5 lessons we learned by spending 100500 RK on Facebook
To work in the online advertising market means constantly learning something new. New tools are appearing, budgets are growing, targeting options are expanding, which help us experiment and launch large-scale advertising campaigns. We learn, sometimes we make mistakes, but we gain practical experience - each time we become better.
In this article, we have gathered five unobvious lessons that Facebook advertising has given us and which we hope will be useful to you.
If you have ever launched an advertising campaign on Facebook, then you probably know that even at the first stage of creating a campaign, the site suggests choosing its goal. The purpose of advertising in the understanding of Facebook - these are actions that people must perform after viewing it. Total advertising system offers a choice of three types of goals.
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If you don’t go into details, the first group of goals is conditionally aimed at the most superficial interaction with the user and the implementation of media KPIs - shows, coverage and brand awareness. The second part of the goals encourages users to perform any actions within the social network itself: like, comment, fill out the lead form, click the transition button, etc. The third group is the most ambitious, optimizes ad impressions so that who is most likely to make a targeted action on the site.
At first glance, choosing a goal seems like a fairly obvious decision — tech-friendly Facebook has already done almost all the work for you. But the devil, as always, is in the details.
For one of our clients, a large auto holding company, we often placed full-screen canvases in order to engage users in content and increase brand awareness. This system looks like a mini-landing within the social. network, which opens when you click on the button of an advertising post in the user's feed. Traditionally, such placements were purchased for the purpose of “Traffic” in order to get the greatest number of targeted transitions to the canvas.
However, the client also wanted the maximum coverage of the target audience in this format, which we could not achieve with the help of current optimization and within the allocated budget. It was decided to test the launch of campaigns with the canvas with the optimization of the coverage without changing the targeting and creativity. The results of our work were analyzed and are given in the table below.
As you can see, we had nothing to brag about. Of course, the average coverage of our placements has increased several times compared to the original, but the quality indicators, by which we previously monitored user involvement in the content of the canvas, have fallen dramatically. The CTR (click-through rate) indicator of click-through rate of placements dropped by almost 2.5 times, the involvement (the number of likes, reposts, comments to the promotional post) also fell by an average of one third.
Significant was the fact that the quality of viewing the canvas by users also decreased. Users attracted by coverage-optimized advertising looked at the canvas by an average of 10 seconds less than the rest, the average viewing depth decreased by almost a third.
Thus, in the pursuit of coverage, we lost the involved and active users. Having rejected the idea of ​​optimizing in terms of coverage, we continued to test new hypotheses.
Facebook is one of the most convenient tools for attracting leads, largely due to the fact that this mechanics is implemented in the social. network. The user does not need to go to a third-party site and enter their data - the smart network will do almost everything for it. By clicking on the button in the advertising post, the user immediately enters the application form, which is automatically pulled data from his profile, it remains only to fill in the missing fields and send the form.
This simplicity entails certain obvious consequences - the number of non-target forms is large, and additional work on processing “empty” applications falls on the client’s call center.
Therefore, as soon as the site introduced a new function to “screen out” random requests, we immediately decided to try it out.
The meaning of the addition is that after the user has filled out the application, an additional window pops up with confirmation of the action. According to Facebook, this measure will help weed out the "poor quality" leads. Is it really?
In the course of the RoK (advertising campaign) for one of our clients, we regularly collect target applications for test drive cars. It was decided to test the new product at the next placement. “Targeting” chose “automobile” interests and a look-a-like audience on the client's CRM base as the targeting.
The test results were controversial: on the one hand, the use of additional settings really increases the conversion from leads to target applications, on the other hand, the total number of leads received decreased, and the cost of a lead with the same budget almost doubled, so having won as a lead Of course, we lost in quantity, and now we are faced with the task of scaling up the results and further optimization.
Video advertising is the trend of the last few years. Our experience with video on Facebook turned out to be quite entertaining at least because we used it not for traditionally media purposes, but for receiving targeted clicks and registrations on the site.
The goal of an advertising campaign of one of our clients was to attract offline participants to an IT conference held in Moscow, as well as registrations for online broadcasting. To launch the advertising campaign, the targeting of relevant positions and interests in the field of software development was selected, the placement strategy was worked out, and creatives with the image of speakers and main theses of speeches were made. In general, we observed a good picture of registrations, since Facebook is basically loyal to this topic. However, I certainly wanted more, so the test decided to use small samples from last year’s conference as a teaser for click formats.
Honestly, we were even surprised by the result. Of course, we expected increased user engagement when using video, but the result exceeded all our expectations. Advertising campaigns had the same targeting and calls to action and differed only in the creative format. Ads with video, according to our observations, received several times more clicks with a comparable number of impressions, and the price per click decreased by 19.71% compared with the usual posts with a picture. By the way, video conversion also turned out to be about a third more.
As a result, for this placement, we turned off posting with a picture. In fairness it should be noted that in other social networks, the video did not have such a significant difference in the results as on Facebook.
Traditionally, advertisers are used to the fact that images for promotion in Instargam should be extremely square. However, the social network has long allowed the use of vertical creatives, which occupy a large area of ​​the user's screen and, therefore, attract more attention.
For one of our clients from the financial sector, there was the task of increasing the click-through rate of ads, reducing the click price and reducing the bid price. As part of testing, it was decided to use vertical creatives 1080 * 1350 as an alternative to creatives with static square images 1080 * 1080.
For testing, we used traditional “financial” interests and look-a-like audiences. The mechanics of interaction were also standard - an announcement was shown to the user in the news feed, after the click on which the transition was made to the site, where it was possible to leave a request for banking services.
In total, five pairs of creatives with different UTP (Unique selling offers), calls to action, color gamut, etc. were tested, the difference between each creative of a couple was only in the size of the image. Virtually in each of the pairs, the vertical creative worked out better and had a lower cost per click than ads with square images. In total, during testing, the cost of clicking on vertical creatives turned out to be 18.64% lower than the CPC (cost per click) of square creatives, which, naturally, influenced the decrease in the cost of the application.
The difference of a few rubles in the price of a click seems insignificant, but when it comes to large numbers (more than 8,000 clicks we received during testing), even the smallest reduction in the price of a click significantly affects the final price of the lead, allowing you to get cheaper applications without significant changes in the strategy of Kazakhstan itself.
Marketing textbooks teach us that the UTP of your product should be understandable to the target consumer and literally bounce off the teeth. This was the reason that advertisers are trying to present as much information as possible not in the text of an advertisement, but directly on the image itself, where the text is most noticeable.
Of course, this has its advantages and very significant, but not in the case of Facebook. The system is critical to the amount of text in the image and automatically blocks ads on which its content is above 20%. And it would be okay to limit the ads to stop, but the tricky site went further: ads that did not exceed the “critical threshold” in the text on the images, but still contain it quite a lot, simply get less target impressions, which leads to a decrease in the number and increase in the cost of traffic.
We have repeatedly encountered in work with such a situation, when the amount of text in the image played a crucial role in the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.
Below, for example, is a screenshot of one of the ads in our RK for attracting traffic to the client’s website, which is developing software for B2B. Due to the nature of the product in the picture, it was necessary to place a sufficiently large amount of text, which significantly influenced the dynamics of the advertisement.
As you can see, until the updated images arrived on June 16, the ad received a consistently low amount of traffic per day, which certainly did not bring us closer to the implementation of KPI. After updating the creative, we began to see a more acceptable dynamic.
To tell the truth, there are several tricks that allow you to bypass the clever text recognition algorithm on Facebook in a completely legitimate way, but this material draws on a separate article.
In this article, we have gathered five unobvious lessons that Facebook advertising has given us and which we hope will be useful to you.
1. Choose your optimization goal correctly.
If you have ever launched an advertising campaign on Facebook, then you probably know that even at the first stage of creating a campaign, the site suggests choosing its goal. The purpose of advertising in the understanding of Facebook - these are actions that people must perform after viewing it. Total advertising system offers a choice of three types of goals.
')
If you don’t go into details, the first group of goals is conditionally aimed at the most superficial interaction with the user and the implementation of media KPIs - shows, coverage and brand awareness. The second part of the goals encourages users to perform any actions within the social network itself: like, comment, fill out the lead form, click the transition button, etc. The third group is the most ambitious, optimizes ad impressions so that who is most likely to make a targeted action on the site.
At first glance, choosing a goal seems like a fairly obvious decision — tech-friendly Facebook has already done almost all the work for you. But the devil, as always, is in the details.
For one of our clients, a large auto holding company, we often placed full-screen canvases in order to engage users in content and increase brand awareness. This system looks like a mini-landing within the social. network, which opens when you click on the button of an advertising post in the user's feed. Traditionally, such placements were purchased for the purpose of “Traffic” in order to get the greatest number of targeted transitions to the canvas.
However, the client also wanted the maximum coverage of the target audience in this format, which we could not achieve with the help of current optimization and within the allocated budget. It was decided to test the launch of campaigns with the canvas with the optimization of the coverage without changing the targeting and creativity. The results of our work were analyzed and are given in the table below.
As you can see, we had nothing to brag about. Of course, the average coverage of our placements has increased several times compared to the original, but the quality indicators, by which we previously monitored user involvement in the content of the canvas, have fallen dramatically. The CTR (click-through rate) indicator of click-through rate of placements dropped by almost 2.5 times, the involvement (the number of likes, reposts, comments to the promotional post) also fell by an average of one third.
Significant was the fact that the quality of viewing the canvas by users also decreased. Users attracted by coverage-optimized advertising looked at the canvas by an average of 10 seconds less than the rest, the average viewing depth decreased by almost a third.
Thus, in the pursuit of coverage, we lost the involved and active users. Having rejected the idea of ​​optimizing in terms of coverage, we continued to test new hypotheses.
2. Pay attention to details.
Facebook is one of the most convenient tools for attracting leads, largely due to the fact that this mechanics is implemented in the social. network. The user does not need to go to a third-party site and enter their data - the smart network will do almost everything for it. By clicking on the button in the advertising post, the user immediately enters the application form, which is automatically pulled data from his profile, it remains only to fill in the missing fields and send the form.
This simplicity entails certain obvious consequences - the number of non-target forms is large, and additional work on processing “empty” applications falls on the client’s call center.
Therefore, as soon as the site introduced a new function to “screen out” random requests, we immediately decided to try it out.
The meaning of the addition is that after the user has filled out the application, an additional window pops up with confirmation of the action. According to Facebook, this measure will help weed out the "poor quality" leads. Is it really?
In the course of the RoK (advertising campaign) for one of our clients, we regularly collect target applications for test drive cars. It was decided to test the new product at the next placement. “Targeting” chose “automobile” interests and a look-a-like audience on the client's CRM base as the targeting.
The test results were controversial: on the one hand, the use of additional settings really increases the conversion from leads to target applications, on the other hand, the total number of leads received decreased, and the cost of a lead with the same budget almost doubled, so having won as a lead Of course, we lost in quantity, and now we are faced with the task of scaling up the results and further optimization.
3. Video attracts more traffic.
Video advertising is the trend of the last few years. Our experience with video on Facebook turned out to be quite entertaining at least because we used it not for traditionally media purposes, but for receiving targeted clicks and registrations on the site.
The goal of an advertising campaign of one of our clients was to attract offline participants to an IT conference held in Moscow, as well as registrations for online broadcasting. To launch the advertising campaign, the targeting of relevant positions and interests in the field of software development was selected, the placement strategy was worked out, and creatives with the image of speakers and main theses of speeches were made. In general, we observed a good picture of registrations, since Facebook is basically loyal to this topic. However, I certainly wanted more, so the test decided to use small samples from last year’s conference as a teaser for click formats.
Honestly, we were even surprised by the result. Of course, we expected increased user engagement when using video, but the result exceeded all our expectations. Advertising campaigns had the same targeting and calls to action and differed only in the creative format. Ads with video, according to our observations, received several times more clicks with a comparable number of impressions, and the price per click decreased by 19.71% compared with the usual posts with a picture. By the way, video conversion also turned out to be about a third more.
As a result, for this placement, we turned off posting with a picture. In fairness it should be noted that in other social networks, the video did not have such a significant difference in the results as on Facebook.
4. Size matters
Traditionally, advertisers are used to the fact that images for promotion in Instargam should be extremely square. However, the social network has long allowed the use of vertical creatives, which occupy a large area of ​​the user's screen and, therefore, attract more attention.
For one of our clients from the financial sector, there was the task of increasing the click-through rate of ads, reducing the click price and reducing the bid price. As part of testing, it was decided to use vertical creatives 1080 * 1350 as an alternative to creatives with static square images 1080 * 1080.
For testing, we used traditional “financial” interests and look-a-like audiences. The mechanics of interaction were also standard - an announcement was shown to the user in the news feed, after the click on which the transition was made to the site, where it was possible to leave a request for banking services.
In total, five pairs of creatives with different UTP (Unique selling offers), calls to action, color gamut, etc. were tested, the difference between each creative of a couple was only in the size of the image. Virtually in each of the pairs, the vertical creative worked out better and had a lower cost per click than ads with square images. In total, during testing, the cost of clicking on vertical creatives turned out to be 18.64% lower than the CPC (cost per click) of square creatives, which, naturally, influenced the decrease in the cost of the application.
The difference of a few rubles in the price of a click seems insignificant, but when it comes to large numbers (more than 8,000 clicks we received during testing), even the smallest reduction in the price of a click significantly affects the final price of the lead, allowing you to get cheaper applications without significant changes in the strategy of Kazakhstan itself.
5. Do not rush to make the UTP on the picture
Marketing textbooks teach us that the UTP of your product should be understandable to the target consumer and literally bounce off the teeth. This was the reason that advertisers are trying to present as much information as possible not in the text of an advertisement, but directly on the image itself, where the text is most noticeable.
Of course, this has its advantages and very significant, but not in the case of Facebook. The system is critical to the amount of text in the image and automatically blocks ads on which its content is above 20%. And it would be okay to limit the ads to stop, but the tricky site went further: ads that did not exceed the “critical threshold” in the text on the images, but still contain it quite a lot, simply get less target impressions, which leads to a decrease in the number and increase in the cost of traffic.
We have repeatedly encountered in work with such a situation, when the amount of text in the image played a crucial role in the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.
Below, for example, is a screenshot of one of the ads in our RK for attracting traffic to the client’s website, which is developing software for B2B. Due to the nature of the product in the picture, it was necessary to place a sufficiently large amount of text, which significantly influenced the dynamics of the advertisement.
As you can see, until the updated images arrived on June 16, the ad received a consistently low amount of traffic per day, which certainly did not bring us closer to the implementation of KPI. After updating the creative, we began to see a more acceptable dynamic.
To tell the truth, there are several tricks that allow you to bypass the clever text recognition algorithm on Facebook in a completely legitimate way, but this material draws on a separate article.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/352924/
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