Written by Maite Beltrán
Automation is a somewhat controversial topic as it has many detractors and at the same time many advocates. However, he has been “with us” in the online marketing industry for some time now. If you’ve ever created automated reports, used bidding rules, or tried CPA, then you’ve already used small forms of automation.
Taking this into account and the fact that automation is becoming more and more advanced to try to make our lives easier, all advertising platforms are offering different levels of automation and Facebook was not going to be less.
Today I’ll talk about 3 simple ways to automate on Facebook that can help you manage your campaigns and free up some time.
Automated Bids On Facebook
When we create an ad on Facebook, it competes to be shown to the audience we have selected through targeting. A kind of auction is created against other advertisers who have a campaign with similar parameters.
In the case of Facebook, automated bidding works pretty much like on any other platform.
It will be Facebook who will try to establish a bid to “win” the competition, so it is possible that at the beginning the cost will be somewhat higher and as data becomes available it will decrease. This means that Facebook’s algorithm collects data on how users interact and, based on this, establishes the way to act.
Another important decision you will have to make is the optimization for delivery.
Want to get more clicks and traffic to your website? Choose the “traffic” campaign, do you want to achieve brand awareness? or better conversions?
Depending on your objectives, the campaign will be different.
If you choose conversions, you must also set the conversion window between 1 and 7 days. To do this you must know if your users and customers usually convert on the same day or if they take between 3 – 5 days to make a purchase.
It is very important to establish all the steps very well since that will mean that Facebook’s algorithm will work in one way or another and will optimize with one intention or another.
If you don’t want something 100% automatic, you can also set a maximum CPA on which Facebook will do the optimizations. You will need to be cautious, as the more restrictive you are, the more restrictive Facebook will be about bidding and promoting ads.
Automatic rules on Facebook
Automatic rules have not been around as long on Facebook and give you the opportunity to automate certain functions in your ads. These rules make our work easier and help us to keep a better control over our campaigns and our Facebook account.
The main help offered by Facebook rules is about bidding and budget spending. You can choose where the rule applies (campaign, ad set, etc.), what the action will be (adjust the budget, for example) and what condition triggers that rule.
So, if we do not want our campaign to reach a very high CPC, we would have to set the condition that the cost per result is higher than what we want to pay. If the maximum we want to pay per user share is 0.25, we set it and click “add”.
The time interval refers to the days that Facebook will be evaluating the behavior of the campaign to determine if the rule is met.
The account now has a rule to help us keep a tighter cost and have more control over the campaigns.
Facebook A/B Testing
The main purpose of this rule is to be able to perform an A/B test in your account on the audience, the ad image, the location of the ad on Facebook, etc. You can test the same ad on two different audiences or test two different objectives (clicks vs. conversions) to really see which one generates better results.
If you don’t trust the promotion spaces that Facebook automatically chooses, you can do a test where you choose certain spaces and compare them with the ones that Facebook automatically sets.
Using it wisely can help us a lot in creating better Facebook campaigns.
In short, automation makes our lives easier and helps us to have more control over our advertising.
Do you dare to try it?
