If you are advertising on Facebook, these are important news for you! Facebook is changing its advertising budgeting.
On the 27th February a mandatory change is coming to Facebook Ads. The ad set budgets are going away and the only available option will be campaign-level budgets. This means that if you have an ad campaign with several ad sets, you will no longer be able to allocate the exact budget to each one of them. Instead, Facebook will decide on a real-time basis which ad set is bringing you the best results and will divide the total budget accordingly.
It’s important to fully understand what this means and how you might need to reorganise your campaigns, as this change will be automatically applied not only to new campaigns, but to all your existing ones. The only way you will still be able to influence what you spend in the ad sets is by setting a minimum and maximum spending limit for each ad set.
So, the change is pretty straight forward and easy to understand, but what does it mean for your ad campaigns? Will it be necessary to change anything in your strategy? The answer is: most likely yes.
We've prepared some advice for you on the matter:
1. If you want to keep allocating certain budgets to specific audiences (for example, you have multiple store locations and a separate budget for each one of them), you will have to create a separate campaign for each audience.
2. If you have a well-performing audience, but you want to test a new one, do not put them both into one campaign. Facebook will notice that your well-performing audience brings better results, so it will direct the entire budget to it, leaving almost no budget to your test audience. This will make it impossible for you to make an informed decision about the test, as you will not gather enough data. So, always use the audience you want to test in a separate campaign.
3. If you have a retargeting ad set, it will now be better to create a separate campaign for it. The reason being that retargeting audiences are usually more cost-per-result-efficient than "top-of-funnel" ones. Pairing retargeting and "top-of-funnel" audiences in one campaign will lead to Facebook allocating most of the budget to retargeting, which will not leave enough budget to the "top-of-funnel", which in turn will lead to a big decrease in traffic coming from your Facebook advertising.
4. If you are optimising campaigns for conversions and you have conversions of different value (imagine you have a “add-to-cart” conversion and a “sales” conversion), Facebook will allocate the budget and optimise your campaigns for the one that happens more often (usually the less valuable conversion, like “add-to-cart”), which will lead to you getting fewer conversions of those you really want (actual sales).
Can this change bring you any advantages then? Of course! As long as you pair into one campaign potentially equal audiences, Facebook can help you get more results for the same money, by directing your budget to what works best in real-time.
So, say you have several mid-of-funnel audiences, one top-of-funnel audience and you want to test a new audience that is supposedly also a top-of-funnel one. The best way to organise your account would be:
- put all your mid-of-funnel audiences into campaign no. 1;
- put your top-of-funnel well-performing audience into a separate no. 2 campaign, making sure it has enough budget;
- test your new audience (top-of-funnel) in campaign no. 3, and if it shows good results, next month you may add it to your no. 2 campaign.
Since this change is happening on the 27th February, make sure you look through your Facebook ads as soon as possible, to get prepared and make the most of it.
For more information, bespoke strategies and efficient digital marketing solutions, just contact the Clarity’s girls through info@yourdigitalclarity.com or visit our website at www.yourdigitalclarity.com.
