With Facebook continuing to gobble up most marketer’s budgets, huge amounts of time are spent deciphering the social media giant’s algorithms, digging for the richest audience insights for targeting purposes, and tweaking creative until we’re blue in the face. Whether you’re an advanced marketer looking for tips to keep your campaign numbers charting up, or a pro who wants ideas on how to make a great campaign amazing, here are a handful of things to try.

Nail down the right metrics

The “right metrics” will differ from business to business and from KPI to KPI, so draw a clear map connecting your goals with how to most effectively measure the success of those goals. In their State of Social 2018 report, Buffer found that most marketers (42%) measure the success of their ads by how much engagement they receive, with leads (17%) and sales (15%) being the second and third most common measures of ROI.

Image from Buffer: State of Social 2018 Report

So if one of your KPIs is engagement, then that’s a metric that makes sense for you. But if you’re focused on sales conversions, drill down on Facebook’s cost per conversion/result metric, which we covered in this post, 4 Facebook Metrics That will Help You Create the Most Effective Ads .

Only by having the strongest grasp on the most important metrics will you be able to identify and act on the opportunities that will help you extend your Facebook campaign.

Monitor constantly to spot opportunities in real-time

By always keeping an eye on your campaign’s performance you’ll not only catch problems before anything can go off the rails, but you’ll be able to adjust mid-stream instead of waiting to learn from your mistakes at the end of the campaign. If you see your reach is low, you can adjust audience targeting. If your CTR is far below the benchmark number you can take another look at your creative or select a different ad placement.

AdStage Report makes it easy to stay on top of campaign performance with simple dashboards and the ability to generate daily reports automatically.

Image from AdStage Report

But don’t jump in too quickly. Make sure your campaign has accrued enough data to be able to tell a cohesive story you can act on. When your metrics have remained somewhat consistent for a few days, then you can confidently interpret the data and start making adjustments from there.

A/B test creative prior to launching

Think of it as indulging in a little taste of the wine before you commit to the whole bottle. You want to give yourself a decent sample size to draw data from, but not spend too much time on an ad that may not yield anything. The magic number here is usually 5 ads with vastly different images and copy.

As we covered in our post 7 Simple Steps to Boost PPC Results with A/B Testing it’s not just the copy you want to play around with, but the content, too. Some headline ideas include:

Image from AdStage: 7 Simple Steps to Boost PPC Results with A/B Testing

Before you kick off your A/B test determine the sample size, or cap, for each ad. The amount of traffic you should set depends on your current numbers. If an ad group currently gets X number of visitors per day, your sample size should be 5-10 times that number.

Ideally, once you’ve run your A/B test and pinpointed the winners, you can refine each of those even further before initiating the big campaign (and the big budget to go with it). If none of the ads you tested are performing up to benchmark numbers you’ve seen in the past, scrap all of them. A/B testing isn't meant to help you create the strongest ad for your current campaign, it’s meant to help you create the strongest ad to date.

Use Custom Audiences to increase reach

Facebook’s Custom Audiences already provides loads of opportunities to reach the right customers with the right message at the right time, but there are some strategies you may not have tapped into yet.

Create a custom audience using an email list. Download an email list as a CSV file, then use it to create a custom audience via Facebook’s customer list option. From there, use location, age, language, interests, and more to dig for the valuable needles in your haystack. You can do the same thing for LinkedIn connections since the platform makes email addresses available as a CSV download.

Set up Website Traffic Remarketing. If a person was intrigued enough with your initial offer to take a serious action like visiting your page, an easy step to maintaining their interest it to hit them with another ad. The initial offer in your campaign might have missed the crucial point to get them to convert, but a second remarketing ad could be the small extension needed to get the sale. Tap into Facebook’s Dynamic ads to automatically show people the ads that are most relevant to them.

Segment blog traffic. If content is a big part of your marketing strategy, get the most out of your blog’s traffic with custom audiences that speak to your readers’ interests. For example, AdStage could create a list that targets readers who click on posts about sales analytics with an ad for our new product, Join , which seeks to close the loop between marketing and sales.

We all know there’s no magic formula to getting your ads to rise to the top at a reasonable cost (if there was, we would have shared it already!). The best strategy is to be aware, be patient, and be ready to act when the opportunity arises.