Meta advertisers often overcomplicate advertising strategies, leading to increased costs and confusion. Simplifying strategies can provide clarity and prevent unnecessary competition or algorithm restriction.
Key factors contributing to overcomplication:
- Campaigns: Advertisers often clutter their Ads Manager with multiple campaigns. The focus should be on sales and leads, or conversions. An Advantage+ Shopping Campaign is often the best way to run a sales campaign, with no targeting and one ad set.
- Ad Sets: Creating multiple ad sets can lead to Audience Fragmentation, making ad spend less efficient. Aim to consolidate ad sets where possible.
- Targeting: Overcomplicating targeting is common. If optimizing for conversions, use Advantage+ Audience and let the algorithm do its work. Simplify your targeting and stop obsessing over isolating the perfect combination of demographics, detailed targeting, and lookalike audiences.
- Budget: Spread your budget across fewer campaigns and ad sets to help the algorithm learn and generate optimal results.
- Performance Goals: Set a performance goal that defines exactly what you want. This helps Meta deliver your ads to the right audience and determines whether your ad set is working or underperforming.
- Bidding: In most cases, let Meta bid for you using the Highest Volume bid strategy or the Highest Value bid strategy. Manual bidding often leads to spending less of your budget and getting fewer or worse results.
- Placements: If your only active ad sets are optimized for conversions, use Advantage+ Placements. Be careful when optimizing for anything other than conversions as this can lead to low-quality clicks or views.
- Ad Copy and Creative: Don't overdo ad copy and creative. Meta suggests there's no benefit to creating more than six ads for a single ad set. If not getting great results, create two or three more ads.
- Testing: Over-testing can be costly and often doesn't significantly improve results. Let the algorithm sort out the best performing ads.
- Reporting and Interpretation of Results: Don't obsess over secondary metrics. Focus on your goal action and the cost per goal action.
In conclusion, making a conscious effort to limit unnecessary complexity can lead to better advertising results. "Complex" is rarely helpful and can make it more difficult to understand what is working and what isn't.
