By Craig Robinson

If you want to maximize the output of an advertising campaign on Facebook you have to fight against the algorithms. In many cases, Facebook optimizes ads for themselves – not for you as an advertiser.

Think about it. What type of ad results in most money for the people behind Facebook?

When you pay per click, Facebook obviously want your ads to get many clicks as fast as possible. The faster you reach the limit of how much you’re willing to spend per day, the sooner your ad is replaced by another one from another advertiser.

Facebook then works towards reaching the limit for that advertiser, then the next one and then the next.

However, while click-through rate is the most important factor for Facebook, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that for you.

As an advertiser, your results are measured at the end of the conversion funnel. A successful marketing campaign means that you’ve sold a lot of products, had a lot of people signing up, received many likes on your fan page or whatever your goal is. The click-through rate is just an – although important – step in the middle of the process.

How Facebook Optimizes Ads for Higher CTR

When you launch an advertising campaign with, say, ten variations of an ad, Facebook will give them an equal amount of impressions to see which ones receive most clicks. Once that is established, only the one or two ads with highest CTR will be shown to Facebook users.

The problem is that this might not be the ad that generates the best result for you. It’s not unusual that an ad with a lower CTR has better conversion percentage.

The solution to this problem is to create campaigns with fewer ads. A lot of advertisers go as low as three or four, and when you know what works, you can publish just one ad per campaign. This makes it impossible for Facebook to optimize your ad for something that doesn’t match your end-goal.

Time Matters to You – Not to Facebook

Facebook doesn’t care when people click on your ads. As long as people click fast enough, they’re happy. This, however, may have an impact on your results depending on what product or service you’re advertising.

If you’ve ever analyzed the results of a Facebook campaign, I bet you’ve seen improved conversion during certain hours of the day or certain days of the week. It just makes sense. It wouldn’t be surprising if advertiser who sells office supply see better conversion rates during office hours and an online pizza-delivery service around dinner time.

For improved conversion you need to put a campaign on hold sometimes. You want to show your ads when there’s a high return on investment.

If you advertise through Facebook’s own interface this has to be done manually, which can be a bit annoying, especially if you have to go up in the middle of the night to start or stop your ads. But if you use a marketing tool connected with Facebook’s API, there’s functionalities that allows you to schedule campaigns so this is done automatically.

Conclusion

Advertising on Facebook can be great for any businesses, whether you’re doing it for raising brand awareness or online sales. It’s a huge platform, and if you put some effort into Facebook ads optimization so that you reach just the right people, there’s a good chance that you’ll see good ROI.

Just remember that your business goals don’t necessarily match Facebook’s. You want good clicks. They want clicks.

Craig Robinson writes for Qwaya.com – Facebook campaign manager tool run through the web browser! Besides writing about social media and trends within social marketing, Craig enjoys retro gaming and paintball.

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