If you've implemented a pixel, want to drive website sales, are getting over 10,000 monthly pixel events, have developed some successful conversion optimization strategies and are looking to scale up your conversion optimization campaigns, this is the right guide for you. It shows you how to maximise your campaigns' efficiency and effectiveness as you increase their budgets and make them the focal point of your advertising strategy.

If you don't yet have at least 500 monthly pixel events, read our introductory guide instead. If you have more than 500 - but less 10,000 - monthly pixel events, read our intermediate guide.

Scale up and refine your campaigns

With a steady flow of data, a robust costumer base and a baseline of successful experiments to build on, you're ready to scale up your conversion optimisation campaigns. As you do this, you'll want to refine them to ensure that you can spend your increased budgets and maximise the value they generate. You can do this through improvements to your campaign structures and target audiences, testing and using more of your pixel's features.

Solidify your campaign structure

As advertisers increase the scale and complexity of their conversion optimisation advertising, they often want to split their campaigns into many very specific ad sets based on different slices of their target audience. However, this can lead to poor performance. We recommend only creating a new ad set only if you're trying to control costs differently based on your audience or desired outcome. Otherwise, combine your target audiences into one ad set with a larger budget. Here are two examples that show why:

• Each ad set accumulates data. An ad set (not a campaign) needs about 50 of the conversion that it's optimised for in order for Facebook to be able to deliver it with stability and efficiency. If you have ten ad sets that get five conversions each in a week, you have 50 conversions, but also ten ad sets without enough data, and which may stop being delivered. If, instead, you have one ad set with 50 conversions, your campaign has the same amount of conversions as the other set up, but also an ad set with enough data to start delivering more stably and efficiently.
• Say it takes GBP 100 to get enough conversions to start delivering an ad set stably and efficiently. If you have ten conversion-optimised ad sets with £100 budgets, then, in your best-case scenario, you'll have spent £1000 on data gathering and £0 on optimised delivery. If you have one ad set with a £1000 budget, £100 is spent on gathering data, and £900 is spent on optimised delivery.

Note: You might think that, despite the information above, you still want to segment your campaign into many small ad sets in order to see which one performs best, then use that as a model for future ad sets. However, with that many ad sets, you're unlikely to get a statistically significant number of results for any one of them anyway. Therefore, they're probably not a good model to base anything on in the future.

Expand your target audiences

As you increase the amount you want to spend on conversion optimisation, you may need to expand your target audience. (This is both because we need to find more results to spend on and you may "exhaust" your existing audiences after a certain point – meaning that the people in them stop responding to your ads).

The best tool for doing this is Lookalike Audiences. A Lookalike Audience is made up of people with similar characteristics to a "source audience." Any other audience you've saved can serve as a source for a Lookalike Audience. They enable you to keep building on the success of a source audience even after you've reached everyone in it.

Here are some tips for using Lookalike Audiences for conversion optimisation:

• Avoid broad Lookalike Audience sources. Sources such as everyone who visited your website are not ideal for conversion-optimised ad sets. We usually suggest avoiding these because they don't distinguish between great customers and average customers. Everyone is just grouped together. Use any proprietary data that you have to help you make that distinction. If you don't have much data of your own, try dividing customers by pixel events. Create a Lookalike Audience from a source made up of the customers who've taken the action you care about most.
• Source quality is more important than source size. Generally speaking, a Lookalike Audience source of between 1,000 and 50,000 people is ideal. However, having a high-quality source (meaning a source made up of your best customers) is more important than any specific number. For example, if the source is good, it doesn't matter if it's 20,000 people or 30,000. You may even be able to succeed with 100 people.
• Expand on a high-quality source rather than using multiple similar ones. If, for example, you have a high-quality source and have created a Lookalike Audience of the people who are most similar to it (say, the top 1%), we recommend expanding on that source (e.g. by incorporating the top 2%) rather than trying to create another similar source and targeting the people most similar to it. Learn more about advanced Lookalike Audience options.
• Avoid using additional targeting on top of a Lookalike Audience. Lookalike Audiences already incorporate information such as age, gender and interests from your source. Layering more parameters on top of that is likely to muddle, rather than refine, your targeting. (However, if you do use additional targeting, make sure that you use targeting expansion to give our delivery system as much flexibility as possible.)

Read the stories of businesses that have succeeded with Lookalike Audiences.

Optimise for pixel events closer to your true goal

As more people visit your website and take more actions there, you'll have a wider range of pixel events that you can optimise for successfully. It's worth trying to optimize for any event that occurs at least 100 times a month without running ads optimizing for it. For example, if you've been optimising for the page view event but have enough add-to-basket or purchase events, try optimising for one of those instead. Optimising for events that are closer to your true goal gets you even more value from your ads.

Test your strategies

You'll want to test out various approaches to conversion optimisation to ensure that you're getting as much as possible out of your ads. If possible, we recommend running a split test. Review our split testing best practices before doing so.

If you're not able to run a split test, you can still gain valuable information from manual tests that follow these guidelines:

• Use a bid cap or target cost when testing.
• Let your test run for at least one to two weeks.
• Remember that you have to spend a lot of money to do a proper test. For example, if you're testing something with a £50 budget and a £30 bid, you're probably not spending enough to get statistically-significant results.
• For testing creative: Rather than testing five ad sets with one variation on your creative each, create one ad set with five variations. We'll automatically figure out which works best and you can view this information in your reports.

Here are some examples of variables you may want to test:

• Static images vs video (or other variations in your creative)
• Lookalike Audiences based on your customer list vs Lookalike Audiences based on traffic to your website
• Different conversion windows (e.g. 7-day click vs 7-day click or 1-day view)

Important: Remember that you can't test and optimise at the same time. Putting restrictions on our delivery system in order to do a well-run test prevents the system from choosing the best results from the full range of options. We fully endorse testing to help you find the best strategies. (We even recommend consistently dedicating a portion of your budget to testing so that you can stay aware of what's happening in our dynamic ads marketplace and experiment with new features.) However, if you need to do a major test, do it right and then act on the results. Let our delivery system optimise based on what you've learned.

Get more out of your pixel

As you refine your conversion optimisation strategies and increase your budgets, consider using some of these pixel features:

• Custom conversions. Implementing them allows you to:

  • Measure more realistically. Tracking more signals gives you more insight into where the people you're reaching are dropping off in your marketing funnel. This information can help you make improvements to your website itself. Maybe your login experience or browsing flows are preventing people from making purchases. Once you make the necessary improvements, your ads will be even more effective.
  • Re-target people who dropped off before converting. Adding custom conversions creates additional opportunities to capture potential converters that drop off before reaching your desired result. You can reach those people by creating audiences of people who have (or haven't) completed a certain custom conversion.
• Value optimisation. If your pixel has the purchase standard event implemented and it's sending us value and currency parameters (learn how to set this up), you can optimise for value. This means that we'll show your ads to people who we think will get you not just a purchase, but a purchase with the highest return on ad spend available.
• Dynamic ads If you set up a catalogue, you can combine that with your pixel to run dynamic ads. Dynamic ads enable you to create an ad template that automatically uses images and details from your catalogue's data feed to show ads to people who have already expressed interest in your business.

* Nguồn: Facebook