16 Expert Tips To Optimize Facebook Ads For High ROI

Looking to win World’s #1 Most Average Facebook Ads Manager?

NOPE. 👎👎👎

We—you—don’t do average. You’re not here to keep your decently performing ads.

Average outcomes won’t cut it. You’ve got a business to build, a boss to impress, and higher key performance indicators (KPIs) to hit. 

You’re here to learn how to win World’s #1 Most Impressive Facebook Ads Manager With The Highest ROAS. 

We’re here to tell you how.

After spending millions on clients (and our own ads), we’ve nailed down the tips to turn your results up. They’re tested, proven, and oh-so-worth-it. 

So how can you run more effective Facebook campaigns and increase your return on ad spend (ROAS)?

In this article, we’ll explore how to optimize Facebook ads so you can improve campaign performance, get better results, and stop leaving money on the table.

For most businesses, the ultimate Facebook ads goal is driving revenue via eCommerce sales or brick-and-mortar store visits. But that doesn’t mean you should focus on these end goals in every campaign. Instead, Facebook campaigns typically work best when they’re part of an advertising funnel.

With an ad funnel, you can continually introduce new people to your business, get them interested in your products and services, and eventually make a sale. By the time you’re ready to make a sales pitch, your audience will be better prepared to buy—making your ads more successful.

Creating a Facebook ad funnel can also help you keep your costs in check. That’s because campaigns with lower-funnel objectives like sales and conversions tend to be much more expensive to run. If you run many of these campaigns without warming up your audience first, you’re likely to spend a lot of money without generating any results.

In contrast, campaigns with upper-funnel objectives like reach and awareness tend to be much more affordable to run. If you start with these campaigns, you can connect with your target audience and get them interested before shifting to pricier revenue-driven campaigns—ultimately saving money and optimizing results.

Here’s a simple overview of a Facebook advertising funnel:

• Awareness: First, introduce your business using the Brand Awareness or Reach campaign objective
• Consideration: Then create interest using the Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video Views, Messages, or Lead Generation objective
• Conversion: Finally, make the sale using the Conversions, Catalog Sales, or Store Traffic objective

No matter what funnel stage you’re targeting, your campaign should feature custom content that you created just for the campaign. Right?

Not necessarily. In some cases, it’s important to create new content that aligns perfectly with the campaign’s objective. But in other cases, it’s a better idea to repurpose existing organic content.

Here’s the thing: even if you’ve done a lot of audience research, you can’t always predict which creatives or messages will resonate with your target audience. If you invest a lot of resources in producing creatives and captions just for ads, you could end up wasting a lot of time and money.

To save time and money, consider using a creative that’s already proven to work. When you create a new Facebook ad, choose the Use Existing Post option to repurpose an organic post you’ve already published on social media. Choose a post that’s generated a lot of reactions, shares, or comments—in other words, content that has resonated with your audience.

When Facebook delivers your ad, it automatically displays the organic engagement that the post generated. All that engagement can serve as social proof—or evidence that others trust and engage with your business. As a result, your target audience may be more likely to engage with your ad, which can increase reach and improve campaign results.

Once you’ve created a successful Facebook ad funnel, you might plan to keep running the same campaigns for the long run. It’s natural to expect to achieve the same level of results over time, especially if you continue to target the same audience.

However, the longer you keep a Facebook campaign going, the more likely you are to encounter problems with ad fatigue. Essentially, if you show the same ad to the same target audience over and over, they’ll get tired of seeing it. They might ignore it and reduce your conversion rate, or they might hide it from their news feed and provide negative feedback.

To prevent ad fatigue and optimize ad delivery, keep each campaign’s creative assets fresh. Introduce new photos, videos, and captions regularly to keep your target audience engaged while continuing to deliver your message and get results.

Each version doesn’t necessarily have to be a completely new concept. Instead, you can make small changes to existing assets and produce iterations on ads that already work well. For example, you might change the caption wording slightly, use a different background color for the image, or add text overlays to the video.

Your ideal customers may share a lot of similar characteristics, such as demographics, interests, and online behaviors. But even if your target audience is a relatively niche group, they may react differently to various ad creatives and placements.

It’s impossible to create one ad that works for everyone in your target audience. But you can rely on the Facebook algorithm to identify what works best for individual Facebook users and deliver the optimal combination of elements.

When you toggle on Facebook’s dynamic creative feature, you can upload multiple versions of ad elements—including images, videos, headlines, descriptions, and primary text. Then the platform can automatically display ads using the components that are most likely to drive the results you want.

If you switch on the “Optimize Creative for Each Person” option in Facebook Ads Manager, the platform can also make minor edits to your creatives. For example, the platform can automatically generate videos from images or crop your creatives to optimize results.

Although the dynamic creative feature is great for optimizing Facebook ads, there is one potential downside. Ads Manager aggregates results rather than reporting on each individual combination of ad elements. That means you may see great results—but you may not be able to identify the exact mix of creative assets that drove all those conversions.

When you want to optimize your ads, it’s easy to focus on the creative elements and placements your audience sees on Facebook. But it’s important to remember that what happens after prospects click your ad has just as much of an impact on the results.

Have you noticed that your ads get a lot of link clicks but surprisingly few conversions? If your ads direct prospects to your website, then a great landing page is critical to the success of your campaign. Here are a few simple updates you can make to optimize your landing page:

Do the same business name and logo appear on your Facebook page and on the landing page? Do the brand colors and style carry over from the ad to the website? Creating a consistent experience can make it easier for customers to trust your brand.

Does the landing page highlight the same offer that prospects saw in the ad? Make sure your landing page has all the information that prospects expect, or you could end up with a bounce rate that’s way higher than necessary.

Are your landing page visitors confused about what to do next? Make it as easy as possible for potential customers to get what they’re seeking. By placing a call-to-action (CTA) above the fold, you can typically increase conversions.

When you want to optimize your Facebook ads, it’s easy to assume that having more control over budget distribution is better. After all, you know your marketing goals. Shouldn’t you know how best to spend your budget?

Although Facebook Ads does allow you to set budgets for each ad set, this approach isn’t always the best option. With campaign budget optimization, you can take a lot of guesswork out of the process and let the platform do the math for you.

Essentially, campaign budget optimization lets Facebook Ads distribute your entire campaign budget across all active ad sets for the best possible performance. That means you can rely on the advertising platform to optimize ad delivery—with no need for adjusting ad set budgets manually.

By default, Facebook ad campaigns typically use Lowest Cost (or the equivalent) bid strategies. If you want to get as many results as possible without controlling the cost, the default bid strategy works just fine.

But what if you could generate more value or increase your ROAS with another bid strategy? Testing out some of the other available bid strategies can optimize your Facebook ad results.

You can adjust bid strategies at the campaign level (options may vary based on your objective and eligibility):

• Cost cap: Set your desired cost per action while generating maximum results
• Bid cap: Control the amount you bid in every ad auction
• Minimum ROAS: Maximize the value you get for every conversion

For most campaign types, Facebook recommends using automatic placements—a setting that allows the platform to place ads wherever they’re most likely to generate the best results. That means your ads could display anywhere from the Facebook news feed to Instagram Stories to the Audience Network.

In some cases, one or two of the available Facebook ads placements may contribute significantly better results—and may be worth more of your advertising resources. You can find your top ad placements by using the Breakdowns feature in Ads Manager. Choose a campaign to view and select Placement from the Breakdowns dropdown menu.

Then sort by metrics like click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), or cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM). You can also sort by results and cost per result if the campaign targets an in-app objective—such as reach or engagement.

Did any of the placements dramatically outperform others? When creating future ad sets, you can use the manual placements feature to display your ads in your best-performing locations only.

Do some of your target audiences far outperform others? You can follow the same workflow as outlined above to find and prioritize your best-performing segments.

In Ads Manager, choose a campaign and select a demographic metric like Age, Gender, or Region from the Breakdowns menu. Then review the results closely to find the segments with the lowest CPM, CPC, CTR, or other key metrics.

Note: Because of the iOS14 changes, this only works for campaigns that aim to get traffic or link clicks. It will not work for campaigns aimed at lead generation or purchases.

You can use your insights to adjust your current saved audiences or create new ones. You can also add select parameters to your lookalike audiences to get more control over who sees your Facebook campaigns.

Since detailed targeting is based on demographics and interests, they’re ideal for targeting people who fit your company’s customer profile. That makes them a good match for upper-funnel campaigns that focus on increasing awareness and expanding reach.

But as your campaign objectives move further down the funnel, detailed targeting audiences tend to be less of a good fit. Instead, it’s much more effective to retarget people who have engaged with your content or shown interest in your business.

You can remarket by building custom audiences with data sources like your company’s:

• Client lists from your eCommerce site or customer relationship management (CRM) tool
• Website, including people who have visited specific pages on your site
• Facebook page or Instagram account, including people who follow your business or who have engaged with your content
• Facebook shop, including people who have browsed or made a purchase

If you use the Catalog Sales objective for your campaign, you can also access a built-in retargeting option at the ad set level. You can show ads to people who viewed products or added them to a shopping cart, and you can upsell or cross-sell to existing customers.

With a well-constructed Facebook ad funnel, you can continue to connect with new potential customers and introduce them to your business. But eventually, you may reach all of the most affordable people in your target audience, making your advertising costs increase.

To deliver your ads to more people who are similar to your target audience, use Facebook Ads’ lookalike option. With lookalikes, you can choose one of your custom audiences as a source and let Facebook automatically find people who share the same characteristics.

For best results, use source audiences that align with the funnel stage you want to target. For a bottom-of-the-funnel objective like Catalog Sales, you might use a custom audience based on your current customers or your most valuable clients.

Keep in mind you can always fine-tune your lookalike audiences at the ad set level. When you add a lookalike audience, you can either make it even larger with Lookalike Expansion or narrow it down by choosing age ranges, genders, and detailed targeting parameters.

The more conversions your ads generate, the larger your pool of existing customers is likely to become. In some cases, you may want to upsell and cross-sell to existing customers or remarket to them when it’s time to stock up again.

But in other cases, serving ads to existing customers is a waste of your ad budget. To optimize your ad targeting, exclude the audience segments that don’t provide sufficient value.

Do you want to exclude an entire custom or lookalike audience? At the ad set level, click the Exclude button under Custom Audiences and choose one or more audiences to remove from the targeting pool.

Do you want to exclude people who live in a certain area or fit other detailed targeting parameters? At the ad set level or in Audience Manager, click the Exclude button under Detailed Targeting. Then choose the demographics, interests, or behaviors to remove.

In 2021, the Facebook Ads platform made numerous updates to its conversion tracking policies, mainly due to iOS 14-related restrictions. These updates don’t affect in-app objectives like reach, awareness, engagement, and lead generation. But they’ve had a major impact on third-party conversions, such as actions completed on your website or in your app.

If you want to target iOS 14 users and receive accurate results from your conversion campaigns, you have to configure and prioritize conversion events. Start by installing the Facebook Pixel on your website. Then locate your Pixel in Facebook Events Manager and go to the Aggregated Event Measurement tab to configure web events.

In Events Manager, use the dropdown menu to add the conversion events that you want to target in ad campaigns. Then drag and drop them in order of priority, with the most important event at the top of the list. For example, you might set Purchase or Start Trial as the highest-priority event.

Further reading: How iOS14 Impacts Facebook Ads (And How To Get Around It)

Once you prioritize conversions in Events Manager, you can start optimizing for them in Ads Manager. That means when you run a campaign using the Conversions objective, you can tell the Facebook algorithm exactly how to optimize delivery.

You can find all eligible prioritized events at the ad set level. Note that you also have the option to optimize for non-prioritized events, which have a yellow warning symbol. But that isn’t always a good idea. Targeting non-prioritized events can compromise ad delivery, which can limit your results.

If you aren’t seeing the results you want from a campaign, you can always duplicate the ad set and choose a different optimization event. In some cases, optimizing for an event that’s a step or two removed from your end goal (such as Add to Cart rather than Purchase) allows the Facebook algorithm to improve delivery, which can increase your results overall.

If you aren’t sure how to optimize your ad sets, you can always use the Experiments tool to do Facebook ad testing. With this tool, you can A/B test entire campaigns or different ad sets to see what works best for your audience.

For best results, use the Facebook Experiments tool to set up ad sets that are identical aside from one difference—such as optimization events, target audience, placement, creative, or ad types. Then choose the key metric to determine the winner—such as cost per result or CPC.

When the split test ends, you’ll have the data you need to optimize your Facebook ads. You can also use the insights you gained to run more effective campaigns in the future.

A major part of Facebook ad optimization is figuring out how to get the results you want reliably. Once you’ve accomplished that step, it’s often a good time to scale your campaigns. With Ads Manager’s automated rules, you can ensure that you don’t miss a key opportunity to scale.

To set up automated rules, click the Rules button in Ads Manager on the campaign, ad set, or ad level, and select Custom Rule. Then set up the parameters for scaling a successful campaign. For example, you may want to scale when a campaign’s cost per result goes under a certain threshold or when the website purchase ROAS goes above a certain amount.

In the Action dropdown menu, choose Increase Daily Budget By or Increase Lifetime Budget By. Then input the percent to increase the budget. To avoid sending ad sets back into the learning phase, it’s usually best to scale relatively conservatively rather than doubling or tripling your ad budget every week.

With so many options for optimizing Facebook ads, you easily have over a dozen ways to improve your campaigns and get better results. The difference is truly in the small details.

Start testing each one of these tips for incremental changes per idea. Collectively, you'll see a huge difference (and a lot more return).

Doubting you can implement all these? Work with an experienced Facebook Ads agency like KlientBoost and take the guesswork out of paid social.