More often than not we see Shopify businesses using Facebook Ads to drive traffic to their store, with some brands committing over 50% of the marketing budget to this source. With such significant investment in both time and money, optimising your implementation process could save you a lot of hours and stress in the long run.
At Blend, we’ve helped many high growth brands build out a fully optimised plan for their Facebook Ads. For us, it’s all about developing their skills and understanding of the platform so that they feel confident in being able to implement the strategies we recommend.
After working with many brands, we’ve narrowed down the areas that most Shopify Merchants struggle with:
- Knowing what audiences to use
- Implementing Ads across multiple Ad Sets
- Creating Ads that look good on all placements
- Using Budget effectively
If you’ve also struggled with these areas, then this blog could be a great resource for you. We’ve created this video guide blog on our 5 top Facebook Ads Hack and Tips that we use with every client to improve efficiency.
Number 1: Creating Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike audiences are a great way of finding what we like to call a ‘Luke-Warm’ audience. They’re cold as they haven’t engaged with your brand but as they have interests that look like your engaged audiences they tend to perform better than saved audiences.
Facebook makes the creation process of Lookalike Audience fairly simple but there are a couple of niggles and small drop downs that you may have not seen before.
Below you’ll see how to quickly create a Lookalike Audience straight from a Custom Audience and how to make multiple audiences without leaving the screen.
Number 2: Duplicating Ad Sets
An Ad Set with a Facebook Ad Campaign, is the section where you decide who you are targeting and on what placement. As part of our Facebook Ad Strategy, we always recommend testing the same ads but with different audiences to see if an audience has a preference for a certain ad.
In the below video, you’ll see multiple ways of duplicating your ads across different ad sets. This is a hack that could literally save you hours of time.
Number 3: Use the Media Library
Most marketing platforms have an area called a Media Library. This is a location where all your images and videos are saved. It’s often an area that gets overlooked but for Facebook Ads, this is something that you should use.
Using the Media Library will allow you to pre-upload all images and videos you want to use for your ads, saving you agonising minutes of upload and waiting times. You can see it in action below:
Number 4: Using Facebook Ad Creatives
Whilst this is an area that is constantly updating, Facebook has made it a lot easier to tailor your ads for each placement. To optimise your visuals for all placements you should create your ads in the following aspect ratios:
- 1:1
- 9:16
- 1.91:1
Or in easier terms:
- Square (For Feeds)
- Vertical (For Facebook and Instagram Stories)
- Horizontal (For Right Columns, Search Results and In Articles)
Below we show you Facebook’s Ad Creative Tool that will allow you to easily update your ads for placements.
Number 5: Updating Budgets
As part of our strategy, we always recommend using Lifetime Budgets at the Campaign Level to allow even distribution of budget and to allow for spikes in Engagement. However, this can often cause confusion when you need to update them for your monthly ad budget.
Whilst this may mean you spend an extra 5 minutes each month updating budgets, unlike the Daily Budget, your ads will not try and spend all of the Daily Budget in one go and may even spend more or less depending on the engagement that day. So for an extra 5 minutes, we think this is well worth it!
Below we’ll show you how you can adjust your budgets quickly and efficiently.
Summary
There we have it! Our top 5 Facebook Ad Hacks and Tips. We’ve developed and used these with many clients and can honestly say they have saved us hours of implementation. If you have any other hacks or tips to share, be sure to comment below.
Published: December 16, 2020
Last updated: December 16, 2020
