Facebook Advertising: Resuming vs. Starting Fresh

Facebook advertising can be tricky. When juggling several campaigns, it can be hard to know when to resume a campaign with slight modifications or when to create a new one from scratch.

We decided to test whether it was more effective to use a current Facebook advertising set or create a new one by duplicating the existing ad set, essentially tricking Facebook a little bit.

At Media Cause, we frequently run ongoing Facebook advertising campaigns that turn off and on depending on a nonprofit’s goals and priorities for that month or quarter. One of our clients, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has a great bird identification mobile app. We have found Facebook mobile advertising to be very successful in acquiring new leads. Typically, we take a peak and valley approach to running these ads, pausing and restarting every few months.

We use this approach for two key reasons.

1. Refreshing seasonally lets us pull relevant, seasonal imagery.

2. Pausing between campaigns prevents us from diluting our earned market.

New vs. Existing: The Test

We ran a test and created a new ad set with the same budget, targeting, and parameters as the existing ad set. Both were turned on, and within 12 hours we learned that the new ad set was performing much, much better than the existing set.

New Ad Set — Reached 5,255 users and drove 66 mobile app installs
Old Ad Set — Reached 48 users and drove 0 mobile app installs

The Verdict

Although it might be easier to use a pre-existing ad set, this test shows it is worthwhile to start over. The next time you want to restart an old campaign, try duplicating it to see which performs better. Chances are you will have more success with a new ad set, too!

With the new ad set, we reached 203,654 users, drove 3,752 mobile app installs, and acquired 3,752 email addresses in just two weeks. 

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