How to Optimize Social Media Advertising

For many, advertising on social media platforms is comparable to trying to solve a puzzle that constantly rearranges its pieces. Whether it is the multitude of different campaign objectives, countless targeting options, or endless amounts of customizable creative available—running an effective social media advertising campaign on any platform can be daunting, to say the least.

While all the different levers available to advertisers ensure that no two campaigns will ever be the same, it's important to understand each platform’s algorithm and set-up campaigns that coexist with the on-going machine learning optimization that exists within each of them. This understanding will boost your confidence, and help you manage multiple social media initiatives simultaneously, and more effectively. Review our three key points to better understand and optimize your social media advertising, below:

Understand Social Algorithms and Machine Learning 

Social media platforms have relied on user engagement since their inception. This is now more important than ever before, with advertising revenue accounting for a significant portion of each popular social site’s bottom line. To solve for this and meet business goals, social platforms have taken information from billions of users and created a digitized proprietary “brain” (i.e. algorithm) in order to sort what they show users, based on popularity and relevance.

Naturally, these algorithms have migrated over to benefit advertisers as well. Each social platform utilizes its algorithm to determine which ads to show to which users via machine learning, in order to ensure advertisers that their ads are being served in real-time to the most valuable user.

While each platform’s algorithm is slightly different, common variables used in machine learning outputs include automating and maximizing each advertiser's bid amount in real-time, understanding the effective rate they'll have to pay in an auction in order to win an impression, and factoring in the perceived value of each ad to the end-user.  This is real-time, auction-based bidding in a nutshell!

Work with Machine Learning 

Now that we have a working understanding of social algorithms under our belt, the real work begins. It’s imperative that advertisers ensure their budgets, bids, and KPIs are clear and fully fleshed out, prior to launching any social campaign. Aside from that, given what we know about the algorithm and the signals it uses to make decisions, the best way for advertisers to get the most out of their social media advertising is to:

1) Create ads that are relevant and engaging.

2) Ensure campaigns are set-up to optimize the desired business outcome.

3) Take advantage of automated features within each social media buying platform to maximize the impact of its algorithm.

By working with machine learning (and doing these three things), you ensure that your campaign is set-up for success.

Generate Success with Social Media Campaigns

Finally, some quick and helpful hints to optimize your social media advertising:

• Match your main business objective to your campaign objective type to optimize the most important result.
• Be mindful of audience sizes—too small of an audience and your campaign won’t spend; too large and you might need more budget to make an impact.
• Ensure that the bidding structure is aligned with what’s most important. For instance:
  • Lowest cost per result = use the Lowest Cost setting
  • Managing overall cost = use the Bid Cap setting
  • Cost stability = use the Target Cost setting
• Utilize all placements to allow algorithms to serve ads wherever your target audience is spending most of their time.
• Use lifetime campaign-level budgets to automatically distribute media spend across your campaign’s ad sets based on what's performing best in real-time.             

Connect with us to learn more about social media advertising with Centro.