Currently, Facebook decided to analyze what the top advertisers on the platform were doing to generate some awesome results. We’re talking big spenders like HelloFresh, Bombas and Smile Direct Club. The new Facebook ad campaigns structure called Power 5 go as follow to generate the best results:
- Campaign Budget Optimization
- Automatic Placements
- Auto Advanced Matching
- Dynamic Ads
- Account Simplification
More and more, we’ve seen advertisers, including K6, go from trying to manually do everything from ad sets to ad copy to letting Facebook’s artificial intelligence take care of the testing and optimization for us. We’re not complaining, because it allows us to put more efforts in other areas!
Facebook will optimize your budget, match your ad copy with the best ad creative, find the best audiences based on your goals, and so on. The hard thing is to find the fine line between doing it manually and letting Facebook take care of it for optimal results.
Without further due, here are Facebook’s Power 5 in greater details with our input as a Facebook ads agency:
1. Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO)
When launching multiple ad sets within a campaign, you might think that a similar ad set will have the same result as an exact copy of it but it’s not the truth. With Facebook ads, there are a lot of things that should work in theory but aren’t at all the way they are supposed to work.
The biggest problem with that is most advertisers were setting a budget of $5 per ad set on 10 different ad sets. What would happen a few days later is that two ads brought 80% of the results but received only 20% of the budget.
It’s where Campaign Budget Optimization comes in to rescue your budget optimization. CBO works perfectly to spend your budget inside your Facebook ads campaign and split your budget perfectly.
If you want to learn more about Facebook campaign budget optimization, I recommend our article “Facebook Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) Will Not Be Mandatory“.
Prior to using Facebook ads CBO, you would have to set your budget at the ad set level. Using that, it can be hard to track and optimize your account spending. With CBO, you set up your budget at the campaign level. Facebook then finds for you the ad sets that perform the most and optimizes your budget to give you the best results at the best price.
What’s even more amazing is that Facebook optimizes for you in real-time. Here’s what it would look like visually if you are more of a visual person. You’ll see a version without CBO and another with CBO to compare who the results would look like!
Why should you use Facebook CBO?
The first reason why you should use Facebook’s CBO is to save some of your precious time. I won’t tell you that time is a scarce resource for most, but you get the drift. It’s about saying goodbye to changing and analyzing your results manually (you’ll still have to do it from time to time) to do other valuable things.
Another thing is that changing your ad set budget generally ends up starting the learning phase again. This means that all the optimization you accumulated might be lost. With Facebook CBO, you don’t have that risk anymore. You can increase your budget and Facebook will distribute it to the right ad sets.
Arguably, most advertisers don’t have the time to optimize their ads every single day. It means that you should be able to generate better results than you would by manually optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns.
If you are looking to improve your Facebook ads, I recommend you take a look at our article “34 Facebook Ad Examples You’ll Want To Steal In 2020“.
At K6, our CBO campaigns directly delivered a better ROAS than manually allocating our budget to our Facebook ad sets. It enabled us to focus way more on crafting amazing creatives and actual marketing angles for our clients. It’s how we’ve been able to deliver such amazing results to our clients.
Although it seems like you can set it and forget it with Facebook campaign budget optimization, it’s not entirely the case. It’s really important that you set your initial budget, bid and Facebook ads goal in accordance with your company. By doing so, you’ll be able to generate the results that you want if you are paired with the right creative & marketing angle.
Facebook CBO’s play a crucial role in Facebook’s Power 5 and I’m sure that if you aren’t leveraging them yet, you will love them. Since we started using Facebook CBO’s we haven’t stopped. We still test ad set level budgets from time to time, but in general, we see better results with Facebook’s CBO.
2. Facebook Automatic Placements
Facebook’s automatic placements are one of the Power 5’s best features. It’s not surprise that advertisers are loving using Automatic Placements to scale their Facebook advertising budget.
Automatic placements allow you to automatically display your ads on the placement in which it will perform the best. Some of the most well-known placements are the Facebook feed, Instagram stories, Audience Network and so on. The truth strength of this feature lies in the fact that Facebook constantly optimizes your placements to give you the best results, something that would be almost impossible manually.
When it comes to Automatic Placements, a lot of advanced Facebook ads expert would consider Facebook to be pushy about that feature. They always say “we recommend Automatic Placements because it allows our delivery system to make the most of your budget.”
While we understand that most advertisers make each of their ad creative based on a specific placement, it’s not the entire story. It can seem logical to only advertise in one placement if 80% of your sales come from the Facebook feed for example, right? Not really.
When it comes to Facebook and advertising in general, the more touchpoint you have with your client the more they have a chance of converting. It’s why, when using automatic placements, we might have sales coming 60% from the Facebook feed but the rest of the sales dispersed on the other placements.
The reason why you have such a low cost per purchase in the Facebook feed isn’t that you should spend all your money there. In fact, the reason you have sales at a good price is that you spent on other placements which were good opportunities. You see, this is why Automatic Placements can be very powerful.
Another popular opinion against automatic placements is that you make your creative to fit a certain size of a placement. In our experience, you can edit how your ad looks on any placement and even change the size. There’s really no reason not to try Automatic Placements with Facebook ads to lower your cost. Here’s a little video explaining it by Facebook themselves!
As you can see, the advantage of using multiple placements is tapping into lower-cost objectives by always filling the cheaper spots early on. When you scale, it can be a great advantage to keep your cost per acquisition low as long as possible.
We encourage all Facebook advertisers to select Automatic Placements or at least try. Inside our agency, using Automatic Placements has really changed the way we interact with Facebook ads and allowed us to generate better results for our clients.
3. Auto Advanced Matching
Auto Advanced Matching is one of Facebook’s Power 5 that is really easy to implement and take advantage of to improve the results of your Facebook ads.
As you’ve probably heard in the past few years, ad blockers have became quite popular amongst most people. This made it harder and harder to create audiences based on the Facebook pixel activity. Not being able to collect cookies, make your Facebook ads retargeting somewhat weak.
Auto Advanced Matching allows brands to capture more information about your customer’s information through your Facebook ads. This allows you to create bigger custom audiences, have better-retargeting results and better attribute the right result to the right campaigns. In other words, Advanced Auto-Matching helps companies make more money with data.
According to Facebook’s official article, there are three benefits to Facebook advanced matching:
- Increase the number of attributed conversions. They do this by matching more conversions with people on Facebook to better optimize your Facebook ads.
- Increase your Custom Audience size. They can match more people that interacted with your brand to feed your custom audiences.
- Decrease the cost per conversion. Being able to better identify your audience helps Facebook optimize to show your ads to people more likely to convert.
Here’s how Auto Advanced Matching works. It keeps all the old functioning of the Facebook pixel but adds a feature to be able to collect data from filled forms on your website.
In other words, when someone visits your website and enters their information in a popup or by initiating a checkout, Facebook gathers all the information it can take to refine your custom audience and bring better results. This data can be a phone number, email address, name, and so on. Once they have the data, they try to match it with a Facebook profile which somewhat encompasses ad blockers.
At K6, using Auto Advanced Matching has been a true game-changer. Being able to capture customer data from our client’s website’s form has allowed us to run extraordinarily profitable Facebook retargeting campaigns. Attribution, retargeting, custom audiences enhanced are truly amazing features to generate better results with Facebook ads.
If you want to learn more about Facebook ads retargeting, I recommend our article “Facebook Ad Retargeting: 155-Point Guide + 18 Fresh Examples“.
Here’s how you can turn on Auto Advanced Matching simply inside your Facebook ads account:
- Go to your Events Manager
- Select your Pixel
- Then click on Settings
- Under Details, you can toggle on Auto Advanced Matching
- You will also be asked what data you’d like to collect.
At K6, we recommend collection first name, last name, email address and phone number to start. If you have the option, the more data you can gather the better it is. Another positive change you’ll see from using Auto Advanced Matching is better attribution which should attribute more sales to your Facebook ads.
4. Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads are extremely powerful when it comes to improving your Facebook ads result and saving as much time as possible. When we saw it inside Facebook Power 5, we weren’t surprised. It’s probably one of the most powerful automation used in Facebook ads.
As you’ve probably realized so far, Facebook’s Power 5 tools are really focused on spending less time on tasks and driving better results. Who would have known that the ad creative part of Facebook ads could be automated to bring better results?
When leveraging Dynamic ads, you can personalize your ads without having to do it yourself. Facebook uses its own artificial intelligence to take products from your product catalog and create ads that perform the best.
Facebook focuses on finding the right people at the right time with the right product to increase your chances of succeeding. Giving as many variables to Facebook allows them to have the freedom to learn and give the best results fast.
It can be hard to do this manually since you have to launch multiple ads with multiple ad copies and call-to-actions. With Dynamic Creative, you can just launch one Facebook ad with all the elements and Facebook will tell you which one is the best. Your only role is to change your product catalogue and ad copy based on your offer.
The awesome thing is that Dynamic Creative are available for customer acquisition and retargeting. We love using them at K6 because they allow us to focus on the ad creative and not focus on testing which often takes a lot of time. By being able to run Dynamic Creative & Automatic Placements, it really allows us to make sure we are not missing out on better results.
You might have heard about Facebook Dynamic Product Ads, well the concept of Dynamic Creative is very similar. Facebook leverages assets you have to create the best ads and give you the best possible results. Here’s what you can do:
- Upload up to 10 images or videos
- Add up five captions
- Insert five headlines
- Write five link descriptions
- Test five call-to-action buttons
The more awesome feeling is just creating assets and bringing new ideas while being able to constantly add them to your Facebook ad. If you are looking for Facebook video examples, I recommend our article “24 Facebook Video Ad Examples To Freshen Up Your Results“.
You now have the ultimate recipe for Facebook ads automation success: campaign budget optimization (CBO), Dynamic Ads & Automatic Placements. This allows us to focus on choosing the right objective, our audiences and creative assets to bring the best out of our work. With this bulletproof strategy, you are bound to find success.
5. Account Simplification
When it comes to account simplification, it really comes down to creating less campaigns. Most advertisers (and we’ve seen that at K6 a lot from clients) is that they create a new campaign any new ad they want to launch. This often ends up being a Facebook ad account with around 300+ campaigns with names that only Albert Einstein would understand.
The problems with such an ad account strategy are the following:
- Lots of time-wasting having to verify inside each campaign & ad set what it is
- Difficult to optimize because we don’t know what is what
- Hard to scale because we lose track of the entire spend
- Doesn’t look really good which don’t make Facebook ads fun
- It can cause an audience to overlap or be redundant which is two ad sets targeting the same audience and competing for it inside one Facebook ad account
Facebook’s Power 5 emphasizes organization and simplification of all ad accounts to reach good results. By simplifying your Facebook ads account while leveraging all the other Facebook Power 5 tools, you will be able to let Facebook’s AI find what works best for you.
You’ll be able to try Dynamic Creative, Automatic Placements, Auto-Advanced Matching and Facebook’s CBO to their full potential. This combination in our experience can create tremendous results for any Facebook advertisers.
The times where you had to have 300 campaigns and laser-focused audiences are over. Having to create an ad set for each placement, for each demographic and each ad creative is over. It was very easy to create an infinite amount of audiences a few years back but you don’t need that anymore. In fact, we would say you are missing out on better results if you are doing that.
By having your competitors leverage Facebook’s AI, you’ll find yourself in big troubles if you don’t do the same. It’s now time to focus on creating the best possible advertising campaigns. It’s about leveraging ideas, creativity and expertise to drive the best Facebook ads results for your campaigns.
At K6, this is how we structure our Facebook ad accounts:
- Acquisition ❄️ (Top Funnel)
- Re-Engagement ?️ (Mid Funnel)
- Retargeting ? (Bottom Funnel)
- DPA Retargeting ? (Bottom Funnel)
We always strive to keep a small number of ad sets within those campaigns. Generally, we only keep active 3-5 ad sets with each a different audience that doesn’t overlap.
Audience overlap can happen easily because we’ve seen that our ad accounts were generating way better result by focusing on super broad audiences. We’ll try audiences such as lookalike 10% or even “no interest” targeting. This gives us a lot of leverage to further scale our Facebook ads once we start seeing results. It’s something we couldn’t do when we were targeting super small 100k audiences.
I’d like to add that our focus on Facebook ads at K6 has greatly changed in a good way. We spend a lot of time thinking about marketing angles, ad creatives, doing tons of research to never miss out on something that is currently working well and so on. This change of focus was extremely beneficial for us as an agency because we could truly use our brain to our client’s advantage. If you are looking for a Facebook ads agency, hit the get proposal button and we’ll be right with you.
Wondering if Facebook’s Power 5 drives more results?
At K6, we have tested both methods and we think it depends on the situation. For instance, Dynamic Creative works well when starting a new account but you can’t keep the likes of an ad. If you have an ad with 1,000 likes, it might perform better than another creative that has 0 likes.
Furthermore, CBO is great but not perfect. If you want to run a short term promotion, you should not use CBO because Facebook might not spend a dime on it. In other words, Campaign Budget Optimization & Dynamic Creative are great in certain cases but not the best for other cases.
Overall, we’d say that using Facebook Power 5 has made our life easier and helped us gain back a lot of our time. We can generate in most cases the same or better results while spending 60-80% less time inside the Facebook ads manager.