When it comes to building a Facebook ad campaign, we’re faced with many decisions. One of the most common areas of opportunity that I’ve uncovered has to do with choosing the correct marketing objective. This probably seems self-explanatory. If you’re familiar with Facebook’s ad platform you know that a user can optimize ads to achieve awareness, brand consideration, or conversion. But is it really that simple?
Consider the 7-Day Learning Phase
It’s logical to think that if, for example, we want more loan application submissions, we would choose conversions as our marketing objective, counting each application submission as a conversion. However, we need to consider the 7-day learning phase associated with any Facebook Ad campaign. During this phase, Facebook’s algorithm gathers the information necessary to optimize our campaign for success. What I find often unknown, is that the algorithm needs roughly 50 conversion events during the learning phase to gain the information necessary to effectively optimize a campaign. So, in this example, we would need to obtain 50 application submissions within the first 7 days of our campaign to provide Facebook’s algorithm with enough information to effectively do its job.
Testing Marketing Objectives
So.. what does this mean for us? I think it ties back to the importance of continuously testing our Facebook Ads. If your marketing objective is conversions and you’re not getting close to 50 conversion events within that initial 7-day learning phase, test a different marketing objective that you can get 50 events for to see if it provides better results. Maybe you can’t get 50 application submissions, but I bet you can get 50 landing page views. Would optimizing your campaign for landing page views result in more loan applications? Only testing will tell. Give it a try!
I hope you found this blog useful. If you have any questions about selecting the correct or testing Facebook Ad marketing objectives, feel free to message me on LinkedIn or email me directly at greg@corcoranpr.com. Thanks for reading!