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Best Practices for PSAI Facebook Campaigns

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Facebook is the best platform to reach key audiences on social media thanks to its powerful targeting abilities, reasonable costs, and innovative ad offerings. To deliver meaningful results for your business, use this step-by-step guide to build your PSAI social media campaigns effectively.

1. What Kind of Campaign Do I Want to Run?

PSAI offers two different options for ad campaigns on Facebook:

  • Ads Manager
  • Storm Campaigns (via the Weather Center)

The first decision to make is which type of campaign you'd like to run. Learn more about each option below.

Ads Manager

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Ads Manager has several options with tested messaging designed to drive leads. You can promote an existing offer, promote a recent job, or create your own ad from scratch. Within these parameters, you can demonstrate creativity (more on this below!) and can target specific priority areas.

If you’re in the restoration business, launching more retail-oriented campaigns through Ads Manager can be a good strategy in between major storms.

Learn how to create a new ad or explore Ads Manager in our beginners' guide

Storm Campaigns

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Storm Campaigns are a great asset for restoration work. You can quickly get ads up and running so your target audience sees you before any potential competitors.

Because of the way these campaigns are set up, it’s important to only use this feature for storms that occurred within a month of campaign launch. The more recent the storm, the better.

What about targeting an old storm?

Although the Weather Center does offer the ability to target old storms, we do not recommend doing so through a storm campaign. PSAI storm campaigns use terminology like “recent storm” several times and are not optimized for older storms. Instead, we recommend using Ads Manager to target certain areas shown in the weather tool.

If there’s an older storm that you’d like to target through Ads Manager, please reach out to PSAI for additional assistance.

2. Who Do I Want to Reach?

You know your service areas, but it’s important to build an audience that is “just right” to drive leads on Facebook effectively. PSAI will help with this for both Ads Manager and Storm Campaign ads.

Ads Manager

If you’re using Ads Manager, think about whether you want your audience to be concentrated, general, or broad. You will choose this setting on the Launch Parameters page in PSAI Ads Manager, as shown below.

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Storm Campaigns

When deciding who to target for a Storm Campaign, you should use the same Facebook ad campaign for multiple swaths of the storm.* (You would do this by drawing multiple shapes on the map, as shown below.)

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*Exception: If the storm is very large (covering more than 100,000 homes) or if you want to prioritize certain areas over others, then you can do multiple Storm Campaigns. However, this would be a rare occasion.

3. What Do I Want to Say?

This is where you should put yourself in the target audience’s shoes. What would make you not just stop and take a look at the ad, but also provide personal information?

These are our key recommendations:

  • Be clear about what you’re offering. And quick. Your audience sees a lot of ads on Facebook every day. You need to let them know quickly what your business is, what you offer, and something to really motivate them to provide their information.
  • Does the copy match the image? Whatever project you’re promoting needs to be mentioned in the copy and shown in the image.
  • How’s your creative looking? Images should be high-quality. Videos should show key messaging within the first 3 seconds. (That means that videos you’ve made for other platforms may not always be the best fit for social media ads.)
  • Your headline should be catchy. This is what likely will motivate people to click over and enter their details. For example, “free roof inspection” is short and enticing, and it shows the audience what you’re offering.
  • Include an amazing offer. Unlike other marketing efforts, your target audience is not looking for a specific service while on Facebook. They are passive. Including an offer like free gutters with a roof or a free post-inspection gift card (Starbucks, Amazon, or a local store everyone in your area loves) can be great for restoration campaigns. If you are creating a retail campaign, offer a % off a service or create a sweepstakes.

4. How Can I Monitor the Ads? 

After you’ve launched your campaign, we don’t recommend a “set it it and forget it.” Our campaigns are designed to take out much of the guesswork, but performance can vary based on audience size, budget, creative, and timing. It’s important to check in on Facebook and look at what’s going on within a few days of campaign launch to understand performance.

You can view your campaign details on Facebook by clicking Manage.

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Your PSAI customer success managers will check in as your campaign is getting started. If you see something unusual, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Within Facebook, we can look at some metrics to get a better understanding. Don’t just look at the leads—yes, we know that leads are the key metric, but we need to consider other metrics, too, in order to understand what’s really going on.

Here are a few additional metrics we can look at to uncover the issue:

  • Overall reach: Let’s compare the audience size to the number of people actually seeing the ad. If it’s not reaching enough people, we may need to expand the audience size.
  • Frequency: This metric refers to how many times one person has seen your ad. If the frequency is higher than 4, then we need to adjust the audience because too many people are seeing your ad multiple times and not taking action.
  • Link clicks: This metric matters specifically for storm campaigns. This shows how many people have clicked on the link, and it is the main metric for how our storm campaigns are being built. We want to make sure there are a lot of clicks happening.
  • Landing page views: Again, this metric specifically matters for storm campaigns. If not enough people are getting to the landing page compared to link clicks, then the current audience may not be the right target.

So what does it mean to adjust the audience?

A lot of time it’s adjusting small things in targeting to get Facebook to serve your ad to the right people. It might mean adjusting the age parameters, adding or removing a behavior, and/or expanding or narrowing the geo-targeting. We’re also looking at campaigns to provide optimizations.

5. What Learnings Can I Apply After a Campaign Has Ended?

It took 6 seasons for Michael Jordan to get his first NBA championship. Does that mean he was a bad player in the early years? No. The Bulls knew Jordan was key to success, and they slowly built their perfect lineup. It can take a little bit of testing and adjusting to determine what approach will be most effective to deliver leads, but we will work with you to develop the best strategy for your business.

We’re always looking to learn from our campaigns. When one wraps up, we can review, analyze, and develop learnings to make a game plan for next time. The more data we have (like the data points mentioned above), the better insights we can uncover.

Some of the common learnings that we find with our customers' campaigns include the following:

  • If this was a storm campaign, was the audience size too small?
  • Was the storm not severe enough? A storm with small hail sizes may attract less attention as not everyone believes that small hail can damage their roof (even though it can).
  • Was the storm too old? As mentioned before, if storms are not recent, it’s a little more difficult for the user to remember. It may sound silly, but that is how most Facebook users think while on the platform. If you want to target an older storm, consider using Ads Manager.
  • How did you handle the leads? Our customers who get the best sales from leads reach out within 12 hours and also use phone calls, text (SMS), and email to follow-up. It's also important to make sure that the homeowner understands you’re calling from the Facebook ad. We have call scripts for specific ad campaigns that can also help with this situation.

Using PSAI features strategically from the start will help set you up for success. We recommend keeping this guide handy to make sure you're making the most of Ads Manager and Storm Campaigns.

Need help with your Facebook ads? Please submit a support ticket for any social media questions.