middle-of-funnel and the bottom-of-funnel. So technically, the more you spend on your top of funnel campaigns, the more offshoot you’ll create for your middle and bottom of funnel campaigns to capitalize on. Because the more you plow deeper into audiences and discard anyone that wasn’t converted immediately, the more people your campaigns have to retarget.
For example: let’s say that you spend $1000 a day on your top of funnel campaigns and you reach 100,000 people with that campaign every day. You’re not converting 100,000 people a day. On a good day you might convert 1% of those people which means you’d covert 1,000 people out of the 100,000.
That means a good portion of those 100,000 people will be retargeted for your mid and bottom of funnel campaigns. The more opportunities you can create for your mid and bottom of funnels campaigns the better (meaning the more you’ll convert).
So… when you think about it, the more you spend on your top of funnel campaigns the better your middle and bottom of funnel campaigns will work – so long as you tested your ads and structured your campaigns correctly.
And to take this a step further, let’s say that you spend $1000 a day on your top of funnel campaigns, and then set your middle of funnel campaign to spend only $49 a day. What’s going to happen is, your middle-of-funnel is going to get unthinkable ROAS.
Wait, but why?
So here’s what’s happening, your top of funnel campaigns are creating too much high value offshoot for your mid-funnel campaigns, but because your daily spend for your mid funnel campaign is so low, Facebook is only going to serve mid funnel ads to the most likely prospects to convert.
In other words, out of lets say 5000 people ready to convert, Facebook can only convert so many of them and because it’s limited by budget it will convert as many as possible for the budget available.
To make it simpler to understand, Facebook has an overload of conversion opportunities for the allotted budget so the conversions come in at a ridiculously low price.
With this in mind I would always start with a relatively low mid funnel campaigns budget, and then slowly scale it up as time moves on, so you can find the sweet spot of spend and conversions. If you spend too much on your mid funnel, you’ll struggle to get decent ROAS, if you spend too little you’ll get incredible ROAS but low volume.
TMB Managing The Scale
As mentioned earlier each step down the funnel the higher the ROAS get. So let’s look at some examples of how we can leverage the data between this three tiered system to create a mega profitable Facebook advertising campaign as a whole.
So first things first, know your numbers in your business. If you’re running an e-commerce shop, coaching business, info product company, service base company, consultancy or anything else, you must know your numbers.
That means, how much can you afford to acquire a customer, how much does that customer produce in value over a year or more, and what’s your profit on all of it. This is not a lesson in margins and customer LTV but you do have to know these things when running ads and heres why.
Let’s just assume that you’re able to achieve a 2x return on ROAS (return on ad spend) on your top of funnel campaigns. That means you should technically get a 4x ROAS on your mid funnel and a 8x ROAS on your bottom of funnel campaigns.
And with Facebook ads, the more you spend on your daily budget the higher your conversion costs are going to get (usually not always).
Simply because you are trying to reach and convert more people the cost will inevitably go up, so spending $1000 a day on a top of funnel campaign might cause your initial acquisition cost to go up.
But here’s the deal…
If your top-of-funnel costs go up as you spend more, but you reach more people with more spend, and you feed your mid-funnel more opportunity, then your mid-funnel converts more people at better ROAS.
And.. because you’re spending more and feeding your middle of funnel, you’re naturally feeding your bottom of funnel even more as well. Which means your bottom of funnel ROAS are off the chain.
Ok so what does this all mean?
It means, you’re better off spending $3000 a day on your top of funnel campaigns and breaking even just to feed that much more opportunities to your middle and bottom of funnel campaigns and take your profits there.
Let me explain a little more…
If I can break even on 300 conversions a day on my top of funnel campaigns, that means my middle and bottom of funnel campaigns will get an additional (estimated) 100 conversions a day at 2x to 4x ROAS which would make me very profitable.
I would be converting 400 customers a day while building a giant list of repeat customers and profitable with insane ROAS off of 100 customers a day. Not to mention this would group my email list and allow me to remarket to an insane amount of customers every month.
Ok so imagine this…
You convert 400 customers a day, and make huge profits right off the bat.
That’s 12,000 people added to your email list and customer base every month. All you have to do is email market to your email list a few times a month and you’re PRINTING MONEY all day every day.
And with a system like this, you are literally getting paid, to get paid – again and again and again.
Oh wait, but this gets even better….
Once you understand how much income your email list produces, you’ll know how much more money you’re willing to spend on your top of funnel campaigns.
And it might sound crazy but when you really know your numbers, you could be willing to lose money on your top of funnel campaigns – because you know that you’ll more than make up for it through your mid, bottom and email marketing campaigns.
And here’s the real deal…
When you dial in your numbers and really know how profitable you can be, running Facebook ads just becomes a way to acquire customers and you’ll worry a lot less about the initial cost of acquisition.
In fact in many cases the cost of acquisition can be 2 – 3x higher than you ever thought possible and you’ll still be making an insane ROI so long as your backend end systems and products are producing additional revenue.
That right there, that’s what nobody talks about when it comes to Facebook ads. Many of the massive advertisers on Facebook are initially losing money on the front end and making massive profits on the backend. And there is an old saying, the person who can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.
The reason I’m sharing this is so you can conceptually understand how and why incredibly high levels of daily or monthly ad spend work for larger companies. Many of you reading this guide will only need to focus on creating prediticle ROI with the three step funnel systems. As your experience grows (and your budget) and your backend systems produce more and more return, you’ll be able to analyze your numbers and see what campaigns you can spend more on for customer acquisition.
But again, for now just focus on getting the Top, Middle, and Bottom of Funnel producing stellar ROAS for you and your company and build up enough revenue and profits to really understand your numbers and where and how you can improve.
Final Notes
Let’s go over the core concepts of this guide and summarize what we’ve learned.
In testing, our goal is to find ads/creatives that produce our desired results and to find audiences that produce our desired result. To create scaling campaigns we’ll want to have three to four audiences and three to four ads that work.
Creatives/ads fatigue, so we need to make sure we’re always testing new creatives and angles. Audiences rarely fatigue but it’s always good to have a handful of high performing audiences on hand.
Once we have proven ads and audiences we move them into Top Of Funnel CBO Campaigns that are designed to grow deeper into audiences while providing plenty of retargeting opportunities for our Middle and Bottom Of Funnel Campaigns.
When our Top Of Funnel Campaigns are running we create and launch our Middle and Bottom Funnel Campaigns using the proper exclusions and inclusions listed earlier in this guide.
Once the whole TMB system is running, we can begin optimizing ads and campaigns every 3-4 days until our campaigns are running smoothly and then we can start increasing the budget by 20% or less a day. To scale faster, we start our Top Of Funnel Campaigns at higher daily budgets or we duplicate lower budget campaigns and make massive increases to budgets on the duplicates.
With this system, anyone with a good offer, product or service can rapidly grow their sales revenues, and profits with Facebook ads, while creating stability and consistency in their business. As your business grows and your system optimizes, you’ll realize more opportunities for growth and high return on investment.
When I first started out with Facebook ads I was so far away from this system and so far away from profits that it literally took me years to figure this all out and practice this with large monthly budgets. If I had this information at my fingertips back then, I would have saved myself hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted ad spend.
If you’r\e interested i learning more about Facebook advertising and how we can help you take your business to the next level, head over to https://www.commandtraffic.com