Are your Facebook Ads strategy ready for Black Friday? 

This is THE time of the year when shopaholics are hunting for the best offers, so you need to make sure your Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads campaigns are ready to attract hungry buyers. 

So, do you have your Black Friday Facebook Ads strategies all planned out? No? Well, you’d better get on that, because the big day is just around the corner! 

With so many changes to how we advertise on Facebook and Instagram in a post-iOS world, the Meta algorithm is going through some growing pains of its own. So, how can you be sure you’re setting your ads for success? Well, we talked to ACTUAL engineers at Meta and created a checklist with everything you need to have your target audience open their wallets for you!

7 Meta Tips & Updates You Need to Know BEFORE Creating Black Friday

#1. 20 is the New 50

Everyone has heard that an ad set needs at least 50 conversions in a 7-day period. And yes, that was true a while ago, but now things have changed. 

In the past, the Facebook Ads Learning Phase ended when, in a 7-day period, an ad set reached 50 events (whether it is conversions, lead gen, landing page views, etc). However, the Meta Ads Manager has evolved and improved. Now to exit the learning phase for optimization, your campaigns need 20 completed events in a 7-day period.

What does that mean? 

Now, a campaign can leave the Learning Phase after it reaches 20 events, again, depending on the objectives you select. The algorithm will gather data until that time to help you make better decisions in a simplified, quicker way, and make it easier for you to be successful on the platform. 

But what happens if my campaign doesn’t achieve that goal? Then, after the 7-day period *and not a minute before*, you can edit your campaign to optimize it! The algorithm will still learn based on successful events, but to hit true Meta Ad success velocity, you’ll want to consider increasing your budget so that you can achieve the 20 events Meta needs your campaign to hit for optimization in a 7-day period.

#2. Keep Your Cold & Warm Audiences Separated

Let’s think of our cold and warm audiences like a dating process. 

Cold traffic is like when you’re interested in someone you don’t know and want them to swipe right back at you. Your profile pic and information is all they have on you to make a snap judgment decision on whether they’ll engage in a convo and maybe give you their number.  

This is the same for an IG ad. They have 1-3 seconds MAX to decide whether or not your ad is worth ‘swiping right’ via engaging with your content by stopping their scroll. 

Meanwhile, our warm traffic is geared to those that have already engaged with your profile and is either mid-convo or mid-first date. Like a Facebook ad, you’ve already captured their attention, and now you’re ‘courting’ them. Asking them to get to know you more and ideally make some sort of commitment. With dating, you’ll want to ‘make it official’ and with ads you want that lead or purchase! 

They’re totally different, right? 

• Cold Traffic’s primary goal is to get them to swipe right or engage with your content (and maybe purchase!)
• Warm Traffic’s primary goal is to get them converted into being Facebook officials by subscribing to your list and actually purchasing a product

When you blend warm and cold audiences in your campaigns, you’re giving the algorithm the chance to favor warm audiences as they’re more likely to convert to a more cost-effective bidding strategy. This means, using our last example, that it’s more likely for someone that already had a first date with you to say “yes” to a second date because they already know you. Thus slimming down the chance of new swipes showing up on your feed.

Taking this into account, at the top level of your campaign, for cold audiences, you’re teaching the Meta Ads algorithm which cold audiences are yielding conversions. A successful conversion sends a signal to the platform to find more humans like the user who just converted. 

When you’re using cold audiences in a campaign, and excluding warm ones, you’re forcing the platform to find new people *aka people that don’t know anything about your product/service* that will make the desired conversion event.

Should you blend the audiences and include warm audiences in the campaign, Meta will favor the warmer audience time and time again because an abandoned cart purchaser is more likely to convert than someone who doesn’t yet know, like, or trust your offer. 

And Meta is always optimizing for the easier (more cost-effective) win in their algorithm.

That’s why at Mongoose Media we recommend not mixing these audiences in the same campaign. When you throw cold and warm audiences together you’re not teaching the algorithm to specifically find new prospects, you’re asking your algorithm to find the best buyers possible, allowing it to cheat and deliver the ads to people that already know who you are. So, instead, build a campaign for prospecting and another for retargeting warm traffic. 

#3. Know What CPA You’re Willing to Pay for Your Cold & Warm Audiences

The algorithm is listening to you, so you have to tell it exactly what you want. And this applies to anything you set up in Facebook Ads, but it is especially important for the CPA.

Let’s suppose that you are willing to pay $85 per CPA (cost per acquisition) for a skincare customer, but you capped the bid budget at $75. In this case, the algorithm doesn’t have the means to know that you have more money than what you put, so you’ll be forcing it to optimize your ads for a $75 budget. Which can mean you’re limiting your audience reach to forced CPAs that fit within your lower budget. Meaning, you’re missing out on potential customers that you’d be willing to pay for but your bidding strategies say otherwise.

Why is this so crucial? Because there may be better people with potentially higher order value or propensity to purchase available to you, but because you told the algorithm that $75 is your spend limit, your ad may not reach those people. 

Bear this in mind: if your CPA is too high, it will eat into your profits. Conversely, if your CPA is too low, you could be missing out on potential customers. 

Additionally, every day we get closer to Black Friday is a day that the auction experiences additional new competitors to the marketplace and more auction pressure that you’re competing against. So, start thinking about your CPA before the big day approaches. 

{important dates graphic: September 20th, the soft pressure increase in a ‘pre-Black Friday auction’. October 15th – the unofficial kickoff for Black Friday and the D-Day for heavy auction bids. November 15th – consider using different Meta objectives cause everyone and their grandmothers are doing ads.}

And, if you’re not sure what your CPA should be, working with a qualified Meta Ads consultant can help you to set a realistic CPA for your business!

NOTE: Your WARM CPA and COLD CPA should be different.

#4. Your Ads are a Marathon, Not a Place to Bet on Horses

I know that it is very tempting to look at your ad campaigns and ads like they are competing in a horse race. But you’re not betting on a pony, you’re marketing your products or services, so there’s no rush. 

What I mean is that even though you may want to perform a gazillion changes every time you check your ads statics and something seems off, you need to let it rest! As I said above, the Facebook Ads Learning Phase covers a 7-day period; however, if you edit your ad every other day, what will happen is that the time period will restart with every change and your campaign will be stuck in the Learning Phase *sounds like time traveling, right?*. 

Plus, you won’t be giving the algorithm enough time to optimize your campaign! Simply put, let’s suppose you launched your ad on a Monday, but by Wednesday you don’t get any of the results you wanted, so you turn it off. But, what you don’t realize is that, in a 7-day period, the algorithm is working to understand your campaign, so it may take time to reach your target audience and generate conversions. 

And don’t worry! 

Everyone is tempted to edit or stop a campaign when it is not achieving what we want! In fact, at Mongoose Media we used to make that decision after a 4-day period. However, we realized that, by doing this, we were potentially wasting the effort the algorithm is making to optimize a campaign, so now we wait a full 7 days before touching anything. 

So, walk away and go back in a week… But wait, there are a few things you need to be mindful of before you sit back and relax. Here’s a quick ads checklist

• Tracking: 

For Facebook Ads to be effective, it is essential that you have your tracking set up correctly. Without tracking, you will have no way of knowing whether your ads are succeeding or failing during the Holiday season. 

• Creatives: 

During Black Friday, brands compete for consumers’ attention with ads that are often loud, colorful, and eye-catching. As a result, it’s important to make sure that your ads are designed to be thumb-stopping.

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One way to do this is to start working on your ad creatives well in advance of Black Friday. This will give you time to experiment with different designs and ensure that your advertising campaigns are truly eye-catching. 

• Winning offer

Have you already put some thoughts into your Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals? It is important to craft a must-click offer that your specific audience is going to love. 

Remember that Facebook, unlike Amazon, is like walking into the mall during the holiday season. There are a lot of options you can pick and different offers that sound appealing, so, with many competitors out there, it is important to create deals that really persuade your audience!

• Work within a comfortable budget

Have a budget that you’re comfortable spending daily with a long-term goal of success. If you’re coming to Meta ads for a silver bullet, a single solution in your company’s bottom line, you better have a budget to back up the investment for data and the algorithm to find your target audience.

Meta Ads are great to-scale offers that work and as a discovery tool for new audiences. When Meta Ads stand on their own without a cohesive marketing plan for omnichannel remarketing, subscriber engagement, and more, expect to pay high acquisition costs to cover your marketing gaps. 

{Meta Ads on a CVJ image? Meta ads drive awareness, meta ads help subscriber acquisition, Meta Ads can drive excitement and loyalty, but Meta Ads aren’t Atlas, holding the weight of the company alone – that’s my graphic recommendation…. People think Meta Ads are the Atlas holding the world, but instead, it’s the offer that’s atlas and Meta is the muscle on the one bicep only}

#5. The Algorithm Assumes the Data is True

This may sound like a no-brainer, but it is important to understand that the algorithm can’t read your mind, so it learns from the data you give it. 

That’s why it is so important to be mindful about what you tell it. From your target audience to your ad spend, that algorithm will take everything you put as a fact and, if you’re not careful, it can affect your campaign negatively.

#6. Advantage+ Placements & Advantage Campaign Budget & Why They Matter

Placements are also known as the different platforms on which Meta can show your ad. An example of this is running your ads on Instagram, Facebook, or Messenger.

In this case, choosing multiple placements is a great idea if you want your ads to reach your target audience across different platforms. Meta’s platform is going to try and serve your ads on the placement your targeted audience is most likely going to engage and convert.

Taking this into account, by using Advantage+ placements, you’ll be allowing Meta to find the best conversion opportunities for your ad in all the placements.

This not only will help you to get the optimization events at a low cost (because Meta’s delivery system will analyze the data from all available placements and choose placements that are both cost-effective and high-performing) but also will help you make the most out of your campaign budget!

Another way of automating your campaign is by using the Advantage Campaign Budget. This is a feature that allows Meta to distribute your budget depending on the placements where each ad set will get the most optimization events at a low cost. 

With both features, you can make sure that your budget is effectively invested, Advantage+ placements and Advantage Campaign Budget are godsend help during the Black Friday season

#7. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

If you were looking for a way to increase your campaign’s performance without having to stick to your computer 24/7, the new Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, launched on August 15, 2022, is quickly becoming my favorite new roll out from Meta. This new Meta product can automate an entire ad campaign with machine learning, so you can focus more on the general aspects of your online store and less on managing campaigns.

Just imagine being able to automate EVERYTHING from creatives and placements to audiences. With Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns you can maximize your ads’ performance throughout the Black Friday weekend (and beyond) without all the manual work it used to require. 

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns allow business owners and paid media buyers to use AI to automate a campaign from end to end and make the best out of their ad budget by finding the best placements in which your ad will get the most conversion events at a lower cost.

And, if that wasn’t enough, this new feature can also automate creatives to analyze which ones are more effective in a specific audience! 

Finally, if you have a Facebook or Instagram Shop, Meta is using AI to drive traffic to the most converting destination for your eCommerce store. Either your in-platform store (FB or IG shop) or your website, depending on which one will generate the most optimization events in a certain audience! 

There’s nothing you can’t achieve with this tool and, even though it’s still in its Beta version, acting on it now will give your campaigns a lift as most other brands and advertisers aren’t taking advantage of this new campaign!

What’s the Best Time to Run Facebook Ads for Black Friday?

As soon as possible! Taking into account that you have to wait for the Learning Phase 7-day window, help the algorithm understand and optimize your campaign, and make edits if necessary, at Mongoose Media we recommend our clients to start their Black Friday Facebook Ads campaigns between July and September. 

However, this doesn’t mean that you should have launched your sale months ago! What you should have done is launch campaigns to find your audience and build a warm list.

The idea is to build a list of buyers that want your product/service and are eager to get a good deal, so you can offer them early access or another offer if they signup or register ahead of the big day. 

Why is this so important? Because even though Black Friday and Cyber Monday may seem like a weekend events, more and more people start craving good deals and offers even before November starts, so it is crucial *and cheaper* to start warming up your traffic early

But wait! If you’re reading this in October/November, that doesn’t mean everything is lost. You just need to be mindful that, when you launch your Facebook ad campaign, there’s going to be a lot more auction pressure. 

Ready to Start Preparing for a Successful Black Friday?

Planning your Black Friday campaigns with time is the key to not only crafting profitable ads that catch the attention of your target audience and persuade them to click the “Buy now” button, but it also helps the algorithm understand your brand and put your deal in front of the right people. And now you have a checklist with everything that has changed in Facebook Ads and you need to keep it in mind to set your campaigns up for success. 

Do you feel already overwhelmed with all the preparations pre-Black Friday? Fear not, you’ve come to the right place! At Mongoose Media we have a team of Facebook experts, copywriters, designers, and strategists that will help you with the planning while you worry about running your business!

So, meet with us and start your journey to a successful Black Friday Facebook Ads strategy!

The post 7 Things You Need to Do AHEAD of Your Black Friday Facebook Ads According to Meta appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

If you haven’t added paid traffic to your T-shaped marketer toolbelt, you’re missing out. Paid search marketing is a proven marketing strategy for getting instant results and dialing in the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.

Let’s talk about the benefits of paid traffic.

#1: Speed to Market

The first benefit of paid traffic is speed. To illustrate what I mean, let’s compare paid ads to search engine optimization. You may think this is an unfair comparison, but it illustrates my point perfectly.

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process by which you try to get your content to rank in the search engine results pages or SERPs. SEO strategy includes keyword research, meta data, backlinking, and all kinds of technical elements. Most people view organic traffic as any traffic you don’t have to pay to get in front of.

With organic marketing, it can take three months to get a piece of content to appear as a search result. In other words, to rank organically.

If you’re trying to optimize for a term that has any level of competition, it can be 3, 6, 9, 12+ MONTHS before you begin to see any traction.

With paid traffic, you can see traffic the next day.

Both paid traffic and organic search traffic are critical to business success. But paid traffic needs to come first. Why? Because it’s so freakin’ fast. In the realm of digital marketing, you need proof of concept before you can scale. Proof of concept is difficult to have without speed. 

Quickly & Easily Test Campaign Elements

Speed has another benefit. It gives you the opportunity to quickly test what’s working or not working with your ppc ad.

You get to test your ad copy, pricing, the call to action, landing pages, the ad creative, etc. And it can all be tested quickly.

Testing takes the uncertainty out of paid advertising. It doesn’t take a lot of time or money, because paid traffic is so fast.

#2: Analytics You Can Actually Track

Another of the benefits of paid traffic is the analytics that back it up.

With organic marketing, social media marketing, and especially email marketing, there are limited data points, and those data points are being taken away from us because of privacy first initiatives.

With paid traffic, the advertising networks – Google AdWords, Facebook, Bing ads, etc. – have to give you this information because you’re paying for the traffic.

The Conversion Path

A conversion path is the sequence of events a user goes through before they engage in a desired action. It’s important to track the conversion path and look for the common behaviors of your best customers.

It’s difficult to track the conversion path with free traffic.

For example, organic social traffic is very disparate in terms of the information that you’re given. Because of the iOS 15 update, we don’t see things like open or click through rates for email marketing.

But because the advertising networks like all that ad revenue, they allow paid advertising customers access to advanced and detailed analytics. When you track the conversion path, you start to see the story people need to be told before they’re willing to convert.

#3: Optimization of Every Element of the Campaign

Who is this paid ad reaching? Where is the conversion happening? What time is our social media ad performing best?

With paid advertising, you can optimize everything with minor tweaks. You can’t optimize or change these variables outside of a paid ecosystem.

Again (beating a dead horse), because you’re paying for that Facebook ad, Google ad, Bing ads, whatever, the network gives you opportunities to enhance your ad campaign.

When you pay attention to the data, you see exactly where the disconnect is. Then you can make minor tweaks to improve the performance of your paid search ad long term.

The changes don’t have to be major. Everybody’s heard the analogy about the plane that’s off course by 1% that ends up in an entirely different country over time. Your campaigns will be the exact same way.

The ability to optimize your campaigns is one of the strongest benefits of paid traffic.

#4: Enhanced Customer Targeting

One of the major differences between free traffic and paid traffic is targeting. With paid traffic, you get to decide who you put your ads in front. This is an amazing benefit, especially given how much information these ad networks know about people.

Ad networks have 70 million demographic and psychographic profiling factors on every human on the planet.

Who is your target audience?

• Where do they live and work?
• What are their interests?
• Are they married?
• How much money do they make?
• What products do they buy online?

From a machine learning perspective, this data is important. Why? All the ad networks are reverse engineering intent. They want to understand why people do what they do. They want to know what makes people buy.

It’s a little scary, to be honest with you, because they’re getting good at it. But the better they get, the bigger your advantage.

You can take advantage of machine learning through targeting.

As you can see, the benefits of paid ads are immense. I’m not here to tell you that paid ads are the only thing you need to do. There are not the end-all-be-all. But paid advertising should be a cornerstone of your digital marketing foundation because of these benefits.

Want to become a traffic master? Click here to find out how!

NOTE: This content came directory from DigitalMarketer’s Paid Traffic Mastery Certification.

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In our Paid Traffic Mastery course, we bring together four of the world’s top paid advertising leaders to share the foundational knowledge you need to know to win with paid traffic. One of the first lessons they share is common terms and acronyms every paid advertising professional should know.

These Are The Term To Know Before Running Paid Ads

Search Engine Marketing or SEM

Search engine marketing is a broad marketing strategy term that includes search engine optimization, content marketing, as well as paid ads. 

Social Media Marketing or SMM

Social media marketing is limited to social media channels and includes organic and paid traffic.

Conversion

A conversion is the desired action you want someone to take on your website or funnel. A conversion event typically includes a time or money commitment on behalf of the customer. 

Conversion Rate

This is the percentage of prospects landing on your page or taking you up on your offer.

Cost Per Click or CPC

Cost per click means that your ad campaign is billed each time someone clicks a button, link, or directly on your ad. 

Cost Per Thousand or CPM 

Cost per thousand is charged for every 1,000 impressions. An impression happens anytime someone lands on the page where your ad is placed. (Don’t ask us why it’s CPM…it’s just weird.) 

Click Through Rate or CTR

Click through rate is the percentage of potential customers who saw an ad and clicked on it. This metric is a good indicator of the quality of your ad copy and media. 

Cost Per Acquisition or CPA

Cost per acquisition is the expense incurred to acquire a new customer.  

Return On Ad Spend or ROAS

Return on ad spend is the amount of revenue earned per dollar of ad spend.

Return On Investment or ROI

Return on investment describes how much you get back after calculating the entire cost of the ad campaign. When calculating the ROI, costs can include agency fees, copywriting, graphic design, video production, call tracking, etc. 

Lifetime Value or LTV

Lifetime value is the long-term value of a customer. 

Urchin Tracking Module or UTM

The Google Analytics we know and love started out as Urchin Software Corporation. The term just stuck around after Google bought Urchin in 2005. The term Urchin tracking module (not universal tracking mechanism or Uncle Tom’s marmalade) is a piece of code that is tacked onto the end of the URL. The code is pushed to the search engine whenever someone clicks through the ad. 

Use this list of common terms to impress your friends at a dinner party, or to share with your paid advertising clients. It’ll get everyone on the same page and avoid confusion down the road.

NOTE: This content came directory from DigitalMarketer’s Paid Traffic Mastery Certification.

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Welcome to the fun world of digital advertising, where everyone starts off asking the same question:

What even is digital advertising?

If you’re not Steve Jobs and didn’t realize how important digital advertising was going to be in building a company in 1984 (the year Apple’s iconic commercial launched), this is your OFFICIAL invite into the club.

Let’s be honest, none of us got the memo as quickly as Jobs did. Yet, we can all learn a valuable lesson from him.

Digital advertising can catapult a business, like Apple, into success and create raving fans from your customers (this is advice from a company that reached a $1 trillion valuation in 2018).

What is Digital Advertising?

Digital advertising is a strategy that promotes a product online. This promotion happens on social media platforms, search engines, websites, or even in your inbox. Essentially, digital advertising is promoting your product or services to people on the Internet.

And (just to drive home the point) it’s a huge part of the marketing industry right now.

In 2018, Facebook made $55 billion in advertising revenue. That means that marketers paid them a cumulated sum of $55 billion to advertise their products on the Facebook platforms.

Like we said, digital advertising is kind of a big deal.

It can also be referred to as “online advertising” or “paid media.” All of these terms just mean that you’re promoting a product online with the hope of starting conversions (i.e., users to sign up for your email list, people to buy your product, etc.).

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How Does Digital Advertising Work?

When Apple ran their iconic ad in 1984, everything was pretty simple. While they had to wait until 2000 to be able to run a Google ad for their products, there wasn’t much competition trying to steal their customers online when they could finally launch online ads.

Which is the total opposite of what digital advertising is today. Customers in 2020 have a lot of options when it comes to who they want to buy their products from, and this rise in options has made online advertising a bit more complex than it used to be.

But, don’t worry. At DigitalMarketer we have blog posts and courses that will teach you the most up-to-date information about paid media as it stands today. While this may seem overwhelming, it all starts to make sense the more you learn about it.

For example, digital advertising requires you to have a traffic campaign and it all starts with your customer.

To create an online advertising strategy that works, you have to create the right ad for your audience. It needs to be something that makes them stop scrolling and think, “Wow, that’s exactly what I need.” That ad is going to make your prospects convert—remember, this is marketing lingo for getting users to sign up for your email list, people to buy your product, etc.

And if this were 2000 again, you could stop there. But…digital advertising requires a bit more effort now. 

Part of this strategy also involves building relationships with your audience by giving them free value and showing them that you’re the business they want to buy from. It also involves doing audits on your ads to find ways to improve them and increase your conversions.

You’ve most likely spent the majority of today looking at different forms of digital advertising (we’ll explain how in the next section). Let’s look at some examples!

(NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)

Examples of Digital Advertising

If you’ve spent anytime online today chances are that you’ve seen some form of advertising. That’s because it’s really…everywhere.

For example, Mazda is using Twitter to promote their new model, MazdaCX30 (as you can see by the “Promoted” text in the bottom left-hand corner):

Industrious HQ, a coworking space located in Los Angeles, is running paid media on Instagram (notice the Sponsored text under their name):

DigitalMarketer is running ads on Facebook (again, notice the Sponsored text under our name) Also, is anyone else hungry?

And even Office Depot is running ads on websites, like Forbes:

So, unless this article is the first piece of Internet content that you have touched since you woke up this morning, chances are you’ve spent a lot of time looking at digital advertisements—whether you realized it or not.

And that’s because business owners, agencies, and marketers are now on the train that Apple hopped on over 3 decades ago.

It’s is a huge market (obviously). Businesses around the world have figured out that with digital advertising’s ability to target specific audiences they can create more customers and double their business.

And that’s a really big deal.

(NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)

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