Three New Features in Facebook Advertising to Deliver and Track ROI
Facebook has launched three powerful new tools in their advertising arsenal that all arts organizations should be taking advantage of.
1. Conversion tracking
As of just a few months ago you can place Facebook conversion code on the thank you page of your site. This allows you to see the number of sales from Facebook users who have viewed or clicked on your sponsored content.
Insights:
-We are seeing a positive ROI on all campaigns so far. Proof that social media can be tracked and make money.
-The ads that convert the best (i.e. drive the most sales) are delivered to friends of fans. I initially thought that ads served to friends would drive the highest ROI but I was wrong. This just proves what makes Facebook so powerful and that is the power of the social endorsement. When users see something their friends like, they are far more likely to click on it and purchase.
2. Audiences
Late last year, Facebook released “Audiences” which allows advertisers to import email addresses into the ad tool. Facebook will then match Facebook accounts to the list of emails and advertisers can serve Facebook ads to the email addresses that have associated Facebook accounts. This is a great tool for arts marketers. You can import all the ticket buyers from relevant past shows and deliver ads for current shows. And with conversion tracking (outlined above), measure your success and optimize.
3. Lookalike Audiences
Even better than Audiences is the brand new “Lookalike Audiences.” One past challenge with Facebook advertising was when you narrowed into a target audience using interests, your target group was very small. If you want to target college educated female dance lovers over 30 in Atlanta you can do so with interests. Trouble is you may only get 10,000 users, so it’s not scalable. With Lookalike Audiences, advertisers can import an email list of customers and Facebook will run a magic algorithm to find lookalikes. So with a list of 10,000 email addresses of your current customers, Facebook will find 50,000 users that are similar, for example.
Insights:
-This feature launched last week so we have only tested this with one client, but the click through rate for the ad with the imported email list was 8%. The lookalike, 7%! Not bad.
Quick note. You need to use Power Editor for Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.