How to structure your facebook AD account for success

Basically, the question often came up when we were talking about their sales process and how it maps back to advertising campaign. They almost always knew, that they have to structure their advertising, follow the different stages of the sales process and adjust their ads to how far their visitors were in the sales process… but always struggled with putting all that into practice!

WHY EVEN STRUCTURE YOUR AD ACCOUNTS

Makes it easy to see what’s working and what’s not
Gives you an overview of different funnel stages and what profitability you are reaching for specific stage
Makes it easier to understand your target metrics. Eg. if you want a 200% return on your ad spend overall, you have to keep your prospecting/top-funnel CPA below 20$...
Makes it possible for multiple people to work on the account (having a consistent naming convention and account structure are a game changer)

FUNNEL STAGES:

1 - Prospecting / Top of Funnel / Cold - first touch point with the brand, this is where you will be spending 60-80% of your ad spend, so you fill up all the other retargeting audiences with fresh eyes and do so consistently. If you want to grow your brand, you can't just be showing your ads to the same group of people, you have to reach new audiences that haven't interacted with you before. At this stage, they get a first contact with your brand, so it’s important to take that into account when making the ad creatives - you need to present the brand, what you are selling, why its good, why they should trust you, why they should buy. Here you are using combinations of interest and behaviour targeting & a LOT of different lookalike audiences of your other custom audiences (or the new value-based lookalikes that can work REALLY well).

2 - Reactivation / Middle of Funnel / Warm - People who have engaged with your ads but haven’t reached your website yet - video viewers % audiences, page engagers custom audiences, IG engagement custom audiences. Still a pretty cold audience so you still use creatives here that do a lot of informing.

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3 - Retargeting / Bottom of Funnel / Hot - People who have visited your website but haven’t yet purchased. Create custom audiences based on which pages they have visited, how long they have spent on your site, how many pages they have browsed through on your site (eg. custom audience of website visitors, that have visited at least 5 pages on your site will be a way more relevant audience than just targeting all website visitors)

4 - DPA & transactional events (product page view, add to cart, checkout, purchase)

Here, you are targeting people who have viewed a specific product or moved from the product page to any of the pages in your ecommerce flow - cart, checkout, payment methods… You can either create dynamic product ads, where the user gets served a dynamic ad with the exact product they viewed, along with similar products, that are frequently bought together, or create audiences and ads for different stages of your purchase funnel - eg. people who have added an item to cart in the last 7-14 days, but haven’t yet purchased and creating an ad with a customer testimonial about the product, how it helped them and adding a discount code for free shipping on their order :)

5 - Targeting past purchasers
Here, after the first purchase, comes the part where you start working on your customer lifetime value. Up to this point all the steps were a cost to get the customer to the first purchase - now you’re working to get them to stay with you, order again, become a happy customer and advocate for your brand, order any consumables that they will need, write a review, create user generated content, etc. Great way to start it out is by just creating a “thank you” video where you target people who have purchased in the last X number of days. After that, if you are selling a consumable product (eg. food/drink related items, cosmetics, candles, etc.) retarget them when they have to re-purchase, order a refill.. Or create an ad X days after shipping, when they have enough time to test the product out, for them to leave a review, or create content about your brand (if you make a video of you using the product and post it to instagram using the hashtag #brandXYZ we will send you a X$ coupon code for your next order!).

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That’s it for now:) If any questions pop up, leave them in the comments!
Would love to help out if you have any questions regarding your specific case, so feel free to ask away in the comments!