Jon Quinton, of Overdrive Digital, opened the Paid Social talks looking at 5 key principles he believes will help you deliver results in your paid social campaigns. Jon began his talk focusing on what advice you can really trust regarding paid social strategies, the truth being that there is no one size fits all approach.
5 Truths About Facebook Ads
Truth 1: Creative Matters
With this first “truth” Jon goes on talk about how people use social media as a way to escape, so you need to find a way to make your creative fit into a user’s news feed. He suggests investing in quality photography, keeping copy punchy and also relevant to your target audience.
When building ads on Facebook, here at Impression, we would always suggest testing a minimum of 3 different ad variations per ad set, be it creatives, supporting copy, headlines or calls-to-action. Applying multiple ad variations to each ad set enables Facebook to optimise the best performing piece of content which can help to improve your overall ad relevance score.
Truth 2: You Don’t Have to Spend a Fortune
Just because your budget is small, doesn’t mean your results have to be too! With this truth, we’re taken through a case study to show how you can still deliver big bucks with a small budget.
The objective was to generate class bookings for a series of dates for a jewellery making business. They spent £233.91 on Facebook and generated a booking revenue of £1,200, and here’s how they did it:
Their first test was at audience-level in an engagement campaign. After reviewing performance shortly after they went live with the campaign, they switched their optimisation tactics to website traffic in order to drive users to site to book their classes. Finally, after seeing a low number of leads, they opted to change up the creative copy to offer a sense of urgency.
Moral of this case study: Know what metrics to look for in order to achieve results, and be prepared to act fast to test results.
Truth 3: Lead Volume Doesn’t Equal ROI
As with any channel, Jon’s point here is to be aware of your lead quality when running lead campaigns. Although CPL with Facebook’s own lead forms can seem desirable, it doesn’t necessarily mean your leads are going to be of any good to the client. In order to measure lead quality, Jon suggests hooking up your CRM system to Facebook to ensure that you are able to track the leads right back to campaign and ad set level, as this will allow you to optimise your leads for quality and not just volume.
Truth 4: Let the Pixel Work for You
To prove just how amazing the Facebook pixel is, Jon shared an extreme case study where they ran an ad set with absolutely no targeting beyond location, versus an ad set with granular targeting. They found that the ad set with no targeting achieved almost half the CPA compared to a traditional lookalike ad set. The point he’s making here is that if you provide the pixel with enough data and optimise your ad sets to the right objective, your pixel should be able to do the legwork for you.
My thoughts on this, although Facebook’s tracking pixel is good, I wouldn’t recommend running campaigns with no targeting. With audience targeting, you’re able to identify who your ideal customer. Also, with no targeting at all, you’re probably looking at a lot of wasted spend and low-quality leads!
Truth 5: Best Practice is Not Always Best Practice
Jon’s truth surrounding best practices is to test everything for your business, or clients, instead of relying on other marketers’ case studies, because remember folks – no one size fits all!
He goes on to talk about some common, good, best practice for Facebook ads:
- Nurture cold traffic through a sequence of ads prior to making the “sell”
With Facebook custom audiences, you can create a series of funneled approaches to your marketing strategy that does exactly what Jon is talking about. We suggest starting off with a cold audience and using a series of remarketing tactics, be it website traffic, engagement traffic, move these interested users through the funnel to conversion. - Video is your best chance of engaging an audience
And is also a great way to remarket to users based on how long they viewed your video content for. - Split ad sets by placement, demographics and device
- Don’t rely on conversion ads, as CPMs tend to be higher.
Like Jon’s point above, don’t be afraid to split test your ads by conversion tactic, you may be surprised to find that the most obvious objective isn’t always the best one for generating ROI.
