Stop splitting your ad budgets!

Social ads is a product that comes with a lot of options & opportunities to promote your school. This is a great tool to get creative in your approach, carefully test results, and continue to try new things. The danger lies in the budget for all of these efforts. Testing too many campaigns, features, or programs at once can get tricky.

Let’s look at a scenario:

You’re running 2 campaigns, “Engagement” and “Cosmetology”. “Engagement” is the campaign that takes posts from your Facebook page and boosts them out to a larger audience. “Cosmetology” is a campaign that uses direct ads to drive traffic to your Cosmetology landing page. Let’s say both campaigns spend $8/day ($500/month total).

You notice your Esthetics program is starting to get some more attention so now you want to run ads to take advantage of that. There are 2 options:

• Divide up your $500/ month across 3 campaigns now instead of two
• Increase your monthly ad spend for the new campaign

The most common request is to keep the same budget. There are a lot of reasons behind this, but it comes with some major baggage. If you add an Esthetics campaign to your marketing efforts, you can expand your reach without increasing your ad spend, right? No.

You have now moved from 2 campaigns at $8/day to 3 campaigns at about $5/day.

The issue:

Facebook is a bidding platform. The bids are taken into account by ad set (audience), not by your total account’s spend. You’re now stepping up to the action with 3 – $5 bids, instead of 2 – $8 bids. Facebook has made it clear that you will not hit 100% of your targeted audience. Facebook also knows that, of your total audience, there is a certain percentage that is much more likely to convert than the rest. As you’ll soon find out, you are not the only company trying to get in front of your target audience. If you step up to auction with a lower ad spend, you’ll win the less-desirable portion of the audience.

Splitting the budget of a good campaign will almost always turn it into a mediocre campaign.

Now, it’s not just your bid that’s taken into consideration. Facebook also looks at ad strength, relevance, etc. That being said, cutting your budget down on a good campaign without strategy will almost always turn it into a mediocre campaign. Unlike PPC and organic search, you are not only competing with other beauty schools on social media. Women ages 17-26 is a popular demographic for beauty schools as well as countless other products and services. Women don’t get onto Facebook to look at beauty schools, but they are very likely to get on to Facebook for product/service recommendations from friends & family. Because of this, you need to pay close attention to how your budget is allocated as well as the quality of the content you’re putting in front of them.

So is the only real solution to increase your ad spend each time you want to run a new campaign? Not exactly. Between your knowledge of your school, and the knowledge of your account from your marketing agency, you should be able to partner with them to make a strong decision. As much as Facebook may love it, throwing more money at your ads is not always the solution. Take the time to look at your campaigns, weigh their performance against your expectations on certain metrics, and make a decision from there. Sometimes the answer is to increase ad spend, other times it may be to pull from another campaign that isn’t quite stacking up to your goals. Trust your knowledge and the knowledge of your marketing agency to move your school in the right direction!

Want to take a more advanced look at how Facebook ad bidding works? Check out our blog on Facebook Bidding