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.
What to do with your stuck Facebook Campaigns?
Our friends at MedieJobb.info do their fair share of Facebook advertising and were recently offered their own Facebook account rep. Their rep provided insights and advice to help them improve their campaign performance, generate more revenue from Facebook, and achieve a higher ROI.
The Facebook duplicate campaign experiment
Despite the close support, MedieJobb’s campaigns were still reaching a threshold they could not overcome. To see if their rep’s advice was accurate (specifically, that duplicating campaigns doesn’t help), they took two campaigns — one mobile and one desktop — that were spending about three euros per day.
They duplicated the campaigns without changing anything. No adjustments were made to bids, targeting options or any other settings that could affect ad delivery or performance. All ad creatives were left exactly as they originally were, without any changes to images or ad copy.
Contrary to Facebook’s advice, things changed very quickly. Within a few minutes, they got their first impressions on the duplicated campaigns. Within a few hours, traffic skyrocketed without an adjustment to their bids or targeting settings.
Talk about a sudden increase in traffic! Contrary to what Facebook’s support team says, making duplicate campaigns produced an obvious increase in traffic compared to the original campaign.
Results
Within a couple of hours of duplicating the existing campaign, its total spend skyrocketed to 100 euros. This is more than 100 times the previous average daily spend of the campaign.
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.
