How To Make Meta Ads Work For Your Business

A Social Hour & Social Hour – Speaker Recap

At our social media seminar last month, Gavin Longthorne, Strategy Lead at AdShark, spoke about how to make Meta Ads work for your business and gave us 3 levers to have success advertising on Meta. If you missed it, don’t worry—I’ll recap his slides below!

How Meta Ads Work

Meta Ads can run on Facebook, Instagram, and even placements on Threads. As a whole, Meta has 3 to 5 billion monthly active users, which is 35-60% of the world’s population! Just imagine how many eyes can be on your ads.

Meta has also been rolling out AI advancements at the campaign, ad set, and ad level. This means it tries to add ways to automate the setup process, and could even add things to your ad itself.

While strategic creative drives the bulk of current-day Meta Ads performance, there are account-level settings to be aware of to ensure your campaigns are working as efficiently as possible. Meta ads are not a slot machine; it’s an auction, and every placement & user is constantly up for sale.

3 Meta Ad Levers for Success

Gavin explained that Meta Ads come down to three key levers, and pulling the right ones can make or break your results.

#1. Optimizing for the Right Goal

Meta’s automated bidding is very good at its job and has multiple campaign objectives to choose from, depending on your goals.

Do you want to:

• Reach as many people as possible?
• Drive as many link clicks as possible?
• Drive as many sales/leads as possible?

Meta can do that!

Wondering which objective to use? Gavin recommends using the Leads or Sales campaign objectives. You should only use Awareness, Engagement, or Traffic if there is nothing on your website worth optimizing for.

But… in order to use a Lead or Sales campaign objective, the algorithm needs to be fed enough conversion data in order to optimize for it. We recommend identifying a conversion event that fires at least 5+ times/week. This will help the algorithm learn by providing an adequate sample size.

For the lead objective, you’ll need conversions like:

• Contact forms
• Quote requests
• Phone calls
• & more!
  

For sales/e-commerce, you’ll need conversions like:

• Purchases
• Add to carts
• Checkout initiations
• & more!

Meta website pixel tracks and sends customer signals to the algorithm, such as demographics like web activity, age, job title, education, geo, and listening to you through your phone (just kidding).

#2. Audience Targeting & Exclusions

While targeting settings still have a place in your account structure, most of our campaigns can be set up fairly broadly, and the conversion-based bidding will use the conversion data to find the right audience.

Gavin recommends this account structure:

1. 1. Primary Campaign – majority of ad spend goes here
      1. Set the must-have targeting parameters that apply to your business (location)
      2. EXCLUDE the audience that has already converted
         1. Like qualified leads, past buyers, etc.

• Secondary Campaign(s)

1. 1. Unique targeting situations when needed
      1. Warm lead email lists
      2. Retargeting existing customers with cross-sells/upsells 

#3. Creative Testing

Creative testing is crucial in Meta ads, and oftentimes, users don’t know what metrics to look for to see if their ad creative is successful. Gavin recommends monitoring these metrics:

• Hook rate (3-second video views/impressions) x 100
  • This will tell you if your ad was scroll-stopping or not. Your goal should be a 25% or higher

• Link click-through rate (link clicks/impressions)
  • This tells you whether your ad is driving traffic or not. Try to achieve a 1% or higher (closer to a 1.5%+ for e-commerce).
• Cost Per Action (CPA): (cost/conversions)
  • This calculates your cost per lead and an optimal goal will vary based on your business structure.
• Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): (conversion value/cost)
  • This calculates your revenue per dollar spent, and it will vary depending on the business. If you need help calculating your ROAS, use our free ROAS calculator!

If you notice your ad is lacking, follow Whitney’s advice and test out different ad creative to see what works best. Here’s an example:

Are My Ads Making Money?

Curious if your ads are making you money? Check out our target ROAS calculator! It’s fully customizable, calculates your break-even ROAS, gets your ideal target ROAS setting, and it’s free to use anytime.

Recap

Gavin’s 3 levers for successful Meta ads are:

• Optimize for the right goal

1. 1. 1. Campaign level: Sales/Leads
      2. Ad set level: valuable event(s) that fire 5+ times/week

• Define your audience

1. 1. 1. Input your must-have requirements
      2. Existing customer exclusions

• Launch creative, iterate, repeat

1. 1. Optimize your ads further to stop the scroll, drive traffic, and make sure they’re clear and relevant.

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Thanks for reading! If you have questions or want to talk to the Meta ads pro himself, feel free to reach out to gavin@adshark.com. Toodles!