3 Rules You Should Put On Your Facebook Campaigns Today To Increase Efficiency

. 3 min read

Written by: Tom Murray | Managing Director, Agency

While Facebook would like you to believe that it’s algorithm is omni-prescient and the smartest thing ever created, often times it can serve ads that are quite wasteful. Humans are still needed to intervene and ensure that the platforms serve the best ads more often. How many times have you launched 20 ads in an ad set and then only have a couple of them spend? Often times, the platform will select a select few ads and run with them after just a small amount of impressions (around 1000). This causes a big discrepancy in terms of the allocation of spend amongst ads, and can also mean a lot of your ads are not tested the way you would like.

Using rules will combat this specific issue in the most efficient way possible, by running every 30 minutes if you wish, 24/7/365. This is just one example of why rules are needed and how they can help media buyers.

Here are 3 rules that you can set up for your Facebook campaigns right now in order to increase not only efficiency in terms of performance, but also in terms of time.

Rule #1: Trim the Fat
My favorite rule to set is what I call the “trim the fat” rule. This rule is set up to kill any ads that are well above the KPI goals. For example, let’s say you are a B2B client driving small business leads for payment processing. If your goal CPL is $20, setting a trim the fat rule for all ads with a CPL over $30 will automatically trim away at the worst ads automatically. This will then leave ads on from $20 – $30 as those are close enough to goal where they might become better, but that is for a human to decide. Of course, you could be more cut-throat and set the rule closer to the goal, but if you have a bad day, this could turn off all ads, so you need to watch it carefully.

Rule #2: Safety Net
Often times, you’ll see an ad with bad performance, but then when you check it later in the day or the following days you see that a paused ad actually was quite good. This is because of latency and lag that can happen due to the Facebook pixel reporting. To combat this, simply set a rule that turns on any ad that is paused that is at or better than your KPI. This ensures any good ad that gets paused pre-latency gets turned back on post-latency.

Rule #3: Stop / Loss
If you are testing a lot of ad sets, you might want to ensure you give them enough time to work before cutting them. And sometimes, with running sometimes hundreds of ad sets, doing this automatically can help save some time. This rule works by allowing an ad set to spend a certain amount X, and then pausing the ad set if at that time, the KPI is not being met. This allows for enough time to test, and then an automatic pause to cut it once it hits the threshold.

There you have it, 3 simple rules you can put on your campaigns right now to improve your performance and save a little time. For some of the more advanced rules, you might need a special program such as RevealBot to help you navigate the more complex situations.