13 Ways to BEAT Your Competitors Facebook Ads

the first way to beat all of your competitors in Facebook ads is by optimizing on a different attribution setting so that while they're wasting money on the wrong ads you're spending money on the proper ads the first thing we're going to do is we want all of our attribution settings for all of our campaigns to be 7-Day click one day view the reason you want this to be a little bit wide here is because you're going to inform the pixel and inform every campaign every adset every ad who your people are and who are more likely to purchase quicker when you're trying to decide where to make changes and this is what the competitors do not do I would guarantee 99% of your competitors are going into their Facebook account they are looking right here and they're looking at everything from a 7-Day click or a 1-day View Window meaning they're just taking their data as they see it right here so if I was this client for example I would be seeing a 3. 82 return on ad spend I'd see a $46 cost for purchase I'd see $69,000 in ad spend and $265,000 in Revenue over the last 30 days and then I would start to make adjustments so one of the adjustments I may make here is I might take this campaign here which has the highest cost per purchase and the lowest return on ad spend and I might say let me reduce the budget to this and push it into somewhere else that's not what you want to do so what you're going to do is go into your attribution settings click compare attribution settings and select 7-Day click and 1day view once you do that select all conversions for how you choose your conversion count and click apply once you do this you're going to see a clear breakout between the conversions that are being counted for a 1-day View and a 7-Day click what we could generally assume is that one day view conversions may have been influenced by a variety of other factors whereas click conversions are very very likely directly attributed to Facebook ads what we want to do is make our decisions only on the 7-Day click so when I actually look at the same exact data on a 7-Day click we actually notice that this bottom campaign here which you can see has the lowest cost per purchase overall but on the 7-Day click has the highest cost per purchase that is a massive swing so what I'm going to actually optimize on is reducing spend in this campaign and pushing that spend into these two campaigns which have very very low cost per purchase and very high return on ad spend when it comes to a 7-Day click now don't worry about that one-day view hurting you that one-day view is literally meant to just inform your pixel more and more the second thing you're going to want to do to optimize better and to outflank all of your competitors on Facebook ads is set your column set so they are flawless you don't want your columns to be a distraction you don't want to look at metric that are going to totally take you off the rails unless you're specifically diving into a deep dive for that metric so I'm going to just show you my column set so you can just copy this metric by Metric to modify your columns you're going to go into your column set click customize columns and then you are going to be able to make selections within here I'm actually going to show you this in the ads manager so you can see all the settings and how they work starting at the top delivery we always want to see whether the campaign the ad set or the ads are active second attribution setting if I saw anything here that was not 7-Day click or one day view I would know in a millisecond that I made a mistake third is Bid strategy this is especially applicable if you're running anything like cost caps bid Caps or using a combination of CBO and you basically just want to make sure you have your bid strategy in front of you at all times so that you don't rely on a naming convention and therefore human error to actually inform you what your bid strategy is the next is budget this is a little annoying at the campaign level because if you're using adset budget it does not bring you the total here you can see things when you're running CBO as your total budget and then ad set budgets will have to go down into the adset level next is amount spent clearly obvious most important metric for you to follow if you want to know how much you're spending on a daily basis then we get into some of our purchase conversion metrics if you do track different things it's okay to add one or two here but generally speaking these are the metrics that are going to guide you most closely to your goals purchases cost per purchase purchase conversion value also known as Revenue purchase row as return on ad spend which is just your Revenue divided by your amount spent and then we get into the secondary metrics I'm going to go through this quick and then actually a few of these metrics are going to be part of the third way that you're going to outflank your competitors the metrics that I like to have in my ad accounts are outbound clickthrough rate which means someone clicked your ad and went to your website that doesn't mean they clicked your ad and went to your Instagram profile or went to your Facebook profile or clicked on one of the comments and went somewhere else a click in Facebook ads is literally any engagement with the ad even a like is considered a click we don't care about that we want people going to our site therefore we use outbound click through rate you could also use Link clickthrough rate it's essentially the same thing CPC we want to make sure we're using our cost per link click and then for CPM it's the most standard metric here which is our cost of advertising cost per 1,000 impressions in this account specifically this is an insanely low CPM at $7 practically 70% cheaper than most of the industry right now next two are Impressions and reach so impressions are number of times our ads were seen reach are the number of unique times that ad was seen so individual people versus total Impressions frequency is one of the most important things that you need to add to your ad account today if you don't add anything else and you just you know have a 100 columns in here please add frequency and make sure it's up so you could see it very early so frequency is the average number of times someone has saw your ad this metric is quote estimated by Facebook but generally speaking it's literally a ratio of reach and Impressions so you can see here reach was 139,000 Impressions were 576,000 that's literally just 576 ided 4. 14 equaling our reach and the last two that I like to add are add to cards and cost per add to card the third thing that none of your competitors are doing right now that you need to be doing on a daily weekly and monthly basis in your Facebook account in order to get better results than them is actually monitoring some of the secondary metrics usually what we see where people are only caring about these Topline metrics and then they're making crazy decisions for spending thousands and thousands of dollars just looking at the Top Line metrics there's no doubt everything that we're doing is focused on improving these Topline metrics what I want you to look at here is your secondary metrics the reason these secondary metrics are super important is because they're key indicators for what's going to happen to those primary metrics in the future now I just rattled off each one of these columns and each one of these metrics and what they do and why we use them but I really want you to understand what you should be looking at on a daily weekly and monthly basis when you hop into your ad account and you're looking at let's say a 7-Day view what I want you to do is click the compare button right here and compare to the previous period when you compare to the previous period assuming that there's no significant sale or major change in your Market over the last 7 days you're going to be able to see and click this little button right here to actually unlock the change in this specific metric so in this case we can see our cost for click only Changed by 2.

68% which in my opinion is nothing I'm completely comfortable with a 2% change on a weekly basis the next thing we want to look at is our CPM our cpms have gone up by 1 cent I don't care about that what I do want to look at here is I want to look on a m macro level so I'm going to be looking not just at a 7-Day but I'm going to look at a 14-day a 30-day a 90day a year to date because what you will notice is that as your cpms and your cpcs specifically as those continue to climb your Raz is going to decline your cost per purchase is going to increase those primary metrics will get worse if you're not paying attention the most important things I'm looking at are cpcs and cpms when I'm comparing Trends what you might want to do is look at something like the last 30 days versus the previous 30 days so in this account's case case we see very very little change it's actually a positive change in the last 30 days which means we're rotating creative properly we're doing all of the things that we need to be doing for this account to keep our cost of advertising or rather our CPM our cost per 10,000 impressions in line the other column that I want you to keep an eye on is frequency so frequency is the number of times each person sees your ad on average you should really be looking at frequency on a 7-Day and a 30-day window there's different general rules for each pocket depending on how long that window is and how much you want to show so for example if you're running a retargeting campaign where people who have been to your site and you're re-engaging the same group over and over and over on a 7-Day window you should never have more than a seven frequency if you have more than a seven frequency you are hitting that Target group way too often if you have under a seven frequency that's cool I would generally like to keep it around four to 5 for retargeting and the same for retention for prospecting efforts 2 to three is usually The Sweet Spot on a 7-Day look on a 30-day look it can climb up a little bit to the 3 and fours which is completely okay but generally speaking we don't want to overspend on the same audience over and over and over again if they're not converting right now the next thing you need to do that none of your competitors are doing right now is actually advertise your best products and completely throw out all of your worst products I'm not saying don't sell those products anymore but what I am saying is stop advertising and stop wasting your money on products that don't convert as well and scale into the products that work the best so what we tend to see is it's common place these days to run all of your catalog ads or all all of your products in all of your ads all the time so you basically have this maximalist view of things where you are literally spending money on all of your products all of the time this is absurd because different products convert at different rates and different products are better selling for you and different products have better margins or different margins for you and you need to be careful about which products are actually getting your spend what we like to do here at the moonlighters is use an 8020 rule generally speaking for a starting point the 8020 rule in e-commerce states that 20% of our products are going to drive 80% of our revenue and the other 80% of our products only drive 20% of the revenue so what that means for you is that 20% of your products are driving your business and the others are just being supportive so we need to spend ads on the products that are actually driving the business forward it's not too complicated I have built out complexer forting for this so that we can do it with every single client in an instant however if you're just trying to do this on the fly right now and you have existing sales you have a lot of sales in your e-commerce store then what I recommend doing is first pull your complete Shopify data so what you're going to want to do is grab your product title your orders and your gross sales once you get this list sum up your total revenue so in this case we're looking at a total gross revenue of 190,280 per point is going to happen when we reach 80% of 190523 190,000 523 * 0. 8 is 152,000 so once we reach our gross sales of 152,000 that's when we know we found the products that drive 80% of the revenue now what you're going to notice in this analysis is that I'm not trying to actually find the number of products that equal the 80% I'm just finding the 80% and then in 98% of cases the percentage of product is going to be 20% so it's just a naturally occurring rule kind of in the world let's see we have 190,000 I'm going to highlight down until we reach 150,000 which we know is our 80% Mark I'm just going to use this sum column down here in the bottom right we're starting from the top 11 18, and call it right here so this 150,000 and you can see here I have my top 8020 which is a conditional formatting thing that we do on our side just cuz we have reporting dialed in for this we stopped here we've hit 151,000 and then let's just look at the total number of products so if I just highlight down from here to here we're going to see that we have 74 products in this entire catalog and we have 29 that are in the top 80% which means this is actually pretty oddly more like a 40% rule so we actually are comfortable targeting 40% of the products in this catalog instead of the 100% that's currently being targeted little bit different we actually normally see this on an 8020 but what's most important here is we have found our 29 products that drive 80% of the revenue and I want to make sure that we're focusing 80% of our ad spend on these 29 products and the rest can get a very small percentage of Maximum 20% the next way that you could outperform all of your competitors right now and get an edge in the marketplace specifically on Facebook ads is by having a combination of images and videos within your account you run a bunch of ads you run a bunch of image ads you run a bunch of video ads and you realize that hey videos convert better so I'm only going to run video ads or you find out something like hey catalog just converts the best so I'm only going to write a catalog and then you throw everything else out and you never find out if different videos or different images or different catalogs or different catalog groups could actually work better for your business the second thing is there are different placements on Instagram there are different placements on Facebook reals IG stories so if you only are available on one or two of those placements because let's say you're just running images then you're story placements are going to be significantly lower your reals placements are essentially going to be zero you are constraining how much availability you have to the platform and what you need to do in Facebook right now is focus on finding your customer not meeting your customer halfway you need to be literally right in front of your customer smack in the head and Facebook is so incredibly amazing at finding the right customer for you but if you don't have the correct image or video or the format isn't even there that customer is never ever going to be able to match with you so we just generally want to make sure that we have a balance of images and videos don't worry about the exact number if you're running 10 creatives in your account just have a few videos If images are what's dominant if Facebook doesn't think that those creativ can scale don't worry about it allow Facebook to figure out where to put the money because it's way smarter than you and I and what we need to be leaning into is the full algorithmic learnings and this is one of the best ways that we can feed that algorithm and allow it to explore different placements for all of our Brands the other thing you'll see here is that our CPM and our cpcs go down because the variety and additional placements that we're able to serve on increases therefore we have more available placements more available impressions for us to serve on the next way that you are going to be able to outperform your competitors is by not going all broad but also not going too constraints into too many interests so what you're going to do is have a balance again of interests and Broad audiences so what this generally means the setup that we like to push forward the most is a completely balanced setup where we have broad ad sets new packs coming in as broad ad sets but we also have single interest ad groups in addition I would at this point recommend an Advantage Plus campaign and then you're still going to be breaking out your retention and maybe even your retargeting into different swim Lings now if you really want to learn more about our structures we have an entire video where I break down this exact structure in massive details so every single piece of this the number of creatives that you want to have where to launch new creatives when to launch new adsets when to launch new campaigns how to graduate things into Advantage Plus how to create a scale campaign and on and on the next thing that I would highly recommend you do right now that a lot of people are not doing that most of your competitors are not doing that a lot of brands are not doing that a lot of agencies are not doing is running different swim Lanes so therefore different campaigns and unique campaigns that specifically Target your existing customers and new customers furthermore if you are a big brand and when I say Big Brand I mean you're spending over $100,000 per month in advertising then it wouldn't surprise me if you've grouped a ton of this stuff together I would actually recommend in your case you should have prospecting R targeting and retention I'm going to break out what this looks like in the same account we've been looking at this is our retention campaign and the reason that it's so important that this is different is for a few reasons first we have a different Target for retention meaning we have a different return on outspend target than the rest of the account and second we manage this account to a frequency so you can see the frequency right here is 7. 7 we are completely comfortable hitting our existing customers on a 30-day basis at a 7 frequency if this was 145 we would know that we're smashing our existing customers way too often and we would need to make adjustments we see all of our four prospecting campaigns here at relatively low frequencies this top one here is a little bit high I'll admit but basically we see these at a lower frequency which we're comfortable with and that's what we want for new prospecting but our retargeting campaign is okay at a higher frequency because it's still returning at a row as that's very high for us at a 4.

19 but the rest of the account is generally performing at like a 3. 5 one of the reasons we want to create this unique campaign is because we don't need to overspend on our existing customers they could be sent a text message we could potentially engage them on Instagram there's other places where you can touch your existing customers so we don't need to overpay and continuously spend money on them we just need to spend the right amount of money on them so they don't forget us and share them with new offers but also keep in mind that we can hit them on email SMS and other platforms now this next thing is something that's becoming more and more popular if you're not doing it it's a major red flag so this is something that's more of like a cautionary tale just like don't do this because if you're not doing this there's no doubt that your competitors are doing it so this is one of my more safe side bets here that do this it's going to help you out 5 10% easily so what you're going to want to do here is we are leveraging our CRM to enhance our pixel Facebook tracking is the worst that's ever been so the amount of audiences that are available the match rate of those audiences the pixel data the CRM data it's all significantly worse there's way worse matching therefore it's harder for Facebook to actually understand who your customer is however if you're using any sort of email list clavo send Lane any of these email platforms you could Port those email list over into your Facebook account and then it could match those IDs to actual emails or rather it could match those emails to Facebook IDs and therefore Facebook IDs could be matched to people when they see your ads that is absolutely incredible because you're using your first party data matching it with third party data and therefore creating a better result here's what this looks like in practice whatever CRM you're using Port that audience over once you port that audience over you're going to be able to go to any of your existing adsets and if you're targeting any any sort of list so in this case we have a 180-day purchase which is coming from the Facebook pixel we also have a customer list ml uncore purchased 180 this is coming from clavio so what we've done here is we've ported over this list and we've matched it exactly to what the pixel says so this way we have a 180 days coming from the pixel we have 180 days coming from the email CRM and therefore there's definitely going to be overlap but it's the same list we don't care if there's overlap it's just going to fill in the cracks and maybe Catch 10 or 20 20% more people that we wouldn't have been able to hit if we were just using the pixel alone so if you're not doing this don't be lazy because your competitors are absolutely spending the time to do this it's an easy fix that you could absolutely increase your return on ad spend in these specific campaigns somewhere to the tune of five to 10% which isn't that big but think about that over the course of a year if youve been watching this far I'm going to give you something good here this is the number one piece of Education that if you can grab anything from this video it would be this one piece this is the number one problem I so often in ad accounts when people don't actually know what they're doing what we have here in this ad accounts we have over a 100 active ads now that might sound crazy but those are to different audiences to different locations they're driving to different destinations there's a reason why we had this many ads what you notice right at the top here is that most of our ads return at an average of $46 on a cost per purchase or a 3. 82 return on ad spend now you might immediately jump into this ad account and try to optimize and the first thing you're going to want to see is what's driving the lowest return on ad spent and has a very high amount spent and it's going to be this ad right here so this ad has spent $4,000 and it's only driven a 2.

92 return on ad spend where some of the other ads right here in my view have driven significantly higher in the fours and the high 3es and the first thing that 99% of advertisers are going to do is they're just going to click this off button and just pause this ad and cut it that is not what you want to do the reason you don't want to do this is because Facebook would not spend against this ad for any reason at all if it wasn't supporting the rest to the account so for some reason in a touch point that we are not physically able to see whether it's a view whether it's a click we don't know for sure this is what I call a supportive ad a supportive ad is powering your account and helping other creatives Drve the return that they are getting and by keeping this ad on we are supporting the full account so most of the time what we see in these cases is a very slippery slope usually what happens is you pause an ad like this down and the entire account takes a little step down and then you start to find the next ad that's driving a lot of spend with a slightly lower return and then the account drops down another 1 or 2% and another 1 or 2% if you compound those 1 or 2% steadily over time because this is going to be dozens of ads that you do this for you are going to significantly damage your account now what we want to do is allow Facebook to have the free rant there's one exception to this if you have an ad let's say it was this ad that was driving an outrageously High clickthrough rate or super cheap cost per click and now I'm talking like a clickthrough rate three times higher than the average in your account so you can see just by looking very quickly at the other top ads in this account they're all roughly in the same 15% range if we saw something like 2 and 1 12% here then I would say whoo something's going on something's catching people's attention we're not converting them right and that's a bad signal for Facebook in that very rare case and we're talking thousands of Impressions that's when you're going to want to pause his ad down early otherwise sit back let an ultra algorithm allow it to do the work for you you'll probably notice in a lot of what I'm saying here we're kind of teetering a line of allowing the algorithm to work and also giving creating levers for oursel now what we want to do generally in an account is set ourselves up for the most possible success by feeding the algorithm as much as possible but not giving it total control so we can make adjustments when we need to the next thing that none of your competitors are doing right now on Facebook ads are running day of week analysis day of week analysis basically means we're trying to figure out which days of the week convert better for you so let me put this to you very broadly when I used to work at BarkBox we found out very very quickly there that the more people spend time with their pets the more like they are to buy things for their pets the same goes in the children's industry the same goes in many Industries if you play sports you're more likely to buy sports equipment on the weekend when you play that sport same goes with literally every single industry no matter who you are there's just so many thousands of examples of this so why are we spending the same amount of money every single day it's one of the most fundamental issues in Facebook ads is that you set a daily budget say $1,000 or $100 per day and it spends the same amount every single day no matter the demand no matter the conversion rate so what we want to do is we want to actually understand do we need to make adjustments so what I've done right here is I've put together a comprehensive day of week analysis and what you can see here is that we have our spend purchases revenue and then a few secondary metrics being Impressions and clicks along with all of our calculated metrics for Raz cost per acquisition conversion rate cost per click and CPM based on day of the week and what we're going to see is that there are significantly worse days of the week than others so you can see on Fridays there's such a strong day for this brand and even Sundays and Mondays are pretty strong as well we start to see drop off on Tuesday and we dive on Wednesday and Thursday oddly here Saturday is not a good day so I'm going to actually want to action on this and make sure we start to spend more money on the days when we have higher conversion rates and you could see very clearly in the conversion rate column our highest conversion rate matches with our highest return on ad spend so why would we ever spend the same $3,200 that they're spending every Friday versus every other day of the week we'd always want to put more money on the Friday and one thing I didn't mention here is that this is a look at a 90day view so we're not just taking one week here it's a full 90 days and you want to compare this over the course of your 90 days the way you can grab this in your Facebook account is you can go within the account you go to all tools and then you go to ad reporting once you're in ad reporting create a new report select your ad account and click create select pivot table for the option and then get rid of all your campaign names all your adset names and just all you want to select is day and then get any metrics that you want to push into here you may see some trouble in getting cost per results or row outs here all we actually care about is purchase conversion value so you want to type in purchases here and you're going to grab purchase conversion value and then any other secondary metrics you want to grab what you're then going to do is you're going to export this as a raw data table export and then open up a blank Google sheet once you go into this blank Google sheet click file import upload browse and then select your newly downloaded report just make sure that this report is for an acceptable date range so in this case I'm just using this month I'd always recommend 90 days plus and if you're a smaller brand look at like a 180 days even 365 days once you grab this we're going to just click replace spreadsheet and import the data so once the data is in in column r or really whatever column is at the end here you're just going to create a quick formula here it's going to be called Equals weekday you're going to click the enter button and then select the day on the corresponding row click enter that's going to give you a 1 through 7even column s represents the Saturday so the week day starts on a Sunday meaning 1 equals a Sunday then you're going to highlight this entire thing click the help button type in insert pivot table new sheet and for your rows you're going to select column R which we know is 1 through 7 and for your values you are going to grab purchases purchase conversion value and any of the other metrics that you want make sure everything here is by some and then what I like to do just because I can't possibly read 1 through 7 and understand the days of the week I like to write Sunday Monday and then I'll just drag this all the way down to get my clear days of week here then you can go ahead and calculate your return on adspend formula you can calculate your cost per acquisition formula got to also make sure you have spend properly in here as well we really just want to set this up in a way we can see all of our core metrics how much we're spending here by day of week it's just a matter of putting in that 2% effort to get 30% better results for every single brand that you're working with once we have this data and as I said we do all this preset we have templates for all this all reported includes all of these breakdowns and as you can probably see on my screen right now we also do the same thing for age we do the same thing for gender we have a whole lot of platform and placement breakdowns that we also like to include for all of our clients it doesn't just end on day on week but this is the most important one that I want you to focus on today we are approaching the end of the list number 12 here is actually understanding your goals we work with dozens of clients in a variety of verticals all across e-commerce and what we've noticed is that every brand that comes to us has a different explanation for why their goal is actually their goal so what I want you to do is actually understand why your return on ad spend is your return on ad spend Target and then work to what does that Target need to be now what we see all the time is we have an introduction call Brands come to us and they say my competitor someone else is getting a four five 6 seven return on ad spend I promise you there's too many factors for you to just use someone else's data point and actually understand if that's going to apply to your business it does not matter your Ras is particular to your business if you use other people's achievements and goals to try to get to your goal then you are never going to get to where you actually want to go and you're going to be chasing something forever who knows when they got a four row as who knows when they got a 10 row as maybe it was on one ad one time and their media buyer told them and it was wrong maybe they were double counting on their pixel maybe they had completely inaccurate reporting you need to understand your goals and why they are your goals from the very top of how much profit you make per product and drill it all the the way down to how much you could legitimately afford to spend on Advertising if it's a two drive for a two and scale your business rapidly if you need a four because your margins are very thin then fine try to get to a four if you only need a 1. 5 because you have tremendous margins maybe you're in the beauty space incredible you're going to crush it you're going to smoke all of your competition while they're chasing threes and fours you're chasing a 1. 75 you're going to be able to scale three or four times faster than them they're going to wonder where all their customers went so don't worry about your friends maybe even your competitors don't worry about what their goals are you will not get to your goal chasing other people's and the last thing that you need to do right now in 2024 to outflank all of your competitors to really just stay ahead of the competition especially if you're a small brand you need to have accurate reporting I'm going to give you a very quick preview of what our reporting looks like and I highly recommend you copy this to some extent the reason that this is so much more important than using the Facebook dashboard or any other AD platform dashboard is because the date range changes and you can't look back holistically quickly you need a pulse check every single day and you need to be able to compare year over year month over month quarter over quarter quickly so what we'd like to do for every single one of our clients is we create a monthly tracking dashboard now you'll notice in here we do have other tabs that break monthly weekly daily and we have all of our raw data hosted in one place the most important thing that we have here is the full month tracker so right now we're coming at the end of July and in this tracker right here we have all of our ads spend all our ad purchases our Revenue our cost per acquisition our Ras and most important who cares about these secondary metrics in the platforms what we care most about is what does the Shopify data say what does the real money coming in say so that's why we also compare side by side our Shopify orders our Shopify sales our Shopify cost per acquisition Roi not just Ro our true return on investment and then our M these are the most important metrics that you need to guide your business and if you're not looking at these metrics daily you are doing yourself a disservice the last thing I'm going to recommend in a little tiny bonus here you have reporting set up if you know what your goals are don't track to 100 different goals have one main goal we used to say cost per acquisition is King when I used to work at BarkBox so no matter what if we spent too much money if we spent too little money if we drove certain amount of Revenue the number one thing that we cared about the most was driving our cost per acquisition down and I encourage you to run your business that way as well if you applied every single one of these principles and every single one of these steps into your day to day on a discipline level you would see how standing differences in your ad performance you would made more money immediately and that's why we do every single one of these things at the moonlighter for every single find that we were with if you want to potentially work with us go to the ms.