After setting up your catalogs, using dynamic ads is straight-forward and effective in most cases. Despite this, problems do occur and they often relate to high frequencies and campaign scopes. Here we present some tips for optimizing your dynamic ads campaigns!

Isolate funnel events to separate ad sets

The different audience-building signals represent different stages in the customer's decision making the journey. E.g. for e-commerce, adding a product to cart is a signal of higher purchase intent than just viewing a product.

We recommend separating each signal type (Pixel or app event) to a separate ad set to be able to

• see the performance separately for each and
• to be able to optimize the bid/budget separately for each.

Bid smartly

By default, bidding towards the event lowest in the sales funnel is advised. Even if the ad sets struggle to get enough weekly conversions, this yields the best results in most cases. If this does not work, try combining audiences to get more conversions to allow Facebook to optimize better. In most cases, we also recommend using pay per impressions bidding due to better optimization.

• Bid towards the lowest event in your sales funnel (e.g. Purchase or Subscription in an app).
• Use pay per impressions as the billing event

Fight back Frequency

In many cases Facebook marketers neglect high frequency if the ads are still profitable without seeing the negative effects, such as creative relevance scores dropping, cost-per-clicks going up and click-through rates going down, which are symptoms of unhappy customers and brand damage. Frequency issues are often linked with too small audiences. You can automatically rotate through different ad templates with Ad Rotation, but to control the frequency even more, check the following two tips.

Modify your retargeting time window

Simply by adjusting the time-window of your ads can have a big effect on your frequencies. Having a longer time to gather conversions will result in a larger audience for your retargeting. Changing time-window from, for example, 7-day window to a 14-day window can lower your frequencies significantly.

• Try changing your retargeting time-window on the dynamic ads ad sets' Audience tab to a higher value.

Widen your prospecting

The audience you get for your retargeting comes from prospecting which means that the traffic from your prospecting campaigns impacts the frequencies of your dynamic ads campaigns. If you have a hard time getting enough conversions, you can shift your budgets and efforts more on the prospecting campaigns.

Update your ad creatives

Ad creatives play a huge role in delivery. Making changes to the design can have surprising, dramatic and immediate effects on your performance. Try refreshing your ad creatives every week by changing their images or copy. This is done easily with Smartly.io's Image Templates.

Campaign structures

The structure of your campaigns should include a campaign for every stage in the customer lifecycle, e.g. prospecting, retargeting and re-engagement. See the below image for how your campaign structure could look like.

Each of the objectives (prospecting, retargeting and re-engagement) have their own campaigns, and the latter two have also been split into dynamic and static custom audience campaigns, as they can't be mixed. Remember to avoid audience overlapping in all cases through audience exclusions. In the image above, audience exclusions would work in such a way that all ad sets exclude the audiences of all the ad sets that are placed below them. For more information about structuring your dynamic ads campaigns, see this Blog post.

We also highly recommend using Facebook's Optimal Campaign Setup as a guideline on how to structure your campaigns.

This image offers a closer look at how to optimize ad sets, where to place ads and what kind of creatives to use. It also takes audience overlaps into consideration and provides insights on what audiences to exclude.