By Molly McCarty, Director of Social
It's easy to get bogged down in the day to day of Facebook account management and forget to check on the general account health regularly. To make sure we’re keeping an eye on the big picture, I have put together my top 7 monthly checks. Of course there are months where I will check each of these multiple times, but I make sure to check these in every account, at least once a month.
1. Last 30 Day Frequency
I like to check this at least once a month, but usually more often than that. As frequencies increase on Facebook, we see CTRs go down and CPCs increase. In order to combat this, I usually try to get my frequencies below 3 for each campaign that I am running (for a 30-day lookback). There is no frequency cap on right-hand side ads, which means their frequency counts will often get out of control if you have a high daily budget. It is important to refresh right-hand side ads as soon as you see frequency reach double digits.
2. Cross-Device Behavior
Facebook allows you to check cross-device performance within your ad account. Mobile is a much less expensive placement than desktop, but, depending on your product, mobile can often have a much longer latency window. If your internal numbers are not aligned with what Facebook is saying, pull a cross-device report. You may be surprised at the number of users who start on mobile and then convert on desktop days after the fact. In some of our accounts, we have over 60% cross-device conversions for a 28-day click attribution window on mobile placements.
3. Mobile Placements
If you are grouping all mobile placements together, make sure you look at performance broken out by Mobile News Feed, Instagram Feed, and Audience Network. Often, I find that I am not happy with how Facebook how allocated spend amongst these different placements. As a result, I will often break Instagram out from Mobile News Feed, or I will opt out of Audience Network.
4. Facebook Event Tracking
If you are using oCPM bidding, it is very important that you ensure the Facebook Event you are optimized for is tracking correctly. I recommend going to the "Pixels" Dashboard and looking at "Events". This will show the total number of times the pixel has fired (it includes users not from Facebook). I recommend looking at the last 7 days. The total number of fires should be within 10% of what this dashboard is reporting. If Facebook is off by more than 10%, do a thorough QA to make sure all events are set up correctly.
5. Audience Exclusions
Throughout the month, you will likely build and pause ad sets. With it, the active audiences will change. At least once a month, make sure you are only excluding audiences that are still active within your account. This is also a good time to ensure that smaller audiences are being excluded from larger audiences. For audiences of roughly the same size, exclude the weaker audience from the top-performing audience.
6. Bidding
Make sure any ad set that is running on oCPM is being optimized for the correct event. Every few months, perform an A/B test to see which event is strongest for your brand. It is possible that optimizing towards “add to cart” instead of “purchaser” brings in a lower final purchase CPA. For small audiences, make sure you test CPC and CPM bidding, as opposed to relying too heavily on oCPM bidding.
7. Relevance Score
It is a good idea to regularly check the relevance score of your ads. The top-performing ads will have higher relevance scores. Typically, we see that direct response ads bring in relevance scores below 5, but in some accounts they are often 1 or 2. By regularly refreshing the ads and testing new creative, we can often bring them up to an average of 3.
Which checks would you add to this list?
