5 Tips for a New Paid Social Media Manager to Remember
Whether you’re a junior ad buyer, a hiring manager hiring an ad buyer, or even a seasoned expert wanting to brush up on your skills and make sure you’re still operating out of best practices, this blog listicle is for you.
While ad buying changes yearly (and quarterly, monthly, daily, hourly…), there are five things that (we think) stay consistent always. Keep these five things in mind and you’ll be on your way to profitable ROAS.
Structure
Delays
Creative Iterations & the Creative Process
Creative Analysis
Reporting
Let’s dive into these a little further. In the meantime, have you checked out our Foxwell Founders Membership? It’s a community of 350+ ad buyers worldwide who share tips, tricks, best practices, and moral support to help us all continually improve our and our clients’ ad accounts.
Structure
Structure (n): How you set up your ad account; think: campaigns and ad sets. While there’s no one way to be successful with structure, we’ll share what we see the most success in the accounts we manage, oversee, audit, and discuss in the Founders Membership. Generally, breaking up prospecting and retargeting in separate campaigns is best for organization and reporting. Separate campaigns are also helpful for organization in learnings and organizing campaigns and ad sets by what you’re trying to learn.
We also break out ad sets based on: audiences, placements, start/end dates, attribution, testing, and more.
While there’s no one right answer to structure, the one truly right answer? Just be consistent.
Delays
Patience, young padawan. Yes, patience is hard. Yes, none of us want to waste money. BUT, not only is your customer many times delayed in converting from the time they see/click on the ad to when they purchase, but there may always be some amount of delayed reporting. This is ok! Yes, it’s normal. Don’t panic.
We try to look at data at NO SHORTER than a 3-day window, and usually look at 7-day and 14-day windows while we’re at it. Look at trends and how things are pacing/seemingly headed, but do NOT make decisions based on how performance is going on anything less than a one-day period. See low performance in the morning and it’s the afternoon? Take a deep breath and don’t optimize just yet.
The only time we wouldn’t shun you for optimizing same-day is if you have a HUGE sale going on, and/or maybe if it’s Black Friday. Yes, still be patient, but customers are more likely to purchase more on impulse during high sales times such as these, and if your sale is for a limited period of time, quick optimization is necessary. We’ll allow this, for just this exception.
Creative Iterations & Creative Process
Have an ad that’s working?
Great!
You still need to continue to do more creative testing of completely different creatives and ad types, and keep making iterations and small changes to the ad that’s already working. See if you can make it even better! If it’s a video, change the hook, change the length, change the subtitles/text overlay, change the body copy (short copy that’s less than 3 lines and long copy that’s a paragraph or more), change the voiceover, etc. If it’s a photo or graphic, choose a new photo that’s similar to or the same theme as the original, change the background color of a graphic, change the copy (see how above), change the headline, add graphic/text overlay to a plain photo. The possibilities are endless.
As you’re going through the process of creative iterations, also make sure you have a creative process between the ad buyer, graphic designer/video editor, brand owner/brand marketing POC, and any other key players in the ad buying and creative approval process.
Don’t forget, you find out this information with data through…
Creative Analysis
Data, data, data. You can’t know what is or isn’t working and any further details about it unless you know how to analyze the data that the creative is reporting on. Whether you’re using tools like Motion, TripleWhale’s Creative Cockpit, in-platform Facebook Reporting, or other softwares, it’s important to set benchmarks for what thresholds are good and bad and what goals are for each one. Look at soft metrics and conversion metrics, look at video metrics to determine at what point in the video viewers are making what decisions, look at CPMs, and more. Have you checked out this blog on the Soft Metrics You Need to be Using for Creative Analysis?
Reporting
Optimization is for real(ish) time edits. Reporting is for after the fact analysis, brand data, and making future improvements. Set up dashboards that are critical to the data that your brand needs. Determine if it’s necessary to have daily, weekly, or monthly reporting and what type of communication is necessary for internal vs. external reporting, i.e. ad buying/agency purposes vs. what is needed to share to the brand/owner side.
If you’re interested in templates and documents on how to serve great reporting to clients, check out the Founders Membership – there’s all of this in there, and more!