Are you ready to take your social media advertising game to the next level? Look no further! In this blog, we’re spilling the tea on our secret playbook for running killer paid social audits. At the end of the article, you’ll know exactly what to search for and how to translate that data in order to bring success to your clients. So let’s jump into consolidation strategies, budget distributions, and a deep dive into creative analysis! Trust us, the learnings you’ll gain will be worth it.

Let’s begin with your Campaign Structure.

First up, you need to look at the structure of your campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

This will help you identify any errors. In particular, combining campaigns that are targeting pretty much the same audiences, as well as removing any ads that have been duplicated.

You also need to establish whether the budget distribution is happening at the ad level or at the ad set level.

Moreover, review your campaign objectives and ensure that they are ideal for the wants and needs of your client.

Then, you need to study all the conversions you’re getting. If your client is receiving less conversions per week, you can adjust the campaign objectives or you can increase their ad spend. These can all help improve the results.

Bottomline, running paid social audits will help you discover areas that need improvement in your campaign, which in turn will boost performance.

Moving over to your Targeting.

When setting up ad campaigns, we also suggest looking at the targeting strategies used in each individual ad set.

This includes the use of lookalike audiences, broad targeting, and retargeting.

Furthermore, we recommend consolidating lookalike audiences to one or two maximum, to increase the effectiveness of your advertising strategy.

It’s also important to get optimal placements for ads, which means you should exclude the audience network for smaller accounts — those looking to acquire high-quality leads. As for larger accounts with a focus on brand awareness, you can use the audience network despite the lower quality placements.

On the whole, careful targeting is essential in achieving the best results.

Creative Analysis is where it’s at!

Next, we’re discussing the importance of creative deliverables in your advertising campaigns.

The creative is the most impactful variable an advertiser has manual control over. For instance, if an advertising campaign isn’t performing well, it’s most likely due to the creative. So, you need to analyze the creative quality of your campaign — stuff like branding and commercial appeal. Does your campaign look cheap or does it look high-quality?

From there, you can move on to applying best practices. Check if your campaign is using best practices for images, videos, and carousels, and take note of the text on the images and optimal lengths for video.

Additionally, study the quality of the editing and the types of images and animations used. Look for any quick and minor edits that can be done to improve overall performance. Personally, we recommend shortening and speeding up your videos (this almost always helps boost performance) or adding thumbnails with text to draw attention.

A deep analysis of your creative is of utmost importance as it can help the client improve the quality and performance of their leads.

You need to improve your Landing Pages too.

It’s time to dive into the landing page experience, specifically for E-commerce and B2B businesses.

First, you need to ensure that all pixels are firing properly and that the experience is ideal for mobile. Hence, you should use progressive lead forms to optimize for mobile devices. The goal at the end of the day is to minimize friction for the viewer. So a smooth transition from “Add To Cart” to “Checkout” is the target.

Second, you need to filter data back to Meta to optimize for high-quality leads. We suggest using qualifying questions to filter the leads and sending different data back to Meta (depending on the quality of the lead).

Third, use your “Thank You” page experience as an opportunity to make the user experience better. A simple “Thank You” message is a wasted opportunity. Brands should do something more engaging such as adding a video to the ‘Thank You’ page that will educate the viewer on what they can expect down funnel.

Lastly, there are tons of tips and tricks you can use to improve the lead quality sent back to Meta. Use a good filter question, for example (such as salary) to select higher quality leads.

Let’s analyze that Data!

Now, it’s time to dig into data to understand the performance of your campaign.

So, examine the trends over the last 90 days, as well as month-over-month and week-over-week, in order to gain more knowledge of your campaign’s performance and how it’s being affected by other variables.

Look at the budget distribution to see precisely how the budget is allocated between ad sets and creatives. This will also give you an understanding of which ad sets and creatives are achieving the best results. Plus, you can discover which ones should be added or removed.

For example, consolidating an ad set with a high-performing creative can lead to a huge boost in performance! Therefore, let the data guide you, even if you may or may not like the creative you’re putting out there.

And finally, do a creative analysis to gain more insight into which creatives are driving great results and why they’re performing so well. That way, you can optimize the data to improve your campaign’s performance!

In Conclusion

By studying our rules for running paid social audits, you can gain a better understanding of your creative deliverables, campaign structure, and budget distributions. You can also learn the best strategies on how to consolidate them for the best results. Additionally, by conducting a creative analysis, you will gain more insight into which of your creatives are performing well along with the reasons why. This will allow you to make better decisions to improve your advertising efforts.

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