Tag: Facebook
Automate More, Worry Less with Automated Rules on Facebook
If you’re like me and don’t want to double check your Facebook ad campaigns every day to monitor certain thresholds you’ve set, such as a target Cost per Acquisition, then you will be psyched to learn about Facebook’s latest feature: Automated Rules. Automated Rules allow you to automate your campaigns to turn off when they hit certain thresholds or meet certain conditions, as well as notify you.
For example, if you want to keep your Cost per Click under $1, but don’t want to check it every single day to monitor, using Automated Rules you can set your ad to turn off if the CPC goes over $1 as well as send you a notification about it.
Another example that could be especially useful for Remarketing campaigns revolves around Frequency. Remarketing campaigns are obviously great for a more targeted and interested user, but with that comes a smaller audience size. With this smaller audience, it is much easier to see Frequency numbers get out of hand and have users being served the same ads over and over again, which will kill your Relevance Score. So you can now set your target threshold using Automated Rules and have your ad shut off as well as alert you if the Frequency goes higher than you’d like it.
This could save marketers a ton of time if you manage a lot of ads and ad campaigns for larger clients, but don’t want to spend time double checking certain key metrics for every ad every day.
Facebook is rolling this feature out now as they do with all new updates, but I only first saw it last week. So if you haven’t seen it yet, keep your eyes peeled.
Store Visits Tracking from Facebook Hits the Shelves
Unless you’re a big brand or agency, you probably haven’t gotten direct access yet to Store Visits tracking on Google or Facebook. It looks like Facebook is now rolling out their version of the metric with a new ad objective.
“With over 90% of all transactions still taking place offline, driving customers into a store, restaurant, auto dealership or other place of business remains a primary marketing objective for any advertiser with brick-and-mortar locations.”
Essentially the feature allows you to determine how many users visited your business location after clicking on a Facebook ad. While this is exciting news to anyone that advertises on Facebook, there are minimum thresholds that need to be met before FB will grant eligibility.
This has been something marketers have been craving for as long as digital has been driving sales. Everyone has micro-moments, everyone does research online and many people make purchases online, but what about the people that just go into a store to make the final purchase? If not attributed directly or proper expectations are not set, marketers can oftentimes be left out to dry by the gap in data. So while it remains to be seen how well this new ad type will work, it is quite exciting for any brick and mortar locations.
“This objective has been specifically created for brick and mortar businesses who want to reach customers in the right location, with localized ad content and the ultimate goal of driving customers in-store. Additionally, over the next couple weeks, we are rolling out enhancements to the Store Visits objective which will allow you to not only report on store visits, but optimize your ads towards those most likely to visit.”
Facebook is describing this as the “Evolution of Local Awareness on Facebook and Instagram.” They might be right.
How to Uncover (Direct/None) Referral Traffic in Google Analytics
Have you noticed in your client’s Google Analytics that certain sources are not being identified clearly in Source traffic? One of the best ways to alleviate this issue is to use URL Parameters modifiers to essentially call out where the traffic is coming from. This helps GA tag the traffic coming in and sorting it into its own specific source, which allows you to identify and confirm the referral source.
This is an issue I know most marketers are aware of as (Direct/None) traffic can be a number of things. It’s not very likely that every one of your customers is typing in the long, specific URL every single time though. What’s more likely is that Google doesn’t know exactly how to sort the traffic or identify where it’s coming from.
I recently identified this issue for a website who’s Facebook tracking wasn’t firing and Analytics wasn’t reporting much referral traffic coming from Facebook, despite plenty of paid ad clicks. So looking through GA you’re likely to notice a large portion of traffic from Direct/None and while it’s unlikely to ever uncover 100% of the unknown traffic, you can tag URL’s from traffic that you know you’re driving, to help close the loop.
So how do you accomplish this? Below are a few quick steps to use URL Parameters to tag your traffic for GA to more easily sort. Note, this specific example was for tagging Facebook referral traffic.
1.) Identify that your ad traffic definitely isn’t being reported accurately in Google Analytics.
2.) Pull the URL of wherever you are driving traffic (i.e. example.com/product)
3.) In the case of Facebook, you’ll add the following URL Parameter at the end of the url:
?source=facebook (i.e. example.com/product?source=facebook)
4.) Copy and paste that URL into your browser to make sure it doesn’t cause any errors or unexpected reroutes.
5.) After sufficient clicks on your ad using this URL Parameter, go into your Google Analytics > Behavior > Content > All Pages. This will allow you to see what pages all of your users are landing on.
6.) Using the URL Parameter you set up earlier you can identify that specific landing page (example.com/product?source=facebook), which you’ve tagged as coming from a specific source. In this case it’s a Facebook ad, so GA will sort out that traffic and label it with the new URL so you can easily identify this traffic is in fact coming from your Facebook ad — breaking it out of the ambiguous Direct distinction.
You’ve now uncovered your referral traffic out of (Direct/None) in Google Analytics!
How to Bring Your Offline Customers Online with Facebook Advanced Matching
Facebook continues to roll along towards it’s goal of being omniscient by identifying more and more layers of audiences for marketers to target. With the recent updates to the Custom Audience Interface for Advanced Matching, Facebook makes it possible to target a custom audience even more accurately than before.
In the past, when Custom Audiences were first introduced you needed to have a customer email address and then hope it matched up with the email address they used on their Facebook account. Unsurprisingly the match rate wasn’t incredibly high. Then Facebook introduced phone number matching, which helped a bit. But now with the Advanced Matching update you can use those data points plus, first and last names, DOB, gender, zip and more.
Now while on the surface this may not seem that exciting, but just imagine some of the possibilities for certain campaign types. Facebook even says it itself:
“With this update, you will be able to leverage the offline customer data you have (e.g. direct mail data, voter file) to find your most valuable customers on Facebook.”
So if you were running a political campaign and knew exactly who your voter base was, you could upload that file and hit those exact people on Facebook rather than relying on demos and interest targeting! Or even using that offline voter information to target users on Facebook with Lead Ads to gather more info to add to your other marketing platforms like an email list. Round and round we go. This could help politicians drive much higher lift, brand recall and ultimately improve sentiment rating if they’re hitting their offline users with a specifically targeted message on Facebook to the same audience.
You could also use this feature to provide air support for any traditional marketing you’re running. So if you’re running a direct mail campaign, use that same data you have and apply it to Facebook to hit the same users, at a much higher match rate, to provide that digital support for your traditional campaign. Currently, Facebook says from early tests, clients have been able to match 54% of their offline customer base. Not too shabby.
“By reaching your offline audiences online with relevant marketing messages, you will be able drive greater success for your Facebook campaigns, while boosting the performance of your direct mail marketing via simultaneous offline and online messaging.”
How to Create a Facebook Sales Funnel for Your Website
With the insane level of targeting and reporting that advertisers can access on Facebook, it would be shortsighted to not take advantage of everything available. I’m going to give a quick breakdown of an easy and effective way to create a Sales Funnel from your Facebook ad campaigns, so you can track how users are interacting with your site, what’s drawing them in and what’s driving them to convert.
We’re going to utilize the Facebook pixel and the various Standard Events in the code to measure people coming through the funnel all the way to shopping cart abandonment and ultimately a purchase.
So the 10 Standard Events in the Facebook Pixel allow us to identify and tag users based on what pages they’re visiting, how they’re using the site, as well as if they are bouncing out at a certain point or (hopefully) making a purchase on your site. These Standard Events are listed below:
Be sure to include the Standard Event line of code in your pixel for the corresponding landing page. If you want to double check or have any questions on how to edit and place the code you can refer to the Facebook Pixel Implementation Guide. The Facebook Pixel Helper is also a great Chrome extension that helps identify if your pixels are live and placed correctly on a page. Additional Pixel Troubleshooting from the Facebook developers.
- View Content: This is most useful if there is a specific page on your site that you identify as a key page view such as the product page, the additional info page, a landing page with more details that could lead to a purchase etc.
- Search: This will help identify if users are getting to your site and performing searches in your search bar. If they are, but you’re still not seeing sales you may need to revisit your targeting as users may not be finding the relevant content/product that they thought they would.
- Add to Cart: Key step to track how many people are starting the checkout process vs finishing an order. Drop offs are useful for measuring shopping cart abandonment and retargeting, but can also point out red flags in user experience if people are not converting after adding to cart.
- Add to Wish List: A great way to track extremely interested users who maybe weren’t ready to pull the trigger yet.
- Initiate Checkout: The strongest indicator of purchase intent and one of the main steps to measure the path to purchase.
- Add Payment Info: Again measuring drop offs here will be key.
- Purchase: The name of the game; tracking conversions and using that data to optimize your ads further. You can also identify the value of a sale if you have different Thank You pages for different products
- Lead: This is useful if you are having users fill out a form, redeem a free trial etc. rather than making a purchase.
- Complete Registration: Useful for identifying users that sign up for a service or a subscription through a registration form.
- Other: Use this to track any other key actions on your website that aren’t listed above.
Using these Standard Events as qualifiers, what you want to do is place the corresponding code on each page all the way from a Page View down to a Conversion. So you would have the standard pixel on the landing page, Add to Cart on the first step in the cart page, Initiate Checkout page gets its own pixel code, same for Add Payment Info and Purchase. Now if you have other relevant pages on the site then you’ll want to add the additional codes to those such as View Content for a key page view and the like.
In the end this will help you identify how many people came into the funnel at the top, how many came out the bottom with a purchase and exactly how many dropped off and at what part of the process so you can re-engage or tweak your campaigns.
Stop Starting from Scratch On Your Facebook Ads
If you miss a new update to the Facebook Business Manager it’d be hard to blame you as it seems there are new updates dropped in all the time unannounced. Just recently Facebook added the new feature to essentially save a draft of an ad campaign while still in creation. And it’s not only just for a few hours as I started making a new campaign on Friday and left before finalizing the ads. I came back on Monday morning and after selecting Create a Campaign, my previous ad was automatically populated and ready to go. Everything from ad copy to creative imagery. No more starting from scratch!
Use the Amount of Time a User Spends on Your Site to Create a Custom Facebook Audience!
Facebook is now offering a brand new method of creating a Custom Audience and it should excite you if you’re using landing page content to generate leads. Time Spent on Your Website is the newest method Facebook has unveiled to craft a Custom Audience! This could be huge for businesses that are driving customers to a specific landing page to learn/read/view more.
*Note, that this option isn’t available to all advertisers yet as Facebook usually slowly rolls new features out before they’re widely available.
Businesses can drive users to their website and flag them for remarketing, but what good is one giant audience if it doesn’t take into account how engaged that customer actually was? Of course everyone knows this, but if your landing page is educational content that a customer may read/watch and they don’t make any additional actions on your website then you’re kind of up the creek when it comes to segmentation.
Using this new Custom Audience segmentation though you can easily identify who actually spent the most time on your website reading/watching your content. Don’t waste any time, money or effort reengaging with users on Facebook who hit your page and bounced out or maybe stayed for a few seconds and decided they weren’t interested. Now you can actually identify the top percentiles of users based on Time Spent on Website, similar to how you can already do that with Facebook Video and percentage of a video viewed.
It opens doors for people producing one sheeters, white pages or any other tactic of capturing customers’ attention on a specific landing page to learn more. People may be interested, but not necessarily engaged. So identify who has devoted the most time to the content you produced and reengage. This is just the latest example of how you can narrow the funnel and sell on social.
Ambiguity is the Enemy of Attribution: Facebook to Roll Out Store Visits Tracking
Google started the trend when it launched a very similar program nearly two years ago to track Store Visits after a user saw or clicked a business’ ad. However, this is still something that requires a very large threshold of clicks and quite frankly geographical footprint. It’s not accurate enough yet for small business owners to take advantage of. It looks like Facebook may be identifying an opportunity to strike while the iron is hot.
Ask any digital marketer working with a brick-and-mortar business what the biggest challenge is and they will tell you attribution. I hear it all the time from clients that understand they need to run digital and social campaigns and may even acknowledge they are performing well, but what does that really mean to them? Without any real data on how much foot traffic these campaigns are driving there will always be that question mark. Unless of course you have a client where you can tie in with their in-house Point-Of-Sales (POS) system to track purchases, but that’s not always available.
So over the next few months Facebook will begin rolling out its own Store Visits tracking, which makes a ton of sense considering that its Local Awareness Ads are designed to drive this exact action. I think we saw the early glimpses of this with Local Insights, which can be found in your Facebook business page’s Insights and then under Local. An incredibly effective tool that can tell you loads of information about which kind of people your ads are reaching nearby your location, what their demographics are, what times are most popular etc. to help optimize your local ads. You can actually narrow the radius down to as tight as 165 feet around the location!
If you tell a client that his Local Awareness ad got 850 Clicks and drove 100 Calls he may say that’s great, but if you’re able to tell a client this campaign specifically drove 250 people directly into their store? Now that is valuable data.
Facebook will also be rolling out the ability to connect Ads Reporting with a location’s POS system to track sales via the Offline Conversions API.
Facebook says these functionalities will be rolling out to all advertisers globally in the coming months so start getting your clients prepared now.
Facebook Video Updates Include Split Screen; Could Be a Boon for Advertisers
A new update to Video Ads on Facebook could be a boon for advertisers. The more and more content, ads, options that get pushed out there the less and less time and attention your stuff will get. Opportunity is constantly shrinking so it’s up to the advertiser to find new and different ways to engage the customer. We’re day trading in attention here so the key is to find out what will grab a user and what will keep them the longest because that’s going to give you the best opportunity to drive a conversion and make a sale.
This new update to Facebook Video will essentially allow users to watch a video and click through to view your website without waiting until the video ends or having to leave Facebook at all. It opens up a split screen option so users can view your website while still watching the video in their browser, uninterrupted.
I’m predicting this will have a huge positive effect on the percentage of videos viewed. People don’t have to interrupt what their doing or wait any extra time to learn more, they can watch the entire video all while multi-tasking on the brand’s website to find what they need quickly. Keep in mind this is only for clicking on a video link ad on iOS. Facebook is also saying that “In early testing, advertisers have seen a significant decrease in cost per click and cost per conversion.” So initial results are looking good at least.
The same experience goes for Mobile App Install Ads, rather than waiting for the video to end and/or sending a user to a separate experience, they will be able to watch the video in split screen while (on iPhone only) opening up the App Store to download the app, all while still watching the video simultaneously. Efficiency at its finest.
Full release from Facebook below:
Updates to Video Link Ads and Mobile App Install Ads
We recently launched a new experience for video link ads in the website click and website conversion objectives that creates a more engaging experience for people when completing lower-funnel objectives. When people click on a video link ad on iOS, they can now browse your business’ website while watching the video from the ad, uninterrupted. People no longer have to stop a video mid-way or wait for the video to end to visit your website. In early testing, advertisers have seen a significant decrease in cost per click and cost per conversion.
Additionally, we have made improvements to the video experience for mobile app ads. In the past, when people tapped on your video mobile app install ad, the video would play in full screen. To improve the experience both for people and our advertisers, we have updated this design. Now on iPhone only, when people tap on your mobile app ad with video creative, they will be taken to the Apple App Store with your video creative still playing in a split screen.
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