It may be tempting to tweak a new Facebook campaign after going live, however, it’s important you leave it, at least for the first three days. Don’t believe me? Let me take you through an experiment that I’ve been working on to test one of Facebook’s best practices.

Day one

During the first day, the campaign ran at $10 a day on each of the four ad sets, with one specific ad set generating two leads, and two others just getting clicks.
I’d like to draw your attention to the remaining ad set here: 5% Lookalike Audience of our website traffic. On this day, $7.43 was spent here, with not a single link click. Usually, social managers would deactivate it due to the poor response.

Day two

Looking at days one and two combined, all ads sets except the one mentioned above have managed to generate leads. This is where you might make the decision to deactivate it, however, based on our experience, we follow that principle of letting the ad sets run for at least three days.

Day three

Day three shows only one ad set has generated leads; the previously underperforming one which many would have deactivated over the first two days. Looking at the first seven days, we can see that this ad set in fact ended up being top-performing one.

Why three days?

Although not widely known, it’s Facebook’s best practice to let an ad set or a campaign run for three days before manipulating or changing it too much. This is because Facebook’s ad algorithm needs time to collect enough data to fairly optimise its performance.

Want to see more?

Facebook advertising is a lot of trial and error, and at Missing Link Social Media, we love trialling new practices and theories to get results. If you have anything you’d like us to test out, send us a message or an email. We’d be happy to speak to you, or potentially feature it in one of the upcoming videos.