Clever Facebook Ads optimization hacks that knockout your competitors

A person is holding a tablet with a clock out of it. The blue colored background symbolizes the execution and optimization processes.

Do you know the real significance of Facebook Ads optimization

Picture this:

It is an ordinary day – quite like all the other days of your life. Nothing looks different. 

You push yourself out of bed in the most toneless way you can, just for the sake of a routine. That’s it!

Coffee had lost its charm, aroma, and meaning to you long ago. You gulp or chug it as if it’s the worst thing you are doing to your time. But, you do it anyway, just to follow a routine. 

You sit up on a chair in the lounge and recollect it still needs to be mended or replaced – like your routine. You carry on anyway, unlocking your phone. That’s the part of the routine too.

Of the many notifications flashing on the screen, crying for your attention, this notification meets your eyes.

*Your Facebook ads are scheduled or running*. 

Nothing out of the ordinary yet, you decide to look into the ads anyway.

With no idea of what’s following next, what appears on the screen next dazzles you. 

Results! Exceptionally unbelievable ones! Much like what you have always dreamed of. Much better than the results of a whole month combined! 

“But, in such a short period?” you still can’t believe your eyes. 

Brilliant. Isn’t it?

But what happens next is overwhelming!

Now watch this spell of happiness spread throughout your day. Watch it positively impact your whole lifeless routine and change it for good.

Sounds good. Right? 

“Too good to be true,” you say.

Interestingly, this could be your day; every other day! 

Your morning ritual. 

Your daily routine!

Wait, did it all begin with good results? Let’s make it that way!

We see these rags to riches stories every day!

All it takes is learning to do your ads the way not many others bother following. 

So, to change your mornings and life for good, we got you a list of Facebook ads optimization hacks that can make each of your days happiest.

Here are things you need to master to stay sane:

General Facebook Ads Optimization hacks you should already know.

Now, here’s the deal. 

Each business is as different as chalk as cheese.

So, while some of the rules, tips, and hacks apply to one business, they might not be equally effective on the others.

However, these are the everyday hacks that are close to universal. Rest assured, most of them would be as effective for your business, as they’re for another business. 

A Facebook business page opened on a laptop on a woman's lap.

  • Attract targets with a great offer
  • Optimize your copy to attract and persuade:
    • Use emojis and exclamation marks in your ad copy to draw more eyeballs (and then increase click-through with the quality of your copy and the power of the offer).
    • Insert social proof with reviews & testimonials in pictures, videos, or even in the copy.
    • Strategically insert power words.
    • Test out short and long headlines and ad copy
  • Use numbers in your ads, especially in headlines and descriptions. For instance:
    • 100000 followers, and counting.
    • Be 1 of the 100 to win the book FOR FREE.
    • New arrivals: 7 new designs.
  • Use the fear of missing out in your favor. For example:
    • Only 5 hours to go…
    • While the offer lasts…
    • The offer applies to the 1st 30 purchases!
  • Vigorously A/B test creatives, audiences, placements, or other factors to earn the best, winning elements.
  • Use highly targeted ads for a targeted segment.
    • For instance, if a big chunk of your target audience has a big factor in common – a city they belong to, a famous player they love, a big name they follow, etc., create ads incorporating that factor in the ads directed to that segment. This would catch their attention far better. 
  • Re-market for tremendous success.

Sky’s the limit.

But you can find these and many other hacks in every other source on the internet. 

Let’s turn our heads to what you might not find readily online.

Facebook Ads Optimization Hacks that you probably didn’t know.

Our list comprises great hacks many of you might not be aware of, with a description of why this is a good idea to go with. 

Here’s the best part:

Most of these hacks are coming from the legendary bag of trips and tricks of Canz Marketing

Tried, tested, and recommended!

So, doubts ruled out!

So, let’s get straight down to the list now!

1- Use Facebook Ads Library to learn the industry trends or spy on the competitors.

Facebook Ads Library is a great tool to examine the ads of your competitors that are currently running. With just a few filters, you can hit on a jackpot of data.  

For instance, here’s just a glimpse of the data you can find with the ads library. All we wrote was to write McDonald’s and pick a few filters. 

A screenshot of the ads library with the information on McDonald's.

While you can not analyze the performance of the ads, you sure do learn loads about the industry trends. It’s a great way to explore the creatives (especially the headlines & descriptions) and the offers of your competitors.

2- Forget the marketing funnel. Skip to flywheel!

While systematically bringing the cold audience down to the highest heat level sounds logical, it is too remote to think about now.

Attracting, engaging, delighting, and finally converting a cold audience is how it has always worked for all those senior marketers. It did because they made their worlds (and banks) out of the marketing funnel. 

But, among the other flaws our traditional marketing system has, the once converted audience is not usually bothered much again. 

While the old remains gold, gold might not always be in high demand. 

Here’s the thing about the flywheel.

It revolves around the customers and their experiences, with the sole objective of delighting them. Delight one customer and see ten more customers walk in with him as he becomes your repeat customer and a free brand ambassador.

Interestingly, now a growth hack (though flywheel has been in action since 2018), it would soon be a marketing norm. The new normal!

So, make your customers the center of your ad’s attention and keep delighting them at your best. Reap the benefits of such ads for a long time down the road.

Bonus hack #1: 

Instead of selling to your hot audience only, try delighting and converting a potential at whatever stage he/she is at. You’d be amazed to see as many conversions from the cold audience as from the hot ones.

This is the new alternative to the success of the marketers today. Interestingly, it appears to be a good match for the generation with short time & attention span but a lot to do.

3- Pick the right conversion type to change the scores

You might have felt tempted to draw more eyes to your ads at a low expense – with the traffic and engagement ads. It might have sometimes worked as well. 

But understand the system behind the objectives, and you might want to reverse what you have done so far.

Facebook has a plethora of information on each one of us – the users. That doesn’t come off as News. Because it isn’t! 

Here comes the News!

Facebook knows exactly which one of us is more into clicking the ads (but not really into buying) and who is more prone to buy if he sees a product ad. They can differentiate the ones inclined to watch videos and those who’d otherwise engage more with the content (like, share, comment, etc.).

So, for a campaign with the sales objective, avoid instructing Facebook to run it to the ones more inclined to click the ads or comment – at the most. Avoid picking traffic or engagement objectives when what you want is more sales.

Your ads might be expensive, but can you ignore all those confirmed (well, close enough) hits?

4- Promise yourself better results with a speed-budget-start

Admit it or not, if you have run Facebook ads ever, you can’t resist the temptation of optimizing the ads for better results as your ads start delivering.

We have all made that mistake at some point in time (because it appeared satisfying and well, the wisest thing to do at that time).

When you run Facebook ads, give them a bare minimum of a week to learn, adjust, and give you the best they can, before you intervene to optimize their performance.

This works like a charm, EVERY.SINGLE.TIME.

But, deep down inside every marketer, that naive marketer is still alive who is curious and restless for results. Interestingly, there’s a hack for that naive marketer or busy or pressed-for-time marketers out there.

Give your Facebook ads campaign more than the designated budget for a short time. The more the budget, the lesser the time needed to learn and adapt. The idea is to let it complete the same learning and adapt in less time with more budget at its disposal. 

Once your data has given Facebook a good starting point, shift back to your regular, planned daily/lifetime budget. 

What next?

Sit back, relax, and watch your Facebook ads deliver better than your average ads (that you do the usual way).

Bonus Hack # 2:

 After each tweak, give Facebook at least 24-48 hours to learn and adjust – thus fetch you the best it could.

5- Hit the right audience the right way

The ways to discover new grounds (and audiences) through Facebook are limitless. Interestingly, you can’t proclaim one of them right and the other one wrong. 

You probably know how to create the saved, custom, and lookalike audiences. But did you know all of these hacks with the said audiences?

I- Use the audience insights tool for the on-point audience research & targeting.

Using Facebook for a while now, there is a good chance that you are aware of the audience insights tool.

But have you considered using it Miles Beckler’s way yet? 

All it takes is combining a bit of general audience research with the affinity of different interests in the audience insights tool in the business manager. While it is quite an old practice, the results are still no less than mind-blowing.

II- Use a competitor’s name to dig into its audiences

As simple as it sounds, a well-known competitor’s name in the ads targeting section can take you a long way. 

Facebook would suggest that competitor’s audience’s demographics, interests, behaviors, and other useful targeting options. 

What’s the catch, though?

The technique might not work well with small businesses or those whose competitors are not well established. 

Facebook Ads search bar in the browsing section of the Ads creation window

III- Use your competitor’s followers to discover new grounds

But if you are a small business, it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve thriving well with Facebook ads. 

Here’s a simple but useful process to find new audiences using your top competitors’ Facebook pages.

1- Create a list of your top competitors.

2- Based on your objectives, pick the audience to analyze. For instance:

  • If you want to increase your reach and brand awareness, look into all the followers of the competitors.
  • If new customers are what interest you, dig into the customers of your competitors. In this case, you’d have to rely on the reviews.

3- Pick a person and stalk. Look into the books he/she reads, the shopping areas and eateries he goes to, the movies he watches. In short, find all the interests.

Sounds creepily crazy, right? But it pays off big time in the end.

4- Repeat the same process for a valid number of audiences.

5- Make a list of the most common interests and BINGO. 

You have just hit the jackpot. Now, use these interests in your new Facebook ads campaigns and enjoy what you earned.

Bonus hack # 3: 

Our experts suggest using three or more lookalikes in a single ad set in a campaign that they call Super Lookalikes

The idea is to push Facebook’s learning process and speed it up.

Multiple pairs of shoes in different sizes, placed in parallel.

While still in the testing phase, this idea of super lookalikes has worked really well for all our client accounts this far.

Bonus hack # 4: 

Use video ads more than the image ads – no matter what your conversion objective is.

Why?

Video ads double for new audience attractors for the future, along with converting more audiences in the current campaigns.

6- Let Facebook bid for you

While the beginners often find it intimidating (rather smart) to set their manual bidding, it might not always be a good idea for you.

Here’s the thing: 

Facebook makes its fair share of earnings from us marketers and advertisers. There’s no way Facebook would want us to run away, taking the money that could have been theirs, in our pockets. The more delighted we are, the longer we’d stay. 

So, the platform would and does make every attempt to make the advertising process, fair, transparent as well as profitable for us. All the more reason, their bidding algorithms are spot on.

So we can count on them and earn our own share of profits well, relying on automatic bidding type in the beginning. 

Once we have learned the ins and outs of advertising and know the right bid cap to put on our ads, AdEspresso has a great experiment proving how we’d still be taken good care of.

Bonus hack # 5:

For the same set of reasons, you can count on the auto placements feature of the Facebook ads to fetch you the best results.

7- Use GIF Ads for, well, you know what!

Stats speak so high of Facebook GIF ads in terms of the click-through and the conversion rates. 

The best part?

The creation process involves no rocket science (or any science for that matter)!

Here’s a detailed guide on creating your GIF ads from scratch.

So why not try them yourself and see if they are a good fit for your business?

8- Use the inspect tool before your competitors

Facebook inspect tool is a relatively new addition to your way of optimizing performance. With the help of this tool in your ads manager, get better control of your Facebook ads campaigns.

How? What exactly does it do?

It gives you a closer, amplified, better vision.

A magnifying glass giving an amplified view of a flower.

It helps you learn your ads (and the loopholes) better, and make informed decisions reflected in your results, and the ad spent: The areas you can analyze or mend with the inspect tool for now include:

  • Bid strategy
  • Auctions competitions
  • Audience saturation
  • Edit history

Dig into the topic further in Jon Loomer’s stellar guide.

9- Rotate the ads to dodge the Ad fatigue

If monotony reaps anything, it’s “fighting off productivity,” not improving it. This fits perfectly well in the Facebook ads scenario.

And how’s that?

Put yourself in the shoes of your prospects. Now imagine seeing THE SAME AD, many times a day – every single day of the week. 

How do you feel? What do you do? 

Enough of those ads? Some of your prospects might go the extra mile to block your ads out to get rid of them altogether.

So, what happened to the power of repetitive marketing?

It is still equally relevant and effective. But it needs to be executed strategically. 

And the best strategy we’d recommend is:

Create multiple ads with the same message and direct them to the same audience. However, run each one at different times or on different days.

Now, you’d be running the same message to them, repetitively. But no same ad would be running all the time. Therefore, no ad fatigue and no repelling the audience with the same ad.

Wrap up

One thing to remember: your business is different!

This is only how you’d remember not to be a copycat but work up your way to the top.

However, easier said than done! You don’t have to deal with it all alone.

So, we have created a list of typical Facebook advertising and optimization hacks to put you in the saddle. They work effectively for any kind of business, and there’s no denying the fact.

But more importantly, we carved a bigger list of the Fb advertising and optimization hacks not many people out there know or practice. 

So, here’s your chance to shine.

Test and learn each one and see what suits your business best. Lift your Facebook conversions and surpass your Facebook ROAS goals. Just like that!

Are you already on your way to try these hacks? Which one would you want to try out first?

Let us know in the comments 🙂

But if you feel stuck anywhere, feel free to hit us up. See some other surprises our experts might have held in their legendary bag of trips and trips.

Do you need Facebook advertising services? Facebook Ads management keeping you awake through the nights?

Guess what? 

Our Rapid-Fire Testing has delivered as much as 39X + ROAS for one of our clients. Let’s discuss how our expertise shapes into your future – a better future!

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