My cold campaign has an ad set consisting of 5 ads. Now the issue is that Facebook itself chooses how much of the ad set budget will be attributed to each ad.
They say the reason is that they are trying to allocate your budget so that you get the best possible results from your campaign.
But sometimes it just seems like Facebook is choosing to completely overlook a specific ad, without a good reason for it.
Look at my ad set, one of the ads spent only $4.58 and brought back $63.64 in revenue, why the hell is Facebook not pushing the ad that is LITERALLY best performing??? (sadly I can’t insert an image here for some reason, but I have 5 ads in this ad set and this one literally brought back the most in revenue, and got allocated the least amount of budget…)
I figured I’d trust them and not go wild creating ad sets with only one ad in them (the one I would like them to push more).
What are your thoughts on this, and what are the standard best practices regarding this matter. (P.S This is an eCommerce business)
Thanks and good luck to everyone :)
A spend of $4.58 is not statistically significant, and FB is trying to give your ads enough spend that it doesn’t make a mistake.
Let’s say you have an ad set that has 5 separate ads, that get shown a total of 10 times each, this is 50 impressions in total.
If one ad gets 2 sales, and the other ads get 0 sales, you’re going to assume that the ad that got 2 sales is the winner, and the other 4 are the losers - the problem with this is that you don’t have enough data yet.
If you ran those same ads to 1,000 impressions, it’s entirely possible that the one ad that got 2 sales, ends up generating 0 more sales. The other 4 ads may end up generating, more, or less, than 0 sales - but you can’t know for sure until you’ve reached a statistically significant number of impressions to a wide enough audience.
Over time, the ads will continue to adjust themselves in an attempt to slowly favor the better performers, while slowly eliminating the ones that perform worse. That said, you should also prune your ads based on your own knowledge of the size of your audience.
If you’re selling a very niche product, you should give your ads less leeway, if you’re selling a product that appeals to a much larger audience, you should give the system more time as it’s going to take longer to reach a portion of your audience that’s going to be statistically significant.
I personally won’t adjust an ad until I’ve seen at least 5,000 impressions, per variation. Yes, this can get expensive, but it has also shown me that what you think you know on day one, may be totally different than what you actually know by the time you reach day 7.
Thanks for this very thorough explanation I really do appreciate it. My ads now have around 2.5k impresions each (except the ad that I mentioned as the one with most sales, that one has 450 impresions)
My ads are signaled to be in the “learning phase” rn because I doubled the budget from 25 to 50 for my ad set and totaly forgot that that would put them back into the learning phase.
But also I think I was poking with my ads and ad sets too much in an attempt to optimize them while in reality I had no concise data to actually make those decisions…
My best advice is, DO NOT TOUCH THEM AT ALL FOR 7 DAYS!
Just let them run their course. I know it’s tempting to play with things, adjust, etc, but each time you do, you’re basically telling FB to start over and ignore what it has learned so far.
Just leave things alone, let the system do what it should, and come back after a full 7 days.