Change is not always good

If you have ever made a change to your Facebook™ ad or campaign and your results went to pot, this post is for you.

HAVE YOU EVER MADE A CHANGE TO YOUR AD OR AD SET AND REGRETTED IT?

Facebook will let you change your ads and ad set at any time, but is it a good idea?

When you create an ad set, it is going to optimize for your audience and pixel event. Let’s break down what this means and how to make changes the smart way:

Each ad set is associated with a pixel event, and you choose that on creation. If you are optimizing for the Lead event, you choose that event and then that ad set starts what’s called the “Learning Phase”.

That means that the algorithm is going to go out and look for the people that they predict will take the action that you are asking for, in this case it could be giving up their email address and hitting the thank you page where that lead event fires. Facebook will then optimize for this event as soon as it gets 50 fires – so if you collect 50 email addresses, Facebook begins to truly optimize that ad set.

Changing the audience will cause Facebook to start this learning phase all over again, which results in a lot of lost dollars, not to mention that your metrics will go right in the trash because you won’t be able to track the true performance of that ad set.

Another thing to consider is that if you change the creative of the ad, all of your social proof disappears and starts all over, and no one wants that since one of your goals should be collecting that proof for authority and maximum reach.

So how do you change your ad sets or creative? Duplicate them.

Duplicating an ad or ad set and making changes will start the learning phase over, but it will be a clean start and allow you to test the original against the new one if you are using a new audience, pixel event or creative.

One thing to know that’s super important: if you duplicate, make sure you change the budget, creative, pixel event, audience (even just by an age) SOMETHING to prevent the downfall of a good campaign through the act of bidding against yourself.

Just duplicate and move on instead of making changes to the ad set, it will save you a lot of headache.