How to Set-Up your Facebook Ad Campaigns for Success

Your Facebook Ad Campaigns should be split between Top of the Funnel (TOF) Campaigns and Bottom of the Funnel (BOF) Campaigns. 

Top of the Funnel (TOF) Campaigns

70% to 80% of your daily budget should be attributed to your TOF Campaigns.

The purpose of your TOF Campaigns is to build brand awareness. Therefore, these Campaigns will target cold audiences—essentially, those users who have never interacted with your brand. You can ensure this is the case by excluding the following key audiences:

• Visited Website – 180 Days: Users who have visited your website in the last 180 days.
• Purchased – 180 Days: Users who have purchased from your website in the last 180 days.
• Engaged Facebook – 180 Days: Users who have engaged with your Facebook page in the last 180 days.
• Engaged Instagram – 180 Days: Users who have engaged with your Instagram profile in the last 180 days.

Regarding TOF targeting, you can target interest-based audiences or lookalike audiences or keep things open (e.g., no interests or lookalikes). Depending on the vertical you operate in (e.g., apparel, beauty, home goods, etc.), you may find success with one audience or the other, with a combination of two audiences, or even with all three audiences running together—in separate Ad Sets!

When deciding on which audiences to use for your TOF targeting, prioritize the use of lookalike audiences. Lookalikes are a valuable asset for TOF targeting. From my experience, the percentages that work best for lookalike audiences are 1%, 3%, and 5%, though your results may lead to different conclusions. Ultimately, the percentage will depend on the vertical you operate in and the location(s) you operate in. Keep an open mind when testing lookalike percentages. Remember that the higher you go in percentage, the lower the similarity between your lookalike audience and your base audience.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOF) Campaigns

20% to 30% of your daily budget should be attributed to your BOF Campaigns.

Your BOF Campaigns aim to capitalize on the users who have engaged with your brand. These Campaigns will target warm audiences—essentially, those users who have engaged but have not yet purchased from you. You can ensure this is the case by limiting your number of exclusions down to one:

• Purchased – 180 Days.

In BOF targeting, you should target users who are closest in the funnel to purchasing. This means targeting users who have recently added to their carts or recently initiated a checkout, though don’t limit your audiences to just these two types of users. Test out other audiences as well. Some BOF audiences that I’ve found success with include:

• Engaged Facebook & Instagram – 30 Days.
• Visited Website – 7 Days or 14 Days.
• Viewed Content – 3 Days: Users who have viewed your content in the last three days.

Additionally, BOF Campaigns are where you should be targeting users who have visited specific pages on your website. For example, let’s say you operate a jewelry brand. You should be targeting users who have visited the page where you display your ring collection, or the page where you display your necklace collection, etc. These users should be targeted with category-specific Ads (e.g., Visitors of the ring collection page should be targeted with ring Ads, etc.) that employ category-specific Ad Copy. This will require a little more work on your part, but the results from this personalization will prove to be worth the extra effort.