Are you prepared for arguably the biggest ad spends you will see all year? With Black Friday & Cyber Monday right around the corner, we decided to put together a thorough checklist for you as an agency, or brand, that you may want to review before making any moves.
For more information on one of the most common issues during the holidays, please read “How to Avoid Under-Delivery” for some quick takeaways and best practices.
Specifically, the “Ad Delivery and Auctions: Advanced Training” Blueprint module will really help you with understanding how to find success.
Things to Remember:
Your bids are high enough to offset market competition, learn more here.
Your ad sets are not targeting the same audience, which cannibalizes delivery of the campaigns (Check your audience overlap)
For those of you who are new, remember, Facebook's system is built to get you the most conversions at the lowest cost, not necessarily to spend your full budget.
Schedule Campaigns in Advance:
To avoid delays, we recommend scheduling your campaigns in advance. (This is through reach and frequency buys) Back out the average CPM, you’re seeing the number of conversions you are seeing which will get you into a general area of how many conversions you can expect from your media buy.
Benefits: Your ad (and creative) can be reviewed and approved before the day of launch.
Please note: It may take longer for ads to be approved during this high volume time.
Credit (Big Focus For Top Spenders):
Ensure you have enough credit to support your Holiday ad spend on Facebook and Instagram.
Daily Spend Limit (if on Credit Card): Please let me know the max that you plan to spend per day to ensure you do not reach your daily spend limit.
Payment Method Changes (if applicable):
If you are planning to switch your primary payment method over to another credit card, notify your rep as soon as possible because every new credit card applied to an account WILL reset the billing threshold on the card and your rep will need to put in a request to get the billing threshold increased back to its original level.
Credit Allocation (if applicable):
Please ensure that your credit line will sustain your spend during the holidays - you should have enough credit for all of November + December.
Wire Transfer:
Wire Transfers take up to 3 business days to apply to the account. Given the volume during the holiday, you’ll want to monitor your “Current Balance” in Business Manager closely to ensure that you have plenty of time to wire payment before reaching your credit limit.
Pre-payment:
Pre-payment acts as a buffer for the account. Essentially, the pre-payment is kept on file. If you’re about to reach your credit limit, you can email AR@fb.com, and instruct them to apply a pre-payment to a specific invoice. When submitting a pre-payment, it is VERY important that you label the payment as a 'pre-payment' and list the Ad Account ID for it to be immediately applied. Follow the instructions listed here.
Updated Bidding Guide:
The new options of Lowest Cost, Lowest Cost with Bid, and Target Cost provide more flexibility for advertisers to choose between scale and control. The new recommendation is for 50 conversions during learning phase for optimization within 7 days. Ensure that bid to budget ratio is at least 5x. Daily Budget > 5-7x value of the conversion. Lifetime Budget > 50x value of conversion. If an ad set is not spending its entire budget, then increasing the budget on the ad set will not change delivery. You'll need to increase bid on the ad set for delivery to change.
Bonus: If you would like an updated deck on Facebook's new updated bidding options and strategies, feel free to message me and I will be sure to share it with you!
Short term Campaigns/Flash Sales:
Bid higher to win more auctions or move pixel higher up in the funnel to increase CVR and speed learning phase.
Bid Your True Value With LTV:
Set different bids for low and high lifetime value (LTV) users. Create different LTV audience segments. Bid higher for people who bring more value in the long run. If you're targeting your highest value customers or want to reach a high percentage of a small audience, you'll likely have to bid more than usual to reach them.
Targeting:
Audience Saturation: Audience saturation is the point at which your performance starts to drop as your ad frequency rises. Leverage delivery insights in ads manager to check your First Time Impression Ratio and Audience Reached. If First Time Impressions are low, and the outcomes you care about are declining (conversions, for example), it may be time to change your creative or targeting. For Audience Reached, 70% max is a normal range with larger reach for retargeting audiences.
Overlap:
Leverage Delivery Insights to check overlapping audiences and their impact on campaigns. If there are overlap percentages > 50%, it may be best to consolidate.
Consolidate vs. Segment:
In general, it's better to have fewer ad sets with larger budgets versus many ad sets with small budgets. This aggregates conversion data for the learning phase and improves optimization.
Segmenting can be useful if you’re bidding differently for higher value segments or if the creative/messaging is different between groups. Otherwise, it's best to consolidate.
If you have any questions please feel free to let us know in the comments below!
Happy CPA Crushing!
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