5 x Facebook "Power 5" Tactics To Boost Customer Acquisition At Scale

One critical task that digital marketers face is scaling Facebook ads profitably. It’s logical to assume that having a high budget for ads results in higher CPMs (cost per million impressions) and, therefore CPAs (cost per acquisition) rises.

Easy, right? Well, not exactly. Now Facebook Power 5 is on the scene.

Marketers have used “data science” for many years to grab the attention of their ideal audience on Facebook. Onboarding clients constantly talked about finding the right niche audience so that everything will work out.

But those days of multiple audiences, ad sets, and many campaigns are behind us. Facebook is becoming more advanced, and it’s now the efficient utilisation of its algorithm that will lead to more manageable and more scalable success in the future.

How are we sure about that? Because we’ve put it to the test and the results we have received are seriously impressive.

By utilizing Facebook Power 5:

• We’ve successfully scaled a subscription client’s ad budget by about 200%. We also generated nearly 250% more sign-ups and dropped their CPA by 10%.
• Sales also went up over 136% while their cost per purchase went down by nearly 40% for an eComm retailer.
• We improved purchases by over 102% in a lead generation campaign for an eCommerce hybrid company and reduced CPA by over 44%. Leads went up by 27%, and the cost per lead decreased by at least 14%.

If you need more convincing before giving Facebook Power 5 a try, you can look at the comprehensive guide below that divulges why we think it’s incredible.

Understanding Facebook Power 5 and Its Origins

The charges for increasing CPMs are making it too difficult to “beat” the system, never mind the fact that it is messy and difficult to manage.

Facebook developed Facebook Power 5 as their “best practices” for digital marketers. It showcases five strategies that should significantly improve the performance of your Facebook ads, but only if adhered to perfectly:

1. Account Simplification.
2. Campaign Budget Optimization.
3. Automatic Placements.
4. Auto Advanced Matching.
5. Dynamic Ads.

Marketing companies around the globe have already experienced huge gains thanks to Facebook Power 5. However, this tactic is not restricted to marketers with colossal budgets. Digital marketers at any level can use Facebook Power 5 to their benefit.

Why Everyone Can Use Facebook Power 5

Leveraging on the learning and automation capabilities of Facebook’s algorithm is the secret to killing it with the Facebook Power 5 method.

Instead of carving out a particular audience niche to target, you have the freedom to be broad as you go about your targeting, as long as your creatives are top-notch.

In doing so, your CPMs will decrease significantly. This will, in turn, minimize your CPCs (cost per click), thus helping you lower your CPAs.

Having cleared that up, we can begin breaking down the five Facebook Power 5 tactics.

Facebook Power 5 Tactic #1: Account Simplification

As I previously explained, you will not achieve success through hyper-targeting your Facebook campaigns in 2020, regardless of whether it’s by specific niche interests, demographics, audiences, or placements.

Such strategies may have performed well previously. Unfortunately, they can no longer assist you in scaling your ads as you would like. Apart from that, they bring about unwarranted confusion and redundancies.

By having fewer ad sets and campaigns in your account, you will give Facebook’s algorithm authorisation to experiment and find out which audiences, placements, and ad creatives are performing well.

Almost every marketer has a unique set of challenges and experiences; therefore, it’s hard to define a “catch-all” method of account structure.

A lot of B2C advertisers will design a structure with no more than four campaigns. It should resemble this outline:

Prospecting (Top of Funnel).

1. Broad Interests Related to the product.
2. Lookalikes 1%.
3. Lookalikes 1 to 5%

Re-engagement (Mid Funnel).

1. Instagram & Facebook post/ad engagers.
2. Video Viewers.

Remarketing (Bottom Funnel).

1. All Page Visitors.
2. Cart Abandoners.

Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs)–(Bottom Funnel).

1. Create Dynamic Product Ads retargeting if your brand has a catalog.
2. If you are only selling 1 product or are a B2C service, avoid using this method and only use the above three campaigns

You are probably wondering how long this structure takes to experience gains, and how it looks for an actual account?

A client specialising in selling home decor was experiencing serious challenges in getting higher than a 1.0 return on ad spend (ROAS).

Therefore, for the client to see some positive changes, we used a simple Facebook Power 5 model, and on the first day, we recorded instant gains.

Within the first week, we were able to increase click count by 20%. Purchases went up by about 18%, with an almost 40% increase in revenue. This was achieved by simplifying and going broader on roughly the same ad budget.

Keep in mind that we reduced their account from six campaigns and 24 ad sets on the legacy campaign system to four campaigns and nine ad sets on Facebook Power 5.

The best part? The massive gains we experienced came solely by simplifying the structure. We had not even set up any creative at the time.

The client recorded a 2.25 return on ad spend during those seven days. This is coming from an account that had previously never experienced a ROAS higher than 1.0.

Facebook Power 5 Tactic #2: Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO)

CBO is the modern method of implementing ad spends at the campaign level instead of the ad set level.

Rather than manually controlling the spend dedicated to each ad set, Facebook instead adjusts the spend between your ad sets and push the budget to where you are likely to have high conversion rates.

This tactic is highly efficient as it eliminates the “guesswork” aspect, giving you the freedom to adjust your budget in real-time.

What appealed to marketers with the oldr method of applying budget at the adset level is that you can decide how much money you focus on each demographic.

However, the downside with this tactic is that you will have to estimate which audience might record the best performance. Alternatively, you could place the same budget for each ad expecting all audiences will perform similarly, which is a much worse route to take.

Thanks to Facebook Power 5, you won’t have to play guessing games as to which audience will perform best because the platform will take care of that. Trust its machine learning capabilities, and you will record astounding results from your ad sets.

If the Facebook algorithm notices high performance in an ad set, they will funnel more budget to that ad set for you automatically. Similarly, if your money is being directed toward ad sets recording undesirable results, Facebook will move the funneling towards more beneficial ad sets.

If you think that’s the best part about CBO, you are dead wrong. What makes CBO stand out is its capacity to restrict the learning stage.

Since Facebook transfers budgets in real-time, it’s always learning and will never have to re-enter the learning phase.

Previously, whenever you made significant amends on ad set budgets, you would have to reset the ad set back into the learning phase, which halted performance.

Facebook Power 5 Tactic #3: Automatic Placements

I have to admit that I took a personal liking to this strategy.

When I audit a potential client, and I notice they have Facebook or Instagram specific campaigns appearing many times on their account, I tend to be at ease because I’m certain that setting up automatic ad placements will win them over.

A convenient trick media buyers initially used would involve prioritising automatic placements. The moment they noticed high results on IG, they would break the platform down as an individual and completely different campaign on Instagram.

This made it possible to manage the creatives, and budget to generate the highest scale from Instagram as possible. Unfortunately, on occasion, you would see sudden dips in results.

The cause behind this is Facebook used to offer you the highest audience reach in Instagram users who would be interested in buying from you. If you got no more, it was because Facebook no longer had potential customers that the system could target.  

Conventional media buyers used to granulate specific campaigns per placement. This was to establish better creatives to coincide with the ad set from the start. However, Facebook provides a remedy in the form of placement asset customisation.

Placement asset customisation allows you to set up your campaigns and change how it looks for each campaign. This helps marketers avoid having to granulate manual placement ad sets.

Combining placement asset customisation with automatic placements will ensure that your ad will always look appealing.

Finally, the most significant benefit of using automatic placements as a tactic is its cost benefits. As aforementioned, the secret to cost reductions is reducing your CPMs.

Enabling automatic placements will allow Facebook to adjust your budget to the placements recording the highest performances. This will help reduce your cost per million impressions, which, in turn, will decrease your cost per click and, consequently, your cost per acquisition.

Facebook Power 5 Tactic #4: Auto Advanced Matching

Auto Advanced Matching is probably the most under-used and underrated strategy of all five—which is strange because it is also the simplest to implement if you are trying to improve the results you achieve from your account.

Have you heard of the name Barry Bonds? He is a 7-time MVP, 14-time all-star, and the player with the most home runs in the entirety of Major League Baseball history. Barry Bonds is widely ranked among the prime baseball legends in baseball history. Unfortunately, he is more famous for his regular use of steroids.

Barry Bonds was an outstanding baseball player long before he used steroids. He was named MVP by the Pittsburgh Pirates on two occasions before he went to San Francisco, and that’s when his association with drugs started.

Now let us compare Barry Bonds to Facebook Pixel.

Let’s assume the Facebook Pixel is Barry Bonds before going to San Francisco. The pixel is an exceptional asset and is necessary for achieving high-performance results on Facebook. Incorporating Auto Advanced Matching is loading your ads with steroids and converting it into a legendary Barry Bonds.

This tactic will help to collect customer data in a much better way. It helps customise your audiences better and more accurately by assisting the pixel in understanding precisely how, when, and which audience converts on your website.

But the power Auto Advanced Matching gives the pixel is in a different class.

It allows Facebook pixel to gather customer data through user data collection tools and strategies such as:

• White-paper downloads.
• Email sign-ups.
• Registration forms.
• Newsletter sign-ups.
• User subscriptions.

When a user submits these forms with their filled data, Facebook can leverage that information to link it with their profile. This is convenient because it gives Facebook the power to effectively follow up activities by people who are probably using more than one device, or possibly, ad blockers.

Auto Advanced Matching is simple to toggle. All you need to do is log in to your Events Manager and choose your specific pixel. Proceed to the settings section of that pixel. Once you have selected it, toggle auto advanced matching on under “details”.

Facebook Power 5 Tactic #5: Dynamic Ads Mastery

This is the last strategy of our Facebook Power 5 tactics.  

As a B2C marketer with a service or subscription, you can execute the four strategies listed above to achieve massive wins on your campaigns. Please note, however, that this tactic may not apply in your case because it needs you to have a catalog.

According to Facebook, the advantage offered by this tactic is that it gives you the allowance to customise your ad sets without you having to do it manually. This is usually achieved through Dynamic Product Ad (DPA) retargeting.

If you’ve ever visited an online store to window shop but did not make a purchase, you might have noticed that you start receiving ads on Facebook based on the same items you looked at. That’s dynamic product ad retargeting doing its best to target you.  

DPA retargeting customises how each user interacts with the ad by showing them ads on the same items that they’ve shown interest in.

However, it is important to note that incorporating DPA targeting on your product list can be a brilliant hack for prospecting and not just for retargeting.

Facebook is aware of the items you have stocked through your product list. It is also mindful of the interests people have, based on their internet activity, what they follow or have liked on Facebook or their browsing behavior.

You must understand that this strategy is solely for eCommerce marketers or advertisers who have a product catalog. Facebook uses its algorithm to match relevant users with your product ads. All you need to do is grab some popcorn and watch.

Where These Tactics Are Used To The Max

We have realised that these five tactics work best with B2C brands rather than B2B brands. This is because a lot of B2C brands have a rather sizable audience they can potentially reach without particularly having to carve their audiences down to a niche.

With B2B marketing, on the other hand, marketers are compelled to carve out a demographic so they can quickly reach their target market. This means marketers are not allowed to be broad with their campaigns.

This should not mean that it is impossible to incorporate these five tactics into your B2B ad strategy on Facebook. It’s just a point always to remember while setting up your Facebook campaigns.

Final Thoughts: Five Stars For Power 5

We have put Facebook Power 5 to the test, and we have discovered that its capabilities can be of significant benefit if used well. We have granulated what we found into three easy takeaways:

• Time: If you ease your approach and let the Facebook algorithm do its job, you will save a lot of the time and money you spent to manually hack the process previously.
• Bigger Picture: Having saved an appreciable amount of time from manual adjustments, marketers will no longer get stuck designing your campaigns, as you will have quality time to reflect on grander tactics.
• Results:  Through minimizing inefficiencies and lowering our CPMs, it provides better outcomes for our clients.

Why don’t you experiment with any, or all, of the tactics and let us know your results, whether positive or not.