Topics You Must Study Before Taking The 322-101 Facebook Planning Exam

Great you’ve passed the Core Exam…

And you’ve scheduled to take the Facebook Planning Certification Exam.

But you don’t feel ready to take the exam.

You still don’t know what else to do to better prepare for your exam.

I recently re-took the Facebook Planning Certification Exam and was surprised by some topics.

For some of them, I wasn’t really prepared. 

They were not hard questions but easy to miss if don’t know much about the topic.

To be honest, the Facebook Planning Exam is built more for people who work in large advertising agencies or with big brands.

If you are not sure if you should take the Facebook Planning Exam, I highly recommend reading this blog post “What is the difference between the Buying and Planning Exam”

So there are a number of tools and policies you might not be aware of.

Here is a list of 7 topics and specific things you should know before taking the Facebook Planning Certification Exam.

1. Facebook Live

I was surprised, to be honest, and was not expecting questions for this Facebook Live topic.

Definitely worth understanding a couple of key concepts:

What is Facebook Live?

Live lets people, public figures and Pages share live videos with followers and friends.

Below are some tips + tricks as per Facebook before you go live:

1. Tell fans when you’re broadcasting ahead of time.
2. Go live when you have a strong connection.
3. Write a catchy description before going live.
4. Ask viewers to subscribe to live notification.
5. Say hello to commenters by name; respond to their comments live.
6. Broadcast for longer periods of time to reach more people.
7. Use a closing line to signal the end of the broadcast.
8. Be creative and go live often.

You need to own and control all property, trademark and rights for your live content.

Also very important is that you need to own and control all rights (or have obtained all necessary licenses/permissions), to sound recording and musical compositions of all the content you upload through Facebook or broadcast through.

Meaning… don’t go to a Broadway show and live stream the whole show.

You will get in trouble 🙂

2. Offline Conversions or Events

We’ve all seen the little screen with “Offline Events” at the end of our ads:

But we rarely use it.

However, you will get a couple of questions regarding Facebook Offline Conversions on your Facebook Planning Exam.

Things that you should know:

Facebook offline conversions let you leverage offline events data to optimize, measure and link your online marketing investment with sales.

More specifically, you can track:

• In-store purchases
• Over-The-Phone bookings
• Qualified Leads

Facebook offline conversions allow you to connect your CRM or POS system in cases when you can not use Facebook Pixel or Facebook SDK to track your marketing campaigns.

There are 3 ways you can upload information and connect that data to your Facebook campaigns:

• Facebook’s native offline event manager
• Through Facebook API
• Using one of Facebook Partner Integrations

You can view your offline conversions in the Ads Manager of through Facebook Analytics.

3. Facebook Brand Lift Study… not the same as Facebook Conversion Lift Study

It took me some time to realize but they are not the same! 

Make sure you understand that a Brand Lift Study will measure three specific aspects of a marketing campaign:

1. Ad Recall
2. Brand Awareness
3. Message Association

What do these three areas mean?

1. Ad Recall: Do people remember your ad?
2. Brand Awareness: Do people remember the brand in your ad?
3. Message Association: Do people remember the copy/image in your ad?

You should be running only one campaign for your brand or one product when running a brand lift study; otherwise, your control group might see other ads from another campaign and not give the right results.

I wrote a blog post on this topic, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind before you take the Facebook Planning exam:

• A Facebook brand lift study runs the same type of questions
• You should have a control group of at least 20% of your target audience
• If you are running a Facebook brand lift study to a small group, you might need a larger reach (more than 50%)
• A Conversion Lift study (more below) is not the same as a Brand Lift study
• Percentage point lift: is the difference in the percent of people who recall seeing your ad in the exposed group versus those in the control group
• Cost per incremental person (CPIP): represents the amount you spend to get one additional person to respond favorably to a poll about your ad

4. Facebook Conversion Lift

Unlike Facebook Brand Lift study, Facebook Conversion Lift study measures the impact of your campaigns on your final conversions.

In other words, a Facebook Conversion Lift study should respond the following question:

Are my campaigns generating any revenue or final conversions?

Hence,

You need the Facebook pixel, Facebook SDK, or offline conversions from a secure point-of-sale (POS) connected to your account in order to measure results.

You can add as many events as you want in your campaigns.

There are four main factors that influence your conversion lift:

1. The layout of your ad and visual creative (image, video, text, and links)
2. The audience or people that you target with your ad
3. The number of people you reach and frequency
4. The perception of your brand or biases towards your brand or product

5. Brand Awareness Optimization for videos

Should you use Video View or Brand Awareness for your videos?

We have been running some tests to see results in multiple countries with our new #MarkekoMonday tutorials and will show you results in another post.

You will get a number of questions regarding this specific question.

When do you use the Video View objective and Brand Awareness objective?

It’s a difficult question to answer as it really depends on the type of business, the country you are in, and type or length of your video or content.

As you can see below, we are running new tests with Facebook’s change in its algorithm.

However…

Follow Facebook recommended objectives and descriptions:

• Video Views: Show your ads to the right audience to help you get the most video views of +10 seconds at the lowest cost.
  • Optimization: video views
  • You will measure results with % of video watched or cost per video view.
• Brand Awareness: Reach people more likely to recall your ads and increase awareness for your brand.
  • Optimization: ad recall
  • You will measure results with brand lift (people who remember your ad 2 days after seeing it).

Here is where it gets tricky…

Example #1 – Videos Question

Let’s say you have a client who wants to run a 45-second video. They would like to build an audience of people who have watched more than 50% of the video and generate leads.

What type of objective should you select?

Take a guess… (and really try before reading further down)

The answer is video views.

Yes, you are building awareness; however, your goal is for people to actually watch the video -not necessarily remember your ad-.

You need to optimize for video views and get as many people as possible to watch it so you can then build a customized audience.

Here is another example…

Example #2 – Videos Question

You have a mainstream car brand who is launching a new truck. They would like to show 3 videos in sequence for the product launch.

What type of objective should you select?

Really think about this question…

If you were thinking “brand awareness”; I am sorry to say, but you are wrong.

Wait… what?

How is that possible?

In this particular case, you don’t want video views nor brand awareness. Both of those options are buying options for Facebook auction.

For a sequence of videos with a large brand, you want to budget your campaigns through Facebook’s reach and frequency buying option.

So keep in mind and be really careful with questions regarding video views, brand awareness, and reach/frequency.

You will get a number of questions and examples.

6. Catalog Sales

Or dynamic ads.

Facebook dynamic ads is a product that not a lot of people have used and you will get a number of questions on this topic in the Facebook Planning Exam.

It allows you to automatically promote specific products based on interactions that users have shown on your website, mobile app or the Internet.

How do they work?

Pretty simple.

If you look at the example below, I was doing some searched in Airbnb for a home in Coxen Hole, Honduras.

10 minute later I was looking at home options on my newsfeed for more homes in Coxen Hole, Honduras.

Dynamic ads allow businesses with large inventories to dynamically show similar or the same product as the ones the user interacted with online.

If you are in one of the following industries or you get a question for a business related to these industries, the answer most likely will contain dynamic ads:

• Hotels
• Flights
• Destinations
• Real Estate
• Autos

A lot of people also don’t know, but you can run these ad types:

• Carousel
• Dynamic ads
• Collection
• Product tagging for Facebook Pages

Also just know the three main parts in our catalog:

1. Catalog: Container for all the items in your inventory.
2. Data feed: File with all the items you want to advertise. Supports CSV, TSV or XML format.
3. Product set: Grouping of related items in a catalog.

7. Creative – Branded Content

Facebook defines Branded Content as a publisher’s content that features a business partner for an exchange of value.

In other words, when Lady Gaga partners with Intel for a video…

She has to tag Intel on the post to make it clear that the post is a branded content.

What counts as branded content?

Any text, photo, video, Intant Article, text, Slideshows, Canvas, Carousel, links, 360 videos, or live video featuring a third-party product, brand or sponsor.

You can tag your sponsor through the following surfaces:

1. Page Composer (web and mobile)
2. Mentions app
3. Pages Manager App
4. Graph API
5. Live API
6. Publisher Tools

Conclusion

To be honest, preparing for the Facebook Planning Exam is usually more difficult for most. 

A lot of the questions you get in the exam are geared towards large brands or social media managers who have worked with large companies.

Especially on brand awareness.

They usually have experience with reach and frequency, campaign planner, sequential ads with various buying options and understand strategically how to measure their campaigns.

You just can’t just run a small brand lift or conversion lift study just for fun; unlike campaigns.

You can just run them -even if you have small budgets- and learn on how to use Facebook tools.

Therefore, preparing for the Facebook Planning Exam can be a bit tricky. 

Hopefully, you can go over those 7 topics above and pass your next exam.

Make sure you join our community and follow us on Facebook 🙂