How long should I run my paid Meta ad?
For those of you who are new to paid Meta ads, start with one month of paid advertising. Meta needs time to run your ads, serve them more than once to your ideal audience, and allow time for accurate data to be gathered so you can properly assess their performance.
With a starting budget of $10 a day, your first month would cost a minimum of $300. Plus any additional costs for designing your ads, and management fees if you are using an agency, which can start at $1000 a month.
How do you measure the performance of paid Meta ads?
Before you set out to measure your ad performance, you need to keep in mind the objective you set. Too often, brands are disappointed that their paid ad campaign didn’t generate enough sales, meanwhile, their objective was awareness. With the awareness objective in mind, the advertising campaign provided a strong return on investment.
When your paid ads are running, you will need to monitor them regularly, rather than set and forget. Ongoing reviews of active campaigns in the market ensure that you can make adjustments if needed in real time. For example, over a week into your month-long campaign, you notice that the still image ad has less than 25% of the reach compared to the other formats. You may decide to turn off that ad and reinvest the remaining budget into the remaining two formats as the audience is responding to them well.
Learning, optimising, and trialing, over time, will ensure that you create strong-performing ads.
Ads are also a place for engagement, with your audience tagging friends, asking questions, or leaving comments. Monitoring your ads allows you to engage directly with people online, find out more about what they want due to the questions or comments they post, and build brand loyalty and momentum for the paid ad.
A few things to remember
YOUR PIXEL
Before you commence paid Meta ads, you should have the Meta Pixel (formerly a Facebook pixel) set up on your website. You place the pixel code in the header and footer of your website template and it will automatically be included on every page of your website. Learn how to set up your pixel here
With this in place, if a potential customer clicks on your ad, you will collect data which you can use later in your paid advertising strategy by retargeting ads to the people who have shown interest in your brand/product.
If you are running a paid Meta advertising campaign with a different objective to awareness, such as sales (conversions), you will need both this pixel set up, as well as a conversion pixel. The conversion pixel should be embedded on the checkout/thank you page when someone purchases on your website.
YOUR ORGANIC CONTENT
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of running ads online, but it's no reason to neglect your organic content. Rather, paid and unpaid, social media should work together to achieve your business objectives from building your brand to driving sales.
If you are looking for an organic social media scheduling tool to free up your time, we recommend SKED