Paid Pals
In our business we often focus on social media advertising and paid placements; although as a Google Partner Agency, we have valuable experience promoting global events and managing sales campaigns. That being said, let’s get to the nuances and capabilities of paid social advertising. Follow us down the rabbit hole…
Audience Targeting
This is where we like to nerd out. Within a campaign exists the ad set, and within the ad set exist individual ads. Budgets can be optimized across the campaign so different ad sets have different objectives and creative, but utilize the same spend to keep things under control. We can target people in a multitude of ways including affinity, interests, demographics, and psychographics.
Furthermore, we can leverage existing database collections to serve targeted messaging to existing customers or people who have signed up for a newsletter, as an example. We can further segment our targeted audiences based on location, age, gender, and even seasonality, as well as using Facebook-collected data to create a Lookalike Audience. This method uses Facebook’s API user data to generate entirely new audience lists that are created based on similarities among our already existing audience. It’s like social media cloning.
Audience Growth
Different tactics exist for paid audience growth within Facebook and Instagram’s advertising platform. Whereas Facebook has an audience-growth-specific objective campaign, Instagram does not. So we utilize approved third-party industry partners to directly engage with users on Instagram to help grow our base.
Multi-Funnel Consumer Targeting
Different portions of our existing audience will be at different stages of the consumer journey. We want to identify and segment those audiences based on purchase behavior trends and create objective-specific campaigns targeted to each subset including but not limited to: educating the consumer (awareness), and content marketing (consideration), CTA and offers (acquisition), engagement and quality control (service), remarketing (loyalty).
Quantifying
Let’s be objective. Transparency is key in determining the success of any campaign, whether organic or paid. With monthly and real-time reporting, you’ll see how efficiently we manage your ad spend by looking at ROAS, CPR, CTC, CPC, CPM, Video Plays, Video Percentage Watched, Reach, Impressions, and Ranking Metrics (Engagement, Quality, and Conversions), as well as when we made significant edits to the campaign to ensure we didn’t “set it and forget it.” We can walk you through the entire Ad Platform so you know what to look for.
Though we analyze hundreds of KPIs, we find the following especially critical:
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – Revenue generated compared to the money spent on advertising.
CPR (Cost Per Result) – Audience growth, data collection, views, reach, clicks, purchases, etc.
CTC & CPC (Cost-to-Click & Cost-Per-Click) – Click-through rate and cost-per-click metrics.
CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) – Cost per thousand impressions served.
Video Plays – The number of times the video was viewed.
Video Percentage Watched – The percentage of the video that was watched.
Reach & Impressions – Reach as opposed to impressions.
Quality Ranking – Ranking of our ad’s perceived quality, measured using feedback on our ads and post-click experience. Ranked against other ads competing for the same audience.
Engagement Rate Ranking – Ranking of likes, comments, shares, and clicks. Ranked against other ads competing for the same audience.
Conversion Rate Ranking – Ranking of our ad’s conversions such as clicks, purchases, sign-ups, etc.
Ad Recall Lift – Estimate of the number of people who recall seeing our ad, if asked, after a 48-hour period.
Benchmarking
As we explore the social media jungle, it’s important to interpret the data into meaningful benchmark KPIs. What’s our average daily reach? What’s our average monthly reach? What are the trends month to month and year to year?
Audience
We look at the demographics and psychographics of our audience size by diving into dashboards exclusive to Facebook Partner Agencies. It tells a story about our audience based on gender, income, job title, family size, languages spoken, education level, purchase behavior, and affinity. This helps us identify potential for corporate partnerships and revenue generation.
How do we approach audience growth? We leverage a close industry partner that uses real human beings (they’re cool) instead of robots (no personality) that stay within Facebook guidelines to direct message and encourage specifically identified users to follow us. Like us, please!
Impressions + Reach
What’s the difference between impressions and reach? Why is it important? What has our competition achieved in this metric, and how do we beat them? We inspect the existing ad library to discover what ads the competition is running. Are they using image and video? A carousel? What about copy? Are they promoting anything specific? A new spa? A new promotion? A new local partnership with a museum or restaurant we didn’t know about? Get the binoculars and fake mustache because we’re going to do some (perfectly allowable) spying.
Efficiency
Have you run any paid media campaigns? What were the “Big Three” conversion scores? We dive into this as well by looking at CPC, CTR, CPM, Engagement Rank, Quality Rank, and Conversion Rank. This is compared to ad campaigns targeting similar audiences in which you are then ranked. “Above Average” means the top 15%, whereas “Below Average” means the bottom 15%. We’ll establish clearly defined benchmarks to strive for so month after month, we can quantify our successes and identify new opportunities.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
They say they love us, but who loves us the most? We want to identify our CLV by cross-referencing data collection with purchase behavior and conversions. This helps us paint a schematic view of our paying guests as they exist digitally (i.e., a social media user). We can leverage this data by retargeting and remarketing through the use of pixel tracking codes.