The next time you start setting up a Facebook ads campaign that you plan to run for 7 days or more, make sure you segment your audience. You’re going to be so happy you did when you check in on your ads and inevitably see this:
This graph shows conversions, a.k.a. the number of people who bought your product, opted in to your free trial, or became a lead (depending on what the goal of your ads is).
Nearly every campaign I’ve run follows this same pattern. Your ads get a good response on Day 1, and Day 2 is even better. Then the conversions start slowing down even though you’re spending the same amount each day.
Why do your conversions always drop?
Even though I love Facebook advertising, I’m typically the first one to blame the platform for trying to squeeze more money out of businesses. That said, I think in this case it’s most likely a question of novelty.
When your ads first hit people’s News Feeds, the newness of your offering is going to impact some people strongly as soon as they see it. I haven’t done any studies of this, but experience tells me that the earliest clicks on your ads have a better chances of leading to conversions.
What’s the solution?
Start by only showing your ads to half (or less) of your intended audience. You can learn exactly how to target the right people for your ads here, but today you’re going to add in a little twist. (You can even do this to ads you already have running.)
By segmenting your ads, you can keep them “fresher” longer. After about 7 days, you change the segmented audience and show the same ads to a new audience. By doing this strategically, Facebook will even believe it’s a completely new campaign.
Here’s how it’s done:
1. Choose how you’re going to segment your ads. Your surest bets are age, location and gender.
For example, if your campaign is going to run for 14 days, you need two segments. If your ideal customer is between the ages of 30 and 50, segment 1 only targets people between 30 and 40, while segment 2 targets 40-50 year-olds.
For location, you can choose areas of the country. It takes an extra minute to input actual state names, but you could stick with East Coast and then West Coast states.
Remember: the longer your campaign runs, the more segments you need. If you have several segments and go through them all, you can go back and retarget each one. Just make sure you refresh the creative (a.k.a. text and image) of your ads so as to reap the benefits of novelty.
2. Create a new campaign every time you target a new segment.
To do this, you need to be inside the Power Editor (take the tour here). Click on the campaign you’ve been running with one segment, and then click Duplicate.
Then go into the ads of that new campaign and adjust the Audience so that your new campaign is targeting the new segment.
Pause the original campaign and upload the new one.
That’s it!
I’m off to take my own advice and make sure I’m segmenting the audiences of all my campaigns. Questions? Leave ‘em in the comments!
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Well explained. This is exactly what I experienced with my campaign. However, my peak doesn’t happen on the first / second day of launching. I’m looking at maybe one to two weeks before getting conversions or even reach when using oCPM. Any tips on how to speed this up?
Also does the nature of “as fatigue” on Facebook mean that you can never run one single ad forever? If so I feel it’s pointless then to split test ads because Facebook tends to quickly maximise the reach of the winning ad early on.
Hey Tin, something must be off if you’re not able to get much reach for an entire week, but I’m afraid I can’t say what it is without knowing your case. Has it always been this way since you started running ads?
And yes, you won’t be able to run one single ad forever. You’re right about how FB optimizes the winning ad, so I just make sure I’m always split testing two ads with every new campaign.
Hi Claire,
Its bizarre but true. Its always like that when i run ads on oCPM.
I even created a brand new campaign and tested it and it did the same. I then went further and tested it with a new account and guess what, same again.
Its not that i get zero reach. I do get some but ridiculously low numbers. My audience is 800k. Daily reach is expected to be around 16k and yet in the early stages of the campaign, i get about 1k reach per day, if I’m lucky.
My bids are set higher then FB recommended and budget is over 5 times more than bid, as per oCPM best practice guidelines.
Anyway, nice blog you have. I’m going to spend some time catching up on here :)