Search arbitrage media buyers waste thousands of dollars a month testing different strategies on Meta Ads before finding success. But what if there was a way to cut your losses, boost your profits, and streamline your workflow? These 5 automatic optimization rules are the unfair advantage you’ve been missing. Before you begin! Please note that thresholds and time zones defined in the following rules are for reference purposes only! It is highly recommended to adjust performance thresholds to your actual thresholds, as well as adjust the time zone settings to your ad account reporting time zone or another time zone that fits your needs. Cut Non-Promising Campaigns Part of your day-to-day process is that of regularly launching new campaigns daily. This process helps you find new winning campaigns, but at the same time increases your ad spend and the possibility of generating bigger losses from testing. This optimization rule will help you minimize your ad spend waste by automatically turning off non-promising campaigns on time. Rule explanation: The rule checks if a campaign has been running for more than 4 days and if it has generated less than 40 conversions. It also checks the ROI between the last 2 and 4 days, and for yesterday if it is worse than negative -30%. Additionally, the rule targets the hour of day at which the actions are executed. Here we select the ad account time zone and combine it with the execution frequency of every 1 hour. The goal of this rule is to pause newly launched campaigns if after 4 days of running the campaign hasn’t reached the break-even zone.   Detect Performance Dips The purpose of this rule is to detect negative performance changes in a good campaign and prevent losses before it wastes any profits generated so far. It aims to identify campaigns that have been performing well but have recently experienced significant performance decreases. Rule explanation: The rule checks if the tracker ROI between the last 4 to 2 days has been greater than 10% and if the ROI for yesterday has been less than negative -10%. In addition, it checks if the CPA has a 50% increase compared to the CPA between the last 6 and 2 days. It executes the next day after the previous day’s revenue has been finalized by using the Hour of Day condition in combination with the execution frequency of every 1 Hour.   Clone Winning Ad Sets The purpose of this rule is to help you scale your Meta campaigns horizontally by detecting and cloning winning ad sets 2 times each 3 times a week. Rule explanation: The rule evaluates the performance of your Meta campaign ad sets over two-time intervals: the last 6 to 3 days and the last 2 to 1 days. If the performance is greater than 15% in both intervals, the rule initiates a cloning action. Additionally, the rule incorporates an Hour of Day condition, which restricts the cloning to occur only three times a week, specifically at 1 am in the ad account’s time zone. This condition is implemented by combining it with an execution frequency of every 1 hour.   Scale Winning Ad Sets The purpose of this rule is to help you automatically scale the budget of your winning ad sets or campaigns by automatically increasing the ad set or campaign budget by a specific % of the current budget. Rule explanation: The rule checks if your ad set or campaign has more than 50 conversions in the last 7 days (excluding today). Then it checks if the ROI of your campaign or ad set between the last 6 to 3 days and 2 to 1 days is greater than 20%. By using an Hour of Day condition in combination with the execution frequency of 1 hour it makes sure to update the budget only 3 times a week at 1 am your specified time zone (ad account time zone). Once all these conditions are true, it increases the budget by 40% of the current budget by respecting the minimum and maximum budget limits.   Low-Performance Alerts The purpose of this is pretty straightforward. What it does is alert you if any of your Meta campaigns or ad sets are running on a negative ROI for more than 4 days. Rule explanation: The rule checks if your campaign or ad set has less than 30 conversions over the last 5 days. It also checks if the ROI between the last 4 to 3 days, 3 to 2, and 2 to 1 days is worse than negative -10%. It executes every 2 hours and sends an alert via email, slack, or telegram with the names of your Meta campaigns or ad sets that meet the rule conditions. No optimization action is executed.   Running search arbitrage campaigns shouldn’t be a struggle. These simple-to-implement rules put campaign optimization on autopilot, giving you the freedom to scale your winners and ditch the losers without breaking a sweat. It’s time to work smarter, not harder, on your Meta Ads.  

Ever get that sinking feeling that your Meta campaigns are a black hole for your budget? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. In fact, Meta Ads (aka. Facebook Ads) has changed a lot over the past few years and media buyers like you and me have to constantly change the way we buy traffic to get the desired results. Let’s go over a quick checklist of things you need to keep present before launching your next Meta campaigns in 2024. Conversion API Tracking and Attribution As new regulations are being constantly added to the online advertising industry, so are the tracking limitations too. Since Apple’s IOS 14 privacy move, we saw that relying on website pixels is not sustainable anymore. In fact, new privacy changes have been introduced by major browsers like Firefox and Chrome by putting an end to 3rd party cookies. What this means is that you need to move from relying on website pixels to Conversion API solutions. By making this move, you will be able to accurately track your Meta campaigns performance and have a clear understanding of where results are coming from, while still being able to feed Meta Ads with the right conversion signals and user information it uses to optimize your campaigns. If you don’t have any idea where to get started with Conversion API, I would recommend checking out ClickFlare.io. It offers a pretty solid conversion API solution for Meta and the team behind it is always ready to help if you need a hand with the setup.   Meta Ads Audience Targeting Back in the days, it was pretty easy to deal with Facebook Ads (now Meta Ads). All you had to do was combine the right targeting options with the right ads to build up your optimal audience and boom, you had a decent campaign running. Now with all the privacy changes imposed by government regulations, you’d rather go for broad targeting instead of picking specific audience interest. To put it simple, adding interest targeting to your ad sets will likely increase your CPMs without providing any additional benefits in terms of results. So unless you are promoting a niche product or service, I would highly recommend going broad.   Meta Ads Creative Testing Meta Ads (aka. Facebook Ads) continues to be a creative centric platform. Before anything else, Meta focuses on creative engagement – after all people hang on Facebook and instagram to get entertained or be informed. So one of the most important things for a creative is to drive a healthy amount of engagement. Think of likes, positive comments, and clicks. If you are planning to test image ads, it is very important to test angles and design styles separately. In case you are into video ads, that applies there too. Whether you are doing stock image and footage animations with voiceovers or UGC-style ads, make sure to separate the angles, actors, and video styles accordingly. Pro tip: If you’re going to use UGC video ads, make sure your first couple of seconds have a strong thumb-stopping hook. Thought-provoking or controversial statements help a lot with that.   Meta Ads Budget Allocation Still to this day, Meta Ads is looking for at least 50 conversions in 7 days for your campaign (or ad set) before it exits the learning phase. So allocating the budget wisely is crucial for your campaigns or ad sets. Instead of allocating random budgets from what you feel right to test waters, do some basic calculations and allocate the right budget amount for your goal CPA. Example – You want to collect auto insurance leads at $20 per lead. Min Daily Leads: 50 Convs ÷ 7 Days = Around 7 leads/day Daily Budget: 7 leads x $20 = $140 /day You can always test the waters with smaller budgets, but the chances of you getting out of the learning phase on time and being able to scale your campaigns fast enough are pretty low.   Funnel Optimization for Meta Ads The best tool you can use to pitch your products and services after the prospect has clicked on your ads is your landing page. There is where you can further capture your prospects’ attention using the power of story-telling or make them engage in a smooth and fun to interact questionnaire. Adding landing pages to your funnels gives you the ability to further refine your angles and optimize your funnels by A/B testing different angles or landing page styles to see what resonates best with your audience. Pro tip: Make sure to A/B test one element of your landing page at a time as well as isolate landing page testing from creative testing. Testing multiple creative and landing page elements all at once often leads to unreliable results. Check out Landerlab.io if you’re getting started with landing pages, or looking to upgrade your current landing page solution. It is packed with hundreds of ready-to-use landing page templates you can easily customize through its fully-fledged visual builder, run A/B test experiments, as well as collect and access lead information without having to deal with 3rd party tools.   Meta Ads Campaign Optimization and Automation There are two types of Meta media buyers. Those who launch and manage a handful of campaigns on a monthly basis, and there are those who launch tens if not hundreds of campaigns a day and manage hundreds or thousands of campaigns at any point in time. If you belong to those that run a handful of campaigns, you can handle most of your campaign optimization tasks manually on your own. However, if you’re one of those who consistently launches 10s of campaigns every day, and manages hundreds or thousands of campaigns simultaneously, then you need a solid automation solution. By adding an automation solution to your media buying routine you will be able to launch more campaigns while spending less time, detect your campaign performance changes, cut out losers and scale winners without having to waste your days behind your ads manager. TheOptimizer offers you the power to do all of that from a single dashboard. Besides all the automation capabilities, TheOptimizer allows you to bring hundreds of Meta ad accounts in one single dashboard, so no more need to jump from one ad account to another.   In conclusion, Meta campaigns in 2024 require a strategic approach considering conversion API tracking, audience targeting, creative testing, budget allocation, funnel optimization, and campaign optimization and automation. By following this checklist and incorporating the recommended tools, you can effectively handle the ever-changing Meta Ads and achieve successful campaign outcomes. Remember, adaptation and continuous optimization are key to staying ahead in the ever-changing digital advertising environment.   [vc_empty_space height=”15px”]