Can you believe it? Q4 is almost here again! If you advertise on Meta this time of year, then you know what this means – it’s time to hunker down, get organized, and start producing some killer ad campaigns that will stand out against the competition.
If you’re anything like me, it may be easy to feel overwhelmed during this bustling time of year if you don’t have effective tools in place to keep yourself productive and on track with your holiday Meta campaigns. That’s why in this blog, I’ll be breaking down my top three favorite time-saving tips to help you make the most of your busy work days as you head into Q4.
Tip #1: Make a Game Plan
If you’re already feeling a bit behind on your Q4 campaign planning, it’s not too late to get started! With the right tools, mapping everything out can be done quickly and effectively. Some of my personal favorite ways to get campaign ideas are using the Planner Tool within the Meta Business Suite and X’s 2024 Marketing Calendar. Both resources highlight important holidays and key seasonal moments that you can choose to leverage for your campaigns. Additionally, you can lean on AI tools like ChatGPT to help brainstorm a list of campaigns specific to your industry or niche.
Once you have your key promotional dates nailed down, it’s helpful to make a list of all of the creative assets and campaign builds needed for each, as well as assignees and timelines. I personally like to keep a master spreadsheet that includes all of this key information for each client to help the team stay on track and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. See our previous blog, Unwrapping Success: A Holiday Shopping Roadmap for Paid Social, for even more tips.
Tip #2: Test Into Dynamic Creative Ad Settings
Save time on ad builds and testing, and let Meta do the heavy work when it comes to finding the winning combinations. Meta’s Dynamic Creative feature allows you to streamline your work by creating one ad per ad set with multiple creative, copy, and headline variations. Meta will choose the iteration that is most likely to convert for each ad viewer!
To create a dynamic ad, you’ll have to:
Open the Ads Manager interface for the account you wish to advertise on.
- Click the “Create +” button to draft a new campaign.
- Once you’ve selected your campaign-level settings, click Next to toggle to the ad set settings.
- In addition to your preferred ad set settings, be sure to toggle on Dynamic Creative.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “That’s great, but how do I know which text and creative variations are actually performing?” don’t worry – there’s a solution for that, too! In the Ads Manager interface, click the Breakdown dropdown, and select “Customize columns.” There, you can select “Text” to compare performance against multiple headlines and primary copy variations, and you can select “Image, video and slideshow” to compare the various creative iterations using your selected reporting columns.
Dynamic Creative is a feature I wish I had capitalized on more in previous holiday seasons, along with other Meta advertising automations, like campaign and ad scheduling.
Tip #3: Schedule, Schedule, Schedule!
It’s time for my final and all-time favorite tip: Schedule ahead! If you’ve been advertising on Meta for years, like myself, I’m sure you’re familiar with some of the scheduling pain points there have been around the holiday season. In past years, we’ve been able to set start and end times on a campaign or ad set level, which is great, but not all advertisers’ promotions are organized on a campaign level. This may have meant sleepless nights containing late-night ad changes to make sure your promotions were being advertised to the appropriate timeline and timezone.
If that was you, I have some good news. As of this month, Meta has introduced a new feature that is going to be game-changing for many advertisers this holiday season. In addition to the campaign, ad set, and Advantage+ Shopping Campaign ad-level scheduling we already had access to, we now also have access to ad-level scheduling abilities across all campaigns and objectives! Now, you can schedule one promotional ad to end delivery automatically at any date and time in your time zone and schedule another to start whenever you choose.
Finding this setting can be a bit tricky, so here’s how to locate it in the Meta Ads Manager:
- Click open the Edit pane for any ad.
- Scroll down to the “See More Options” dropdown beneath the ad format selection.
- Hover over “Schedule” to click the edit button that appears.
- Input your desired start and/or end times for the ad.
- Publish your ad changes.
Once you’ve enabled the ad, you can sit back, relax, and let the ad adhere to the schedule for you.
Now that you have these three Meta time-saving tips in your back pocket, it’s time to get to work and start planning and producing some awesome social ad campaigns! By making a thorough game plan, leveraging dynamic creative ad settings, and making the most of Meta’s scheduling features, you’ll be able to spend less time doing tedious grunt work and more time focusing on optimizing your advertising efforts this holiday season. Which trick will you be trying first?
