Did You Ever Play In A Sandbox?

Did You Ever Play In A Sandbox?

You might be asking why I’m asking you about sandbox play - it’s an odd question, I know. I never played in a sandbox when I was young…sand…ick….BUT I do encourage it when it comes to Facebook ads. 

Let me explain….

When it comes to Facebook….ahem…Meta…advertising…it’s important to continue to test new things even if your ads are performing well. We have to test new things and see what’s working (and eliminate what isn’t). If we’re working with a limited budget - say $50 a day, we often can’t put 20 ads in one ad set. Facebook just won’t be able to spend the money on all those ads so you’ll never really know what ads performed best because they’re not getting a fair chance, so I run a small test of ads, in what I like to call a ‘sandbox’ campaign. 

Here’s what I do:
Let’s say my client gave 10 versions of ad creative to test and I have about $100 a day to spend. As mentioned, with a small daily budget, Facebook just won’t feed out all 10 ads. So, I’ll pick 4 that I think will perform best for my ‘main’ campaign and save the others for my sandbox.

I’ll take my ‘testing’ images and create a new campaign using 10% of the daily budget and let them run for about a week to see if one starts to perform best. When I see a ‘winner’ (winner = I’m getting the CPL I want, CTR is over 1%, and conversion rate is over 25% ), I’ll move that ad into my ‘main’ campaign and see how it performs there against the other ads. If all is going well, I’ll gradually scale that main campaign and keep testing in the sandbox. (Note: Keep the ad in the ‘sandbox’ running. If it’s doing well, never shut an ad off!) 

When it comes to running Facebook ads, the goal is to find ads that are working, scale them, and test new ones to keep things fresh - especially for evergreen campaigns. We don’t want to see the frequency metric go over 4 for any one ad. So testing is key!