5 areas to automate in your social advertising

As humans, we tend to enjoy doing the the tasks we know – those ones we are comfortable with, have done before and feel like we’ve mastered. But what if some of that work doesn’t add a lot of value? What if it could be automated?

Automation can be a touchy subject because, in general, we don’t like being outside our comfort zones. But the reality is that, depending on your specific role, a lot of what you do on a day-to-day basis could be automated.

And since you’ve just come back from summer vacation, we thought it might be a good time to discuss this ‘touchy subject’. Perhaps the rest & relaxation doesn’t have to be completely over now that your back at work! Automation could help you sleep better at night and ensure your focussing your time on things that add value.

Where to start?

So what activities in social advertising should you be automating? And how can automation drive effectiveness?

We talked about this topic in a recent episode of our weekly Facebook Live. Watch the video replay and read more detail below.

Naming Automation

Starting very simple, the naming of an ad, ad set or campaign is really important. Having a consistent naming convention will enable you and your team to retrieve what you’ve previously worked on and also easily share any campaign results.

Setting up your naming convention and having all your employees manually follow the same naming rules is a waste of time. So here at Paragone we’ve developed an ‘auto-naming convention’ feature! Now, all our customers need to do is choose the convention (for example, date_gender_country), and all their ads, ad sets or campaigns will automatically be named in that way. This automation helps you quickly find what you’re looking for and, even if you weren’t the person who created the campaign, you’ll  know what a specific campaign is about even before opening it.

Budget Automation

We all know that respecting the budget is crucial to social advertising success. You need to be careful with it, and ensure it is well allocated. Budget automation can be set up to transfer budget from one campaign or ad set that is underperforming to another campaign or ad set that has a better chance of success. And it’s all done on an ongoing basis and in real-time! As human-beings we can’t be in front of our ads 24/7 – you can’t be actively managing your campaigns every weekend after all! So this kind of automation can help to constantly optimize your ads, even while you’re off relaxing! Our innovative agency client Social.Lab had great success with this using automation features available in Paragone.

Bidding Automation

Focussing on Facebook advertising, you have the choice to either manually set your bid or leave it to the Facebook algorithm to decide for you. As a general rule, when you’re not sure what you’re doing, leaving it to the algorithm is a good idea. Bidding isn’t a ‘set-and-forget’ thing – it’s not about one action at one time. It’s a dynamic activity which should change based on the competition within a specific auction, for example. In many cases, choosing to automate your bidding can help increase the visibility of your ads to your chosen segments. For a deep-dive into getting your Facebook ads bidding right and what it takes to win more auctions, download our ‘Ultimate Guide to Facebook & Instagram Ad Bidding‘.

Auto-Promotion

Organic posts that perform well tend to also work well in paid advertising. Paragone clients have the luxury of being able to set up rules to automatically boost their best performing organic posts. Often, in large organisations, the roles of Community Manager and Paid Acquisition Manager are quite separate. Auto-promotion can help to bring these people together, focussing social media activity across organic and paid on the overarching business goals.

Other Automation Rules

Rules are the bread and butter of the Automation Center in Paragone, and cover much of the automation we have mentioned above. Rules can be set at the ad, ad set or campaign level or even to a group of campaigns. Keeping your costs under control by setting a rule to turn off campaigns with a CPA over 20 euros, is a great example of the usefulness of these kinds of rules.

Integrations with third parties like Zapier allow Paragone users even more automation options. Making changes to Facebook ad campaigns based on external factors like the weather and Google sheets metrics is only the beginning. Third party integrations like this one enable performance marketers on Paragone to set up a ‘safety-net’ of automation, allowing them to focus on the things that really need their attention.