It’s that time of the year when you can’t turn your head without hearing something about Football. With an estimated 41 million people playing Fantasy Sports, Fantasy Football has become the center of many an office discussion over the past eight weeks of the NFL season. Fantasy sports participants spend hours each week analyzing statistics and probability then building their teams accordingly.
The question is, how can we harness what has typically been deemed a distraction in the workplace into something that helps drive business results? If we employ Fantasy Football strategies to improve our Facebook Ad performance, suddenly all the ‘wasted’ hours become time well spent.
So read on Fantasy Football lovers, and be prepared to show your boss why all that ‘useless’ knowledge is actually beneficial to your Facebook Ad Strategy.
Research Before Drafting Your Campaign
Many Fantasy Football seasons are won and lost at draft time. Facebook Ad campaigns are no different. We must do our preseason research before drafting a Facebook campaign.
The two areas we need to focus our preseason research are:
Campaign Type
Campaign Targeting
When Choosing a campaign type we must choose the campaign which aligns with our business objective. Why are we running a campaign? What is the goal? Choose a Facebook Ad campaign type based off our business objectives.
Some of the most important preseason research we can do is on the Campaign Targeting level. Who are our ads intended to reach?
The more precise we can get with our targeting, the better the results for our campaign. Establish a persona for your ideal target, who is this person that we are trying to reach with our ads and then cater your ad targeting to that specific person. The possibilities here are endless.
Take a Chance on Sleeper Ads
After doing our preseason research and drafting our campaign type and targeting, it’s time to build our ads. It’s during the ad building process that we get our second piece of Fantasy Football advice – take your chances on sleepers. Sleepers are usually the long shot players with very high upside. When we build ads, we should include these long shot ads that have a very high upside.
We should always be A/B testing ads against each other, but even more so we should throw into the mix some long shot ads that have potential to produce results (sleepers). We’ve seen this time and time again, it’s not the ad that you think was the ‘best’ while building out your ads that produce the most efficient results.
Facebook wants your campaigns to be successful so you keep coming back with more advertising spend. In order to produce the best results for you Facebook will deliver the ads that your consumers are reacting with the most – if your consumers aren’t responding to an ad, Facebook simply will not show it. It is through this type of ad delivery that we will find the sleepers on our ad roster.
Cut Under Performing Ads from Your Lineup
The key to any successful Fantasy Football manager’s season, is reacting to the performance of the players on his team. Players should be cut and picked up, based on their performance throughout the season. This same thing is true for any successful Facebook ad campaign manager, we must cut and boost posts based on their success throughout our campaigns.
We must monitor our ad campaigns relentlessly within Facebook Ads Manager. This is paramount for success. We should be watching for which ad sets are getting the most results at the cheapest price. We should be monitoring which ads are delivering over others. And ultimately, we must make adjustments throughout your Facebook ad campaign’s delivery.
If you have under performing ads, they need to be cut from your lineup. This will give your top performing ads access to a larger portion of your budget. While Facebook does this to an extent, the best managers will be monitoring performance and cutting under performing ads from campaign lineups to improve the overall campaign.
All Puns Aside
When it comes down to it, there are three takeaways we can use to help improve the strength of our Facebook Campaigns:
Research your target audience and business objectives before ever building an ad.
Use A/B testing to fine tune your ad strategy and determine what your consumers respond to.
Monitor your campaign performance and continually make tweaks to improve the
Now it’s your turn: What has worked for you when tweaking your Facebook Campaigns? How do you improve your campaigns? What is the record of your Fantasy Football team?