Looking to work with a contractor or agency to help manage your Facebook advertising?
Awesome!
Running your own campaigns can be overwhelming (both from a technical standpoint, and from a time-management standpoint), so outsourcing is a great way to take the burden of running Facebook ads off your shoulders.
But working with someone else to manage your ads and spend your money involves a lot of trust.
Do you trust them to do what’s best for you and your business, regardless of their bottom-line?
Do you trust that they know what they’re doing?
Do you trust them to care about your ads as much as you care about them?
If you’ve done your research, asked your questions, and read their testimonials, you should have some level of trust when you start. But the real trust comes when they start delivering results.
That’s why whether you have already paid your first invoice, or you are still in the process of hiring a Facebook advertising agency, the question you really wondering is:
When should I see begin seeing results in my Facebook campaigns when working with an agency?
Let’s get one thing straight first: The answer is the same, whether or not you are running the ads yourself, or have decided to work with someone else.
When working with an agency on your Facebook ads, the timeline of your project works in four phases:
- Define Goals & Get Your Ducks in a Row
- Setup
- Measure Initial Results
- Optimize Your Ads & Audiences
Let’s dive in…
Phase 1 – Define Goals & Get Your Ducks in a Row:
If you have hired a great agency to help run your Facebook ad campaigns, this phase will take a bit of time.
Any solid ad agency will take the time in the initial stages of your work together to learn about your business, the mission of your brand, goals you have in the short-term and long-term, and what makes your customer a raving fan!
With this information, your ad agency will then put their heads together to develop a great move-forward ad strategy that will hit all your goals for running ads in the first place.
In the beginning, your ad agency will also determine specific ad goals you have for when you launch your campaign(s).
For example:
How much is a lead worth to your business?
- How frequently does a lead turn into a sale?
- What are your conversion goals? I.E. What numbers would you like to see for your CPC, CPL, Cost Per Order, etc.?
- Do you have a sales funnel and opt-in developed? If not, you should BEFORE running any ads!
Once you have these questions answered, your ad agency can put together an ad strategy that works for your specific needs.
If your agency has a cut and pastes framework for your campaign… beware. While certain industries and products do have formulas that work – every product and every audience is slightly different. Your ad strategy should be developed and customized to fit your brand.
Phase 2 – Setup:
Once your ad strategy is defined, it will take time for your ad agency to set everything up on the backend of your website and the almighty Facebook Power Editor.
To start, the Facebook pixel will need to be placed both on every page of your website and any 3rd party pages (Leadpages, Shopify, etc.).
Based off of the goals and objectives identified in Phase 1, it will also take time to identify and create audiences within Facebook, as well as create a budget for your initial campaign.
Finally, the biggest portion of the setup phase will be the time it takes to work with your ad agency to develop and finalize ad creative (ad copy & images/videos) for your campaign. If you hired an awesome agency, they will work closely during this step of the process to ensure your initial sets of ad copy and creative fully represent your brand and goals.
Phase 3 – Measure Initial Results:
Your goals are set, your audiences are defined, the ad budget is set up, the pixel is placed where needed, and your ad creative is finalized. You are ready to hit the start button on your first campaign.
Hooray!
Once your ads start running, it’s tempting to check results every hour on the hour. However, if you look at your results too soon, you are sure to be discouraged.
Why?
You need to give it time before real and valuable results come in for your campaign. The Date will start to come in immediately once the campaign is launched, but the best ad campaigns improve over time because you let the Facebook algorithm do its thing and find the best audiences to view your ads.
Our recommendation: Hang tight, and give your campaign at least 48 hours to run before you analyze any initial data.
When measuring results, remember that the budget of your campaign may dictate when you start to see actual results. For example, the larger the budget, the quicker you will see results.
Phase 4 – Optimize Your Ads & Audiences:
Once results of your campaign come in, you will likely have a lot of tweaking to do to get the results you desire. In this phase, your ad agency will have to go back to the drawing board with you to tweak ad copy, targeting different audiences, test new images/videos, etc.
Your objective in this phase is to ultimately achieve your target Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Sale. However, in the early stages of a campaign you often will want to focus on other metrics, like Cost Per Click (CPC), Link Click Through Rate (CTR), and link clicks.
From Phase 1, your ad agency should have some target numbers for these metrics above that you should be aiming for in your optimization phase.
The reason you want to focus on these secondary metrics in the beginning?
Because you might not have enough quality data on Cost Per Lead or Cost Per Sale yet to make any decisions. Additionally, even if you have the data, the secondary metrics will tell you what to tweak first in order to get your CPL and CPO where you want them.
Here’s a helpful guide on the key metrics you should monitor during the duration of your campaign.
Final Takeaways:
When it comes to working with an ad agency on your Facebook advertising, be realistic!
Not all ad campaigns are a smash successes from the beginning. Proper setup and quality results take time.
Bottom line, a good ad agency will take the time to be intentional and help you achieve your goals through every phase of your engagement together.
Cheryl
Thanks, it is quite informative