I’ve been spending a lot of time working in Facebook Ads recently and wanted to share some tips I’ve learned when it comes to improving performance.

All of the clients I work with have a conversion goal set up, so these tips will focus on ways I’ve learned to increase the number of conversions and decrease CPL.

1. Segment Your Audience

If you are currently targeting all ages of all genders on all platforms and devices in one ad set, you will likely benefit from some segmentation of your audience. This is because different ads will work better for different groups of people or on different placements.

For example, we find that in general longer ad copy works better on desktop than it does on mobile. Ads also tend to perform better if the people used in ad images are around the same age and gender as your targeted audience.

These are the most common ways I like to break out my audience:

• Device
• Platform
• Gender
• Age

2. Consolidate Your Audience

Yes, I know this is the exact opposite of the tip above, but I have seen improvement in performance by consolidating audiences. This typically happens when an audience has been segmented too far, so there is a very small group of people being targeted by each ad set.

If your audience is very small, you give Facebook a limited set of individuals to work with to optimize ad delivery.  You can get an estimate of your audience size in the settings section of your ad set.

If my daily reach is estimated at less than 100 people max, I’ll try and expand my audience a bit.

3. Make Incremental Budget Changes

This is a tip I learned from Facebook Ads support and it seems to actually work! Typically, if an ad set is performing really well, you’ll want to throw all of your money at it. In the past, if I would make significant increases to my ad set budget I would see CPL increase right along with it.

A support person recommended not increasing budgets by more than 10% at a time in order to have Facebook slowly adjust and optimize. What I’ll do now is make 10% budget increases about every 2 days and it does help keep CPL down to where it was before the budget increase.

If you need to increase spend by a large amount fairly quickly, I would recommend duplicating the ad set and starting fresh with a larger budget. So, if you have an ad set with a daily budget of $50 and want to increase it to $100, duplicate the original ad set, pause it, and start with zero data in the duplicate with the $100 budget.

4. Test Lifetime Budgets

I’ve seen performance improvements when going from daily budgets to a lifetime budget. With daily budgets, Facebook will typically spend the same amount per day no matter the conversion volume. What I’ve found with lifetime budgets, is that Facebook tends to spend more during the days when conversion volume is high and less when it is slow.

I haven’t run into any issues of Facebook completely running out of the budget way before the end date of an ad set, as Facebook does try to even it out over the time period you select. You can’t switch budget types after your ad set has been created, but you can duplicate an existing ad set, change the budget type, and create a new ad set.

Do you have any additional tips for optimizing Facebook ads? If so, let us know in the comments below!