Meta Performance 5: Best Practices for Facebook Ads 2023

Towards the end of last year, Meta announced an overhaul of its advertising best practices, to help advertisers get the very best results from their campaigns. I often preach about best practices on calls with prospects and current clients, but adhering to them really does benefit the advertiser! Facebook wants us to spend money on their platform, it’s in their interest to show users how best to spend that money (meaning we’ll then spend more).

Account simplification

Reduce the complexity of your ad account structure to help improve campaign performance. You need to make sure your campaigns spend the right amount of time in the learning phase. Any time you create a new ad set or make a significant change to an existing ad set, your account enters the learning phase. During this time Meta ads delivery system learns more about the best users to reach, their preferred placement and time of day they interact. In short – the algorithm learns about your customer and their online behaviours. Performance isn’t stable during this time and CPAs can look a bit higher.This is why I always recommend (preach) setting a campaign live (or editing) and leaving it for at least 7 days before changing any assumptions or more changes.

Creators for direct response

Content creators are WAAAAY more than just influencers nowadays, they create committed communities and help brands drive trust as well as business outcomes. Utilising creators encourages brands to leverage authenticity and originality that these creators bring and they can work together to create tailored content that builds connections with new and existing customers.Meta: An internal study across 12 ecommerce advertisers shows that adding Branded Content Ads to advertisers’ media mix has driven an average sales lift of 39% and a 19% lower median vs. the target CPA.

Creative diversification

Advertisers are increasingly encouraged to utilise and test different creative formats  and placements. This can range from testing video content, perhaps utilising newer formats, like Reels, or UGC (user-generated content) style ads to create a more organic feel for viewers, connecting with them and driving performance. 

Incorporate new messaging and tones into your creative mix. If you’re trying to reach a specific audience, work to ensure the concept of your creative will resonate with that audience.

Conversions API quality check

The Meta Conversions API helps to optimise ad targeting and personalisation, which decreases CPA and accurately measures campaign performance and outcomes. There are two technical areas that your team should pay attention to, since they can significantly influence the quality of your Conversions API set up, and then ultimately your performance.

Redundant event set ups: This involves using your Conversions API and Meta Pixel in tandem. When doing this, it creates a more reliable connection that helps the delivery system decrease your cost per action.
Improving the Event Match Quality score: You can see the EMQ tab in your Events Manager, a higher EMQ score means events are more likely to match to a Meta account, which helps you see more of your conversions and lower your cost per result.

Business results validation

We all that the last-click cookie-based attribution model (*cough* Google *cough*), doesn’t measure the full value of Paid Social advertising, as they don’t account for the impact of impression or cross-device consumer behaviour.
Our clients have no doubt heard us bang on about attribution and that using just GA to track performance just won’t work. That’s why I are increasingly opting for a more holistic approach, especially with clients who receive more than one service from Be Found Be Chosen. Gone are the days when you could track a click and say with certainty that it generated that specific purchase/conversion. Meta has stated that ‘an internal meta-analysis of 32 businesses that showed on average, last click attribution undervalues Facebook and Instagram by 47%.  As long as revenue, traffic and conversions are increasing (or staying steady) on the client side, we aren’t going to start fist-fights with each other over attribution (…yet 👀).