Understanding and optimizing your ad campaign
Updated: Sep 18, 2024
After launching your first campaign and seeing the incoming data, you may be wondering what you could do next. This topic will help you understand and optimize your ad campaign.
The data from your Meta Horizon Store app campaign provide valuable insights into user reactions to your ads. Review the definitions of your selected metrics, especially CTR, which may include additional data like social engagement. Key metrics to monitor include:
- Amount spent: The approximate total amount of money you’ve spent on your campaign, ad set or ad during its schedule.
- Impressions: The number of times your ads were on screen.
- Link clicks: The number of clicks on links within the ad that led to advertiser-specified destinations, on or off Meta technologies.
- Results: The number of times your ad achieved an outcome, based on the objective and settings you selected.
- Cost Per Mille (CPM): The average cost for 1,000 impressions.
- App Installs: The number of app installs that were recorded as app events and attributed to your ads.
- CTR (Link Click-through rate): The percentage of impressions that received a link click out of the total number of impressions.
- CPC (Cost Per Link Click): The average cost for each link click.
- Cost Per App Install: The average cost for each app install.
- Cost Per Result:The average cost per result from your ads. Note that this varies based on performance goals like in-app purchases or trial starts.
- Columns: Customize your reporting by adding metrics related to performance, engagement, conversions, etc. Save these as Column Presets.
- Breakdown: Gain insights on demographics, country, placement, and creative assets to optimize your campaign.
- Reports: Access Columns and Breakdown data in dedicated reporting views.
For further insight, review these example scenarios with common use cases.
In this example, you have a paid app and want to know which creative is most effective at driving installs. Use the install and cost per install columns to identify cost-effective creatives.
In this example, you have a free-to-play app and want to know which age demographic is clicking on your ads the most. Use the Age parameter under Breakdown reporting and the Click-through Rate column to determine which age group engages most.
In both example scenarios, you would monitor significant changes using the
Charts or
History functions across campaign, ad set, and ad panes.
Best practices for optimizing your campaign include:
- Consolidating your audiences, especially if they share similar targeting. Learning occurs on the ad set level, and the learning period stabilizes with a minimum of 50 events over a 7-day period. Too many ad sets with overlapping targets can cannibalize data collection, hurting each ad set’s ability to learn effectively.
- As an example, let’s say you want to target 25-65+ users in the United Kingdom. Rather than creating multiple ad sets with the same targeting setup, create one ad set to reach the minimum of 50 events sooner.
- Making changes to your ad set can trigger a new learning period. This may not be desirable, especially when your ad set has accumulated valuable learnings and you are looking to scale. To help prevent the learning period reset, consider keeping any adjustments minor and avoiding significant edits (for a full list of significant edits that can trigger a reset, see Significant edits and learning phase).
- If you need to make several changes to your ad(s), we recommend applying those changes all at once so they only have to go through one learning period. However, keep in mind that doing so may make it difficult to determine which individual changes led to any shifts in your ads’ performance.
As you start to gather more data from your Meta ad campaigns, you might be tempted to target only your top performing audiences to maximize return on ad spend. However, limiting your
audience size too narrowly can increase your costs and lead to creative fatigue as the same users see your ads again and again.
Expand your audience with
broad targeting to maximize event collection and cost efficiency. If achieving conversions within budget, consider segmenting your audience further. If you choose to use Lookalike audiences, ensure they are built from a sufficient and qualified Custom Audience. You can monitor
Lookalike audience overlap using our comparison tool.
Creative quality is one of the key factors behind highly effective ads. Here are some tips:
- Continuously test various images and videos to identify top performers. Frequent testing will also combat creative fatigue, which can lead to rising costs when audiences have been overexposed to the same ads.
- Utilize Meta’s creative tools for optimal ad editing.
- Engage users quickly with compelling hooks and ensure visibility with high color contrast.
- For Stories and Reels, keep core elements within the safe zone.
- Launch multiple creatives simultaneously using the Flexible Format option.
- Validate creatives through A/B testing to optimize performance.
- Visit the Ads Library for creative inspiration and to see what other advertisers are currently running.
Here are some additional ways you can maximize your Meta Horizon Store app ads performance:
- On the Ad level:
- Use the Advanced Preview tool to see how your ad will look to users once it goes live. This can help you understand how your text and headlines will display on your ad UI, as well as where there might be cut-offs due to text length.
- Use the Preview on device feature to send a test ad to your mobile device (iOS only for Facebook feed). This is a great way to test out the end-to-end ad experience for yourself.
- Use the See Post feature to monitor and respond to users’ comments about your ad on Facebook and Instagram.
- The longer an ad runs, the more social engagement you may see. However, certain adjustments to the ad may remove this engagement upon publishing. To avoid making edits that remove your hard-won engagement, see About editing in Meta Ads Manager.
- While it is generally recommended for advertisers to focus on metrics that achieve their business objectives, you can use the Quality ranking, Engagement ranking, and Conversion rate ranking for a qualitative benchmark of your ads’ performance against others in the auction. For more scenarios and guidance on how to address these rankings, see How to use ad relevance diagnostics.