A Brief History of Facebook Ads

• February 2005 – Click Optimization: Facebook advertising platform shows ads to people most likely to click on your ads.
• August 2005 – Conversion Optimization: Facebook advertising platform shows ads to people most likely to convert or take the desired action in your app/website.
• October 2016 – 7-Day Conversion Optimization: Facebook advertising platform needs a minimum of 15-25 conversions for its algorithm to optimize. However, this can be challenging with small budgets in a 1-day window. But, the 7-day window allows more time for the minimum of conversions to be completed and the algorithm to start working.
• December 2016 – App Install Optimization: Facebook advertising platform shows ads to people most likely to install your app.
• February 2017 – Dynamic Creative Optimization: DCO helps advertisers determine which creative assets perform best for their audiences by testing up to 10 images/videos, and 5 of each copy asset.
• 2017 – ROAS Value Optimization: Facebook advertising platform shows ads to people most likely to spend money on your app/website. Also, it uses the purchase values sent from the Facebook pixel to estimate how much a person may spend with your business over a seven-day period.

Facebook Ad Manager and Google Ad Word’s auto-bidding sets and adjusts bids as needed to maximize results. Budgets also modify in real-time based on performance. In addition, Facebook’s value-bidding allows advertisers to increase their customers’ LTV. While lookalike audiences help advertisers find audiences more likely to take the desired action. Finally, DCO or Dynamic Creative Optimization lets advertisers run multivariate creative tests and thus identify winning combinations.

Advancements

These advancements are driving better performance for advertisers because important decisions and adjustments about budgets and bids are made in real-time and based on real-time data. Also, as Facebook helps advertisers make profitable decisions on bidding, budgets, and audiences, there is still one important variable that Facebook advertising platform can’t help with yet: creatives.

Differentiators

Creative becomes the differentiator for performance and financial success. As a result, constant creative testing – copy, video, images – becomes imperative to an organization’s objectives. Also, a large volume of creative is needed not only to achieve but also to sustain ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). Because creative rapidly fatigue with increased spend and audience reach. Moreover, 95% of creative fail to outperform your portfolio’s best. So, even when having a high-performing creative, you need to think about replacing it. See the graph below to understand the need and results of successful creative testing.

Our team at Consumer Acquisition has created and tested over 300,000 ads spending over $3 billion dollars for clients across several verticals. As a result, we have created this white paper to provide ideas and guidelines on creative testing for mobile app installs and user acquisition campaigns in Facebook advertising.

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