6 Tips to Optimize Facebook Video Ads

Social ads require reach, learn how to optimize Facebook video ads to get the most mileage out of them at the best value.

Image Source: Facebook

Facebook video ads tend to be a scalable and affordable way to reach a large pool of possible customers. Facebook, over the years, has worked to make it easier to connect with audiences in unique, new video formats like interactive, dynamic, and live-streaming videos. 

There have been some headwinds for the company, as they’ve dealt with soaring costs, changing privacy policies and regulations, and other issues, but you can’t count the platform out. It’s still the biggest social platform with almost 2.5 billion users, and some of the most in-depth targeting options from the perspective of an advertiser. 

The following are some tips and strategies to optimize your Facebook video ads and get the best results. 

1. Know Your Objective

When you’re using Facebook ads, you can do so for customer acquisition and retention. The use of Facebook ads can help with building awareness for your brand and also for advertising to new possible customers. You can also use the ads to strengthen relationships with people already aware of your brand. 

There are three overall objectives you can choose from when you’re using Facebook ads. 

There’s awareness, which you can use if you want to attract new customers or launch a new product line. You might also use awareness as your objective if you want to promote an event. 

Then, there’s consideration. With this objective, your audience will have some level of awareness of your brand and business, and you’re going to be delivering ads that provide more information to drive engagement or help with lead collection. 

The third goal you can set is conversion. This means that maybe you have a particular step you want your audience to take, like buying a product. 

It’s important that you choose the appropriate objective because it will set the tone for everything else you do with your video ads on Facebook. 

2. Optimize for Mobile

When you’re creating video ads, you want to ensure they’re optimized for mobile. Mobile viewing is the primary way that people watch content online. Viewing videos is much more common on smartphones and tablets than desktops, but your video ads still need to be able to work properly on both. 

Facebook has a range of aspect ratios, but the vertical video seems to be the one it pushes for primarily because of the engagement rates with mobile viewers. In particular, this is true if you’re using Facebook’s live streaming options, optimized for vertical video first. 

When you upload your video, make sure you’re optimizing it for vertical viewing, which will maximize engagement. 

When you’re working in Facebook Ad Manager, they recommend that you use a format unique to mobile because no want wants to turn their phone horizontally to watch a video. 

3. Personalize Through Targeting Certain Audiences

Again, one of the things that stands out on Facebook for video ads is that they have some of the best targeting choices. You can get highly specific with your targeted audiences, and if you don’t have a lot of current customer data to use, this is particularly helpful. 

There are five criteria that are part of the Core Audience feature that will let you target your market. 

There are location and demographics. There are also interests, behavior, and connections. 

If you use the Audience Insights Tool, you can learn more about building your Core Audience. This will tell you more about the parameters of your current audience, and you can then apply them to your core audience. 

4. Focus on Repeat Customers 

With Facebook Custom Audiences, you can nurture the people you have existing relationships with These are groups of users on Facebook who already have some awareness of your brand. This could mean they engaged with your posts on Facebook or visited your site, made a purchase, or signed up for your emails, all as examples. 

What Facebook will do here is take the customer data you’re providing and compare it to the data of users on the platform. Then, they can start to match your customers to users. Facebook then goes on to create groups of people, so you can target them with different campaigns. 

There are four Custom Audiences you can create. 

One is Website Custom Audiences, which is when you build an audience from people who have visited your site or maybe a particular page on it. 

The second is the App Activity Custom Audience, which is a segment of people who have engaged with your app or taking a specified action within it. 

The third is Customer List Custom Audience, where you would import a spreadsheet of your customers. Facebook matches the data on the list to the users, building the audience. 

The fourth is the Engagement Custom Audience, which are groups of people who, in the past, have engaged with your ads or content on Facebook. 

5. Use Lookalike Targeting

Another option to take advantage of to optimize your video ads on Facebook is Lookalike targeting. With Lookalike targeting, you’re creating segments of your audience with similar characteristics. 

They have commonalities with your existing audiences, so you know which ads are going to perform well, and you may be able to use the same ads that you’re running for your other targeted audiences. 

It’s a good way to use Facebook Ads to get new customers because you already know the preferences of the groups. 

6. Use the Ad Library

If you want to learn more about attracting the attention of your audience, it’s valuable to know what your competitors do. You can see what your competitors are doing by visiting the Meta Ad Library, where you can see all the current and past ads that any advertiser is running. 

You can filter and sort them based on various criteria like location and keyword. 

Pay attention to the ads your competitors, both direct and indirect, are running. Look at their creativity and their variations. 

Also, look at when ads start running and the platforms they’re on.