All is Fair in Love and Facebook
As marketers, we are only as good as our tools. It’s not news that Facebook changes their game frequently, and anything that changes at Facebook can impact entire industries (cough, cough ... publishing). But I’m not here to talk about algorithm changes for organic social, it’s our job to understand what platforms to spend marketing dollars with and how to effectively connect your message to an audience, ultimately ending in revenue.
This year, Facebook has been rolling out massive changes to the ad manager platform. Last month in particular, in the middle of November right before mass consumer weekend a.k.a. chaos weekend for marketers a.k.a Black Friday/Cyber Monday, we saw some serious changes. Things weren’t saving properly, wild errors with no solution happened and we couldn’t publish campaigns, lots of ads were getting disapproved despite passing Facebook’s own Text Overlay Tool. It was a mess, and lots of people were cranky, including all of us at TFD.
After we got through all of that, we still weren’t seeing the results we were anticipating. With Black Friday weekend quickly approaching, we dug deep into our metrics to determine what was different from last year. With so many of our clients in the publishing space, we compared the data between campaigns to see if there were any trends. Guess what? There was one massive trend. And it inspired this blog post, which is basically a play-by-play of what we learned about optimizing paid Facebook/Instagram campaigns this year.
Campaign Caveat
Back in June we partnered with the CRMA to host a webinar about paid social specific to city and regional publishing markets. On that call, we told everyone this trick: if you run a traffic campaign, you can choose how you pay, either by the CPM or pay for each click. We found that CPMs in most of our markets were high and paying for clicks was cheaper and more effective for our clients.
Now, fast forward to the weeks leading up to Black Friday weekend (you know, when all the changes were happening on the back end). Our team is building out holiday subscription campaigns, optimized on traffic, and some markets just weren’t working. We dug a little deeper and noticed that our traffic campaigns had a 30-50% Landing Page View/Click Ratio while our conversion campaigns had a 70-95% LPV/Clicks. In the past, our traffic campaigns for these clients all had a higher ratio than we had experience during this time frame.
***Let me add a little disclaimer before we get into this. The trend was something we noticed for our clients and we made a strategic change to hopefully optimize the campaign ... and it worked. It doesn’t mean that traffic campaigns are bad and you shouldn’t use them.
Just off of the metric LPV/Click Ratio, we knew we could pay for clicks but it didn’t mean that the user would end up on the landing page. We decided to turn off our traffic campaigns and turn on conversion campaigns instead, just in time for Black Friday weekend. And it worked! The campaigns that we changed to conversions saw more success. The lesson here? Facebook makes updates all the time. Sometimes you know and you get cranky because it’s buggy, sometimes it’s an algorithm change. Don’t cut your losses and stop spending, see if you can find a pattern, and find a way to make it work.
2019 was the year of learning with the many Facebook changes.
Often times we go into Facebook and establish our campaign by targeting certain people, of a certain age, in a specific location. Some of those things make sense based on what you know about your audience already. We like to say, throw everything at the wall and let Facebook tell you what works best.
In phase one of a campaign, you use your normal audiences, but what if certain age ranges are converting better than others? Go ahead and break that ad set up by age. Facebook’s budget optimization will likely learn about your ad set and serve more impressions to people in that age range, resulting in a low CPA. Segmenting ad sets out by age can help you optimize your campaign spend and result in more conversions (email leads, purchases, downloads, etc.) by making your ad more relevant to your audience.
You can build out your campaigns to help you know these things more quickly. A rule of thumb that we operate under: the one thing that you change at the ad set level is the audience. If you start with that base, you can expand from there. Try setting up ad sets that are segmented by platform as well.
Newsletter Subscribers - Facebook placement
Newsletter Subscribers - Instagram placement
Lookalikes to Current Subscribers - Facebook placement
Lookalikes to Current Subscribers - Instagram placement
Etc.
If you have budget optimization on for this campaign, Facebook will choose where to spend your money. We noticed when we segmented campaigns like this, Instagram had more subscriptions than it did when they were in the same ad set. Try it next time for your campaigns, see what happens. Anything is worth a test, right?
If you have tried lookalike audiences in the past and they didn’t work, try again. Facebook’s matching algorithm only gets smarter as time goes on, and they’re one of our most successful audiences for lead gen, traffic, and conversion campaigns. Take a look at the AdEspresso article about an experiment they ran vs an audience that was broad. I’d advise never to target an entire location area by radius. You get the point, add lookalikes in, they could work better than an interest group audience (that’s often the case for us, at least).
New and Noteworthy Facebook Features
Facebook added a few noteworthy features recently that may help you as well. Multiple Text Options allows marketers to use multiple copy variations and Facebook will optimize that for you. You can preview all combinations before you upload them, too. Facebook machine learning chooses what is shown so you lose a little control, and you don’t get to know what copy option wins. This is helpful, especially because Facebook recently announced they will be limiting the number of ads a page can run within the next year.
Facebook News rolled out recently and could quickly gain serious momentum. Publishers will need to be registered so they can show up in Facebook’s News Page Index. Registering your page is one way Facebook is trying combat “fake news”.
Lastly, in October, Facebook announced that they were changing the way they calculate reach and impressions to make things more “accurate”. So, if you’re comparing your holiday performance YOY, know that they changed the time frame that cuts off when two impressions from the same user can be considered unique reach. 2019 campaigns reach and impression metrics could be lower than 2018. This may make it seem like you’re having a smaller reach or lower impressions than before, but it’s likely just due to the change in algorithms.
Facebook is here to make money off of... well, everyone, including marketers. If you get into Facebook ad manager and don’t know what you’re doing, there is a very real chance you are burning your money. Paying for garbage clicks, checking that interest expansion box, not using machine learning to optimize your budget, the list goes on. If you want to chat about how your Facebook/Instagram campaigns are doing, send me an email at natalie@twentyfirstdigital.com.
