Needless to say, making over $3,000 from an ad campaign with a budget of $50 is pretty awesome. Ever since we started using AdEspresso to manage our Facebook ads, we’ve been able to produce results like this for our clients. AdEspresso’s A/B testing and real-time analytics paired with Facebook’s specific ad targeting features has definitely played an important role in helping us succeed.
But before I get ahead of myself, let me give you a basic idea of what AdEspresso is. AdEspresso is a Facebook Ads Manager that allows you to easily create and test hundreds of creative variants and audience segments. It also provides insightful real-time analytics and suggestions for optimizations, so that you can easily pause your worst-performing creatives and edit your target audience on the go. AdEspresso makes it much easier to see and act upon what is working and what’s not working while your campaign is live.
What is AdEspresso?
It is well known that coffee stimulates the release of a neurotransmitter dopamine, which is often associated with happiness and other pleasant feelings. The same feelings usually get evoked after you see the results of a successful Facebook ad campaign. What do coffee and successful Facebook campaigns have in common? AdEspresso.
In the words of its creators, AdEspresso was born ‘after countless nights of coding and rivers of caffeine’. AdEspresso is an automatic ad optimization tool, originally geared towards small and medium businesses. Its main purpose is to make managing profitable Facebook campaigns (even when on a limited budget) easier and more straightforward.
Creating, analyzing and optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns has never been simpler thanks to this tool. Originally spun out of an Italian kitchen in 2013, later relocated to San Francisco, and eventually acquired by Hootsuite, AdEspresso has today become one of the first choices when it comes to Facebook advertising optimization.
Microsoft, Hubspot, Kabbage, and TeeSpring are just some of the big names using it. Everybody loves success stories, so here’s one – Capacitr used AdEspresso to achieve a 5384% ROI on Facebook ads, making over $3,000 from a campaign that had the initial budget of just $50.
By better optimizing your Facebook ads, you should be able to grow your fan base, increase engagement, and eventually boost your conversion rate (or simply sell more products). Plus, you’ll avoid overspending while doing so. Let’s take a look at some of AdEspresso’s main functionalities that can help you achieve some of these goals.
AdEspresso Features
- Comprehensive A/B testing
If only you could apply A/B testing to everything in life, it would be… well, much easier. Unfortunately, in real life, most things you can do only once and there’s no going back after that. Luckily, in the world of social media advertising, almost anything can be split-tested.
We’ve already discussed the importance of split testing your next quiz, but it applies to literally any piece of content, including, and particularly referring to Facebook ads. According to some studies, 44% of companies use split-testing software to optimize their conversion rates. Those who employ it properly have managed to use A/B testing to reduce their bounce rate by 20%.
How much should you spend on your first AdEspresso campaign? Although there’s no universal answer, the people behind AdEspresso recommend allocating at least $5 to $10 daily for each experiment you’re running. So, for example, if you’re split testing 20 ad variations, a daily budget between $100 and $200 should be optimal. Of course, it’s up to you to determine the budget, but surely you realize that testing 100 ads with a daily budget of $10 would be a complete waste of money.
If you decide to test the design of your ads, some elements you may want to consider a/b testing are:
- Image
- Post Text
- Landing Page
- Headline
When it comes to ad targeting, you can test a bunch of elements, such as:
- Country
- Gender
- Placement
- Interests
- Age
- Custom Audiences
- Relationship Status
- Purchase Behaviors
- Education Level
- Automatic Post Promotion
Tired of having to promote all your posts one at a time? With AdEspresso’s Automatic Promotion, you can boost all (or groups of) posts at once, based on the parameters you set. AdEspresso gives you complete control over what’s promoted, how often, and for how long.
- Campaign Optimization
AdEspresso will give you an overview of their results. You’ll be able to instantly see what’s working and what isn’t, and act accordingly. Getting to know your audience has just become much easier! Instead of analyzing data day and night, all by yourself, you simply let AdEspresso do all the dirty work. Its Optimization Algorithm analyzes all the relevant metrics for you in real-time and makes recommendations for improvement.
- Clean and Powerful Analytics
AdEspresso Analytics keeps it super-simple, extremely visual and eye-pleasing. The metrics are displayed in a clean and actionable way, making it simple to track the progress of your campaigns. If you’re one of those organization freaks, you can add tags to your campaigns to easily organize and group them. This allows you to get aggregated reports and statistics for each group.
The entire purpose of Facebook advertising (contrary to popular belief) isn’t to get as many likes as possible, but to boost your business and customer engagement. AdEspresso Engagement Analytics enables you to track these things and measure your success.
- Report Builder
With AdEspresso’s Report Builder, generating stunning PDF reports will take only several minutes. The reports you create are highly customizable so that you can drag & drop the elements you want to display, choose the most important metrics and the way they appear, and voilà – your PDF report is ready for download. You can also get it delivered to your email, on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis.
AdEspresso Ad Gallery
Ad Gallery, the unique archive of real Facebook ads that only AdEspresso offers, has been created way before Facebook started this new transparency area. It’s an incredible inspirational tool for marketers that, as of this moment, has a count of 161,672 Facebook Ad Examples in the free section (available to everyone) plus 100,392 more Facebook Ad Examples available for our newsletter subscribers only (you can sign up here).
And what about the 1,544,825 Facebook ads and the 106,340 Twitter Ads free for our customer and University subscribers? Should we also mention that you can see (and search) ads in 36 different languages? And that you can get this immeasurable value for less than one coffee per day?
But what makes this tool really unique is that fact that the hundreds of thousands of examples of our Ad Gallery (and the number grows every day) are collected thanks to your cooperation, too. AdEspresso ads gallery, in fact, is populated by capturing the Facebook ads that show up in your newsfeed and in the newsfeed of all those who added the Ads Gallery Extension for Chrome.
If you are an AdEspresso user there’s even more functionality for you.
Download our Chrome extension, connect it to your AdEspresso account, and within a few hours, you’ll start seeing the ads screen-capped from your newsfeed pop-up in your very own Ads Gallery directly in your AdEspresso dashboard.
AdEspresso best practices
Over the years I’ve learned some best practices that help me get even more out of the platform. Here are the top three that I recommend following:
- Always, always take advantage of split testing. This is one of the biggest benefits of the platform. Even if you’re convinced you’ve created the perfect headline/description/offer combo, test it anyway. You may be surprised at the results as to what’s performing well and what isn’t.
- Give your campaigns some breathing room. This is true with all Facebook Ads because you need to give your campaigns some breathing room to level out. Give your campaigns between 3-7 days, you’ll see where your relevance score is, your CPCs, and your action rates. This goes for changes, too. Any time you make a big change to your campaign, give it a few days to see the effect.
- Watch your campaigns closely. Just because AdEspresso has great optimization tips doesn’t mean you can set your campaigns on autopilot and hope everything goes well. Watch your camp
AdEspresso Pricing
AdEspresso by Hootsuite offers four pricing plans for small and medium-sized businesses, marketing firms, and agencies. The pricing plans are billed on a monthly basis. A 14-day free trial period is also available with no credit card required.
The Base pricing plan goes for $49/month for up to $3,000-per-month Facebook Ads spending and unlimited Facebook Ads accounts. It also include essential features, automatic optimization, a PDF report builder, CRM/Leads sync (up to 3,000 leads), data update frequency (60 minutes), online support in 48 hours, and a one-hour dedicated AdEspresso training session.
The Premium Plan is worth $149/month for up to $10,000-per-month Facebook Ads spending. It comes with everything from the Base Plan in addition to the following: Up to two sub-accounts, CRM/Leads sync (up to 6,000 leads), data update frequency (40 minutes), online support in 24 hours, and a two-hour dedicated AdEspresso training session.
Then there’s the Elite Plan, which is priced at $299/month. It is good for up to $50,000-per-month Facebook Ads spending and includes everything from the Premium Plan. Important features include a white-labeled PDF report builder, up to 10 sub-accounts, CRM/Leads sync (up to 10,000 leads), data update frequency (20 minutes), online support in 12 hours, and a three-hour dedicated AdEspresso training session.
Finally, there’s the Diamond Plan for $499/month and up to $150,000-per-month Facebook Ads spending. Aside from all the features offered in the Elite Plan, this package comes with up to 30 sub-accounts, CRM/Leads sync (up to 15,000 leads), data update frequency (10 minutes), online support in six hours, and a four-hour dedicated AdEspresso training session.
Enterprise plans are also available for agencies spending more than $150,000-per-month on Facebook Ads. Interested parties may visit the AdEspresso official website for details about the enterprise plans and all the essential features that come with each pricing plan.
We interviewed Armando Biondi, co-founder at AdEspresso about the latest tool and what potential use it has to retailers:
- What ad tool does AdEspresso provide to retailers?
The tool was developed for SMEs and SMBs because of its focus on simplicity, design and automation. If you need to test several variations of the same ads but don’t have either the time and/or the knowledge to do it, that’s where we can help. We offer all the ad types that Facebook offers with some dedicated extra features on top. We can help you the most if you’re an agency, an e-commerce, a start up or a small / medium brand.
Instead of creating every single version by yourself you insert 5 titles, 5 pictures and 5 demographic targets on AdEspresso and we create the 125 versions for you in a matter of seconds instead of hours of work. Then we push the version to Facebook and Facebook Analytics, packaging them in a way that’s more comprehensible and more actionable for you.
- How can AdEspresso improve the reach of Facebook posts?
We recently implemented the Automatic Post Promotion. So, if you publish on a regular basis on your Facebook page you can set up a budget to be allocated on posts that receive a certain amount of likes/comments and/or specific types of content including video, image and links. It’s again, all automatic, so you can set it and forget it, we do the work for you.
- How can AdEspresso impact a retailer’s ROI?
If you’re a more advanced user we have an Automatic Rule-Based Optimization. When you create your campaigns you decide things like: “every time an ad performs 15 percent more than the average, increase the budget of 50 percent” or “every time an Ad performs 20 percent less than the average, stop it”. We executed them automatically and report back to you.
At the end of this article, Stephen Kerner, Retail Search Manager at CPC Strategy weighs in on his recent experience with AdEspresso:
- How would you describe your experience with AdEspresso?
This tool has really made the product work behind creating Facebooks Ads, a whole lot easier. This coupled with the ability to A/B test multiple variables all at once, makes the product very useful.
- Are the analytics useful and relevant to retailers?
Yes, they are. It’s easy to A/B test with multiple different variables. You can clearly see the performance metrics and take action on the different variables that you are testing.
- What are some changes or improvements you foresee?
If you are managing multiple accounts it can get cluttered and hard to tell which campaigns belong to which account. You can’t edit campaigns once they are created but I have been told this feature is coming very soon.
Conclusion
AdEspresso by Hootsuite enables users to easily manage advertising campaigns and Facebook Ads performance and spending. The cloud solution allows them to effortlessly conduct various A/B testing to identify the best and most effective approach to converting their target audience. AdEspresso lets marketing firms and professionals split test every aspect of their campaigns. It comes with a variety of tools and applications to help them identify which creatives and demographic targets deliver the most actionable results.
