Here’s a situation that many of you freelancers, and up and coming digital marketing agencies have been in before…
You’re on a call with a prospective client, pitching them on Facebook Ad Management services and they ask you:
“How can you improve on what we’re already doing?”
or
“What is your strategy for increasing efficiency and/or scale on campaigns?”
After years of managing Facebook campaigns, and after talking to many prospective clients, I’ve found one thing that holds true across almost every ad account I’ve audited:
There is always opportunity for improvement and you can almost always find, and correct, inefficiency.
This simple truth is why my Facebook ads audits always begin with a deep dive into their accounts, looking through their previous ad spend to learn 3 things:
1) Which campaigns were amazing?
2) Which campaigns were terrible?
3) What can we learn from the campaigns that went well, that the client believed did poorly?
This process used to require using Excel, learning how to pull pivot tables, and then figuring out a way to present that data to your prospective clients in a way they can digest.
Luckily, with the FunnelDash Facebook Audience Audit Dashboard this process is a lot more streamlined.
After you log into FunnelDash and connect your prospect’s Facebook ad account, you’ll get some interesting information…
At the top of the Dashboard you’ll see five tabs, Age & Gender, Device, Hour of the Day, and “Country.
Each of these tabs will give you detailed stats on how specific ages or genders performed for specific campaign objectives, campaigns and adsets.
When you’re auditing a client’s account, it’s important to keep in mind some common mistakes advertisers make…
Mistake #1: Spending on Traffic Objective or Post Engagement Objective for Cold Traffic Exclusively
This is one you see semi-regularly from advertisers with an affiliate background or who used to run Facebook ads a long time ago, but haven’t done much recently.
Except for rare instances, advertisers who want conversions will find that the conversion objective will perform the best.
Some newbie advertisers upload campaigns for “traffic”. Some find some success with boosted posts targeting their fans, and then decide to target a cold audience with their boosted posts “post engagement objective.”
To find out if your client prospect has made this mistake, filter by objective on any of the tabs and take note of the spend and conversions behind each objective.
If you do find this mistake, make sure to educate your client on the differences between campaign objectives and how their results can and should improve by using the “conversions” objective for performance.
Mistake #2: Advertiser Thinks They Know Their Ideal Audience, but the Age & Gender Breakdown Tab Tells a Different Story
If you’ve talked to prospective clients who run small to medium-sized businesses before, you may have heard them say things like:
“My perfect customer is a 25-35-year-old woman who is an (insert profession or occupation here) and makes $XXX per year…”
With our Audience Audit Dashboard, you can verify this information easily on the Age & Gender tab, and show your client hard numbers on the demographic that’s actually best for them.
This is where those “hidden audience segments” come in. You may find upon further inspection, that some of the audiences your prospect has tested that look like they perform poorly on the surface. However, they actually had specific ages and genders that made money!
You can point this out to your client, and educate them on how limiting or removing spend entirely on low performing demographics can increase their results. You may also be able to show them how they can increase their scale by targeting a demographic they had previously thought didn’t buy or convert…
Mistake #3: Advertiser claims, “Mobile Just Doesn’t Perform Well for Us”, but the Device Breakdown Says It Does
Here’s a fact, 80% of all Facebook traffic is mobile. So, when a prospect says, “Mobile doesn’t perform well for us”, they are most likely not looking hard enough.
In situations like this, first look at the placement stats in the Audience Audit Dashboard and find the key metrics for mobile placement.
If, as your prospect says, Mobile doesn’t seem to be performing well, then you need to go to the device tab and find their key metrics for each type of mobile device, tablets, iPhones, and Android smartphones.
In most cases, you’ll find that one type of device is actually hitting your prospect’s ROAS goal or CPA goal. In the rare case that no mobile devices are converting, then it is most likely an issue with how their landing pages render on mobile.
In extremely rare cases, you may be talking to a prospect with an extremely niche audience, or an audience that skews older.
Assuming you do find that a particular device performs well for your client, you can advise them to limit mobile targeting to that specific device moving forward. In addition, you can advise them to test a lookalike audience of leads, site visitors and/or buyers from those devices to ensure they’re able to reach more of the “right” mobile users.
Mistake #4: Your Customers Live Here…
For higher spending client prospects, and business owners who sell around the world, you’ll want to audit their spend by location.
Again, many advertisers who sell around the world will have made an initial assumption about sales by country, and will have grouped many locations together in a single adset.
With the Facebook Audience Audit’s Country breakdown, you can tell your prospect exactly where their customers live and how to reach more of them.
To reach more potential customers in key countries, I like to do two things.
First, I group converting, second tier countries into one adset together, and I include every version of every 1% lookalike I’m targeting for the United States. With Facebook’s “Expand Across Borders” update in September, you can now reach similar audiences to your uploaded list in any country around the world, regardless of where the people on your list are actually from.
Second, I like to find new interests for my second-tier countries by using Audience Insights. Open Audience Insights, change the location to your new countries, change the age and gender to what you found brought you the best return on the Age & Gender tab of the Audience Audit dashboard, and type in your best performing interests that you’ve previously tested.
After this is done, you can go to the “Page Likes” tab, and voila, you now have a list of interests to show your prospective client, which should allow them to reach more customers in those new key locations.
Mistake #5: Ads During Specific Hours Make More Money
Using our Hour of the Day tab, you can tell your prospective clients, exactly how much money they’re making when they run ads at specific hours of the day. You can also show them which times of day don’t make anything.
Filter for conversion based campaigns and look at the historic best performing hours of the day. Tell your prospective clients about lifetime budgets and dayparting. Show them how they can limit their spend to only hours that convert…and make more money. Fancy that!
Keep these 5 common mistakes in mind as you’re auditing prospective clients’ accounts and you’ll get a much higher conversion rate for yourself when it’s time for them to sign a retainer contract.
Want to Learn More About Doing Facebook Ads Audits for Your Prospective Clients?
Find out how offering free Facebook ad audits can help you convert leads into clients that pay you $2,000 – $5,000 a month to run their ad campaigns. Join us for our online training: 4 Brutal Mistakes that Marketing Agencies Make & How to Avoid Them.
This training will walk you through these 4 common mistakes, as well as show you how to make simple changes so you can ensure you’re not making them anymore. Plus, you’ll see how to build a solid agency funnel that brings in quality leads for those Facebook ad audits.
Click on the button below to save your seat.
What processes do you use in your current audits? Tell us about them in the comments below.
