Facebook has not kept secret the fact businesses must pay to play. As you scroll through your personal newsfeed, you might have noticed most brand content is now sponsored. Facebook got so good at grooming brands to advertise on their platform that now brands are spending up to 200 million dollars a year on Facebook alone. Facebook was allowing brands to target so specifically, they were seeing a huge ROI from their advertising spend. Earlier this year Facebook addressed data misuse and cracked down on a few targeting features previously available.

Although Facebook’s data crackdown is restructuring how advertisers are able to target, we are still seeing a lot of bang for your buck on Facebook. This social media channel continues to have one of the most sophisticated digital ad platforms and now allows you to target even beyond the platform audience with the audience network feature. With Facebook’s recent algorithm changes, I’ve found three ways to continue getting more bang for your buck.

1. Keep your content simple

Keeping your copy and graphics simple is key for many target audiences. We are seeing shorter, simple captions and link descriptions convert at a higher rate than long, clever captions. In the New Media Landscape we consume so much content, it is getting harder to grab a consumer’s attention. Many target audiences will respond to your ad if you are clear and concise with your call-to-action. This includes being concise with any text in the graphic. If you make it too difficult or time consuming for your target audience to get through the ad to convert, you are putting your brand at a disadvantage. Although this is what we are seeing across the board, I recommend you A/B test different types of content with your target audience to ensure the most bang for your buck.

2. Warm your audience

One of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make when running a Facebook ad campaign is not warming the audience before asking for the conversion. This is especially important when you are advertising to a new target audience or a new product. I recommend using a test budget during the first month of the campaign to warm your audience, especially if you are going to follow up with a conversion ad. You want to make sure you have at least 50 fires on your Facebook pixel before measuring conversions for Facebook’s system to do this accurately. A few different ad types such as brand awareness, website traffic and landing page views are all considered audience warming tactics.

3. Get creative with your targeting

One of the best ways to receive ROI on your advertising dollars is strategically targeting. Really understanding the ins and outs of how custom audiences, interests and excluded audiences work is critical to your success as an advertiser. You want to be sure you are not wasting your advertising budget on those who have already converted or purchased. This is why it’s important when you are setting up your Facebook campaign to think about groups you might need to exclude. With Facebook’s custom audience feature there are many unique ways you can target an audience you’ve had a previous engagement with. If applicable to your campaign, there are some low hanging fruit you can easily convert by setting up an audience with those that engage with your posts the most or those who have visited a certain page on your website. Understanding custom audiences and utilizing when applicable can help make your campaign successful. One strategy I use is going in and creating a few custom audiences in my advertising account I think might be a fit for my campaign. I analyze the amount of people and demographic information and choose a few to include in my test budget.