Meta Ads Flashcards
Explain how to run the Ad Lab for finding which creatives, primary texts, and headlines perform the best.
Campaign
Make a new ad campaign and title it the particular offer in brackets and Ad Lab after to indicate this campaign is the ad lab:
[Madison Palica QSYC Webinar Funnel] Ad Lab
Buying type should be auction and you should set the goal to traffic and then highest volume. We want to see how many people are really drawn to each element we’re testing.
Don’t set budget at the campaign level so you have more control in the sets.
Set
Create a set and call it Test 1 (Creatives) and set the conversion location to wherever the ad is sending people to. Make the goal to maximize number of clicks, and no cost-per-result.
Don’t do dynamic creative. This switches things up in a way that defeats the purpose of the experiment.
Schedule the set to run for one day, like start midnight of the day you’re making it and end it midnight of the day after. Set the budget to what that particular set will be spending and make the budget daily since its only running for one day.
For example, Maddie’s 11 creatives will be 11 x $3 per ad x 2 (for 1 duplicate of each) so $66.
NOTE: If it is a new ad account, the daily spend will be limited, so it may be possible to do no end date and do a lifetime budget instead. Maybe that’s better overall actually. Need to test it out. Like lifetime budget over however many days will allow you to reach that dollar amount given the limited budget. Or daily over two days and make the ad spend half the total. We’ll set rules for each individual ad so this may work.
Do a custom audience that ideally has a few million included. Don’t do 65+ because apparently old people are always just clicking on whatever so it skews the data. This depends on the thing you’re testing though. If its super niche you can go narrower.
Then on placements, do FACEBOOK FEED ONLY. Other placements switch up how the information is displayed, so it ruins the experiment as well. You need to do the feed dropdown to access and turn the other ones off.
Ad
Name the ad the creative number, so the first will just be called “1”.
No partnership ad.
Identity should just be facebook since the placements are just facebook feed.
On Ad Setup, create ad, manual upload, and single image or video. No multi-advertiser ads.
The Ad sources seem to offer information on the website you’re going to. Seems like it would take away from the message of the ad in some cases. Sometimes not. I don’t think it should be used for this experiment regardless.
Choose the ad creative and include your control headline and/or primary text. The controls should be the ones you predict will perform the best for optimizing this round, but it doesn’t matter for the main goal of this experiment.
Remember to turn off all optimizations, particularly the one that is “Optimize text per person”. You CAN’T disable this from the ad screen. It must be done in the media edit under the optimizations/enhancements tab, and it hidden in a dropdown at the bottom. The enhancement shifts text around and ruins the experiment.
Make the call to action something that makes sense.
Finally set the destination, set the pixel you want to use, and use this standard url parameter unless you can find something better:
utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}&utm_term={{adset.name}}&utm_content={{ad.name}}
Finally
Make sure all of the thing on this ad campaign, set, and ad are exactly like they need to be. Sometimes edits don’t go through so make sure they do. Also if there’s an error that you can’t figure out, try making a brand new ad in the set and trying again. This worked for me when the preview refused to show, all settings the same.
You need to duplicate this ad so that you can switch the duplicate’s creative, changing only the creative and leaving all else the same. If you have 15 total creatives, duplicate it 14 times. I like to make sure that the numbers are in order when I rename them 1-15 for example, and then I’ll switch the creatives one by one.
You’ll need to go through each ad and make sure nothing got changed in the duplication process and triple check everything is set up perfectly because again, the site can be touchy and mess up.
Other Sets
After the first set is setup, duplicate the set, rename the new ads after either the headlines or primary texts, set the ad spend to the number those elements instead of the creative elements, and switch the appropriate media and text elements to test whatever set you’re making. Rinse and repeat basically.
Make sure you’re payments are set up and everything is good before running this so you don’t get any bans on your ad account. Publish and you should be good to go.
Before Publish
Duplicate all your ads with a quickly duplicate action. This is to make sure the ad is played at different times of the day so it doesn’t get overlooked at say 5 am.
Also you need to add two rules to the campaign. Go to the “more” tab in the ad manager and create rules:
1) Ad Lab $3 Spent – Apply rule to all active ads in the campaign, action is turn off ads, conditions is Lifetime spent > $3.00, Time Range is maximum, schedule is continuously.
This will make an ad stop if it exceeds $3. (This check happens once on a set interval, which means this can trigger after an ad has spent $30 or more potentially.)
2) Ad Lab 200 – Apply rule to all active ads in the campaign, action is turn off ads, conditions is Link clicks < 1 AND Reach > 200, Time Range is maximum, schedule is continuously.
This makes it so if 200 people see the ad and it gets zero clicks, it turns of automatically.
WOOHOO!! Make sure you have a legitimate payment method and publish!
How do you interpret the results of the Ad Lab? What’s next?
