Pro Tip: Leaning into Facebook’s automation for the 2019 holiday season

After much bluster and a snowy Halloween (for some of us, at least!) Holiday 2019 is here, and I’m sure that many of you are working through strategies to maximize your campaign performance while also maintaining your sanity. To that end, I’d like to remind you of a few features available within Facebook Ads Manager: Dynamic Creative Optimization, Campaign Budget Optimization and Automated Rules.

Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) is part of Facebook’s “Power 5,” which collectively are optimization features that allow advertisers to scale growth efficiently. Implementing DCO during this busy season means that you can continue to test into messaging and creative concepts while ensuring stable performance by keeping your hero creatives/messaging enabled. If you would like to test into DCO right now, a few things that you can think about to develop your creative tests are:

• What type of promo messaging do my customers like to see? Percentage discounts? Monetary discounts?
• Does holiday-specific creative convert my customers best? How does that stack up compared to non-holiday creative this time of the year?

Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) is also a “Power 5” optimization feature, which allows you to allocate budget to top-performing ad sets within your campaign dynamically. While a controversial feature (some advertisers have reported drops in conversion volume and increased costs after implementing CBO), I’ve found that opting into this optimization feature can deliver some pretty fantastic results for clients. The key when turning the key on CBO is to:

• Keep your daily budget high enough so that your ad sets can get out of the learning phase within the seven-day optimization window
• Group “like” audiences together – this means keeping lookalikes within one campaign, interests within another campaign, etc.

Automated Rules have been available within the platform for some time, but I’m still surprised by the relatively few advertisers who use this tool regularly. As a refresher, automated rules can “automatically check your campaigns, ad sets and ads, and then update or notify you of any changes. In addition to these automatic checks and notifications, the tool will also take the necessary actions for you.”

As a hand’s on advertiser, this means that you can create a series of rules to ensure that when you’re not online, your campaigns are still at optimum performance and delivering the right message to the right user. Ways that you can implement these rules include:

• Enabling and pausing time-sensitive promotions 
• Increasing/decreasing budgets based on ROAS/CTR/CPA
• Pausing ads based on performance
• Adjust audience bids during high-demand times

In short, embracing automation will be key to maximizing Q4 performance, which will give you more time for both 2020 strategic planning, and eggnog with the family by the fire. Happy Holidays!

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Zenia Johnson

Zenia is an account lead for 3Q Digital, where she develops strategy and manages paid media for clients in a wide range of verticals. While she is knowledgeable in all aspects of digital marketing, her passion is in paid social marketing. She has contributed to Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and Marin, and has spoken at Janes of Digital, SMX Advanced and SMX East.