Does Duplicating A Stuck Facebook Campaign Work? A Case Study

 This little trick might just save your Facebook campaign performance.

In November 2009, Marty Weintraub of aimClear complained about Facebook’s strange policy of requiring agencies to run ads through the personal accounts of their employees. Four years later, another agency voiced its annoyance at Facebook’s barebones advertising support. Let’s just say that Facebook isn’t approaching this issue in lightning speed. Poor support and a lack of communication, it seems, is a long-term problem that has affected a huge number of Facebook advertisers.. The weaknesses of Facebook’s advertiser support

Here are a few examples of the counterproductive and often inaccurate advice Facebook’s ad support team provides:

Don’t duplicate campaigns to re-charge old campaign not getting enough clickthroughs or engagement. It won’t help. Campaigns that don’t work are usually the fault of bad creatives CommentsHero - Buy Facebook CommentsCommentsHero - Buy Facebook Comments.

Offering a CPC bid lower than Facebook’s suggested bid will result in your ad not being served at all. On the whole, there’s a feeling of support “drinking from the company trough” and only offering advice to advertisers that will translate into a greater spend on Facebook.

Most advertisers can tell you that duplicating a campaign does, on occasion, increase its reach and generate more traffic. They’ll also let you know you that campaigns can fail for a variety of reasons, not just a bad ad creative.

Finally, there’s a huge amount of traffic accessible below Facebook’s suggested minimum bid. In fact, many campaigns with large enough audiences can reach their daily budget with a bid that’s well below the recommended amount provided by Facebook’s algorithm.

Facebook’s advice isn’t necessarily bad, but it isn’t completely accurate either. It’s hard to tell if the support provided to advertisers is inaccurate on purpose in order to encourage advertisers to spend more, or if it’s simply the result of limited training for Facebook’s ad support team.

When does it help to duplicate a Facebook campaign, and when doesn’t it work?

Newly launched campaigns are given a burst of impressions by Facebook so that their average clickthrough rate and eCPM can be calculated. If an ad performs well right from the beginning, it can receive a flood of impressions and a spike in traffic like Mediejobb’s duplicated campaign. Even with a great ad creative, your campaign could fail to get any traffic if it doesn’t generate a strong clickthrough rate within its first 1,000 impressions. Duplicating ads is a simple fix for Facebook’s overly aggressive optimization system, which quickly punishes low-performing ad creatives. But it's not just about reach. Average CPCs on the duplicated campaign were 50% lower than the average for the account, indicating that the ad’s performance had an obvious impact on pricing.

Conclusion

If your Facebook Ads campaign isn’t performing as expected, it might be best to take the advice of their support team with a grain of salt. Instead of relying on support for insight and help, carry out your own tests with a limited budget to discover the keys to a successful campaign. This way, you’ll discover how Facebook works through real hands-on experience, and not from the canned (and even inaccurate) advice provided by advertiser support.