June 20, 2022
If someone sat you down and asked you truthfully, do you know if your brand’s social accounts are set up correctly what would you say?
Our new conversation series, Selling on Social in 2022, covers candid conversations between our Associate Director, Sarah, and Senior Paid Social Manager, Danielle, and we started with the ins and outs on ensuring your paid social accounts are set up for success. It might sound like a ‘no brainer’ but a few simple best practice tweaks can really boost your ad performance!
(If you’re more of a ‘I’d rather watch it in a video’ kind of learner, you can skip to the filmed conversation over on our YouTube here!)
Here’s a recap of what Sarah & Danielle discussed in episode one…
1. Look at what you already have
The first thing you've always got to do (and the most logical place to start) is to look at what you currently have up and running across your channels. It’s as simple as stripping things right back to basics - it’s super easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed with stacks of new features and updates but you won’t see their true value until you get the foundations beneath them right first.
It’s important to ensure your accounts reflect best practices for each platform and that you have the basics in place before you start jumping in and increasing budgets - in the case of Facebook, where you’ll need to spend some time is ‘Business Manager’.
Here’s a few quick things to check with Facebook:- Have you linked your Facebook business page with your Instagram page?
- Have you got an ad account set up?
- Have you got a payment method set up?
- Have you implemented the Facebook Pixel? And not only is your Facebook Pixel implemented, but is it firing correctly?
- Have you got the relevant events set up?
2. Implement the Facebook Conversions API
The iOS 14 update restricts the use of cookies for tracking on Apple mobile devices, meaning we can no longer trust the data from the Facebook pixel alone to give us the full picture. To combat this, Facebook introduced the Conversions API which collects and shares first-party data directly from your own servers rather than relying on third party cookies from web browsers, allowing digital marketers to access conversion data when customers have blocked cookies in their browser or on their mobile app!
We recommend making sure you implement the Conversions API if you haven’t already - there’s 2 easy methods to set up, but we cover this in a little more detail in our blog here!
3. Identify what you class as success
When deep diving into accounts during the audit phase, we find a LOT of the time brands are simply not set up to track what they’re looking to measure their ad successes by. If you’re not crystal clear of your campaign goals or what ‘good looks like’, you’re setting yourself up to fail from the off.
Success looks a lot different to each individual brand; are you promoting the use of a discount code, competition entry or even just showcasing a new collection. Whether you’re measuring engagement, clicks, follows, likes, traffic to site, it’s important to get this ironed out right at the start.
4. Check your product catalogues
Making sure your product catalogue is set up is another important element to really get the most from your social ads. In Facebook Business Manager (and other platforms) you’re able to sync the product feed directly from your website which means you can then showcase your products within your social ads and users are able to click directly through to your website.
We have seen great success for some of our Ecommerce clients when we have used the product feed to create dynamic ads (usually with Collection or Carousel ads). ‘Dynamic’ means Facebook will show users specific products based on what they have looked at previously/what they think they will be interested in - we tend to use this style ad within our Retargeting campaigns, however always test! For some clients the Prospecting audiences have preferred them over lifestyle imagery or video content.
For help with your Facebook setup click here.
For help with your TikTok setup click here.
For help with your Pinterest setup click here.
5. Make sure the right people have access
Finally, save yourself the headache in the long run and ensure the right team members have access to your accounts/ Business Manager - even those outside of the team that will need to dip in from time to time. It’s crept up in the past with previous clients where their former employee or even third party marketing agency had sole access to their accounts - it causes unnecessary delays to getting your campaigns live!
For help on how to add people to your Facebook Business Manager click here.
Another big tip… make sure that someone within your business sets everything up - don’t (if you can help it) let a third-party agency do this. If you decide to leave them and go elsewhere it can cause all kinds of issues in the future. For example if they create the tracking pixel, they own it. They can’t transfer ownership, and believe us when we say… you don’t want to lose valuable data you have spent money on obtaining!
Learn more about our paid social offering & access a free audit using the button below!
