effective FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE advertising April 2012
Lead Contributors Justin Fontana Search Marketing Supervisor Havas Media justin.fontana@havasmedia.com Rob Griffin Global Director Product Development Havas Media Group rob.griffin@havasmg.com Mark Egan Global Director New Business Havas Media Group mark.egan@havasmg.com 2012 Havas Media Group 1
Contents 1. Identifying your target... 3 2. Methods of discovery... 4 3. Creative... 9 4. Bid strategy... 11 5. Reporting... 11 6. Optimizing...12 Summary...14 2012 Havas Media Group 2
1. Identifying your target The Facebook Marketplace provides advertisers with the unique opportunities to target consumers based off precise self-selected interests and affiliations. Anything a consumer shares on Facebook is targetable whether it s a fan page they like, an interest they have listed or a status message they have written. It s an absolute goldmine in terms of reaching the right consumer; no other platform comes close to being this niche. There are many different components that come into play that will ultimately determine how effective your campaign performance is, the main driver being your target audience. Certain targets will show a higher propensity to convert; even two targets that seem to be extremely similar can differ drastically. Size, daily growth and target growth organically or through paid media are also important factors to consider. Facebook gives you three options for targeting precise, broad and category: Precise Targeting gives the advertiser the ability to cherry pick individual targets. For example Pepsi will only target people who like the fan page Pepsi. Precise is very beneficial when you know exactly what you want to target. In this scenario, it would exclude a fan page named Pepsi US and any other variations of Pepsi fan pages. Broad Match, which is enabled by inserting a hash tag in front of a keyword, will target anything FB deems relevant to that keyword. Broad match is effective when you can t find every individual precise interest. For instance, there are hundreds of wineries on Facebook, but finding every single one of them is a challenge. Targeting #winery should capture the majority of them. Unfortunately, Facebook does not give much transparency in regards to what you are actually targeting. They merely give you a target size, which is the best way to verify if you re targeting what you intended to target. Category Targeting segments Facebook users into certain categories based off of interests and actions a user has taken. It s a simpler way to reach an entire demographic without building out an extensive list of interests. Categories typically have a large reach, but lack in transparency. One main benefit of categorical targeting is reaching consumers that are difficult to find via interests. For instance it s hard to deduce whether someone is a parent or not based off the interest they choose. With category targeting, you can specifically choose parents and combine that with precise targeting. 2012 Havas Media Group 3
PRECISE BROAD CATEGORY Estimated Reach Estimated Reach Estimated Reach 865,240 1,180,120 11,032,240 people people people who lived in the US age 21 and older who like bacardi who lived in the US age 21 and older who like #Bacardi who lived in the US age 21 and older who are in the category Beer/Wine/Spirits 2. Methods of discovery Discovering interests can be a time consuming task if one does not know where to look. The Facebook UI offers very little besides suggested keywords and the little they do offer can often be very irrelevant. In the section below we outline the different methods of discovery and how effective each method is. LeaderBoard Sites provide categorized list of thousands of different fan pages ranked by order of total fans. Your keyword list should start from these sites, as it s the easiest place to find precise interests that have a significant reach. Leader board sites also show daily and weekly growth, indicating whether a page is stagnant or increasing its fan base every day. It should be noted that these sites are not 100% inclusive, they are a great starting point, but not an end all solution. An advertiser can select the leader board and copy and paste into Excel fairly easily. Source: pagedata.com 2012 Havas Media Group 4
a) Suggested keywords When an advertiser is in the Facebook UI, they can type an interest in and click suggested keywords. It is recommended to use multiple interests at first. Often with only one keyword, the suggested keywords are irrelevant. Most API tools have the ability to save keyword buckets for future use. When inputting keywords, a drop down list of ten relevant keywords sorted by reach will also be shown. An advertiser could select each interest until the drop down list is exhausted. Once the list is exhausted, merely typing a letter after the word could generate even more keywords. This method could be time consuming, but it is effective at building out a large list of keywords. >> Suggested Keywords >> Keyword Drop Down List >> Adding a letter after the keyword 2012 Havas Media Group 5
b) Facebook search Although the Facebook search bar can deliver spotty results in our own personal usage, it can be effective tool for keyword discovery. An initial search should yield up to 10 results and can be expanded by clicking show more results. An advertiser could potentially search on a particular keyword and click show more results several times to build out a potential list of keywords. The steps involved are easy and displayed below. >> Step 1: Search >> Step 2: Click more results (as many times as you want) >> Step 3 (Select All) >> Step 4: Copy and paste special values into excel 2012 Havas Media Group 6
>> Step 5: Sort and filter out rows that are not name of pages Tip Sort first to remove addresses (numbers will typically not be in the name of a fan page) then filter out cells that include the word like or have a backslash. This will typically leave you with a list that is mostly just pages. c) Observing active ads Targeting active advertisers is an effective way to reach fan pages that are actively growing as well as reaching consumers that have previously engaged with Facebook ads. An advertiser should create a fake profile that likes particular interests and fan pages to see who is advertising in particular categories. d) Targeting via administration access Targeting an entire fan base of any target is impossible without administration access to that fan page. This rule was developed to prevent an advertiser like Pepsi from targeting all Coco-Cola fans. Targeting off admin connections VS interest/likes tends to perform substantially better because of this. Administration targeting becomes extremely important when managing advertising campaigns for multiple campaigns for the same client. 2012 Havas Media Group 7
e) Target types Although not specified in Facebook itself, you will encounter three types of keywords during the discovery phase: Literal, Competitive and Inferred. All three are beneficial to your campaign. Literal keywords include words that are directly related to your product. I love wine would be a literal keyword for a wine brand. Typically this type of fan page is produced by a consumer as opposed to a brand. Fan pages that are developed by consumers are occasionally old fan pages and possibly stagnant in growth. Literal keywords tend to perform well but in short bursts because of the stagnant growth. Competitive keywords are brands that you would consider competition. Because these fan pages are typically created by brands themselves, they tend to be large and active. It s very important to include competitors in your mix, because of the reach and relevancy to your brand. One downfall to competitive ads is dealing with brand loyalty; there will always be consumers that refuse to like Coke if they are big Pepsi fans. Inferred keywords suggest that a consumer may be interested in your product. For instance, a consumer that likes to eat cheese may be interested in wine. Inferred keywords can include both brands and literal interests. Much like competitive, reach could be very high, but because the keywords are not always directly relevant, performance may not be on par with the other two target types. f) Compound targeting Most API tools have the ability to segment ads into demographic buckets. These buckets include Location, Age, Gender, Interest/Likes, Relationship Status, Sexual Orientation, Languages and Education. With this in mind, it is easy to imagine ads segmented into hundreds of different buckets and this does not yet take creative into consideration. Facebook imposes a 10,000 ad limit to prevent advertisers from overloading the servers, therefore compound targeting becomes difficult to use across the board. When choosing what to segment by, common sense usually prevails. For instance, unless you believe a married man would perform better than a man that is single, breaking out the two may not necessarily make sense. Compound targeting is very effective in situations where you want to target one large fan page, but want to reduce the size of the fan page into smaller buckets because the large reach may be negatively impacting the performance of the ad. It is a great mechanism for testing but much like ad segmenting in display and search; just because you can do it, does not necessarily mean you need to do it. 2012 Havas Media Group 8
g) Grouping vs. singular targeting Often advertisers, especially ones that do not have an API access, will group several targets together in one particular ad. This method is recommended when going after targets that have a small reach (less than 20,000). Some API tools have the ability to segment by interests and likes, where one could list 200 different fan pages and create an individual ad for each target. If you are using a leader board site for keyword discovery, chances are the fan pages you are going after are large. In this scenario, it makes complete sense to create individual ads for each one. It is important to note that each ad is an individual optimization point, if you are including 100 different targets in a particular ad, you can only use one bid for that target. If you are targeting the top 100 CPG brands on Facebook, one page may be driving up cost while another one is driving down cost. Some API tools have transparency into performance by segment in an individual ad, but ultimately you are not doing your campaign justice by having the same bid for all segments. 3. Creative Facebook offers 4 different types of Facebook ads. Two of the ads are primarily used for fan acquisition; the other two are for fan page engagement. a) Fan acquisition Standard Ads include a 110x80 image with 90 character of ad copy. This is the most common ad type you will see on Facebook. It s important to have an image that stands out or one that consumers can quickly identify. Including an incentive for liking the page tends to perform well, but by no means is it necessary. Sponsored Story: Page Like Stories are social endorsement ads. Creation of these ads is automatic, there is no image and no copy is included. Page like Stories includes an image of a friend that likes the fan page as well as the main image used for the fan page. In certain cases, because the image is resized automatically, the image may look warped or unrecognizable. In this scenario, 2012 Havas Media Group 9
your best bet is to work with the manager of the fan page, to redevelop the main image. Page like stories can be used in conjunction with your regular targeting, but will always include friends of fans. If you running a like campaign, every target you normally use for standard ads should also be used for page like stories, as performance is typically better on these ads. b) Page engagement Page Post Ads distributes status message via ad units to consumers. These ad units are meant to increase engagement with a particular status message. In terms of fan acquisition, they tend to underperform because you cannot like the page directly with the ad itself. There are four actions a consumer can take in these particular ads, like, comment, share and click through. These ads are particularly helpful during promotions. For instance a consumer could click through to a coupon page or enter a sweepstakes directly from this ad unit. If the status message includes a video, an advertiser can promote the video without paying extra. Sponsored Story: Page Post Stories are essentially the same as Page Post ads, but it will show that a particular friend liked the status message. One downfall with these types of ads is that you cannot pick the status message you want to promote, so it could potentially promote an outdated status message. The inclusion of a friend s endorsement tends to drive higher performance verse standard page post ads. 2012 Havas Media Group 10
4. Bid strategy a) Bid types Facebook offers three types of bidding. CPC, CPM and Action Optimized CPM. CPC bidding is recommending for driving efficiency and should be the primary bid type an advertiser should use. CPM is not recommend in any scenario, as it merely delivers ads as fast as possible with no algorithm in place to determine when and where an ad should appear. Action Optimized CPM, which is only offered on select accounts, attempts to deliver ads to people that are most likely to take an action. A maximum bid is not set on these bid types; therefore closely monitoring performance is essential. Action optimized CPM could potentially drive more volume than your typical CPC ad, but ultimately would only be helpful in a situation where you were not hitting your daily budget. In most cases, CPC ads are more efficient than action optimized CPM. b) Bid management Under a CPC model, Facebook determines whether to deliver your ad based off of your effective CPM. An effective CPM threshold is determined by competition. With this in mind, your CTR and CPC bid will ultimately determine how much you pay per click and how often your ad is delivered. If your CTR drops and you are not bidding enough to maintain a competitive CPM, Facebook will slow your delivery down or possibly stop the ad all together. In order to maintain an efficient campaign it is essential to check performance daily. It is quite possible to log into your account and suddenly see delivery stop completely. It is also possible to overbid, especially in a situation with a constrained budget. Although the aggregated CPC on a specific ad will rarely be the same as your maximum bid, the bid still exists as a threshold to prevent the ad from costing more than a specific CPC. Given the volatile nature of the marketplace and the co-dependency on CTR, you ll want to have a CPC bid that you are comfortable with to prevent the cost from getting to high. 5. Reporting With the possibility of having thousands of different ads, you ll want to be able collect the data and pivot it to your liking. Unfortunately, an ad report by itself does not include column data for crucial information such as copy, image or target. If you want this information included in your reports, there is two ways to go about this: Ad naming and Bulksheets. 2012 Havas Media Group 11
a) Via ad names Properly naming each ad with the criteria you want to report on will enable you to perform a text-to-columns in excel. For example if an AD is named Image1. Jpg Enjoy A Free #Mexico, you could separate that cell by the and have 3 columns. Ideally every API tool should have this function, as manually doing this on thousands of different ads would be overly time consuming. b) Via bulk sheets Another method of collecting data is via a bulk sheet export. Bulksheets include column data for every targetable segment as well as copy. Bulk sheets do not include the name of the image. This data could be connected to an ad level report in Facebook because they both include AD IDS. By performing a VLookup of AD ids from the ad report, you should be able to have data on every level besides image. In order to have image, you will need to name every ad by the name of the image. Ultimately you should be able to pivot data into a very granular level, with this type of reporting you could essentially say Males aged 25-34 that were delivered XXX copy with XXX image that are interested in Golf, drove XXX likes at a cost per like of XXX. 6. Optimizing Ultimately performance is evaluated by volume and efficiency. Because the reach on Facebook is so large and advertising is relatively inexpensive, testing is easy and relatively risk free. Re-launch ads Every ad is an individual unit that acts on its own. Because of this, adding an ad that is an exact duplication of an existing ad could potentially yield completely different results. If an ad that historically drove volume suddenly stopped delivering, it is most likely due to a sudden drop in CTR. An advertiser could duplicate that ad and launch it as if it had never run before. In situations like this, it is recommended to build a new ad instead of increasing the bid of the previous ad because the previous ad now has negative historical data. Effective CPMs Effective CPMs are typically between 15 to 50 cents. The lower it is, the less your ad may deliver. If it is higher than 50 cents, you may be paying higher than you need to. The marketplace is always subject to change, especially as competition increases and new ad types are introduced. 2012 Havas Media Group 12
Inline likes Likes that occur within the ad unit- typically comprise of over 90% of all likes. An advertiser does not pay for the like; they pay for a click through to the page. Typical conversion rates are above 50%, upward to 80% and it is even possible to see a conversion rate of 100% because a consumer can click like and not the ad. Because conversion rates are relatively high, it is usually safe to assume a difference of 25 to 50% from CPC to CPL. Brand Affinity Brand Affinity plays a major role in performance. A well known brand should perform better than an unknown brand. A recent study by Webtrends indicates that certain types of products perform substantially better than others. Below is a chart that shows average CTRs and CPCs by industry. This data was collected late in 2010; therefore the average cost may have fluctuated since then. 2012 Havas Media Group 13
Summary Facebook is the new frontier of digital advertising. Never before has an advertiser been able to tap into a vast database of information that included human behaviors at such an extraordinarily granular level. The benefits to an advertiser are unparalleled and because of this it has become a medium to monetize. The competition has been growing and is evident with the influx of new API partners. Everyone believes they have the best technology in market and although technology is important, proper education is even more important. Without knowing the ins and outs of the marketplace such as keyword discovery, creative development, optimization and reporting it is impossible to make educated decisions. There is a lot of fluff in the market right now. Companies are trying to monetize the medium and this often involves misleading information. Ambiguous terminology and grand claims are often developed by sales professionals to lure you into buying a managed service at a huge margin. The Facebook Marketplace is not rocket science, mastering it is a combination of common sense and practice. Equip yourself with knowledge and seize the day! There is a lot of fluff in the market right now. Companies are trying to monetize the medium and this often involves misleading information. 2012 Havas Media Group 14
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