XPLAIN: Things we have learned from 120.000 Facebook ad campaigns

With the introduction of Facebook as the largest, most popular and perfectly targeted Social Network worldwide, the environment for online advertising has changed dramatically, giving marketers opportunities they had not even dreamed of in the past. Consumers are there, and the tools we have available to approach them are becoming more and more targeted and effective, as Kenshoo’s recent research shows, indicating that ROI almost doubled from 2013 to 2014.

Facebook ads have the ability to:

1.) Approach the same or even more consumers compared to any “traditional” advertising medium (radio, TV, print) with much less spending.

2.) They offer amazing targeting features based on demographic or geographic data, real interests of consumers, their online behavior, the interest they have already shown for a specific brand, etc.

Beyond the basic targeting based on gender and age of the target audience, we can approach consumers on Facebook based on their city or even at the district level in large urban centers (impossible in any other advertisement platform) based on their educational level, and also based on the interests that themselves have declared on Facebook in various ways.

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Facebook also gives us the opportunity to communicate with people subscribed to our newsletter, those that have given us their e-mail or phone number and with Internet users who have visited our site (or specific pages of this site) through Custom Audiences. With this method the ad is perfectly targeted (even personalized!) and can “Build” on previous advertising actions. We are talking about retargeting, which on Facebook can rely on more types of data than the “Classic” cookie-based retargeting.

A second, powerful tool that Facebook ads provide is the “social proof “. Ads on Facebook have “Social indications”, meaning that they show the user who sees them that a “friend” has interacted with the Brand’s advertisement, and this acts as a recommendation to the user who sees the advertising (good old and unsurpassable Word of Mouth Marketing!).

How do we best exploit Facebook ads then?

At XPLAIN we have ran in the last 5 years over 120,000 campaigns in 30 different countries-markets and among other things we discovered that:

– Nothing is as important as the correct targeting! Decide on the consumer profiles which you want to send your message to with the greatest detail and the multiple filters offered by Facebook to reach these very people.

– Despite all the care with which you might have defined your audience, if the visuals and texts are not absolutely adapted to this audience, the campaign will have limited results. Try multiple image and text combinations to end up with the most successful ones.

– Campaigns do not run … on themselves! They require constant monitoring, optimization and flexibility to realize and grab opportunities that will rise from the analysis of a running campaign. The page which those who click on your ad will land on, must fulfill the promise of the ad, helping the consumer make the next step, whether that is a purchase or a subscription to your newsletter.