How to Save Money on Your Facebook Ads

Did you know you can test your ads before you spend a single dollar?

There’s a feature in Facebook Creator Studio that enables you to test different creative for a limited duration (i.e. 10 mins – 24 hours max).

During that time, 50% of your audience will receive version A, and 50% will receive version B.

You can run up to four creatives at a time, and also determine the objective you’re trying to meet such as clicks, follows, comments, shares, etc.

This may be a good way for your brand to A/B/C/D test different titles, offers, creative, descriptions, etc. and find a winner before committing to ad spend.

NOTE: One caveat with this Facebook Creator Studio feature is that it only works if you have an audience on your Facebook Fan Page. If your company page is new, or you just don’t have that many followers who engage in your organic posts, then it won’t work.

How to Test Creative in Facebook Creator Studio

Suppose you had 10 blog posts you wanted to promote to drive traffic to your site. But, to save costs, you only want to run posts which yield high CTR.

One way to do it would be to run all 10 posts ads, each with a small advertising budget, collect a sufficient amount of data, and determine, which, if any, yield high CTR. You would cancel any underperforming ads, and increase ad spend on the higher performing blog posts.

NOTE: When I say, run a blog post as an ad – there may be some confusion. Currently, Facebook only allows three types of ads in their Ads Manager:

Single Image
Video
Carousel

To run a blog post as an ad, you would need to post the blog organically on your Facebook Fan Page (aka your company page on Facebook), then hit the ‘Boost’ button. When you do that, it generates an ad in the Ad Manager similar to the aforementioned ad types. Similarly, you can select your audience targeting, budget, duration, etc.

The second way to do it, would be to run tests in Facebook Creator Studio to determine the winners before committing ad spend. This is how you can save money on Facebook Ads.

To start testing creative (video, image, link, text…), do the following steps:

Go to Facebook Creator Studio
Click Tools > Post Testing
Follow the prompts to test up to 4 creatives from 10 mins – 24 hours (max).

Repurpose high-performing organic content as ads

One trick you can use to get more CTR on your ads is to repurpose high-performing organic content. The content that performs the best may be a good candidate to get engagement and click-through as an ad since it has already been tested and proven.

You may also want to remix it so that it becomes more transactional. For example, at the end you can say something like, “If you’re looking for <XYZ>, then click the link to <learn more / book a call / sign up for a free trial…>.”

To learn more about Reposting, Remixing, and Repurposing, check out How to Use TikTok for B2B Marketing.

Start with engagement

When creating ads in Facebook, you can start with ‘Engagement’ as your campaign objective. This will show your ad to users who are most likely to engage (like and comment) with your ad. Ads with lots of likes and comments tend to do better than without as this engagement acts as ‘social proof’.

The ads that receive a lot of positive engagement can then be repurposed (using Post ID). Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do that.