Your Facebook ads are live, but you need to make a change. Can you change the ad while it’s live? Technically you can, and a lot of people do. But there are some serious cons and a few pros to making those changes which we will go into shortly.
In this article we will go through a few scenarios and how best to approach those particular situations.
Can I change my ad to fix a typo?
As a massive grammar nerd (although still human) there is nothing worse than seeing a typo on an ad, or worse when someone comments on an ad pointing one out. So what do you do?
Well, if it’s just been published, by all means, edit to your heart’s content. The danger or the cons come if that ad has been live a while and has a lot of engagement.
If the ad has very few likes, comments engagement, definitely edit the ad. It will reset the learning and remove those comments and likes but for a few comments and likes it’s not worth leaving the typo – especially if it’s a bad one.
However, if you’ve got an ad with hundreds of likes and comments it can be worth leaving the typo, if you change the text, all those lovely comments and likes that show people you have an active following and can be trusted as a brand will go away. So it’s worth weighing up how bad the typo is, whether it’s misleading, or super noticeable – or whether the comments and social proof are worth leaving the typo.
If you’re in the middle, you’ll have to determine for yourself whether it’s worth losing the likes and comments for the sake of the typo.
Can I change my image over once my ad is live?
If you need to change the image in an ad, I would always, always, always duplicate the ad instead. This is for two main reasons.
- If the new image performs poorly, you will have messed with the previous ad and you might not be able to get those results back.
- It’s a much clearer testing process for major changes to have a new ad home so you can compare data.
So, if you want to change an image, always duplicate, never edit an existing ad.
I want to make a new ad, can I edit an existing one?
This is similar to what we discussed in the point above. When you edit an ad, Facebook has to start over in its learning which means you lose the existing learnings, and you muddle any stats for tracking performance.
To keep the testing and data as clean as possible, it’s always best to duplicate and start a new ad fresh.
We use duplication a lot, it helps to ensure settings stay the same across campaign structure and targeting, and when we are testing we can duplicate and change one element (text, image, headline, call to action, etc) and create a new version so we can really compare what’s working best.
Conclusion
In summary, technically you can change an ad once it’s live – however, to ensure quality testing, and accurate data – which is so important for you to understand which ads are driving sales and traffic – in most scenarios I’d recommend duplicating the existing ad, making those changes and either leaving them both to run for a testing period or turn off the original.
