3 Things We Always See When Auditing Facebook and Instagram Ad Accounts
Man, have we been busy auditing accounts lately. We have already audited and looked at easily 40 accounts this year, very deeply, and it’s not even April. Especially in the last six weeks, things have been quite a rollercoaster for people. With all the iOS14 changes, optimization shifts, and reporting bugs happening on Facebook, it’s hard to know what to trust anymore as a true data source.
One thing we’ve discovered in these audits is that most don’t have their attribution windows all set to the same, well, window. Some are optimizing for 1-day click and some are optimizing for 7-day, and it makes it quite confusing. To get all this on the same page, read this.
Secondly, in these audits we do (we have deep audits in which we spend 15-20 hours on, and small audits in which we spend 2-5 hours on), we have discovered some similarities that we wanted to call attention to. These aren’t glaring issues, but they are enough to affect campaign performance during these tumultuous times. Why do we give you all this advice for $0? Because we care and well, maybe you’ll want an audit?
3 Things We Always See When Auditing Facebook and Instagram Ad Accounts
The lookalikes are all built on purchases and nothing else.
If your account is converting on audiences like Engagement Custom Audiences, why not build lookalikes from those as well? Purchases are the smallest size thing in an account normally, in terms of numbers, so as your reported purchases drop, so will the efficiency of your lookalikes tied to them. Build lookalikes on other actions and remember to use horizontal scale. (If you need a refresher, try our Scaling or Testing courses.
2. Lumping audiences of different sizes will always result in the bigger audience getting the most spend, even if it’s not the most efficient.
As we state in our CBO course, it’s important that you don’t just lump things all in one CBO and hope Facebook finds the most efficient one to spend on. They’ll find the biggest one, sure, but not the most efficient necessarily. Recently we saw a CBO with this set up:
US BROAD 25+
EUROPE BROAD 25+
CENTRAL AMERICA BROAD 25+
CANADA BROAD 25+
Generally you do want to put different countries in their own CBOs, but you also want to not have US competing directly against a smaller population grouping like Europe. This will choke performance for Europe (which in our example was at a 2.4X but had only 3% of spend) and it will not give you a real read, especially if you try to increase budgets.
3. Just because mid-funnel audiences didn’t work once, doesn’t mean they’ll never work.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard this said “we tried MOFU and it never worked, so we aren’t using it.” Well, friend, that’s too bad, because it’s often where the most opportunity lives for MOFU and your TOFU. For example, lumping engagements can work and is great. But often we see only a MOFU audience of 365 Engagers and that’s it. First suggestion: try to break them out into things like Saved a Post or Email Opens Last 30 Days and see how that does. Second suggestion, try a lookalike of these specific things, like the examples above, as you might be surprised what it gets you for prospecting.
