Why Run Facebook Ads Longer Than You Think?

Do you run Facebook ads? It’s tricky.

Have you been sitting at your desk wondering if Facebook ads are the best thing that could happen to your business? Or maybe you are still contemplating a fit?

You can read all about funnels, the right way to run Facebook ads, and even take a peek at this sequential checklist.

None of that is going to help if you miss this one crucial aspect of running Facebook ads:

Regardless of where you are at right now — and when you start — ensure that you run Facebook ads longer than you think you should.

Here’s why:

Run Facebook Ads:Let Facebook Do It’s Job

Did you know that when you launch your campaigns on Facebook, the social behemoth puts your campaigns on a “learning phase” — Facebook deploys machine learning and complex algorithms to “learn” more about your ads, the audiences you are targeting, and more.

When Facebook gets a whiff of what you are trying to achieve, who you are specifically trying to reach out, and what you intend to do, it works to get you just what you want.

Steve and Stewart of the Spend 10K a Day Podcast even have an entire episode dedicated to just that.

That learning, on Facebook’s part, is going to take a while. If you run a campaign for a day or a week, you are not going to give Facebook enough time for Facebook’s incredibly complex algorithms to kick in and to add more muscle to your campaign.

Test Before You Drop The Ball

Everything from ad performance to A/B testing, from ad tweaking to landing page optimization takes time. You aren’t going to get any data when you run short-term campaigns.

Without data, you can’t test anything. If you don’t test, you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.

Why A/B testing, you ask?

Despite the 2 days you spend trying to hone in on the exact audience you want to target, you don’t know for sure if you are right. Audience targeting on Facebook isn’t cast in stone so that you get it right, despite your experience with launching campaigns and your massive success when it comes to run Facebook ads.

Plus, you don’t know which of those ads are awesome and which of those ads suck. You aren’t sure if your landing pages are performing the best. You have no idea which of the offers you are making will click and what won’t.

Without giving your Facebook campaigns enough time, you are basically “spraying, throwing dollars out, and praying”.

Ad Fatigue & Ad Blindness Is Real

Imagine yourself watching your favorite TV show and this ad seems to be popping up for absolutely every single commercial break. What’d you think of it?

You’d be frustrated, that’s what. I remember this happening to me and I had nothing more than healthy disrespect (and rage) at the brand that was overdoing its advertising.

On Facebook, your ads will start showing up more for every single person within your reach (Frequency). When that happens, the click-through rates will plummet. You want none of that.

Brooke B. Sellas of AgoraPulse writes on How Long You Should Run Facebook Campaigns, and she lays out the basics and tries to answer the question with some real experiments.

Only when you run a campaign long-enough would you know when the frequency has crawled up. When that happens, it’s your opportunity to swap out ads and create new ones, add more targeting choices (like custom audiences and lookalike audiences), etc.

Now, none of this means that you should run campaigns (without changing ads often, without testing enough, and without optimizing your campaigns) forever (Unless you’ve hit a pot of gold and see no reason to mess with your campaigns).

Be judicious about the length of time you run your campaigns but don’t be fickle enough to stop your campaigns in less 4 hours after you launch them.

There’s a middle road — including all that painstaking work you have to do — to get to campaigns that give you a positive ROI.

How long do you run your campaigns?