One of the first problems that those who want to create ads on Facebook encounter is the fatigue of the ads themselves. They will carry out a campaign that works perfectly for a while and then suddenly they will stop bringing results. The "evergreen" Facebook Ads campaign is a technique that can help solve these problems.
I first wrote about this process over a year ago. I have received a significant number of questions since then and I think it is necessary to take some time to take a second look at the topic.
The post I wrote and tested was certainly complicated: the campaign test consisted of a series of 8 ads over a 32-day period. The truth is that you don't need this level of complexity to successfully run a long-term campaign.
So the goal of this post is to provide you with steps to follow to successfully create a basic evergreen campaign. From there, you can feel free to add more complexity to your project.
What it takes for a consistently successful Facebook Ads campaign
One of the first reasons your campaign stops performing at a high level is that you continue to reach the same exact people. The ones who have converted are no longer targeted (or worse, you continue to target people who you have already converted). Facebook then starts showing your ad to people similar to those who have already converted. The ones who have not converted continue to see your ad and will start to get annoyed by it.
The level of engagement will start to decline, while the number of negative reports will start to rise. The cost of reaching people will also start to increase. Eventually, the campaign will become less and less profitable.
In theory, the campaign that is working today should continue to work for months if:
Promotion continues to have value;
The targeted audience remains high quality;
The targeted audience continues to be constantly updated.
While all three points are important, the most important impetus of the “evergreen” Facebook Ads campaign is the third: keeping your audience updated .
This is the challenge. But we can win this challenge thanks to Custom Audiences that use specific durations.
Define your basic funnel
Before we begin, we need to define a basic funnel to work on. There are two concepts that we need to isolate:
Campaign trigger (usually a particular action);
Campaign goal (usually a sale).
These two concepts should be related. Those who perform the first concept should have a particular closeness to the second.
Define your trigger
Once you have defined your basic funnel, it is time to isolate the people who have performed trigger actions. Trigger actions have these characteristics:
the action is performed only once;
The time of the action can be isolated with the duration of the Custom Audiences.
I wrote a blog post that gave examples of "evergreen" campaign triggers. But the most common of them all is definitely signing up for something.
It is essential to understand that a certain volume of people is needed for the campaign to work. If you only have 5 people performing your trigger action your campaign will never work.
Some examples of trigger actions can be:
Buy a related product;
To register for something;
Interact with a specific Facebook video, or blog post;
Clearly there is less potential volume with the first example than with the second, and with the second than with the third. The quality of the audience will also be higher with the first two examples than with the third. If you can, use the recording as a trigger.
Create a Custom Audience for your trigger
To ensure you have some volume for your trigger, I recommend running a second campaign. How you organize your campaign is up to you, but I recommend targeting a warm audience like website visitors.
The first thing we look at right now is to target people who perform your trigger action in a decent period. For simplicity, let's say in the last 10 days. But you can adjust the period freely based on your volume and other factors.
Getting back to the trigger possibilities, let's look at what custom audiences you need to create.
Trigger 1: Purchased a related product
In this case the only possibility to create an audience of people who bought a related product in particular durations is with Website Custom Audience .
The goal is to create an audience of people who have visited the thank you page after purchasing a product in the last 10 days.
If you don't have a separate thank you page for each product then you will need to use different methods to generate that audience. Most people don't want to use this trigger because of the volume, so I won't focus on it further.
Trigger 2: Recorded to something
This trigger is ideal for most people because you have a better chance of getting decent volume. If you can get a minimum of 10-20 recordings per day then this is a good trigger.
There are two different ways to create an audience of people who have signed up for something in the last 10 days. The first is with a Website Custom Audience of a thank you page.
If you use lead ads, then you should also create a custom audience of those people who have signed up using that method in the last 10 days.
Trigger 3: interacted with a specific Facebook video, or blog post
While this option tends to bring in more volume (it’s easier and cheaper to generate this type of traffic), it can also be a bit tricky for an evergreen campaign.
Remember that the trigger action must be performed only once. So if you promote a video or a blog post you must be sure that the action is not performed a second time (otherwise the campaign will restart for the same person).
First, let's create a custom audience for the interaction action.
The trigger action could be someone watching the video. In this case I recommend creating an audience of all the people who have watched at least 50% of the video. But this will also depend on the length of the video itself.
If you've experimented with Facebook Canvas, interacting with it might be a little tricky.
You can also create an audience of anyone who has read a particular blog post. To avoid having your campaign crash due to people reading the blog post more than once you could use a hidden page. Another option would be to use UTM codes while promoting the post and creating the audience.
IMPORTANT: If you are running a separate campaign that promotes these three triggers, be sure to exclude anyone who has already performed that action in the targeting campaign. Otherwise, when they perform the action a second time, they will restart the evergreen campaign.
Evergreen campaign: objectives
Now you are ready to create a consistently successful campaign When I wrote about this over a year ago I suggested using conversion or traffic goals. These still apply, assuming you use a daily unique reach bid at the ad level.
But a new option has appeared since I wrote the last article: Reach .
Evergreen campaign: targeting
Now we can finally use the audience we created above in a positive way. If you are using both registration as a trigger and lead ads, make sure you target audiences of people who have registered on your site and who have registered via lead ads in the last 10 days.
Notice that I am excluding anyone who has already purchased the product I am promoting (my campaign objective defined previously). There is no reason to continue targeting them in this campaign if they have already performed the action I am interested in.
When using these custom audiences, also make sure you remove all geographic targets and use the “worldwide” option.
This assumes that we don't care about location. For me it doesn't matter where the user lives, as long as they perform the action. But if you can only sell to people from a certain country you must take these filters into account.
Evergreen campaign: offer
Keep in mind that in this case we do not want to use Facebook to optimize. Optimizing means showing your ad only to people who have a better chance of performing your action. But since they have already performed this action our goal is to target a different audience.
If you are using conversion and traffic goals, I recommend using the Daily Unique Reach offer. With this option, Facebook will show your content to as many people in your audience as possible, but never more than once a day.
It's your choice when to use automatic or manual bidding. In my original post I recommended manual bidding to reach the most people. But this may increase your costs. Experiment!
If you are using the Reach objective, then you will want to optimize your campaign for the objective and set a frequency cap.
Similar to Daily Unique Reach, your ad will be seen by as many people in your audience as possible but no more than the number of times you set in your frequency cap.
This is why I prefer the Reach objective; it gives you options for how many times you want the target to see the content.
Again, test to determine if automatic or manual bidding is necessary. If you are not getting automatic distribution, then you will need to set up a manual bid.
Evergreen campaign: placement
If we are careful to have our content seen by as many people as possible but not more than once a day (or similar), then it means that we also need to be careful about our positioning.
Why? Because positioning has a significant impact on the success of our campaign. While the right column can be an effective choice, I would not want to waste my single view there.
It's up to you to choose between Instagram placements or instant post, but the safest of the various offers is Facebook feed .
Evergreen campaign: budget
I won't tell you what budget to spend here, but just know that if the audience tested is small then you will pay a small amount of money per day. I often only pay $1-2 per day, depending on the type of campaign.
But remember that we have selected a cap of daily interactions with Daily Unique Reach and Offer Reach. In any case, we will reach the person at most once a day.
Evergreen Campaign: Recap
Except for a few customizations that differ from case to case (budget, schedule, etc.) that's pretty much it. But if you didn't understand, here's a recap:
Promote a trigger action that the user performs only once;
Create an audience of people who have taken action in the last 10 days;
Create an evergreen campaign targeting those who took the trigger action, promoting a related product
So when someone signs up for your offer they are automatically added to the Website Custom Audience and will be targeted in your campaign promoting the related product. If they don't buy the product in the next 10 days they will automatically exit the campaign.
The result: you’ll be consistently promoting a relevant product to a small audience who have recently interacted with something related, and you’ll reach them for up to 10 days. Your campaign’s target audience will be constantly updated, so you won’t be bombarding people with ads for months or weeks at a time.
Evergreen Campaign: Personalization
In its simplest form, an evergreen campaign is the creation of a campaign that promotes a product by targeting a small number of people who have performed the trigger action in a short period of time. But you can customize it however you want.
If the number of people in your audience is too low feel free to increase the duration, or on the contrary if you are not satisfied with the volume you can reduce the duration to avoid causing problems to the campaign.
You can also create a funnel campaign: instead of having one ad, you can create a series of different ads. In this case, you will have to be creative to make the campaign last several weeks. It's up to you!
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