First off let me state that my goal as a marketer on Facebook is to find the best converting ads/message to an ultra specific demographic or cohort of users. To do this, I need to find a way to get as many impressions as humanly possible within the demographic that I am targeting. As you know, Facebook sucks and is not going to do the marketer any favors.
If you run Facebook Ads then you have probably spent countless hours like me in front of your monitor creating new ads inside of power editor and at the same time scratching . This tenuous process has probably destroyed any form of social life that you have had or wish to have. Its both time consuming, mind numbing, and most of your friends have no clue why you can’t make it out to the bar with them on a Friday night and grab a beer. They just think your weird.
The big pain I have always had with Facebook Ads is that I could never figure out their weird rationale for splitting impressions between ads in a campaign. In essence why do they give all the impressions to this “specific ad” against the other 50 other ads that I spent all my time creating?
For the last 3 months, my goal has been to figure out a way to liquidate as many impressions to my ads as possible in my demographic as possible off of Facebook with a hope of seeing which one of my ads converts the best in a specific demographic.
To do this, I started AB testing a variety of weird tactics to trick their system into distributing impressions across all my ads.
For the experiment below the demographic I was targeting was 50+ year old women in the United States who like 5 different precise interests that will go name-less.
I kept the precise interest consistent across all campaigns except one, the total audience for all of campaigns were over 1,000,000 which is an ample enough size to reach scale with Facebook ads.
I tested the following:
1. Created one ad per campaign and then launched simultaneously 20 different campaigns all with $20 a day budgets
Rationale: Facebook will give each one of my campaigns impressions to start unlike if I enter all my ads into one campaign whereas they would be most likely to just give impressions to one or two of my ads.
Results : This actually worked surprising well since I started getting small bits and pieces of data back on 20 different campaigns but this in my opinion isn’t a scalable to operate campaigns as you will need to create 20 different campaigns around one specific segment of audience and management will in most cases not be simple.
The reach in all these campaigns was over 1,000,000 people and on average Facebook gave me 5,000 impressions a day per campaign to start. Most of my campaigns
2. Duplicated the same exact ad 10 or 20 times in the same campaign.
Results: I created 50 different ads in one campaign targeting one specific demographic of users. Facebook then sent traffic to exactly one of my ads. The ad converted rather well on the click side 5% CTR, Right Side Ad, 15,543 reach. This strategy of ad duplication to maximize impressions isn’t efficient though as not one of my others ads got any sort of reach.
3. Duplicated the same ads +targeted different locations
Results: Again Facebook gave all the impressions to one ad in the whole campaign, a total failure . Each group of locations that I targeted in my ads had over a million people in the audience so I am sure those impressions did exist but Facebook didn’t want show my ads to them.
4. One campaign+many different precise interests.
Results: Again I took the ad duplicated it and then just targeted different precise interests. The results were pretty interesting, I created 10 different ads with 10 unique precise interests. In the first 24 hours Facebook almost equally split impressions between all 10 ads but toward the end of the day two different ads ended up getting most of the impressions.
I ended up pausing all the ads in this campaign after 4 days of running as the ROI wasn’t backing out.
What did we learn from this?
(A) Targeting under 1,000,000 million people in a campaign is a waste of time. You just won’t get impressions you need.
(B) Creating ads around different unique precise interests is a winning strategy, this will get you the impressions you need to accurately optimize ad creative.
© Duplicating the same ad 100 times and making minor tweaks to locations/pricing/creative/ won’t get you more impressions.
To your point of A.) that targetting under 1,000,000 won’t get you impressions, I’ve never experienced that. Often times my ad groups are sub 50,000 and still can get impressions. Maybe you aren’t bidding high enough?
Also if the demo was too broad, which in turn made the CTR too low, FB will just cease giving impressions all together.
That’s interesting, I have tried custom audiences, precise interests, all types of targeting and even up’d my bids way above suggest bid price and I still didn’t get massive amounts of impressions when I was targeting a small demographic.
I kept the campaigns going, but liquidating impressions off Facebook for small demo’s, I still haven’t mastered as of yet.