Any good marketer would corroborate the fact that data is the lifeblood of any marketing campaign. By collecting the right data at the right time, fine-tuning the campaign for better efficacy is easily possible. With Facebook, the potential is enormously high simply because of the staggering amount of data it has at its disposal.
Irrespective of the recent data usage scandals engulfing the social media giant, the fact remains that it sits on a vast treasure trove of user data that simply needs to be harnessed by smart marketers. And what better way to do that than the social media platform’s in-house machine learning algorithms?
Going beyond the norms
It is interesting to note that just targeting efficiently shouldn’t be the end game of data at FB’s disposal. As a smart marketer, you can also use this extensive data to optimise your automation options. In turn, this helps to run more effective Facebook ad campaigns.
Here’s how you can go about it with machine learning:
1. Set the objective
Rather than spreading yourself thin and ineffective with multiple objectives in a single campaign, Facebook does it the better way. It asks you to set a singular objective per campaign.
‘Awareness’, ‘consideration’, ‘conversion’ – these are some of the broad categories you get to choose from when you create a new campaign on FB.
With proper selection, you inform the machine learning algorithm which set of audience should it present the ads to. For example, it will place ads in front of those who are more likely to complete viewing a video, in case your campaign objective is set to ‘video views’
2. Get the placement right
You can optimise placements by looking to target multiple channels. In addition to the hugely popular Facebook platform, you can also pick Instagram and Messenger to expand your ads outreach (and thus improve its likelihood to perform better).
You can explore these channels as additional inventory to use along with Facebook and Audience Network. The algorithm computes the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and serves the ad to that channel where the CPM is the lowest, thereby improving ROI substantially.
However make sure to utilise it judiciously, though. When you create a new campaign, you can select all placements for the ads. Later on, depending on the success rates, you can add or drop individual placements as per its performance.
3. Optimise ad delivery
You can also select various options from the ‘Optimisation and delivery’ menu. Be it website conversions or placing ads to those people who are most likely to load the landing page by clicking on the ad link, there are quite a few optimisation choices presented to you in this menu. Keep testing with different selections and see which option gives you the maximum bang for your advertising dollars.
Facebook machine learning power has proven its mettle with many successful ad campaigns. With these factors, you manage to improve the success rate of your FB ad campaign with a smart utilisation of machine learning.
