When executed properly, Meta advertising is a highly effective way to scale your product or service-based business. However, for the best chance at success you need to be prepared to invest a healthy budget into the platform. Failing to do so, you may fall victim to the age-old “Meta ads didn’t work for my business”.
- Your ad campaigns won’t exit Meta’s learning phase
- Your campaigns will fail to reach new customers
The importance of overcoming Meta’s learning phase
If you fail to invest enough budget or time into Meta ads, your campaigns will struggle to exit the learning phase. This means the algorithm won’t be able to gather enough data to effectively serve your ads to the right people in the right way, making it almost impossible to scale your account.
Meta requires 50 events to exit its learning phase, which should ideally occur within a 14-day period. Think of these events as actions like purchases, leads and link clicks. They will differ depending on your campaign’s objective(s).
Once the campaign or ad set exits the learning phase, you will experience more consistent results and be in a better position to scale your budget and grow revenue. This is by far when you will see the best results.
Audience limitations with low-budget campaigns
In addition to the learning phase, having a low budget will limit who sees your ads.
With its Advantage+ features (AI targeting), Meta will take the easiest route to find the best audiences. It will usually default to your existing customers, or those who have recently engaged with your brand. This means that rather than reaching new prospects, you’ll be targeting customers who would’ve purchased something from you regardless of whether they saw your ad.
You won’t see Meta do this with larger budgets. Instead, you’d attract more new customers and increase your return on investment.
Monitor, monitor, monitor!
A common misconception many businesses have with Meta is that they can ‘set and forget’ their advertising campaigns. A lot of marketers and businesses run ad campaigns in the background, without making optimisations or testing/adding new creative.
To ensure your ad spend is properly utilised, Meta campaigns need to be carefully monitored and where applicable, optimised. You need to constantly ‘feed the beast’ with new creative. After all, your business could have the most well-structured campaign, but if your creative falls short, so will your overall ad performance, given Meta’s strength across AI targeting.
Allocating budget
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to Meta ads, with so many factors at play, including budget and business objectives. To generalise, however, you want to allocate your budget accordingly:
- 10-20 per cent to prospecting new customers with ‘non-conversion’ objectives like traffic, awareness and leads
- 60 to 70 per cent towards prospecting new customers with conversion-based objectives (sales and leads)
- 10 per cent of your budget on nurturing existing customers and retargeting engaged shoppers
If resources allow, your conversion campaigns should be a mix of Advantage Shopping Campaigns (soon to be renamed Advantage Sales Campaigns) and manual targeting campaigns.
Your strategy should also allow for creative diversity, meaning you have a strong variety of ad types and hooks that are constantly being tested and optimised.
If you still can’t increase your budget
Businesses not yet in a financial position to fully invest in paid ads can instead use smaller budgets to run solo lead generation campaigns, with a focus on building your email database. From there you can nurture leads and move them down the purchasing funnel through email automations and regular personalised campaigns.
It should be noted that Meta ads is only one part of scaling revenue and growing your business. If you’re serious about acquiring customers for your product or service-based business, ensure your whole ecosystem is set up with strong foundations; from a high-converting website experience, clear unique selling points, strong average order value, customer retention, strong customer service, timely email automation and more.
