Meta
Paid UA on Meta (Facebook Ads) can still drive a significant value over time, of course provided that it is set up correctly. In this blog post we’ll look at the different aspects of setting up UA campaigns in Meta and provide best practices on how campaign goals, targeting and optimization can increase success.
Facebook ads is one of the most customizable platforms for UA out there. Despite the actions of Meta to limit the targeting options of the platform, we’re still able to do a lot of customization in the targeting.
Campaign creation:
When creating campaign, there’s a couple of options we can choose from, starting with broadest Awareness type up to Sales. In mobile UA, we’re going to work with App promotion most often. This campaign type allows us to select either Advantage+ App Campaigns (formerly known as Automated App Ads) or App Adds.
Difference between AAA and AA campaigns
Main difference is in the ad set setup. in AAA campaigns the set up is quite simplified (limited) and you’re putting fewer inputs into it. You can no select specitic targeting such as interests or demographics, as these are automatically applied for each app separately. Differences are shown in the tab. All setting that can be set manually as marked as yes.
Ad Set optimization
After we choose the type of the campaign, we go down to the ad set where the alchemy starts to happen. Ad set is the place where we tell Facebook what audience we want to show our ads to, at what cost at what bidding power and what kind of user behaviour we are looking for.
App & Dynamic creative
First part is straight forward, Selecting the platform and the app.
Then there is the Dynamic creative button, which works similar to creative set up in AAA campaigns. Once checked, you just upload bunch of assets with copy to the ad set and Facebook will create the combinations of the ads while pushing the budget to the best performing ones.
Optimization & Delivery
Now we select the optimization goal. We can select App installs, events or value. In case we’re selecting app events, I’d recommend to select the one that’s lowest in the funnel. In our case, purchase.
We could also select value optimization in case we wanted to optimize the campaigns on a specific ROAS (return on ad spend) level. For example setting value to 0.4 would mean that we want our ad set to look for cohorts that will generate 40% of ROAS in total. Facebook uses predictions on how much ROAS user can generate and optimizes towards the users that hit the prediction levels of 40%.
In general, it’s important to test both Event and Value optimization and see what results it can generate for a specific game.
Bid control is something we can use to throtlle the spend with. By adding a specific bid with our current set up here, we’re telling FB to find users at specific price in $ that are most likely to do a purchase event.
Attribution setting will optimize the ad set based on the selected period. 7day clik means that this ad set will learn from conversions that happened within 7 days since the user clicked on the ad.
Budget and schedule
There is no special magic going on here, just set up daily or lifetime budget for the campaign. Lifetime budget is the amount that the campaign will spend and then it automatically stops delivering.
If our CPIs would be quite high, let’s say $15, it’s important that we set up the budget in the way we are still hitting reasonable amount of installs per week so that the algo has the data to learn from.
Audience
Facebook has been cutting down targeting options pretty much year by year because of changing privacy policies. We are still able to choose from a variety of targeting options tho.
Starting with the custom audiences, this is the feature that can be used for targeting specific audiences such as users who already made a purchase, leveled up, engaged with the app, etc. custom audiences are used for re-targeting
For UA, meta introduced Advantage lookalike audiences for specific optimization goals such as conversions – in our case, app events. This feature works similarly to “expand audiences” feature, but for lookalikes. In case the system finds better performance opportunities for selected lookalike audience… it may expand the audience further beyond selected percentage.
Detailed targeting is just a glimpse of what it used to be. We used to be able to select the specific groups on Facebook and run ads to super narrowed audiences. Now we can only select interests of people such as gaming, some apps, movies etc. There’s thousands of options to choose from still.
Connections is important for us when we don’t want to show the ads to existing users that engage with the app or the page. On the other hand, if there is a good engagement of your community with your posts, it might increase the quality ranking of the ads because existing users might engage with the ads.
Placements selection
At the end of ad set setup we have placements, which will determine where our ads will be desplayed. At first I recommend to select the devices that the ads will be targeted to. For example when we’re running UA at higher scale for hardware thirsty games on android, we always think about which devices to exclude from the placements. We don’t want to include devices that can’t handle the performance.
Alternative filter of devices can be just their price. Targeting owners of high end devices might help increase the chance of covnersions from those owners.
This was the part 1 of the campaign setup in Meta. In the second part we’re going to look at the creative set up and some best practices for the mix.
See you next time!