A Counter-Intuitive Method for Turning a Good Facebook Ad Into a Great One
Always do a Facebook campaign optimized for sales NOT engagement, goes the conventional wisdom. After all, you can’t eat likes, shares and comments :)
Most of the time this is true. I do however believe there one or two scenarios where a Post Engagement campaign can be extremely useful when you do it properly.
A Post Engagement Campaign is one optimized to get likes, shares and comments as opposed to purchases.
The way that I use Post Engagement campaigns is to make a good ad even better with more social proof.
Here's what I mean by that:
If you're running conversion campaigns and one of the ads is doing extremely well compared to the other ads in terms of ROI, then running a Post Engagement campaign towards that ad can make the ad do even better because it will grab the attention of your target audience better from the conversion campaign when they see how many likes, comments, shares, etc. that it has.
This is backwards from what most people do i.e. they will launch a brand new ad and have no idea if it is even a good ad. Then they will invest a lot of ad spend towards getting that ad a ton of engagement.
The problem with this strategy is if your products only work when there is a lot of engagement on your ads, then that's probably going to be very costly long-term for you. In that scenario, you'll need to invest like $100 for each ad before you even know if it will be a winner or a flop.
The ideal situation is to have ads and targeting that do well without the need for engagement. But if spending some money to get engagement on an ad increases your CTR on your conversion campaigns by 1 percentage point (say 2% to 3%), then that would make a huge difference on your overall profit if all other metrics stay the same.
I wouldn't recommend letting the post engagement ads run forever, just enough to get a few hundred or a few thousand reactions on it. Taking an ad from 2,000 reactions to 4,000 probably isn't going to be much more attention grabbing, but it will cost you about twice as much in ad spend.
Additionally, with all of the comments you get there could be a lot of potential customers asking questions or previous customers sharing their delightful experience with your business and/or your product.
In theory, you probably won't get many comments from the conversion campaign audiences, but if they are a serious customer and they see that there are 150 comments, they will probably check those comments out. If they are met with a bunch of positive comments, you probably just made a new customer.
A couple of points to note to pull this off successfully:
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When you create the “supporting” engagement campaign use the same post id from the original ad so that the likes, shares and comments get attached to the original ad (see the steps below)
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Do not use a video post. Video views are counted as engagement but there is no artifact left when someone views a video and so these are not engagements you want to pay for.
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This technique does NOT work with carousel ads. Use a simple regular ad with a single image.
In conclusion, use Post Engagement campaigns to turn good ads into great ads!
Follow the Steps Below
Step 1: Find your winning ad in ads manager
Step 2: Click on Preview to open up the Preview window (Highlighted in red)
Step 3: Click on the button highlighted in red
Step 4: Click on “Facebook Post with Comments” to open up the ad on Facebook
Step 5: Copy the string of numbers in the URL that is after /Post/ (This is your Post ID - IMPORTANT)
Step 6: Go back to ads manager and create a new campaign optimized for Engagement
Step 7: Create the campaign and ad sets as normal. Once you get to creating the ad, it will look like this
Step 8: Scroll down to “Ad Setup” and select “Use existing post”
Step 9: Go down to “Ad Creative” section and click “Enter Post ID”
Step 10: Enter the Post ID from step 5 and click “Submit”
After following these steps, your campaign will be optimized for engagement and going towards the ad that you have already been running and has been working well. This will get your ad more likes, comments, and shares!
