If you are not using videos in your Facebook ad campaigns, you are missing a lot. Stats have proven that an average user spends 144 minutes per day on social media, and 91% of them prefer visually interactive content over text-based or static media.

So, videos can undoubtedly be an effective way to make the most out of your Facebook ad campaigns. Still, you might be wondering how you can use videos to successfully navigate your potential buyers through your sales funnel.

Hence, we have brought you a helpful guide in which we will discuss the anatomy of a Facebook ad funnel and video ideas for each stage so that you can successfully navigate your potential leads and convert them into loyal customers.

The Anatomy of a Facebook Ad Funnel

A Facebook ad funnel consists of the following three stages:

Top of the Sales Funnel

This is the first stage in a Facebook ad funnel. The end goal at this stage is to capture the interest of your audience and make them aware of your brand.

The top of the sales funnel is crucial because it will lay the foundation for the success of the ad funnel. So, the goal should be to immediately capture the interest of your audience with compelling content that stirs their emotions. Also, you need to ensure that you are not coming across as too salesy. Otherwise, you might just turn them off.

Middle of the Sales Funnel

This Facebook ad funnel stage comes after you have captured the interest of your audience and people know about your brand. Now, they are excited and hoping you will meet their expectations. This is also the chance to prove to them you deserve their attention.

Your goal at this stage should be to feed the curiosity of your audience and establish a great bond by offering them what they want. Answer their questions, give them advice. But still don’t push your products or services too overtly on them. You need to first firmly establish that you are a trustworthy, authoritative brand with their best interests in mind.

Bottom of the Sales Funnel

The bottom of the sales funnel is the time to shine and win the hearts of your prospective customers. Take this as an opportunity to share all the wisdom and promote your business as the solution to relevant problems.

Carefully thinking about how you can lead your potential customers to buy your product should be your end goal at the bottom of the sales funnel stage. Show them the direction by providing them key details and leading them through the purchase journey. To successfully buy your product/service, they need the assurance that their life will be better after purchasing them.

Video Ideas for Each Facebook Ad Stage

1. Video Ad Ideas for Top of the Sales Funnel (TOFU)

Since the goal of the top of the sales funnel stage is to spread awareness and grab attention, you should use education videos for laying a strong foundation of the relationship with your customers. We advise you to spend your money on creating clear and engaging video messages that capture their interest, solve their problems, and offer what they’re looking for. 

Here are some video ideas you can implement at this stage:

Problem-solving Videos

Problem-solving videos are a great way to showcase to your audience what issues your brand can solve. The best thing about these types of videos is that with them you can cut through the noise and offer your audience a direct reason to pay attention to your brand.

While creating problem-solving videos, make sure you maintain a personal connection with your potential customers. The way you want to go forward with messaging can be entirely your choice. Here is an example of an interactive problem-solving video that explains how the Coin credit card saves customers from the pain of having to carry multiple cards:

Educational videos

Educational videos answer the questions your potential customers are actively seeking. Nothing will delight them more than finding a solution to the problem that was bothering them for long. It will also strengthen your position as an industry expert.

Here is an example of how Ben’s Original uses interactive educational video to show the potential buyers that their Jasmine rice is without any artificial flavors or colors and can go along with recipes from around the world:

Pro tip: I recently started using a video creation tool called Boosted by Lightricks to create quick educational clips that grab attention, so I can retarget the people who view my TOFU ads and move people down the ad funnel. 

The app’s intuitive interface along with a broad range of templates, video stocks, and easy customization options make it a breeze.

Explainer Animation Videos

Explainer animation videos are a great way to show your audience how your brand can solve their problems. They are intriguing. You can use them to showcase even the most complex issues or the information you want to share in the most simple, interactive, and comprehensible way. Videos can even help you boost your brand’s likeability by adding an extra pinch of entertainment.

In case you are wondering, here is an idea of an interactive video by The Guardian in which it uses animation to explain how bitcoin works.

2. Video Ad Ideas for Middle of the Sales Funnel (MOFU)

In the middle of the sales funnel, your goal should be to continue the magic you established with your videos at the top of the sales funnel. Hence, follow your strong educational message with videos that clearly state how you can offer the best services in the market.

Here are some video ideas for the middle of the sales funnel stage:

Product Videos

Product videos have multiple purposes in the middle of the sales funnel. You can use them to showcase your products to potential buyers and let them know how they can solve their problems. Also, potential customers might be looking for multiple videos at this stage. So, it can make you stand out.

Here is an example of a brilliant product video:

Tutorial Videos

Tutorial videos are fun. Not only do they take viewers through the process of using your product or service but also allow the audience to picture themselves using your product/service. With tutorial videos, you can show your audience how convenient the availing of your services can be. You can make them understand why they should choose you over others.

Here is an example of a tutorial video from Western States Metal Roofing that takes you through the step-by-step instructions on how to install a ridge vent on a metal roof:

Pro tip: I like VideoScribe for creating whiteboard videos, which are great for in-depth tutorials. The tool has an impressive list of templates for creating in this format, especially effective when you don’t want to show a process in a hands-on manner but also don’t want to bore people with a lecture. 

While the free version is solid, to gain access to the full image libraries and remove their branded watermark, you’ll want to subscribe to the premium version. 

3. Video Ad Ideas for Bottom of the Sales Funnel (BOFU)

The bottom of the sales funnel is the time to drive all the efforts you have put in the earlier two stages and showcase to your audience how you stand out and how they can benefit from a long-term relationship with your brand. So, the video content should also be unique.

Here are some video ad ideas for the bottom of the sales funnel:

Customer Testimonials

Customer testimonials are a great way to showcase the stories of people who have benefitted from your product/service. Done well, they can inspire and persuade your audience to consider your product/service.

Here is how American Commodity Real Estate establishes trust among potential buyers through customer tutorials:

Demos & Webinars

Demos and webinars are a great way to assure potential buyers about your brand’s expertise. Here are the reasons why:

• You have already gained the interest of your audience. They won’t mind spending a little more time with demo/webinar videos.
• The potential buyers at this stage are seriously considering you. Now, they need a lot more than just talk and marketing gimmicks. They need solid proof of what you can do, and demos/webinars can be a great way of doing so.
• Demos/webinars can be a great way to showcase to your audience that you are always there to solve their problems.
• You can use demos/webinars to showcase to your audience how your products/services can make their life better and even resolve their concerns if any.

Here is an example of how the SaaS provider Optimove uses webinars as Facebook videos to guide prospects on bridging the CRM-compliance gap:

Pro tip: I like Pictostory because it lets me convert large webinars into interactive social media videos. This way I can repurpose my content on social media without the fear that the webinar may bore the audience. 

Pictostory also saves me a lot of time, as I don’t need to edit the videos frame by frame. The tool takes care of everything, adding my branding and subtitles automatically. 

How to Get Started? 

Now, you have understood the anatomy of a Facebook ad funnel (top of the sales funnel, middle of the sales funnel, bottom of the sales funnel) and video ideas for each stage.

Still, it will take you a lot to use videos for successfully converting visitors to buyers through the Facebook ad funnel. Especially if you are a beginner, creating video ads can be challenging.  

Here are some resources that may help:

• 10 excellent examples of video marketing on Facebook you can refer to if you are still clueless on how to start with video marketing on Facebook. 
• A complete guide to Facebook video ads that will give you an overview of how to create ads that lead to maximum conversions. 

These resources can at least help you get started with Facebook video ads. Still, I would recommend you hire Facebook video ads experts. They are seasoned professionals who know how to do their job. These people will help you in maximum conversions. We can even help you if you don’t know where you should seek these experts.

What challenges did you face with using videos across the Facebook ad funnel? Please share in the comments. I would love to hear from you.

In this article, we’ll take you through the latest changes in iOS 14 and how these might impact your Facebook Ads.

What is iOS14?

iOS 14 is the most recent version of Apple’s mobile operating system, officially released in September 2020. Here are some of the key features it has updated or introduced:

• Greater customization of the home screen and widgets
• A new App Library with efficient organization
• Compact call notifications and picture-in-picture video calls when in another app
• New Memoji styles and stickers for messaging
• New modes and features for the Translate app
• A new, streamlined design for Siri, and a larger knowledge bank
• Improved performance and privacy when browsing Safari
• Audio sharing for Apple TV with AirPods

These are just some of the updates that will make using an iPhone smoother and more personalized in 2021. 

Improving privacy and security

A lot of the above features focus on design and functionality, but an increasing concern for users these days is privacy. We are becoming increasingly aware that brands and their technologies are collecting more and more data about our demographics, interests, and behaviors.

Well, Apple has responded to these concerns in their latest update, helping users take greater control over their data and their privacy. This is obviously great news for us all as mobile users, but the implications for anyone advertising on mobile are a little concerning.

What has changed?

You’ve always been able to see how an app or brand uses your data, but this information used to be buried deep in the settings or within a long list of terms and conditions. If users were interested enough and savvy enough to check up on this, they could opt-out of certain types of data collection if they wanted to.

Now, this information is becoming more transparent within each app’s product page in the App Store. From early 2021, all apps in the Apple App Store must collect permission from users that allows it to track the user’s activity outside of the app.

Currently, a lot of apps can track which other apps and websites you use on your smartphone, as well as the pages you visit on those apps and certain behaviors you perform.

Once this update has rolled out, you will be able to easily prevent apps from tracking this activity, shifting this type of data collection from ‘opt-out’ to ‘opt-in’.

How does this affect Facebook Ads?

One of the benefits of advertising on Facebook is their extensive targeting options. This allows brands to show their ads to the most relevant audiences based on a wide variety of demographics and online behaviors, helping businesses get the most from their advertising budget through remarketing.

For example, if someone searches for women’s trainers in another app, a sports apparel company advertising on Facebook could target that user.

But, of course, this requires data on each user’s activity across their phone or other devices, something that will become more difficult to attain after the latest iOS 14 update. These issues similarly affect other platforms like Instagram Ads and advertising within third-party apps.

Another issue arises when it comes to reporting on Facebook Ads. It is useful for brands to understand what actions a user completes after clicking on their ad. Did they browse the website after arriving from Facebook? Did they buy something? Or did they leave the site straight away?

If Facebook can no longer track its users’ activity on other apps and websites, it will become much harder to obtain this data, meaning advertisers have fewer insights into how well their ads are performing.

It’s important to note that the capability of collecting the above types of data is still there, it will just become easier for users to prevent apps from doing so.

When presented upfront with the option to opt-in or out with a single tap, it is assumed that most users will opt-out, seriously reducing the amount of user data available to collect.

Facebook’s response to these changes

When this update was first announced by Apple, Facebook was understandably resistant to it. They believe that small businesses will be the most affected by the latest changes, and have spoken out against the policy changes in support of small business owners. 

Dan Levy, VP of Ads and Business Products, claims that the new policy is only done under the guise of privacy for its users when, in reality, it will lead to greater profits for Apple as businesses will be forced to turn to subscriptions and in-app payments to continue promoting themselves.

Since there seems to be no stopping these privacy updates, Facebook has turned to providing advice and support for small businesses in the face of these challenges.

One of their responses is a push towards aggregated event measurement to help users measure ad performance while complying with Apple’s changes. Part of this is that advertisers will be limited to tracking 8 conversion events.

Preparing for iOS 14 changes

Here are some simple tips that could help your business prepare for Apple’s changes:

• Check your existing ad data to see what portion of your clicks and leads are coming from iOS devices. This will give you an idea of how much your advertising will be affected
• There will be a shift from 7-day attribution to 28-day attribution, so update any of your advertising rules that are reliant on 28-day attribution
• Verify your domain with Facebook in Business Manager as soon as possible, as well as product URL domains. This will help you configure your conversion events
• Prioritize conversion events to determine which ones your Facebook Ads will target

You can read more actions that Facebook is advising its ad users to take now, as well as more detail about the specific changes to Facebook advertising, here.

Managing your online ad campaigns

There are lots of online tools and services that can make it easier to manage your Facebook ads and other online ad campaigns, even amidst these changes. Adzooma is a platform that simplifies online advertising, making it easier to optimize your campaigns and monitor their performance.

They also have a marketplace for finding specific marketing services to help your business, including Facebook advertising services. Check out Vitty on Adzooma’s marketplace.

If you’re concerned about how the latest iOS update is going to affect your brand’s advertising efforts, you can contact Vitty for more advice or for support with managing your Facebook advertising campaigns.

It has over 2.7 billion monthly active users, who will religiously use the platform every day. In fact, on average, each person spends more than 50 minutes a day using Facebook. What’s more, 74% of high earners with an income of more than $75,000 also use the platform.  

Combined with an average CPC of $1.72, if you can achieve success with Facebook Ads, you’ll be able to more than double your ROI and scale your business in no time at all.  

And to help you make sure that you’re getting the best results from your Facebook Ads, we created Adzooma to manage your campaigns more effectively than ever before. 

Complete with features that you won’t find inside the Facebook platform, such as ready-made automations you can apply in a click, Adzooma is here to save you time, achieve better results and scale your business.

Creating better ads management as Facebook partners 

Adzooma is proud to be partnered with Facebook and work alongside their development team to create a truly intuitive, and effective experience for its users to manage their campaigns. 

In just one year of being partners, we added full Facebook functionality to the Adzooma platform, created unique optimisation opportunities and implemented an industry-leading automation feature that surpasses the rules on offer in the native platform. 

As this partnership continues to grow, the Adzooma Facebook offering will continue to get better.

Facebook is one of the biggest marketing platforms out there and it’s been amazing being at the forefront of this with our partnership. Working with their teams, we’ve been able to implement amazing features in the platform and get early alerts to  the new features coming.

David Sharpe & Robert Wass, Cofounders of Adzooma

Our exclusive Facebook partnership also means that we get first access to updates, news and knowledge to share with our customers and update the platform, giving you an advertising management solution that you can always rely on.

More intuitive than Facebook Ads Manager 

Adzooma takes all of the functionality and data that you’ll find in the Facebook Ads Manager and gives it a cleaner, fresher look that’s easier to use. 

Let’s look at the campaigns page for example. In Facebook Ads Manager, you have to navigate and click through the different campaigns, ad sets and ad tabs to see all of your data.

In Adzooma, we consolidate all of this down into one, single Management screen. 

All the key data you want to know, including impressions, clicks, conversions, cost, will be neatly displayed in your management table. If you want to get a closer look at your ad sets or ads, just click the arrow to reach the right level. There’s no navigating between different tabs to find the information you need. 

All of the metrics can be customised here, meaning that the data you want to see will always be displayed first. You can also customise the date range by clicking on the calendar icon at the top of the page. 

Adzooma Management is more than just looking at your campaigns. It’s how you can make quick edits and adjustments without leaving the platform.

• If you want to change a budget for a particular campaign or a keyword bid, you just have to click the edit icon and enter your new budget. 
• If you want to make mass changes, just select the campaigns, ad set or ads in question and click the ‘edit’ button at the top to make quick changes.
• If you want to pause or enable campaigns, just click the status toggle.

It’s the same management you’re used to, just made that extra bit simpler, easier and faster.

Powerful automation to save even more time 

Facebook has a great automated rules tool that provides around the clock optimisation, time-saving automatic actions and custom alerts of important changes. 

Fully customisable, you can use these rules to adjust budgets, pause poor-performing adverts or get custom alerts when it’s time to take action, saving you hours of manually monitoring the data. 

It’s like having a virtual PPC assistant by your side. 

At Adzooma, we’ve made automated rules even more powerful.

Our automated rules allow you to select from 50+ Facebook metrics and create rules for any campaign, ad set or advert you want. In Facebook, you can only create rules for all active campaigns, ad sets or adverts. This is a real setback to create specific rules for individual campaigns with different goals attached to them. 

What’s more, you can also send notifications to your teammates, helping to manage workflow, delegate tasks and keep people informed.

Adzooma’s automated rules are simple and easy to create. 

To create a rule, head to Automation and click ‘New Automation Rule’ button. There, you can choose a template or create your own custom rule. All rules are created using 5 steps – with detailed explanations all the way through if you need it. 

Whatever rule you want to make, we’ve got you covered from our intuitive creator.

For more information on creating your own automated rules, you can follow our step by step guide on creating a custom ‘high volume, low conversion’ rule here.

Intelligent conditions not available on Facebook 

Facebook’s automation rules are limited. 

With them, you can only use the same metric once and all conditions you set are connected by an AND operator. This means that every single one of your conditions has to be met before the rule can run. 

So, if you create this rule in Facebook:

Your campaigns will only be paused if:

If one of those conditions aren’t met, the rule doesn’t fire. 

At Adzooma, you can set up more intelligent and precise rules through And/Or conditions. Or conditions allow your rule to run when any of your conditions are met. 

So if you wanted to increase the budget for well-performing posts, you can set a rule that will increase the budget by 10% if:

This allows greater automation and control over your account, without having to set multiple rules to cover every possibility. All your metrics can be covered in a single rule. 

You’re not limited to using either AND or OR conditions here. You can mix and match to create your perfect rule in Adzooma.

Easier frequency settings for one-off events 

For around the clock account optimisation, both Facebook and Adzooma run rules every 30 minutes.

But there are some cases where you need rules to run at specific times, or as a one-off event. For example, if you’re scheduling new campaigns to cover seasonal events or a limited sale, you’ll want them to start on the exact time and date that you choose. 

Facebook has three rule scheduling options, continuously, which will run every 30 minutes, daily, which will run at 12am Pacific time or custom.

Facebook’s custom scheduling options allow you to run the rule between certain times on certain days, for example, you can run it between 8am-5pm, Monday to Friday.  But if you want it to run once only, you have to set the same start and end times. So, a rule will start and end at 12pm on Monday.

However, you can’t choose a certain date, only weekdays. So if you want it to run once, you’ll have to create the rule, wait for it to start then delete it. 

In comparison, Adzooma gives you full control over your frequency settings. You can select to run the rule every 30 minutes, daily, weekly, monthly or as a one-off. If you choose to run the rule once, you’ll be able to select the exact date and time from the calendar.

Templated rules to get you started quickly 

Inside Facebook Ad Manager, you have to build every rule from scratch. 

At Adzooma, we have an entire library of premade rules that you can apply to your account in a few clicks. 

Each rule was created by Facebook experts as the go-to rules that have been proven to increase performance, save time and improve their ROI. It’s perfect for those that are new to automated rules or are just looking for a quick way to apply them to your account. 

These rules include: 

• High CMP Warning, which notifies you when you CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) increases above your set target for your campaign or ad set. 
• Website Purchase ROAS Booster, which increases your budgets for campaigns where your website ROAS is exceeding targets to maximise your success. 
• Pause Ads with Low CTR, which pauses low-performance ads and ensures that your budget is reallocated to those that are delivering better results. 

And many more.

To see our rules, head to Automation and click ‘New Automation Rule’. Then, select ‘Choose Templates’ to be taken to our library of 25 premade rules that you can apply to your account.

Found one you like? Choose what campaigns you want to apply it to, how often you want it to run and click save. You can make any edits and customisations to these rules as you want – they’re your starting point for you to make them your own. 
Want to know more about our templates? Find out our five most popular automation rules and why they’re used here.

One-click optimisation Opportunities

Managing your advertising efficiently means being able to recognise and take optimisation opportunities when they come about. 

Facebook ads manager gives you all the tools to access your data and make those changes, but they leave finding those opportunities up to you. Which means that unfortunately, the changes you need to make to improve your ROI are hidden behind hours of data analysis. 

At Adzooma, we’ll analyse your account and send you personalised optimisation Opportunities, including: 

• Replacing image ads for ads that have been live for over 4 weeks with a decrease in performance
• Removing interest groups with a small audience size to increase your reach 
• Fixing broken landing page URLs or site experience which could be harming your conversions

Each Opportunity will have two options: details or ignore. If you press details, you’ll be given a detailed explanation of why it’s important and how it can affect your account. If you want to apply it, click the ‘add to queue’ button. When you’re ready, hit ‘apply all’ Opportunities in the queue to action all these changes in a single click.

Intelligent reporting to prioritise your workload 

Data makes great campaigns. It’s the key to understanding what’s working and what isn’t, what needs your attention and where you can make optimisations to improve your performance. Having the right data is like being given a torch to light your way out of a dark cave. 

To understand this data, you need good reporting. Facebook ads manager offers two types of reporting:

• Templated reports, which are premade reports that designed to highlight a certain area of your account. Some examples are ROI Snapshot report, Reach and Frequency report, and Overall performance report. 
• Custom reports, where you can choose either a pivot table, trend line chart or bar chart and customise the metrics that appear inside of it.

Adzooma does reporting differently. 

Like Facebook, we also offer premade reports that analyse a specific part of your account. These are: 

• Funnel Performance Report, which helps you measure and understand how your online advertising is performing at every single level and spot weaknesses in your customer journey 
• Device Report, which gives you a full breakdown of how your campaigns are performing across desktop, mobile and tablet to increase budgets on your best-performing devices 
• Best & Worst Performers Report, which instantly identifies your best and worst-performing campaigns, ad sets and adverts to replace weak performers and put your champions to the test
• Cross Channel Report, which allows you to compare the performance of your accounts across two different platforms, such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads to make strategic decisions on a platform level.
• KPI Trend Report, which allows you to track your performance against your company’s goals. 

If you want to run a report, just click it from the Reports menu and we’ll automatically load it with the most accurate data.

Our customizable reports are more advanced as well. Instead of just choosing what type of graph you want, you can build out complete reports containing multiple pages, different types of chart, text and images. That means you can add your own logo, explain your results and send it directly to clients or stakeholders to show off your success.

Even more features for your Google and Microsoft ads 

Adzooma isn’t just for Facebook Ads. 

In fact, you can use this all-in-one platform to also manage your Google and Microsoft accounts simultaneously. Switch between them in seconds, apply your optimisations in less time and automate manual tasks with the most intelligent automation feature on the market. With Adzooma, you can do it all without having to switch platforms. 

For Google and Microsoft, you’ll get all these features, plus custom Opportunities and a unique campaign builder. To find out more: 

• See how Adzooma compares to Google Ads 
• See how Adzooma compares to Microsoft Advertising

Ready to transform your Facebook Ads management with Adzooma? 

Sign up for free today.

To find out more about how Phable can improve your bottom line with world class design and comprehensive writing services, book a consultation and tell us all about your business.

Below you’ll find advice on how to put in the hard work that will make your conversions look easy. By taking a holistic approach to advertising, both creating campaigns and embracing disruption opportunities, you can unlock the secrets to standing out. Whether you call it being prepared to do what the competition isn’t, or zigging while they zag, this is the work you need to put in so that your spend goes further and your message reaches more people.

1. Lead on the benefits of what you can do for your audience.

Embracing Google Adwords keyword research is a great way of ensuring your CTA cuts through, whatever the advertising platform. Use Adwords, Google Ads features and search intent, not only as SEO tools in their own right, but to reveal the needs of customers so that you can lead with that detail in your messaging.

This also works on social just as much as PPC or other forms of advertising. Pay real attention to the verbiage that your audience and competition are using; search out high ranking keywords relating to these terms and embrace them in your messaging. It’s got to remain natural and to your brand’s tone of voice, but engineering your ads with focal points of what your potential customers are already searching for will only go to help you satisfy their need.

Combine this with your tailored strategy, leading on the benefits of what you do best, and you’ll create attention-grabbing advertising with an irresistible click-through opportunity every time.

2. Find your why and tell people about it in your advertising.

Facebook ads and social media spend is all about immediacy and intimacy. In the era of attention, you’ve got a split second to engage, persuade and delight your potential customers. This is the secret to inbound marketing plus.

When you pay to play on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or through Google, put the right message in front of the right people by understanding where your customers are in their buying journey. This isn’t new advice, but it’s rarely used in these days of “do everything immediately if not sooner.” There’s a lot to be said for populating platforms with content for long term engagement, but that doesn’t mean you should forgo a little thought about what you’re saying.

If it’s a new audience, lead on the inspirational “why” of your business or service – what is your purpose and what do you believe as an entrepreneur? Learn more about this approach in the Simon Sinek TED Talk: How great leaders inspire action.

When the advertising demographic is made up of people that already know your background and product, adjust your message accordingly. When you display crafted ads to the right people in the right mindset, they click and they convert.

3. Great graphic design has never been more important.

Just as vital as a consolidated message in advertising and lead generation, your ad design needs to be immediate and engaging in every campaign you set live.

At just eight seconds, the human attention span is now less of that than a goldfish – seriously, look it up. Think how little time you spend looking at a post as you’re swiping your finger up the screen. Would you pay attention to your ad? Do you pay attention to any ads?

You can think of those adverts that genuinely captured your attention. The ones that looked different and exciting; the ones that just worked. Whatever your competition is doing, even if you perceive it as being a successful approach, do something different. Look to other markets and sectors; even completely different industries for inspiration. Borrow elements you like and let others inspire you to do better. Adapt and never copy what you see. It’s the internet. Someone will call you on it and you’ll lose more than you started with as far as reputation goes.

When disruptive design meets value in the copy, ad magic happens.

4. Track your progress and create your own advertising insights.

There are no steadfast rules when it comes to adverts that convert, every time. First of all, algorithms across Google, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms change and audiences catch on to advertising technique trends.

Just like the pop-up ads hell of the late ’90s, prospective customers will soon start turning their noses up if their experience is interrupted for no benefit to them. Instead, use the advice above to add to their experience and service the needs of tailored audiences.

Lastly on this point, listen to the insight of others but follow your own results. There are endless pages and accounts around promising conversion rates and follower numbers, but your business and your audience is unique. If someone is saying “I can get you x followers or x conversion rate on your marketing spend,” it should come as no surprise that they’re not the people to be talking to. At best they can tell you how they achieved those metrics, numbers or sales.

In fact, if you can find someone who’s willing to talk to you about their experience as opposed to trying to sell you on how to do something, nurture a relationship with them as a trusted advisor. They are few and far between.

Look at what posts engages your audience the most and build on that. For paid ads, test a few options with smaller spend and then keep what works and ditch what doesn’t. Increase the spend as you find out what gets you the best conversions, and keep evolving your strategy over time to keep more eyes on your ads.

5. Communicate, share ideas and help other people.

You’re reading this article to gain insight on how to get more attention from less effort with your marketing spend, but more likely than not you already have plenty of advice of your own. Share it. There are no secrets anymore, and communication is key to unlocking new paths and partnerships.

The advertising and marketing communities have so much to offer between businesses, and between hierarchal levels, too. Don’t be afraid to reach out to someone higher than your pay grade, and don’t ever think that anyone’s position is beneath you. We’ve probably all reached the point of webinarmageddon; we’re Zoomed out and have made enough notes that we’ll never read. However, sitting as part of an audience is very different to a one-on-one where you can riff off each other’s ideas.

Get in touch with colleagues or old friends and forge new contacts by reaching out to the people behind campaigns that inspire you. Ask questions. Ask those people who inspire them. Then make a note of their answers and get in touch with those people. Expanding your networking capabilities will expand your professional influence and inspiration.

Keep learning, keep applying those lessons and keep pushing for better. Put the effort in before you create those ad campaigns and you’ll save effort in the long run.

But in order for that to happen, you need to make sure that your accounts are set up and optimised in the best way possible. If they aren’t, you could be wasting money on getting your adverts to appear to the wrong audience at the wrong moment. 

Ad scheduling is one way to stop this and make sure that your adverts are always shown at the right time. 

Find out more about the benefits of ad scheduling and how to apply it to your accounts here. 

What is ad scheduling?

Ad scheduling is a way of limiting what times and days that your ads are shown. For example, advertisers can set adverts to only run on Saturday and Sunday, or between the hours of 9-5 pm on a weekday. 

This means that outside of the times you set, your ad cannot be shown and therefore none of your budget will be used. 

Ad scheduling protects your advertising spend for your busiest, or most profitable periods and ensures that it doesn’t run out prematurely. 

Why should you use ad scheduling? 

Ad scheduling means that your ads are only shown during the times you set. That may not seem like much, but it can make a huge difference to your conversions and profits by using your budget in your most successful times. 

If you only offer services for certain times or days of the week, for example, if you’re a 9-5 service-based business, having clicks and leads come through on the weekend might be a waste as there’s no one around to chase them or answer your calls. 

If you’re an ecommerce business with a self-checkout system, you don’t need to limit your ads to your business hours. But, having them run 24/7 can be a waste if none of your customers are around to see it.

By looking at the data, you can work out when you’re most likely to get clicks and conversion and when your ads are performing the worst. Then, you can use an ad schedule to run in your busiest times, so your budget isn’t wasted on slow hours where your customers aren’t around. 

Ad scheduling can also be used to match individual campaigns as well. For example, if you own a restaurant, you could have a campaign that’s promoting your new lunch menu and choose to schedule it between 10am-1pm every day, hitting their customers at the right time of day to entice them in. 

Ad scheduling vs bid adjustments 

Ad scheduling means that your ads can only be shown during certain times. Now, there might be times when you still want your ads to show – but you don’t want them to eat up all of your budgets. 

This is where bid adjustments come in. 

Bid adjustments can alter your bids during certain times. So, if Monday is your busiest day you can add a bid adjustment to increase your budget by 20% on these days. If the weekend is your slowest point, you can set a bid adjustment to decrease your bids by 10% during this time. 

Bid adjustments are useful for the time periods where you’re still getting clicks and conversions – but just not at your best rate. If you scheduled your ads outside of these time you’d miss out on these sales. But if they ran as normal, there’s a chance you could waste most of your budget on your worst days. 

Bid adjustments are a way of protecting and relocating your budget to your busiest times, while allowing the ad to carry on running.

For more information on bid adjustments, take a look at our guide to managing your keyword bids more effectively.

How to set ad schedules on Google Ads

Using Google Ads? Here’s how you set up an ad schedule from the platform. 

1. While logged into your Google Ads account, click ‘Ad Schedule’ from the menu on the left. If you can’t see this option, you may have to click the ‘+ More’ button first to reveal it. 
2. Click the pencil icon at the top, then select which campaign you want to set a schedule for. 
3. Use the drop down menus to select the days and times you want your ad to run. You can add up to 6 ad schedules per day for each campaign. 
4. Click save and you’re good to go.

To edit a schedule, select it from the table and click the pencil icon. 

You can set bid adjustments from the same page by selecting the campaign from the table and finding the specific time frame and clicking the pencil icon in the bid adjustment column. Choose to increase or decrease the bid and set the percentage you want.

On Google, you can only set up bid adjustments for ad schedules that you’re already running. Do if you want to set up a bid adjustment on Saturday and Sunday, you need to already be running an ad schedule for it, unless you use a tool like Adzooma.

How to set ad schedules on Microsoft Advertising 

To set up ad scheduling in Microsoft Advertising: 

1. Click ‘Ad Schedule’ from the menu on the left.
2. Click the ‘Add Ad Schedule’ button and select which campaign you want to add a schedule to 
3. Enter the times you want your advert to run, or set up bid adjustments. You can choose up to 15 minute increments to schedule your ads by and adjust your bids by -90% to 900%.

Not using Microsoft Advertising yet? Sign up today to receive $125 of free advertising spend. 

How to set ad schedules on Facebook Ads 

Facebook Ads allows you to set schedules for ad sets. To do that, you need to find the ad set you want to schedule and click edit. 

1. Under budget and schedule, click the ‘show more options’ arrow. 
2. Hover over Ad scheduling and click edit.
3. Tick the box to run ads on a schedule, which will bring up a clickable calendar.
4. Click the time blocks that you want your rule to run. 

You can’t set up bid adjustments in Facebook the same way that you can for Google and Microsoft. Instead, Facebook will automatically adjust your bid for you depending on the type of bid strategy that you use. 

Automatically adjust ad schedules on Adzooma 

If you’re not using an ad schedule yet, Adzooma will generate an Opportunity for you to fix this without going through the menus and navigation on the native platform. 

All you have to do is click the Opportunity and select the dates and times you want your ad to run. 

Once you’re happy, click ‘Add to the Queue’ and take a look at the other optimisation Opportunities that we’ve generated for you, including ones that will suggest bid adjustments based on device, gender or age range. 

When you’re ready, click ‘Apply all’ Opportunities at the top of the page and they’ll be automatically applied to your account. That’s ad scheduling and much more in seconds with Adzooma. 

Not already a member? You can sign up to Adzooma for free here.

To carry on supporting SMB’s, we’ve done a deep dive into digital marketing strategies with the help of MBA students at the University of Cambridge. The main aim of the study was to uncover actionable insights around the key factors that drive clicks, conversions and growth, which will help improve our product and further aid businesses to improve their marketing performance.

You can find their other findings here:

• What Makes Online Marketing Work: The Cambridge University & Adzooma Findings
  • A background look into how and why we ended up working with the University of Cambridge
• Why Your Content Strategy Is So Crucial To PPC Success: The Cambridge University & Adzooma Findings
  • The Cambridge team took a deep dive into sentimentality to help shape how you write your PPC ads
• What Makes A Landing Page Convert
  • Using the data, the team took a close look at how to get those extra leads and customers from your landing page

This is just one of the many things we do to try and improve our product, as we can utilise the data to provide more accurate suggestions to our customers. If you want to read more about our optimisations, you can do so here.

For now, here’s why digital marketing strategies are so important, why we partnered with Cambridge University and a deep dive into our new research to help you succeed online.

*Disclaimer – All campaign data provided to study participants was selected at random and anonymised.

Why is this important to me?

Knowing which digital marketing channels work for your brand is essential. Each platform has different audiences with different intent, so what works for one business might not work for you.

For example, although Google Ads is the most popular advertising network, that doesn’t mean it’ll help you achieve the best results in every single area. As this research uncovers, increasing ad spend on Facebook Ads will actually have the biggest impact on impressions.

What’s more, as 54% of Bing users are over the age of 45, and a third of them have a household income of over $100,000, Microsoft Advertising works best for targeting a more professional and affluent audience. Features such as LinkedIn Profile Targeting are also designed for this reason and are more suited towards industries such as Automotive, Finance and Travel.

“The question of what makes marketing work is one which very few have the resources to answer – yet a question that has been plaguing marketers for as long as the practice has been around.

Armed with our data and unique view across platforms, matched with the analytics skills and vast business experience of the students, it was a perfect fit to set about revealing key insights to the question.”

Sal Mohammed, Ex-Googler and current Head of Partnerships at Adzooma

Who took part in the study?

This research was undertaken by Cambridge Business students Akanshaa Khare, Srishti Warman and Sunil Grewal. All three of them have worked with multinational companies such as BCG, ZS Associates, Amazon and Barclays.

Having worked with such teams in the past, they were able to build on their knowledge of the digital marketing industry to identify the most effective ways for SMB’s to maximise their return on ad spend and ultimately grow their brand.

The partnership came about as a result of a previous project with Cambridge Judge Business School and Adzooma’s Head of Partnerships, Sal Mohammed. He told us “such was the calibre of the candidates, I’ve since been itching to work with a cohort from the university again”.

Each student focused on a specific area of research, but this piece will focus on the digital marketing strategy, based on secondary research, factor analysis, iterative regression and a comparison of ad effectiveness and cost efficiency KPIs.

What the study told us

Taking a deep dive into the hundreds of thousands of advertising accounts on Adzooma, this gave us the unique insight of being able to compare data across the three marketing channels of Google, Microsoft and Facebook ads. Data that couldn’t be found elsewhere.

Therefore applying the findings of this unique research could be crucial to helping SMB’s transition online during this time and create a successful digital marketing strategy to achieve their goals.

“The aim of the eventual deliverable was to create playbooks that will illustrate what leads to better ad conversion rates”, said Sristhi Warman. This data would then be used by small businesses and agencies to improve their online advertising performance, as well as enhance the Adzooma platform.

Study A: How do I select marketing channels?

A long-lasting strategy is a strategy that looks at the big picture.

With this in mind, the Cambridge students looked at data aggregation across Google, Facebook and Microsoft, data enhancement and other methodologies including calculating digital advertising ratios. Using this data, they created a 5-step strategy small businesses can use when starting out.

This includes:

• Knowing your target customers and selecting a combination of marketing channels accordingly
• Defining business objective of the ad campaign, based on the comprehensive marketing funnel
• Using the channel-selection framework for suitable advertising formats and channels
• Using overlap resolution methodology to make a choice between overlapping channels from the previous step
• Testing and learning, to understand your customers better and adapt your strategy as you go

So, let’s explore what the first step looks like.

Display, search and social advertising are important for all businesses. But as time goes on and you sharpen your targeting, you might find you want to focus more on one channel than another. This is where the research aimed to conclude the most effective mix of advertising platforms for an SMB.

The research shows that marketing channels which fall into the question mark category could be risky for SMB’s, and those who are categorised as ‘dogs’ should be avoided.

Based on the Cambridge digital marketing acumen and academic literature, it’s also clear that customer behaviour differs across the marketing journey, and based upon which part of the journey a customer is in, they are “more likely to visit a specific channel and respond to a kind of advertising format accordingly”.

This evaluation is supported by existing research which surveyed 1,000 cross-industry SMB’s. It showed:

• Acquiring new customers is the most chased (56%)
• Other goals ranging from ‘generating awareness’ to ‘generating leads’ & ‘retaining customers’ are comparably chased (45% to 49%)

Taking this data into account, the Cambridge students decided that merging the traditional sales funnel with the customer lifecycle model would be the best way for an SMB to manage their overall marketing goals.

The graph below shows which platform a customer is most likely to begin their buying journey on, and where they become more loyal to a brand.

Following this, overlap resolution methodology was used to determine the impact of cost on different marketing channels. This way, SMB’s would be able to effectively determine which platform is best to use when similarities occur – as seen in the funnel above.

The results showed which factors had an impact on results:

Having determined a connection between channel and cost KPIs, further research was conducted to find out the average CPM and CPC across Google, Facebook and Microsoft Ads.

Overall result: Facebook is the most cost-effective channel on average for SMBs.

So, if you’re choosing between Google and Facebook to advertise your business, on average Facebook would be the best bet. But, it’s also advised to look at the click-through rate of both channels as this could differ depending on factors such as industry and geography. Average CTRs are publicly available to help you make a clear decision.

For SMB’s that are debating between Google and Microsoft, the MBA students suggest using Google due to its high reach and low cost. Microsoft could also be useful in addition to Google or particularly suitable for specific business types, especially as it offers high-level targeting and demographics.

Study B: How much should I spend across channels?

For years, advertisers have questioned how much of their budget should be spent on paid advertising. A budget too big might go to waste, but one that’s smaller might not bring the return you need. Again, we worked closely with the MBA students at Cambridge University to find the answer.

To explore this hypothesis, a regression analysis was undertaken to validate if ad spend actually has an impact on increasing the number of impressions and clicks. In other words, whether increasing your budget on platforms such as Google Ads would improve the performance of your campaigns.

The advertising accounts that were analysed were connected to the Adzooma platform, ensuring the data was current, reliable and representative of the three major advertising networks.

Overall, the analysis showed that, on average, if an SMB increased their ad spend by just £1 when using Adzooma – which they can sign up for at no cost – they could expect to see different results across all three channels.

Overall result: Microsoft is the most responsive channel for increasing ad spend.

SMB’s could use this research to distribute their budget more accurately and get a clear idea of which channels will give them the best return on their investment.

However, it’s important to note that “every business is unique and channel mix selected through this framework should be validated through their own experiments”.

How will the data help Adzooma and SMBs?

Generally, the data collected will help to improve the Adzooma platform and allow us to provide more accurate optimisations.

For example, it was suggested that Adzooma could evaluate how channel partnerships can be best leveraged for our SMB customers. As Facebook seems to be the most used channel by 70% of SMB’s, and data analysis suggests it is optimal in terms of cost and return, Adzooma could use this data to scale their Facebook features and Opportunities.

This idea was reiterated by Sal Mohammed, Head of Partnerships at Adzooma, who said: “A lot of the learnings we unearthed from this study will go directly into the core technology. We already demonstrated that Adzooma users receive higher click-through rates than the industry averages by leveraging our technology and the changes we will implement following this work will only enhance that dividend.”

After seeing how easy it is for Adzooma users to compare account performance, the MBA students also devised a benchmarking method SMB’s could use for their own analysis.

The graph would allow businesses to find their peer group and compare ad effectiveness and efficiency, helping them decide which platforms to use. A feature like this is excellent for SMB’s trying to grow their brand and drive traffic in the industry.

If you need support in a different area, Adzooma Marketplace has the expertise you’re looking for. It’s the number one platform that connects agencies, freelancers and more with high-quality leads looking to buy. Browse the categories today to find your ideal match. Or don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to discuss the findings further.

Maximise success with the right channels

If you’re new to advertising or managing your own ad accounts, it can be difficult to build an effective digital marketing strategy. There’s a lot of time and effort involved, and you may have limited resources or digital expertise.

Using the data above, you should have a clear idea of how to select the best digital marketing channels for your business. If you have a tight budget, as the Cambridge research has shown, you will get more for your money using Facebook Ads.

Plus, although Google, Facebook and Microsoft ads are the most popular online advertising platforms, there are alternative (and less expensive) places to list your ads. Although they’re still effective, having fewer users means it’s often easier to reach your exact target audience.

These examples were not analysed within the research, but could increase your profits aside from your most profitable platform.

A few examples include:

• Capterra: An ultimate software review site that allows people to search for new software based on thousands of trusted reviews. Users typically spend a lot of time here, so it’s a great opportunity to set yourself apart and sell the benefits of your business.
• Amazon: 300 million people actively use Amazon which makes it an excellent network to list your shopping ads.
• Reddit: You only need $5 minimum to launch a campaign on Reddit. Popular posts are promoted on the front page, and ‘subreddits’ reach users who share similar interests. Both options allow you to share diverse content with audiences from across the globe.

To find out more about overlooked digital marketing channels, read the full blog post.

But with so many platforms offering automation tools and features for a range of price points, it can be hard to know which one to pick. That’s where we come in, with a detailed look of every single paid marketing automation tool on the market. 

And, we’ll be showing you exactly how Adzooma measures up.

Why use automation? 

Most problems paid marketing managers face when optimising and managing campaigns isn’t a lack of resources or know-how. It’s a lack of time. 

It’s not having the time to apply every single manual change, the time to dive deep into campaign data and find goldmines of optimisation opportunities, the time to strategise and test new creatives. The more campaigns you manage, the less time you have. 

That’s where automation comes in. 

Automation is like having a virtual clone of yourself to look after your campaigns. It’s a way to automate manual tasks, to have data analysed on your behalf, to find new optimisations opportunities in seconds and set up alerts so you know exactly when your expertise is needed. 

Then, you can use the extra time to achieve better results, take on new clients and scale your business. 

Put simply, automation saves time identifying and applying optimisations. That means better performance, better ROI and more time for you to strategise and scale.

Don’t paid marketing networks have their own automation tools? 

Yes, they do. But Google, Facebook and Microsoft’s automation features just aren’t as good as external platforms. After all, external paid marketing platforms are built by, and for, paid marketing managers to achieve more than they can by using the native networks alone. 

This makes them more intelligent, more intuitive and generally, easier to use than networks. 

See for yourself what paid marketing platforms like Adzooma have to offer that networks don’t here: 

• Adzooma vs Google Ads
• Adzooma vs Microsoft Advertising
• Adzooma vs Facebook Ads

Right, now that’s out of the way let’s move onto the paid marketing automation tools out there.

Adalysis

Adalysis is a Google and Microsoft ads management service, focused on reporting, data analysis and A/B testing. I imagine that’s where they got their analysis based name. 

As well as reporting, Adalysis so have some automation features up their sleeve. Namely, in their checks and alerts part of the platform. This is broken down into 3 core features: 

• Predefined checks and alerts, which periodically check for 18 account issues, such as ad groups with no active keywords, broken URLs or low quality score. 
• Performance monitors and alerts, which give you daily, monthly or weekly alerts for change in performance, such as an increase in CTR. 
• Custom checks and alerts, which allow you to build your own checks based on 22 different metrics. 

The biggest keyword to take from this is alerts. Having these checks can save time, but they won’t change anything for you. For the first two categories, you’ll also get information on how to fix these issues, but that will mean leaving the platform. 

In contrast, Adzooma’s automation system gives you the ability to make changes on your behalf, such as pausing ads, increasing budgets and more.

We also offer the same performance and predefined checks with our Opportunities. But instead of just telling you about them, we also give you the functionality to apply the changes in our platform as well. Most of the time, it’s done in a single click

AdEspresso 

AdEspresso is a Facebook Ads manager that’s partnered with Hootsuite, giving users unique access to social tools and the ability to sync data with multiple CRMs such as Mailchimp, Hubspot and Salesforce. 

For automation, AdEspresso offer: 

• An Optimisation algorithm, which recommended performance improvements for your campaigns
• Advanced analytic tools to access testing data quickly
• Custom optimisation rules

The first two of these offerings are good for finding issues and prioritising tasks but all recommendations have to be actioned elsewhere.

In comparison, you can action recommendations straight away in Adzooma. Most in a single click, meaning you’re never switching back and forth between platforms. 

The meat of AdEspresso’s automation comes from their rules feature, which allows users to set custom rules or activate ‘automatic optimisation’. This is where AdEsspresso will automatically pause underperforming ads and set bids based on CPA. 

Custom rules allow you to have more control over this process, setting custom events and changes at the campaign, ad set or ad level. However, automatic optimisation and custom optimisation rules can’t be applied to the same campaign, providing limited usability and functionality. 

All rules are created using ‘If this, then that’ statements. It’s all run on a text-based templates, with everything underlined in blue as customisable options.

Adzooma’s automated rules are a lot different. We give you more functionality and control, in a far easier and more intuitive rule creation system. There are no text templates to fill in, just drop-down menus to select what you need. 

We also offer And/Or conditions when creating a rule, meaning you can set more complex and fine-tuned rules than AdEspresso. For example, with Adzooma you can increase a budget for a brand awareness Facebook campaign if you get more than 1,000 post reactions OR 500 shares. 

We’ll also run a rule every 30 minutes, rather than every day. And to top it off, we’ve got a whole library of templated rules for Google, Facebook and Microsoft advertising.

Aori.com 

Instead of offering an all-in-one platform, Aori.com offer three distinct features that you can pay for separately, or all together as a bundle. These are: 

• SEM tool, which offers a Single Keyword Ad Group (SKAG) builder. 
• Ecom tool, which creates keyword lists and search adverts based on your ecommerce product feed. 
• Budget manager, which is Aoir.com’s automated bidding management tool. 

As we’re looking at automation tools in this post, we’ll focus on their budget manager tool here. Compatible with Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon advertising, budget manager is focused on distributing and automatically adjusting budgets based on performance. 

For example, if you set a target cost per conversion, Aori.com will redistribute budget from lowest performing campaigns to the best performers. 

Beyond bid management, Aori.com don’t have much else to offer in terms of automation. There’s no way to set custom rules or add custom metrics to automate different parts of your advertising like budgets and time limiting.

In contrast, Adzooma’s automation rules cover everything you need. Use it to set and adjust bids, pause ad sets, swap out keywords, start seasonal campaigns or just get notified when you need to jump into action. 

MadgicX

MadgicX supports Facebook and Google Ads, but is predominantly a Facebook-first platform.

In some cases, the Facebook-first nature of the platform works in their favour, giving nice features like being able create Google Ad display campaigns from their Facebook Ad campaigns. 

For automation, MadgicX offers: 

• AI audiences, which allow you to launch Facebook ad campaigns to audiences automatically created based on your best performers. 
• A budget optimiser, which automatically scales your campaigns based on performance. 
• Custom automation rules & 7 pre-built automation ‘tactics’. 

Custom automation rules

MadgicX also offers custom automation rules with And/Or conditions. However, their tool seems to only work with Facebook Ads only. 

Adzooma rules run every 30 minutes, making them one of the fastest on the market. MadgicX don’t put a time to theirs, instead saying they run in ‘real time’. 

In addition, MadgicX also offers pre-built automations that you can apply to your accounts, though there’s only 7. In contrast, Adzooma’s library currently offers 28 templates for Google & Microsoft and 25 for Facebook, giving you more options and wider choices to manage your campaigns. 

One more thing… On MadgicX’s website, they also claim to be ‘The Robin Hood of online advertising’. Well, we’re sorry, but as a Nottingham based company with a free platform, we’re going to have to claim that title off them.

Opteo

Opteo is a Google Ads manager that offers features for both Google Search and Display campaigns. As an automation tool, it offers: 

• Optimisation improvements that can be actioned in a click 
• A simple campaign overview to make adjustments to bids and budgets 

Adzooma’s Opportunities are very similar to Opteo’s. They’re both based on data and can be automatically applied to your account in a click. Even our management feature is incredibly similar, allowing you to see, edit and add to, your campaigns from a single screen. 

But, you can’t set your own automation rule to notify you, or take action, when a specific event happens like you can in Adzooma. Unless an optimisation is suggested to you, there’s no way to automate your paid marketing strategies.

Optmyzr 

Optmyzer is an all-round paid marketing tool that supports: 

• Google Ads, including shopping, display and video 
• Amazon Advertising 
• Microsoft Advertising 
• Facebook Ads

Like Adzooma, Optmyzr offers features like intelligent data reports, one-click optimisations, and a campaign builder to add or edit your campaigns. The differences come with the automation features. 

The main bulk of Optmyzr’s automations comes in two separate features, the Rule Engine and Enhanced Scripts, which we’ll go into with a little more detail. 

The Rule Engine 

The Rule Engine is Optmyzr’s rule based automation system. The core premise of it works much in the same way as Adzooma’s automated rules in which you set a certain action to happen when a certain event occurs. For example, you can choose to increase a budget (action) if your conversions increase (event). 

Optmyzr’s Rule Engine is limited to bidding strategies only. 

They allow users to set their own bidding strategy based on the goal that you’ve selected, such as Target CPA. You can then drill this down into specific parts of your campaign, such as target CPA bidding for your keywords, ad groups, product groups, countries or regions. 

When building these bidding strategies, you can choose to automatically apply Opymyzr’s suggestions, or take full control to customise default settings or make manual adjustments. 

If you want to automate parts of your account that aren’t bidding, you need to head over to Enhanced Scripts. 

Enhanced Scripts

Enhanced Scripts are a way of adding scripts into your account without the need to code.

You can choose from a library of pre-made scripts and use the tool to make any amends or specific customisation. Then, Optmyzr will create a code for you to copy into Google Ads, which requires some platform hopping to get done. 

At a maximum, these scripts will run every hour. Adzooma’s rules run every 30 minutes. 

It’s a useful tool, but they don’t offer the ability to combine this feature with the Rules Engine to give users a single automation feature. 

With two separate features, users will have to decide which part of their accounts they need to automate, then select the one that matches. In contrast, we just made one automation tool at Adzooma that will power it all. 

RevealBot

Alongside Adzooma, RevealBot is one of the more well known automation tools on the market. At a glance, RevealBot offers: 

• Custom and pre-made templated rules, with over 20 actions 
• Custom metrics and timeframes to base your rules on
• And/Or conditions 
• 15-minute frequency 
• Slack integration and notifications
• Rules for Google, Facebook and Snapchat advertising 

Now, let’s break these down into detail. 

Custom rules 

RevealBot’s automated rules are extensive. 

You can set and/or conditions or add your own google sheets data to your rule. You can also set the frequency to every 15 minutes, or select the days and times you want them to run. 

You can put multiple actions under a single rule. So, for example, you could pause one ad group and start another. Each action is nestled under its own set of conditions, so you can set more than one rule at once. However, you’ll have a harder time coming back to them to edit these rules down the line if they’re all nestled together. 

None of RevealBot’s steps are explained however. 

At Adzooma, we believe in making sure that you have all the tools at your disposal to grow your business. That includes making sure our automation rules are explained every step of the way, and checking your rules before they are saved. If there are any errors that could cause them to fire at the wrong times, we’ll send you a warning and the step to fixing it. 

RevealBot Strategies 

Like Adzooma, RevealBot has its own premade rules that you can apply to your accounts, called RevealBot Strategies. 

The bulk of RevealBot strategies are for Facebook campaigns, which are broken into three categories, eCommerce, lead generation and mobile app though the rules for each of these Facebook categories are the same, bar the odd one like ‘On the safe side’.

RevealBots has only 5 Google Ads strategies and 3 Snapchat ones. 

In comparison, Adzooma has 28 templated rules for Google and Microsoft, and 25 for Facebook Ads. 

Another feature of RevealBot Strategies is that users can create and share their own strategies, meaning that you can turn to other paid marketing managers if you’re looking for rules that will help out in a certain situation, while it’s also tied to their referral scheme

Multiple Rules 

Revealbot puts multiple rules within folders, and you’ll see the names of each rule you’ve created in a folder, but you’ll need to hit the preview button to get any more information about what it does. 

At Adzooma, every rule you create will be displayed in the same table, which gives you a tidy summary of: 

• Its status
• Where it applies to
• The action it takes
• The frequency it runs
• Its results 

All at a glance. 

If you click the arrow, you’ll also see the exact conditions that make up the rule. If you want the exact rule results log, just click the blue test on the rule results column. 

Acting beyond automation 

RevealBot’s automated rules are good. But the platform doesn’t offer much automation for afterwards. 

Users can’t make changes to Google campaigns, or build new ones, outside of the automated rules. This means that if you want to follow up an automated rule to pause low-performing keywords, you then have to log back into Google Ads and manually add new ones there. 

In contrast, Adzooma is an all-round paid marketing management platform. As well as automated rules, we offer a complete campaign builder for Google and Microsoft ads, making it easy to make the amends and improvements you need. 

Squared.io 

Squared.io has a lot of good features. Aimed at agencies and large advertisers, Squared.io is designed to give your accounts a digital audit to help you optimise, improve and scale. It looks at different areas of your accounts, giving you a score for:

• Optimisation, based on best practice standards
• Query, which is the proportion of account spend on exact match keywords 
• Value, which is about increasing your Quality Score for Google Ads
• Reach, calculated from how many impressions you achieved versus your potential 
• Conversion, which monitors for clicks with high bounce rates and low conversions 
• Audience, which identifies issues with Facebook audience configuration 
• Creative, which encourages testing ad creatives

If you want to automate your reporting and prioritise your workload, Squared.io’s audit feature isn’t a bad call. But there’s no easy way to action any changes it finds. If an audit finds keywords with a Low Quality score, you can’t fit it inside Squared.IO and you can’t see which keywords they are without downloading a CSV file of them. 

In contrast, most actions that are identified in an Adzooma report can be actioned instantly inside the platform. 

Premade optimisations 

Squaired.io’s automation feature offers a set of pre-made optimisations that you can able in your account. Some of these optimisations include: 

• Deleting ad groups with zero impressions 
• Deleting duplicate keywords
• Adding negative exact match keywords for paused keywords 

But there’s no customisation or alteration. You can’t make or set custom rules for your campaigns. You can’t set automations to run on certain ad groups or campaigns. 

In addition, users have to manually update data by pressing the sync button, but accounts can take up to 30 minutes to sync. 

In contrast, we’ll always make sure your data is up to date at Adzooma. Our reports also automatically update, so whenever you click a report, it will have already loaded the latest data for you for supreme accuracy.

Ready for the best paid marketing automation platform? 

As this list has proven, automation comes in a lot of shapes and forms. But no matter what you’re searching for, Adzooma is the best solution for you with: 

• Custom automation rules that run every 30 minutes
• Easy to use software that creates intelligent rules, including And/Or conditions
• A library of premade rule templates for Google, Facebook and Microsoft, created and used by the experts 
• Performance optimisation suggestions, which can be applied to your account without leaving the platform
• And much more… 

One thing is for sure: Adzooma will never be beaten on price. Our platform is completely free to use, which can save your business hundreds in software costs alone. 

Ready to save time by automating your paid marketing campaigns?

Sign up for free today. 

From the CEO at La Tienda del Apicultor who saves one day a week managing his ads to the freelancer Phil Bacon who increased his conversions by 200%; people in every role and every industry are seeing the benefit of incorporating automation into their daily paid marketing management.

So where do you start? We at Adzooma understand that getting into something new can always be a little bit difficult. New ways of working and new software can seem a bit abstract at the beginning, a bit weird, a bit overwhelming.

But that’s why we’ve written this article. 

Here I’m going to guide you through the five most popular automation rules that Adzooma users implement on a day to day basis. I’m going to tell you why they’re so useful, show you which features are best to take advantage of and explain just how you can implement them into your PPC strategy.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

How do I set up a rule?

Just so you’re not confused when you enter the Automation tab of your Adzooma account, let me just quickly explain what everything is for you.

When you land on Automation you will be taken to a screen which shows all the Automation rules you’ve implemented (you’re not going to have anything showing here if you’ve just started, of course).

Then to create a rule, hit New Automation Rule in the top right. You will then get a choice: Choose Template and Create Custom Rule. Everything today we’re showing you is a template, so click the Choose Template button.

From there you will be taken to the list of all the templates. Once you’ve clicked Create Rule on one of the templates, you will be met by a template that has already been filled in for you. But if you like, you will also be able to customise it to your preference and you’ll be met with 5 different sections:

• Details
  • This is where you name the rule and give it a description
• Apply To
  • This is where you choose what you want the rule to apply to e.g. All Active Keywords
• Conditions
  • This is the most important bit, this is what makes your rule fire, so for example if you’re wanting to run a High Volume, Low Conversion rule, you would add a condition that has a cost which you think is high and a conversion number you think is low e.g. Over £600 for less than 5 conversions. In this section you can create And/Or rules, so you can customise the rule to fire when both conditions are met or just when one of those two conditions are met. There’s more info on that in this blog post on And/Or conditions should you need it.
  • In this section you also set up what action you want to take place when those conditions have been met e.g. Pause Campaign
  • And finally how many days’ worth of data you want the rule to check e.g. the last 3 days worth of data
• Frequency
  • This is where you specify when/how often you want your rule to run. At the times you specify, Adzooma will check your rule and apply the action you have set if your conditions are met. These can be as often as 30 minutes so your campaigns are being monitored every hour of the day.
• Notifications
  • This is simply where you set up which email accounts you want to be notified when a condition has been met

1. Campaign High Volume Low Conversion (Google & Microsoft ads)

Budget management is super important in any line of business, and in the paid marketing world, there’s no better way of keeping that budget in check than the High Volume Low Conversion rule for Campaign-wide ads.

Whether you want it to pause the campaign automatically when your clicks have skyrocketed or just notify you by email when the cost of your campaign has ballooned and the conversions haven’t, the choice is yours.

Why should you implement this?

I almost want to say this is a must have. Not necessarily to pause your campaigns when a certain monetary figure has been reached, but certainly to notify you when it has.

Of course you can go into your campaigns and check this data yourself, but what Adzooma does is check your accounts every 30 minutes of every day, so if your conditions are met, you’ll immediately be notified so you can take action. This just isn’t something you could do manually. 

And with this being a campaign wide rule, knowing when to spring into action as soon as possible should your spend go too high is vital.

How do you implement this?

This is nice and easy. Head to the Automation tab in your Adzooma account, click New Automation Rule in the top right, then Choose Template, and click High Volume Low Conversion at the top in the Campaign section.

Here you will be able to customise your rule to suit. For example, you may want to do the following:

• If during the last 30 days of data
• The cost is over £600 and conversions are less than 5
• Notify you by email when the conditions have been met
• Check this campaign’s performance every 30 minutes

You can adapt and change this to how you like, but all it takes is just a few clicks and you’re away with a peaceful mind and a whole load of time saved going back and forth into your account.

2. Pause Non-Converting Keywords (Google & Microsoft ads)

This is an easy one, and one that’s a bit more granular than the above. Plus it’s also super effective, that’s why it’s so popular.

This template does exactly what it says on the tin – pauses keywords that are spending budget but not leading to the conversions you expect of them.

Why should you implement this? 

Not every campaign you run necessarily is all about conversions. But when this is your main goal, pausing the ads that aren’t converting is of course a required step to success. 

Implementing this automation will quite simply mean you’re not wasting spend on ads that aren’t performing.

This can be done without automation, but what automation does is speed up the process considerably. No more trawling through the data, instead you have an automated helper who will do that for you giving you time to concentrate on the less manual side of your job.

How do you implement this?

Head to the Automation tab in your Adzooma account, click New Automation Rule in the top right, then Choose Template, scroll down to the Keywords section and click Create Rule under Pause Non-Converting Keywords.

From here you will then be able to customise the rule to your preference. So, for example, you might want a rule to do the following three things:

• If during the last 30 days of data
• Any keyword in your campaign has spent over £100 with no conversion
• Pause all the keywords
• Check these keyword’s performance every 30 minutes

You could set this whole rule up from top to bottom in less than 10 clicks. Plus there are loads of different options to choose from to tailor it to your needs.

Whatever you choose, with automation, you can save yourself the hassle of spending hours every week with your head in the data.

3. Low Quality Score Warning (Google & Microsoft ads)

Quality Score is one of many super important metrics to keep an eye on in your account, potentially the most important. This piece on what Quality Score is, is a good introduction if you’re not up to speed on it’s intricacies and quirks. 

A high Quality Score is based upon three factors: expected clickthrough rate (CTR), ad relevance and landing page experience. 

If you’re nailing these, your Quality Score will be nearing the top of the 1-10 scale and will therefore lead to higher-performing campaigns and ensure your ads get displayed in the right places. 

And because keeping an eye on that Quality Score is so crucial, that’s exactly why this template is so commonly used by Adzooma users.

Why should you implement this? 

Ultimately, the higher the Quality Score, the less you pay for clicks so, in turn, that brings down the cost per conversion (CPC) and increases your return on investment (ROI). Low Quality Scores contribute significantly to wasted ad spend.

So having an automation rule always running that checks when your keywords’ quality score drops below 4 for example is going to help the health of your accounts no end. 

And save you plenty of time and money in the process.

How do you implement this?

Again, head to the Automation tab in your Adzooma account, click New Automation Rule in the top right, Choose Template, scroll down to the Keywords section and click Create Rule under Low Quality Score Warning. 

Here you can customise your rule in whatever way you want, though I’d recommend the following:

• Apply to all active keywords
• Notify you using 7 days worth of data when Quality Score is at 4 or less
• Run this rule every 30 minutes

So with the score being out of 10, 5 is not too bad. Anything lower than average and you really want to be considering the relevancy of the keyword to your landing page/website.

However, if you’re running campaigns where you target your competitors, don’t be concerned if that Quality Score is very low as it’s to be expected (and best to exclude those keywords from this rule too).  

From there, you will have to take the action to improve the Quality Score yourself. You may need to improve your landing page’s loading time, you may need to improve your ad copy, you may need to move the keywords to a more relevant ad group.
If you’re struggling with the implementation of this, it might be worth taking a look at our Marketplace to find someone who can help – that’s what they’re there for!

4. Pause Advert – Low CTR (Google, Microsoft & Facebook ads)

These next two rules are pretty similar. They’re both about automatically pausing an advert when something is not performing in the way that you expect.

For this one, it’s all about low clickthrough rate. 

Why should you implement this? 

Having a low CTR isn’t always the end of the world – it’s better than having a high CTR and a low CPA.

But unless you’re running a brand campaign, it’s pretty pointless running the ads if no one’s clicking them.

Plus, some of these ads you’re running with a low CTR might have a really good CPA. Therefore, if you can generate a load more clicks you could generate a load more conversions too.

That’s the great thing about automation. It doesn’t just help you to do your job faster, it also helps you to scale your business faster too.

How do you implement this?

Head to the Automation tab, New Automation Rule, Choose Template, scroll down to the Advert section, and click Create Rule under Pause Advert.

Here you can customise it how you want, for example you may want to do the following:

• Pause all active adverts that have a CTR of less than 1% using data from the last week
• Check your keyword’s performance every 30 minutes
• Notify you by email when your ads have been paused

There are of course loads of different options here. You could add an And condition too, for example, the adverts will only pause if the CTR is less than 1% and the Conversions are at 0, or add an Or condition that will pause the ads if the CTR is less than 1% or the cost of the campaign has gone above £200. 

You can read more about And/Or conditions in our blog post.

Whatever you go for, the choice is all yours!  

5. Pause Advert – High CPA (Google, Microsoft & Facebook ads)

From the same playbook as above, though this is all about managing your CPA.

Why should you implement this? 

This is a great rule to put in place to make sure you’re not overpaying for conversions, because with this rule, the conversions may be coming in but if they’re coming at a cost to your business, they’re obviously not worth it.

And instead of trawling through the data every hour of the day to find these unhelpful ads, you can just run this rule and it’ll do all the hard work for you checking the status every 30 minutes.

Easy!

How do you implement this?

Very similar to above. Head to the Automation tab, New Automation Rule, Choose Template, scroll down to the Advert section, and click Create Rule under Pause Advert.

You can again customise how you want the rule to look like, for example:

• Pause all active adverts that have a CPA of £100 or more using data from the last week
• Check your keyword’s performance every 30 minutes
• Notify you by email when your ads have been paused

Just like the above, you can also add And/Or conditions if you need to. The choice is all yours!

Start Automating

75% of our users run Adzooma automation rules on a daily basis. They’ve quickly become a part of their PPC routine.

The above rules are great to get started with. They’ll save you so much time and allow you to scale your campaigns faster than ever before.

But these are just five of the 29 templates that we have available and 50% of Adzooma users create their own rules within the platform. Once you get the hang of how Automation works that’ll be you too.

If you’re looking for a bit of inspiration to get you started on something a little more inventive, we wrote a piece in January about 3 creative ways you can implement automation into your strategy, if you’d like to take your campaigns even further.

And if you ever need us any help with your automation, don’t hesitate to ping us a message in the Adzooma Facebook group.

Happy Automating!

Social media should have its own strategy within any business, whether it is to stay away from it or spend a massive budget ensuring that you are all over every channel. This is where the problem comes in; trying to strategize when you may not be sure where and when you need to be in this realm.

As you can see from the diagram below social media marketing should become the focus for the future success of a company. Once trained on how to make maximum use of all of the platforms available online, employees will become an even more valuable business asset as it will increase their performance and productivity.

This is why social media training should be seriously considered by all companies for them to have the most informed staff possible. 

As the diagram illustrates social media should play an integral part throughout your business development processes, through planning, building the foundations and delivery of your messages.

Check out Astute Media on Adzooma Marketplace

Why you should seriously consider social media training

If you are considering Social Media seriously, there are two approaches. One approach is to engage with a digital marketing agency, who immediately provides you with the required skills on tap. The second approach if your budget doesn’t stretch to that is to… 

TRAIN! Not the passenger type, but the learning type.

There are a number of reasons why marketing and communications training makes sense in these current times…

1. Staff development

Maybe you are working towards an ‘Investor In People’ status or pride yourself on the manner in which you help to develop your staff. Either way training them in social media means that you can harness their existing skills with newly found Social Media marketing skills, to truly enhance the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.

2. Staff morale

In these uncertain times, what can be a better indicator of how much you value your staff than resourcing some training for them, showing them that you value them and want them to be a part of things going forward.

3. Flexibility

Most training of this sort can take place online over Zoom or MS Teams. You don’t need to fork out for expensive nights away in hotels.

4. Ownership

If you train your internal teams, moving forward, you will have complete control over your social media channels. There is nothing better than motivated, loyal staff, who know the culture and values of your brand. So when it comes to representing your business in the online environment your branding is consistent and correct.

5. Engaging mindset

Rather than just throwing things at your customers and expecting things to stick, trained social media managers will engage with the target audience and listen to what they have to say. This could provide invaluable feedback about any products and services, ultimately helping to shape the future of the business.

6. Ongoing support

Any decent training providers will not just take you through the theories and best practices, but they will also help you in the long run. They will be there to answer questions and engage with you. Show you how to get the most of your social channels. At Astute, in all that we do, our first aim is gain an understanding of your business and what is important to you. This ensures a truly targeted training session maximising your chances of success.

7. Social media training online

In these current challenging times is it also worth noting those facilitators that can provide online training sessions so that you do not have to worry about social distancing in a training room. If you can do it from the comfort of your own home, even better!

So what can you do now?

Review what you have now! This means looking at what you are doing on social and what resource you have. Who in the team shows an interest in social media, who keeps pestering you that you should be on it? 

Look at doing a social media audit and understand where you are. Does your website design reflect your branding and the way you will be positioning your business on the social media platforms. 

You then need to put someone in the driving seat. Talk with them about where they feel their strengths are in terms of social media. That way you can identify weaknesses and where training will be helpful. For example:

• Do they know how to write an outline social media strategy?
• Do they know how to compose a content calendar?
• Do they know what KPIs to set?
• Do they know how to make sure all of the above is in line with business goals?

If you need help with anything to do with social media or digital marketing in general, then Astute Media Ltd can also help you there. We have been in business for over 30 years and we have very experienced social media team you can talk to. 

Simply talking it through with others can often help to make things clearer! When you have identified what your staff need to improve their skills, check out the training courses available at Astute Media and discover how we can help you to help yourself.

They are all half-day interactive courses with a maximum of six delegates per course. As you will see we have courses that will improve their knowledge and expertise, whatever their current social media abilities. To book courses to learn more about our services, contact Bob Mountford.

But those statistics demonstrate performance if you look at the right ones. Likes, shares, and page views aren’t the metrics you’re looking for (at least in isolation). In our guide, we’ll look at 11 social metrics to track in 2021 and why they’re better than vanity metrics.

Why are social media metrics important?

Social media metrics indicate what works and what doesn’t when it comes to your social media campaign. You need to be posting content that is valuable and relevant to your customers to navigate to your website and engage with your page on a regular basis.

Whether you’re using organic or paid social, there’s data to analyse and if paid social is part of your marketing strategy, that includes metrics like ROI (return on investment), CPL (cost per lead) and CPA (cost per acquisition). After all, you need to know how effective your budget spending is.

If you aren’t tracking metrics related to these actions, you’re not going to know which posts are performing better than others.

What’s the problem with vanity metrics?

A vanity metric is something that looks good, and in turn, makes you feel good, but does not give you any real information about how your business is performing. Vanity metrics aren’t suitable for evidence of necessary improvements. These include:

• Followers
• Pageviews
• Likes/faves
• Retweets
• Total downloads

There’s nothing inherently wrong with vanity metrics but you shouldn’t make wholesale changes to a strategy based on, say, a change in follower count or retweets without looking at the underlying metrics. Vanity metrics are often the result of more important metrics in the background.

Metrics you need to track

With that in mind, here is our list of metrics you should be tracking.

Engagement

Engagement shows how substantive a social media following is, rather than looking at follower counts. Since engagement is a broad metric to follow, there are smaller metrics you can analyse such as:

• Amplification rate – the average number of shares per post
• Applause rate – the average number of approving actions your post receives in a given period (likes, thumbs-ups, faves, et al.)
• Conversation rate – the number of conversations per post, whether they’re comments or replies (depending on the platform)
• Engagement rate – the average number of engagement actions per post (a broader version of the applause rate as it also includes disapproving actions like angry faces on Facebook)

By looking at these specific metrics, you can see how active your followers are. You might find that a smaller follower base has more engagement than a larger one and that would be a testament to your content.

Reach

Your post reach tells you how many people have seen a post since you originally posted it. Since the timing and the content impact your reach, it is an actionable metric to follow. It will help you to understand when your audience is online and figure out what your audience finds valuable.

Here are some of the more specific reach metrics:

• Audience growth rate – the number of new audience members divided by the total audience members
• CPM – Cost per thousand ad impressions, used in paid social (Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Etsy Ads)
• Post Reach – the number of people who have seen a post

As well as your post reach, there is your potential reach. This measures the number of people that could see your post during a reporting period. Understanding this is important because you always need to be trying to get a broader audience. Knowing your potential reach will allow you to look at your progress and figure out how far you’ve come, what is working, and what needs changing.

For example, if a follower shared your post, 2-5% of their followers would factor into your potential reach. You can track this by using a brand monitoring tool which will show you the number of brand mentions.

Conversions

Conversion metrics will show you how effective your social engagement is for your marketing campaign. Your conversion rate is the first metric you need to analyse. The higher your conversion rate, the more valuable your content is to your audience.

In order to measure conversions, you need to use conversion tracking which comes in the form of a Facebook pixel for Facebook. Read our article on Facebook pixels to find out more.

Then you’ve got what is called the click-through rate (CTR), which is how often people are clicking on the call-to-action (CTA). CTR is specifically related to the link that brings the audience to a landing page and is not to be confused with other engagement such as likes or comments.

It’s easy to track, and when done accurately, will show you how your offer is doing with the target audience. So, to track you need to divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions (and multiply by 100 for the percentage).

You’ve also got cost-per-click (CPC) which is how much you pay for ad clicks on your sponsored social media post. Focus on your CPC as it will help you to figure out if your investment is smart or if you are wasting money on something that isn’t working. The only way to track this is through your platform’s ad manager. 

Finally, you need to be looking at your bounce rate, the number of people who click on the link in a post, to then leave your website quickly without taking any kind of action. If your social media campaigns are meeting the right audience, then your bounce rate will be lower for social media than it will for other sources as it will be driving higher levels of high-quality traffic to your site. If you want to track this, you’ve got to set up Google Analytics, head to the acquisition tab, go to all traffic for channels, and then click on bounce rate.

Influence

You want to know who is talking about your brand, what they are saying, and how much of an impact they are having. Several tools measure this, but the common takeaway is that audience size does not directly relate to influence. The fact that someone has a lot of followers or friends doesn’t mean that they are having any impact or making referrals.

Past actions can help to estimate how influential someone will be in the future. Tools like BuzzSumo can find content ideas and identify influencers. Then, you can use this information to figure out whom you should reach out to when you are starting a new campaign.

Summary

In summary, you need to be tracking all of these social media metrics that we have mentioned if you want to manage your social media campaign effectively. Every single metric will help contribute to the overall effectiveness of the campaign. It will give you the data you need to change things when they aren’t working as well as showing you what is going well and allowing you to increase the positive side. By tracking and measuring each of these metrics, you are giving your business the opportunity to succeed with customers on social media when you launch a new campaign.

Also, beware of vanity metrics because even though they feel good, they are doing more harm than you know to the overall health of your business.