Frequently Asked Questions

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When first approaching the foundational structure there are four key components.

PROSPECTING This is where you are looking to acquire new customers that have never engaged with your brand before. In prospecting, there are two types of audiences you are looking to target: interest audiences and lookalike audiences. Interest audiences are just that; audiences targeting certain prospective customers that have high affinity to subjects that align with your brand or product. On the other hand, Lookalike audience is audiences that are expanded from a seed audience that has interacted with your brand. For example, you can take all of your past purchases, and expand that seed audience to millions of people that Facebook believes have the same buying habits as those purchasers based on their past interactions on Facebook. You should exclude anyone that has interacted with your brand before in this component (i.e. website visitors, past purchasers, etc.)

REMARKETING After someone has interacted with your brand from either prospecting traffic or organic channels this is where you are looking to get a second touch with the customers that weren’t quite ready to purchase on the first touch. You can do this by creating a custom audience based on website traffic up to 180 days prior. You still want to exclude past purchasers in this audience unless you are trying to target existing customers to get them to come back and purchase again.

RE-ENGAGEMENT In this component, you can target customers that have engaged with your brand, but haven’t quite gotten to your website. Some examples of this are people who have engaged with your Facebook/Instagram page or even just people who have watched your video ad all the way through. Make sure to exclude website visitors and past purchasers here so that you can keep those pools separate and in their right campaigns.

DYNAMIC PRODUCT AD (DPA) This should be the final touchpoint for prospective customers that know your brand and just need one last incentive to purchase. With a DPA instead of optimizing for “conversions”, you are actually using the “catalog” type of ad. This will dynamically pull products that a website visitor has viewed in the past and show them that product as well as similar products to them in a carousel format.

It is totally normal to add new ads to ad sets that are already running. We do it all the time. Just make sure you don't put more than 3 active ads in an ad set at a time so FB can optimize well.

There will almost always be negative comments on ads depending on the level of engagement. Usually, we say no one knows your brand as you do, so it’s important that you’re on top of comments and responding to people as much as possible. It’s also a great way to see if there is a trend with your product or service that you can address. Comment moderation is also incredibly key if you are in seasonal times such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday where you may run into stock issues. You will quickly see disgruntled customers start to comment about out of stock items, but this is a great opportunity to reply and reach out when that item is back in stock so you don’t lose prospective customers that are already at the finish line for purchasing your product.

Stack together to avoid audience overlap.

We like to stack similar audiences. Say you have a high-end clothing line and you want to test high-end department stores and other luxury brands. We’d suggest doing a department store stack in one audience and luxury brands in another. Department Stores would include Bloomingdales, Sax Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, and Neiman Marcus. The Luxury Brand stack would include Gucci, Net-a-porter, Ted Baker, Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, etc.

We usually set our bid caps at 130% our CPA target to allow for more delivery. If we still are having issues with the spend, we will increase first try swapping out creative, then we will see if new audiences help increase delivery; and if neither of these methods work to unlock spend, we will begin to increase the bid caps by about 10% to try and induce spend while monitoring performance.

True CPA Target! The best way to find your true CPA target is to use this formula: AOV / Target ROAS = True CPA Target

As a best practice, we recommend spending 70% on prospecting and 30% towards remarketing (DPA falls in this category) for most accounts. Click here for a resource to refer to when figuring out what prospecting/remarketing split is best for your business.

Prospecting and DPA would be a good place to start, considering your limited budget. I’d also think about this in terms of how you are driving traffic to your site. If you're landing people directly on product pages, default DPA targeting will essentially capture all site traffic. However, if you are driving people somewhere that is not the PDP, then I'd also have a remarketing campaign to capture those who didn't end up on a PDP. Of course, you can also set a custom target audience in a DPA to hit those people.

Yes. Try going broad with your audience targeting. You will probably saturate a 200k audience fairly quickly. A quick option is to click “expand interests” checkmark in the ad set. Suddenly, you’ll have an audience available of over 150 million prospective customers! This is also where we’d suggest stacking audiences! It’s a great way to expand the audience while keeping it consistent across the board.

Our best practice is to use the decision tree. This is the way we make decisions on a daily basis within our accounts. Note: sometimes with a smaller budget or less creative options, you may have to adjust your decision-making process accordingly.

IG Story is limited to 15 seconds or less per story clip. As for Facebook and IG feed ads, generally a video that is 15-30 seconds works. Keep in mind that you lose most of the viewers after the first 3 seconds so your product and any key information should be visible in that window. As a side note in case, you have not considered it, while 16:9 (IG story size) and 1:1 (FB/IG feed square) are considered the “standard,” it's worth exploring a few 4:5 options on Facebook and Instagram as well. That format and more vertical ads, in general, are seeing a lot of success lately

There’s a great video in the training center for this. Please view here and scroll to training number 4 “How to Analyze”. Also, go to our webinars page and find the “How To Determine Your Success Metrics”.

DABA stands for Dynamic Ads in a Broad Audience. Essentially DPA ads at the prospecting level. It’s able to take customer data that Facebook knows and dynamically match your products and serve ads to people who are interested in or have an affinity with other products/brands/ interests that are similar to yours. As an example, if you have a workout apparel line, then people who have shown interest in that area will be served your products. Facebook’s best practices say it takes about two weeks to learn.