The campaign management team at Nanigans is accustomed to working with a wide variety of advertisers who have very unique marketing goals. For some advertisers, their goal is to drive downloads and have users engage with their mobile application, while other advertisers are focused on increasing brand awareness. However, the majority of advertisers are looking to achieve a specific revenue goal. That goal could be to generate one million dollars in revenue in one month, week, or day, so it's critical to approach campaign set up and strategy in the most efficient way possible.
Prior to Mother's Day this year, we began working with a retailer who was looking to drive one million dollars in sales during the three weeks leading up to the holiday. We knew how important it was for us to meet this goal, but also knew that the set up and execution of the campaign needed to be flawless.
We identified four steps to ensure our approach would meet and exceed our customer's expectations.
1. Define Your Audience
Most advertisers already have a good idea of who their target audience is, and it is important to leverage this data whenever possible. Not only can Nanigans target known valuable customers via custom audiences, we can also build lookalike targets based on this data. Facebook Lookalike target groups have proven to be a reliable way to gain additional reach in most campaigns. Creating precise interest groups based on a customer's affinity with the advertiser's existing user base has also worked well. These tactics allowed us to create a relevant audience possible for the retailer, and set us up to select ad creative that efficiently and effectively generated incremental sales.
2. Create Intent to Purchase
A component of successful advertising is the ability generate interest in the products you are offering or the actions you are trying to get users to take. Consumers also need to be given a reason to make a purchase now, rather than later. Promotions and incentives are often a good way to create this intent to purchase. Offering just a small percent off the purchase price is usually enough to generate interest, and at the very least get users to click through to the advertiser's site.
Showcasing unique, yet accessible, products is also a good tactic. An eye-catching image will spark user interest, and so long as that product is also offered at a price point that is accessible for the target audience, it can prompt users to take out their wallets.
Because we're creating intent, accessibility is key. We leveraged precise targeting to ensure that the products the retailer was offering were shown to relevant audiences that would not only be interested in what the retailer was selling, but could also afford them. We want users to purchase immediately, but we also wanted them to purchase again. This made it even more important to show the right products and/or deals to the right groups of people.
3. Adjust Strategy According to Real Time Revenue Data
Once the campaign went live, we wanted to make sure that we monitored real-time feedback on all relevant conversion events as they occurred on the advertiser's site. This way we could leverage the per-ad action rate and revenue data to make informed bidding and budgeting strategies, and ultimately optimize for the best return on ad spend. We know that an "add to cart" event must occur before a user is able to purchase, so we used the "add to cart" rate to make assumptions about purchase rate, as long as those action rates were highly correlated. Nanigans' ability to leverage this data, and make strategy adjustments in real time, allowed us to optimize effectively throughout the flight of the campaign.
4. Continue to Engage with your Audience
It is important to note that some users may take longer to "mature" than others. For example, a user may click through to the advertiser's site, but may not immediately make a purchase. Perhaps a user doesn't have their wallet on hand or they are in the middle of something else. By adding Facebook Exchange (FBX) into our strategy, there's a better chance of getting these users to ultimately convert. Consumers are even more likely to convert when the campaign leverages dynamic creative, or shows images of items that users have previously viewed on the retailer's website.
So how did we generate one million dollars in sales over the course of 3 weeks?
- We took what we knew about the advertiser's customers to define an audience that was large enough to deliver the necessary impressions, yet relevant enough to hit the specific revenue goal.
- We showed the targeted audience content that was relevant, interesting, and offered them an incentive to make a purchase.
- We optimized the campaign for onsite conversion events and used top of the funnel events, such as add to cart, to predict bottom of the funnel conversions and ultimately generate revenue.
- We continued to engage with the targeted audience until we reached the customer's conversion goals.
When developing your own Facebook ad campaign, it's important set reasonable goals and expectations for your business or client. Not every campaign is going to generate $1M in revenue, so make sure you properly evaluate the size of your target market, campaign reach and efficiency, cost and performance KPIs, business operations and sales strategy. We hope that the strategies and best practices outlined in this post prove to be useful and help to valuably scale your performance marketing campaigns on Facebook.