It takes a significant investment of time and capital to plan, produce, and distribute TV commercials. On Facebook, the only real barrier to entry is testing video ads and acting on the lessons learned.

Additionally, the feedback loop and audience insights available on Facebook provide considerably more advantages over TV—marketers can take an agile approach to test and learn before scaling up.

There are a few other areas where Facebook excels over TV that marketers can benefit from: targeting, interactivity, and measurement. Because of Facebook’s social, mobile, digital framework—and massive reach of 2.1 billion people—these benefits just aren’t possible with media buys on TV. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

1. Targeting

Facebook’s wealth of psychographic, demographic, and first-party data matching options allow you to reach very precise audiences with your video content. With TV, media buyers are more limited to reaching people based on the types of shows they’re watching and time of day. Facebook Custom Audiences, in conjunction with your Video Ads, allow you to reach people who’ve interacted with your brand, online or offline, with personalized content.

2. Interactivity

To keep the conversation going with people who engaged with your video content, you can create audiences. Not so on TV. Although you can continue to buy commercials for specific channels to reach people based on the type of entertainment and channels they prefer, you can’t be 100% confident you’re reaching that exact person.

What this means—marketers on Facebook can take an interactive approach to the media planning and buying process by aligning video formats with a compelling narrative to drive conversion.

For example, using Facebook Video Ads, The Economist increased newspaper subscriptions across 24 countries, including the US and in the UK, by 66%. A key driver of success was Marin’s multi-objective media plans, allowing The Economist to implement a full-funnel strategy by re-engaging people who had interacted with their web properties, and video ads with bottom-of-funnel messaging to subscribe.

3. Measurement and Optimization

Video ads on Facebook provide marketers with instant insights, such as how long people watched your video, demographic insights of who interacted with your video, and ultimately whether or not your video impacted a conversion online or off.

In broadcast TV, Nielsen's ratings are the de facto performance measurement, capable of providing statistical conversion lift insights. However, the data insights available on Facebook are instantaneous, allowing marketers to take an agile test-and-learn approach to determine which videos are performing the best and then scale budget upwards. Gaining similar insights with TV would mean more time and higher costs.

Using video ads on Instagram, online casino LeoVegas saw a 44% decrease in cost per first time depositing player. Their key to success was implementing the carousel format with video ads to optimize to the game creative, with the highest level of engagement ultimately lowering overall costs.

Carousel ads automatically determine the most engaging video creative and then shift budget accordingly. For LeoVegas, this wouldn’t have been possible with a TV commercial. TV also couldn’t have measured how much revenue LeoVegas generated from people subscribing online.

Facebook Video: An Easy Win

With social video advertising on the rise and more people actually watching videos before making a purchase, the mandate’s clear—advertisers should incorporate video into their Facebook advertising. If you’d like to learn how Marin can help, contact us today.

Surprise, delight, and convert with video

Mobile applications like Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram have transformed user behavior. Now, at any given moment, people have an always-on outlet for recording and publishing videos of life moments as they happen.

This means that video-based content has taken over online posts that were formerly text-only. To stay relevant, brands need to transition to a mobile-video-first content and paid media strategy for a few reasons:

• Video is more engaging and performs better than static images
• In comparison to TV commercials, online video ads are cheaper, highly targeted, and measurable
• Video is a proven driver of direct response, not just brand awareness

Here are six tactics to improve your Facebook ad campaign performance with video.

1. Use text with your visual assets

The use of text is a great way to hook a person into your video—they’re probably discovering your content while swiping through their mobile news feeds, along with other messages competing for attention.

Overlay compelling copy on your video using neat, easy-to-read typeface and simple text animation. Chances are high that the sound will be muted, so be sure that the first text animation appears within seconds of the ad reel. This will ensure that Facebook impressions at least some element of your message.

2. Keep it short

Brands are discovering that short and sweet videos are oftentimes just at effective, if not more so, than longer form, complicated videos. More videos are competing for more people’s attention, so your video should be no longer than 30 seconds to maintain interest. If you don’t have an in-house production team, use Facebook’s slideshow ads to easily add animation to your ad creative.

3. Get personal with video Facebook Messenger ads

Facebook Messenger ads allow you to expand the reach of your campaigns to nearly 1.3 billion users on the most widely used messaging app in the world. Early adopters of Messenger ads are seeing better click-through rates and engagement than email. That’s because Messenger ads allow you to have a more personalized, one-to-one conversation with your prospects and customers.

Video is a great way to add even more of a human touch to your Messenger ads. For example, you could create a 30-second video introduction to your brand. Once you’ve hooked your audience into the Messenger app, be sure to use Quick Replies to streamline your customers’ experience and encourage next steps, e.g., click here to learn more, find nearby store, tell me more, etc.

4. Plot your story to the customer journey

The key to success is a full-funnel strategy that combines video ads with custom audiences. In other words, your video content should vary based on where your targeted audience is in the funnel.

For example, you may want to use educational videos featuring gurus, thought leaders, or celebrities to drive awareness. Or, you may want to incorporate elements that encourage people to share your video, such as hashtags, competitions, or challenges. At the bottom stages of the funnel, a video with a compelling demo of your offering would be a great way to drive conversion.

5. Collapse the funnel with video

Historically, advertisers have considered video a top-of-funnel tactic. As more and more people watch videos on their mobile devices, many marketers are using video for direct response and brand awareness. New ad formats like Twitter Website Video Cards and Facebook Canvas Ads allow marketers to collapse the funnel, giving users a frictionless experience from discovery to conversion. Both of these new video ad formats provide an engaging way for brands to tell their story with links to landing pages to encourage a purchase.

6. Measure the influence video views have on conversion

The popularity of video means that post-view conversion data is more important than ever. Marketers need to understand the influence that views have on the path to purchase to make informed budget allocation decisions, and to move beyond last-click attribution. Most organizations are still using cookie-based analytics tracking, which doesn’t allow you to track across devices.

Additionally, publisher reporting (such as Facebook and Google) doesn’t provide insight into the influence each channel has to conversion, often leading to overcounting of conversions.

Marin Software is uniquely positioned to solve this attribution gap with TruePath, an innovative new measurement solution providing marketers with actionable cross-channel intelligence and unbiased conversion data. TruePath utilizes people-based tracking mechanisms to account for both post-click and view-level conversions as your customers interact with your brand across devices.

These insights are crucial for growth. A leading travel brand saw 158% increase in overall return on ad spend (ROAS) using TruePath. They were also able to establish a better understanding of how their campaigns on Google and Facebook can work together to optimize the path to purchase across each stage of the buyer journey.

To learn more about Marin TruePath, contact your Customer Success representative. Or, if you’re new to Marin, contact us to discuss with a member of our sales team.

We’re excited about the new rollout of Broad Audiences for Dynamic Ads! Up until now, we’ve been in closed beta for this feature.

As we discussed in a previous blog post, Broad Audiences helps you expand the reach of your Dynamic Ad campaigns, by serving more relevant ads to people who haven’t visited your website. Use Broad Audiences as a top-of-funnel tactic to expand reach and improve quality, as shown here:

Fine-Tuning Your Broad Audiences

You can tweak your Dynamic Ads campaigns until they’re a perfect fit for your business goals and campaign objectives. We’ve identified a few ways to fine-tune your Dynamic Ads campaigns with Broad Audiences.

1. Organize campaigns by existing customers and new customers with a budget that’s spread out based on projected reach of your dynamic audiences.
2. Use exclusion audiences to block out people who’ve recently made a purchase on your website from seeing your ads.
3. Keep your Broad Audiences as broad as possible with only location, gender, and age targeting inputs selected.
4. Don’t layer in lookalikes or any detailed interest targeting to your ad sets with Broad Audiences, as doing so will limit delivery.
5. Use ad creative that’s tailored to folks unfamiliar with your brand, to entice new customers.
6. Set your bids to be optimized towards actual conversion events such as add-to-cart, purchase, and registration. You’ll need to have the Facebook pixel configured for these events in order to run Dynamic Ads, so an ideal scenario is to optimize for registration events.
7. Specify new vs. existing within your URL parameters to better understand the full path to conversion in your analytics tool—specifically, whether a conversion’s tied to in-store or online purchase events.

If you’re interested in implementing Broad Audiences for Dynamic Ads, contact your CS representative today or request a demo.

We’re currently running a closed beta of Marin Budget Allocation. With this new feature, Marin Social’s data science team has developed a proprietary algorithm that allows you to automatically adjust budgets within your ad sets based on top-performing audiences.

When paired with CPA bid rules, the budget algorithm increases efficiency of your Facebook campaigns by achieving maximum scale of your ad spend, while keeping the cost per action at or below your target CPA across your ad sets. You can also use the algorithm’s suggested budget recommendations as indicators for budget planning for future campaigns.

Key Benefits of Marin Budget Allocation

Algorithmic-based budget optimization should have a tremendous impact on your business and the overall performance of your campaigns. As a Facebook Marketing Partner (FMP), Marin Social offers enterprise-grade budget management solutions and exceptional service to assist teams with implementation of complex rules.

Here are the top reasons to take advantage of Marin Social’s algorithmic-based budget allocation:

• Increased ROI
• Countless hours of saved time checking in on your campaigns and identifying the best audiences to allocate dollars to
• Works with all objectives, including support for Dynamic Ads for Retail and Travel
• Activation is as simple as a switch of a button (see below)

How Does It Work?

The algorithm looks at historical data and continuously monitors performance of individual ad sets within a campaign to determine optimal distribution across each one. The algorithm only monitors active campaigns where automatic adjustments will occur in four-hour cycles throughout the day.

As a best practice, you should pair algorithmic budget optimization with bid management rules to automatically pause any ad sets that aren’t meeting your target goals. Once the algorithm is turned on, you’ll see a column within your media plan called “Suggested Budget” with a recommended total. The budget adjustments that occur automatically to ad sets will never surpass the budget you’ve specified within a campaign.

In terms of algorithmic-based solutions, this is just the beginning, with other great innovations in the works. Our longer-term vision includes expanding across publishers and channels to provide best-in-class, cross-channel performance.

Read about how Spacebar Media used Marin Budget Allocation to increase first-time depositing players by 51% for its Magical Vegas online casino.

"Prior to Marin Social, we were spending countless hours in managing Facebook ads with manual means of optimization using the Power Editor tool. The Marin Social team delivered beyond expectations by successfully increasing the volume of first-time depositing players and lowering costs. I highly recommend Marin for not only their expertise in Facebook advertising but also their innovative optimization features that set them apart from the competition."

- Gidon Jacobs / Digital Marketing Manager/ Spacebar Media

At Marin, we know that the most powerful marketing programs are ones that combine the best of search and social advertising. Marketers who unify their programs gain the opportunity to deliver incremental ROI. To actually accomplish this, however, digital marketing teams need to think less about the channel and more about locating where people are in the customer journey.

We created a cheat sheet that outlines ad formats and objectives that Google and Facebook provide for each step in this journey. Follow the guidelines so that you have the best possible chance of reaching your target audience—and clinching the sale. Click the image to enlarge it.

To discuss Marin solutions that help you stand out online and win the battle for revenue, schedule a demo.

Simplify Campaign Creation with Multi-Objective
Media Plans

This month, we’ve rolled out several new UI enhancements to help our users streamline workflows—most notably, our next generation of media plans. Marin Social now supports the ability to create media plans with multiple objectives, which provides users the ability to create campaigns and view performance across objectives within a single plan. This is a significant workflow enhancement that greatly reduces data clutter and the amount of time it takes to launch campaigns.

Roll up Performance Across Multiple Objectives and Calculate Costs Along the Funnel

Multi-Objective Media Plans are especially effective for enterprise advertisers or agencies that want to organize performance across complex initiatives. Now, you can organize your campaigns within a single media plan by things like region, teams, brands, or new vs. existing customer strategies to understand performance across the buyer journey.

For example, say you were launching a new, complicated product with the goal of driving leads. You could create a Multi-Objective Media Plan with video ad campaigns for more top-of-funnel awareness, and Lead Gen Ad campaigns for bottom-of-funnel conversion. This would allow you to view performance metrics across both objectives in the same view and better understand the costs associated to conversion with each touch point.

To see how this new feature can help grow your business, check out our demo video.

For Marin customers only—resources from our Knowledge Base:

• Context Sensitive Mass Editor
• Campaign Duplication Enhancements
• Global Region Targeting Worldwide

This is the fourth and final article in a series on the nuts and bolts of Facebook Dynamic Ads. See our previous articles:

• Acing cross-sell and upsell campaigns
• Achieving better results
• Using the right metrics to measure and refine success

When Dynamic Ads first rolled out, scalability was based entirely on the volume of traffic to your website. This was a serious limitation for small to mid-size companies without a ton of traffic to their owned properties.

Enter Broad Audiences, a new way to expand the reach of your Dynamic Ad campaigns, by serving more relevant ads to people who haven’t visited your website. This is a must for direct response advertisers looking for a cost-efficient way to find new customers and increase sales.

The 411 on Broad Audiences

• How is Broad Audience targeting different than lookalikes? Facebook looks at people who liked pages and browsed particular products across the web that match the products you’ve defined in your product sets. Complex algorithms work in the background to do this matching for you. A name-brand jeweler saw a 357% increase in return on ad spend when shifting from lookalikes of Website Custom Audience traffic to Broad Audiences.
• Should we be using Website Custom Audiences (WCAs) or Dynamic Ads? If you have a product catalog of more than 10 SKUs, then you should transition from Website Custom Audiences to Dynamic Ads.

A Refresher on the Key Benefits of Dynamic Ads

Broad Audiences is a great new feature, but why consider Dynamic Ads to begin with? Well, it’s kind of a no-brainer. Because of the efficiencies, time savings, and improved performance, we here at Marin Software expect feed-based ads to become the backbone of online ad delivery in the not-so-distant future. Here’s what retail advertisers stand to gain with this pace-setting innovation.

Save Time

Dynamic Ads allows advertisers to create ads automatically with unique creatives without having to configure each individual ad one-by-one. All of the elements necessary to launch an ad on Facebook can be pulled from your product feed. This includes information like content ID, name, price, availability, image URL, landing page URL, and more.

Always On

Another key benefit of Dynamic Ads is the ability to sync with your product feed in real time, meaning your ads will always be up to date with relevant information. As information in your product feed changes, your ad creative automatically updates to reflect those changes. Real-time relevance greatly reduces the risk of advertisers potentially spending money on ads for products that may be out of stock or have a history of poor performance.

Personalized Creative

You can further enhance static product images from your feed with Marin’s Smart Image Templates. This is a significant time saver, as you don’t need to be a professional designer to create compelling ad creative. Also, you can choose from an existing library of templates or create your own. For example, you could use a macro of [Sales.Price] in your ad copy that would pull the value from your feed in real time across all of your ad creatives.

Increase Sales

With Dynamic Ads you can capture intent data across each stage of the customer journey and optimize performance accordingly. Not only can you increase the lifetime value of your customer base—you can also find new customers to boost your top-line revenue.

Interested in Marin Social’s capabilities for Dynamic Ads on Facebook?

If you’re interested in implementing Dynamic Ads into your paid media strategy, contact your CS representative today. Or, if you’re new to Marin, you can schedule a demo.

This is the third article in a series on the nuts and bolts of Facebook Dynamic Ads campaigns. See our previous article on acing Facebook Dynamic Ads cross-sell and upsell campaigns, as well as seven quick tricks for better results.

In today’s post, we discuss the Facebook Dynamic Ads metrics you should use to measure the success of campaigns targeted to existing customers. These metrics provide the best means of achieving the goals of increasing revenue and customer lifetime value‍ through reduced churn or increased average order value.

Customer Lifetime Value

Projects how much revenue the average customer nets throughout the time they’re a customer. The better your customer lifetime value, the less you have to spend on acquisition costs. The calculation is simple—customer value x average lifespan. However, determining these values will greatly vary based on your type of business.

Average Order Value

This is the amount of money each customer spends on each purchase with your brand. The more successful you are increasing this amount, the less you’ll need to spend on acquisition. And, customers will have a stronger affinity with your brand. The calculation for this is total revenue over 365 days/total number of orders over 365 days.

Customer Churn Rate

This should be captured as a percentage indicating the number of customers who've been lost over a specific amount of time. First, define a time period in which you want to keep customer churn accountable to, e.g., monthly, quarterly, or yearly. We recommend that you look at this monthly once you have a year’s worth of data to benchmark against.

To calculate this metric, take the number of customers at the beginning of the month minus the number of customers at the end of the month, divided by number of customers for the beginning of the month. The lower this is the better, since (generally speaking) you don’t want to lose customers.

Note that you should have an understanding of these three benchmarks prior to your campaigns taking flight. You can then segment your campaigns to audiences based on these success metrics, and choose to give higher bids to those likely to spend more with higher LTVs or those who may be likely to churn.

If you find these tips helpful and want to explore the right Dynamic Ads implementation for your business, contact us today. Also check out our Dynamic Ads webinar with Facebook.

This is the second in a series of posts on the nuts and bolts of Facebook Dynamic Ads. See our previous article on acing Facebook Dynamic Ads cross-sell and upsell campaigns. In today's article, we show you seven ways to fine-tune your Dynamic Ads campaigns for the best results.

1. Improve match rates from your feed for optimal delivery

Conversion events from the Facebook Pixel such as View.Content and Purchase signal which ad to deliver from your feed. A content ID# from this particular online event is mapped to a content ID# within your feed, which dictates which ad creative to deliver.

For example, if someone makes a purchase on your website and the content ID# doesn’t match your feed, then people who already made a purchase may continue to see your ads. This leads to wasted ad spend and makes it difficult to scale your cross-sell and upsell campaigns.

2. Tailor copy and creative to your product set strategy

Make sure you have multiple product sets in place to specify which grouping of products to upsell or cross-sell. Once you have those product sets defined, you should tailor your creative to these audiences to be more customer-centric.

For example, you could cross-sell people while they’re on vacation at a hotel with a message that says, “Welcome to [San Francisco]. Enjoy 10% off a complimentary drink in the hotel lobby during your stay.” With Marin’s Smart Image Templates, you can create templates to add to all your products in just a few clicks and make creative edits directly in the editor.

3. More is better when it comes to audience size

Create product set groupings by brand and product category versus specific SKUs. Then, add in an additional performance layer to your product set groupings to only show top-selling products with the best margin that you want to cross-sell or upsell. To scale delivery and get the most out of optimized bidding, use broader strokes when grouping your product sets. If your product set is too specific then your ads may not deliver at all.

4. Test different recency windows

With Dynamic Ads campaigns, you can choose to promote products to people from zero to 180-day splits. Be sure to test different recency windows to see which are optimal and where fatigue starts to kick in. For cross-sell and upsell campaigns, we generally see top performance within three days of conversion. However, this will greatly vary based on buying cycles for your business.

5. Organize media plans by new vs. existing customers with      a planned budget for upsell and cross-sell

We recommend that you create media plans specific to new and existing customers so you can more easily roll up performance to each one with unique KPIs and budgets. Most companies should have a significantly higher budget for top-of-funnel activity to find new customers, simply because the audience will be larger compared to existing customers.

Also, attracting net new customers will probably take multiple paid media touches to get them from awareness to conversion. Note that the more intent that you capture at the top of the funnel, the better your upsell and cross-sell campaigns will perform due to the additional information collected on your customers.

For campaigns targeted to existing customers, test which strategies perform better with a fraction of your total budget. We recommend a direct response budget split of 90% towards net new customers and 10% towards existing customers.

6. Specify upsell and cross-sell at the campaign level, and      product set at the ad set level

Once you’ve created a media plan specific to existing customers, create separate campaigns for upsell and cross-sell. This will allow you to quickly drill down into which is performing best and make adjustments accordingly. At the ad set level, define which product set was used with a nomenclature you’ll be able to quickly identify.

7. Use the carousel format to show multiple products and      optimize to top performers

With the Carousel format, you can show a sequence of up to 15 different product images. You can choose to auto-optimize the sequence to illustrate the products with the highest engagement first, after enough people have seen your ads. The Carousel format is a great way to optimize performance of your campaigns based on what people have browsed and purchased.

Interested in Marin Social’s capabilities for Dynamic Ads on Facebook?

If you’re interested in implementing Dynamic Ads into your paid media strategy, contact your CS representative today. Or, if you’re new to Marin, you can schedule a demo. Also be sure to check out our Dynamic Ads webinar with Facebook.

This is the first in a series of posts on the nuts and bolts of Facebook Dynamic Ads. Today, we teach you techniques you can use to entice customers to make additional purchases from your product catalog.

If you’re a direct response advertiser on Facebook, by now you’ve probably heard of—or you’re already running—Dynamic Ads campaigns. We’ve put together these expert tips and real-world examples to ensure you’re maximizing the effectiveness of your campaigns.

A Quick Refresher

Dynamic Ads automatically generate creative from a product feed, and you can target to people based on their actual intent. A lot of advertisers would call this practice Website Custom Audience remarketing.

However, with Dynamic Ads, you can automatically trigger upsell and cross-sell campaigns—to people who’ve converted on your website or app—with personalized creative from your feed. This is a great way to increase the lifetime value of your customer base with relevant product creative based on their purchase and browse behavior.

Now, onto the tips….

Dynamic Ads Upsell Techniques

Gear your upsell campaigns to offering a higher margin product or service based on someone’s browse or purchase behavior. For example:

• Visitors viewed and purchased fitness shoes -> upsell smart fitness watches
• Visitors viewed fitness shoes, but didn’t buy -> upsell with higher-margin shoes
• Visitors viewed hotels in San Francisco -> upsell hotels with great reviews and amenities

Dynamic Ads Cross-Sell Techniques

For your cross-sell campaigns, offer a complementary product or service based on someone’s browse or purchase behavior. For example:

• Visitors viewed and purchased fitness shoes -> cross-sell complementary socks
• Visitors purchased an airline ticket to vacation in Hawaii -> cross-sell hotels within that destination
• Visitors bought a hotel room for a weekend stay in New York -> cross-sell a discount on drinks in the lobby bar

Follow these suggestions, and you should see more engagement and more clicks from your Dynamic Ads. If you’d like to hear how Marin can help you implement a robust, click-generating Dynamic Ads strategy, just get in touch. Also be sure to check out our Dynamic Ads webinar with Facebook.

How do you know how well your unified search and social advertising efforts are working? To answer this question, an incremental lift analysis is a must.

What’s an Incremental Lift Test?

Incremental revenue is earnings you wouldn’t have gained without a specific campaign. An incremental lift analysis, then, assesses the average revenue from two groups:

1. People exposed to certain variables within a test group (two segments)
2. People in a control group

The Framework

A popular setup for an incremental analysis is testing the average revenue of the two segments of our test group. Here is an example of how you could implement an incremental lift test with Product Listing Ads on Google and Dynamic Ads on Facebook. The two formats are similar in that they are both intended for to drive sales with a product feed used to automatically generate creative.

1. Control Group - Those who converted from a paid search campaign over a certain period and were not exposed to an a cross-sell ad on Facebook.
2. Test Group - Those who converted from a paid search campaign and were added to a “cross-sell” audience exposed to a dynamic ad on Facebook (encouraging the purchase of a complementary item)

The hypothesis that we're testing here is that by showing a cross-sell ad of a complementary product offering on Facebook to people that converted from a paid search ad will see an increase in customer lifetime value and top line revenue. For example purposes, we could create a product set on Facebook of socks to cross-sell people who purchased shoes. We would need to create a website custom audience with a UTM parameter specifying the category of "shoes" and channel "paid search".

With the Test Group, we want to identify the average revenue impact of the group that was added to the cross-sell segment on Facebook. Then, we want to compare this impact to our control group, i.e., those who weren’t exposed to a “cross-sell” dynamic ad on Facebook after making a purchase.

The campaign should run for at least a month and you should take into consideration the sample size of your existing paid search traffic to determine which cross-sell product sets to create for a healthy population size to market to. We see a significant increase when cross-sell recent converters so make sure there is a time threshold set as to when folks see your ads.

Once the campaign has ran for a month you will want to measure average revenue per customer between the test and control group to determine what the lift is between the two groups. This should be your primary Key Performance Indicator KPI that you use to determine how to allocate your budget for additional incremental impact across Paid Search and Social. Another metric you will want to look at is Customer Lifetime Value. This metric projects how much revenue the average customer nets throughout the time period that they’re a customer. The better your customer lifetime value the lower you have to spend on acquisition costs. The calculation is simple—customer value X average lifespan. However, determining these values will greatly vary based on your type of business.

Additional Best Practices For Measuring Incremental Lift

There are several things e-commerce advertisers should consider when implementing an increment lift test. In this example, we’re using Google Analytics for attribution beyond last-click.

1. When deciding how long the campaign should be, consider the average time to purchase for first-time buyers and repeat purchases. The campaign should run, at minimum, for the full purchase cycle to best determine impact.
2. Simplify creative and messaging iterations, and make sure they’re consistent across both paid search and social channels.
3. Deploy both the Facebook Pixel and the Google Pixel using a tag management solution. View conversion data as directional within each publisher, and compare to conversion events/goals within your analytics tool early into the campaign flight. This ensures there are no noticeable discrepancies.
4. Set up revenue goals (completed purchase or pre-order request) for the products being amplified in the ads. Be sure to use a monetary value here with the funnel turned on—if you’d like to track landing page success metrics such as where people bounce within the checkout page, input URLs for each screen page the user will see.
5. Ensure the UTM parameters within ads all have a standardized naming convention, so that you can run funnel reports to analyze the consumers path to conversion.
6. A true measure of sales lift uses an attribution model that reveals the individual and collective contribution of each paid channel on the online (or, offline) conversion event.
7. Select an attribution model within the analytics tool that your digital marketing team fully understands prior to launching campaigns. For the purpose of this analysis, the goal should be to view performance beyond post-click or post-impression metrics with a linear attribution model that gives each touchpoint along the path to conversion an equal weight.

To help retail and e-commerce advertisers create more compelling creative and increase sales, today we’re rolling out Smart Images for Dynamic Ads to our customers as a closed beta feature.

Add a Personalized Touch to Stand Out from the Competition

With Marin Social’s drag and drop editor, you can enhance ad creatives with details at a SKU level such as sales price, product ratings, brand logos, or calls to action. Adding these details helps drive higher engagement than Dynamic Ads with plain images and improves sales. As you can see from the images below, Smart Images adds a noticeable improvement to your ad creative.

Save Time by Fully Automating the Creative Process

Apply Smart Images across all of your products in just a few clicks with a simple-to-use editor that can be mapped to your product feed

Smart Images allows you to automate the entire creative process, since the templates pull each detail in your ad creative from your product feed with up-to-date information at a SKU level, in both the image and ad copy. As information in your product feed changes, your creative updates accordingly in real time. Just think of how many hours your design team would have to put into creating each iteration with that level of detail!

Create Your Own Template or Select One from the Library

Choose from one of our professionally designed templates or create your own.

Whether you build your own template or choose one from the in-app library, all of your product images are automatically resized to meet Facebook’s specifications. The Smart Images editor gives you complete control of creative elements—all you have to do is edit the Smart Images template once, then in just one click, update thousands of ad permutations across your entire product catalog. You can save your Smart Images templates to reuse later, or create multiple to see which performs best.

Increase Engagement with Clip Art, Background Colors, and CTAs

Insert your own text and image layers directly into Smart Images with a library of hundreds of clip art images.

Choose from a library of clip art to add some spice to your product imagery. For example, you could use an emoticon to draw someone into a compelling sales offer or a banner highlighting a sale with slash-through pricing. Usually, product images from your feed come with a background that doesn’t stand out well in Facebook’s feed. You can choose from an image palette or input RGB details to adjust the color of any layer in your ad image, including the background. Be sure to use a .PNG file in your product feed so that there’s no overlap in the background color.

Interested in Smart Images for Dynamic Ads?

If you’re interested in implementing Smart Images contact your CS representative today or request a demo.

So, you’re in the market for a Facebook Marketing Partner (FMP). Maybe your search campaigns are bringing in major clicks, and your social’s not too shabby, either. Now, you’d like to coordinate your search and social efforts, to streamline workflows and standardize your data sets in the areas where Google and Facebook intersect—and increase the impact of your search and social advertising.

When you’re evaluating an FMP’s cross-channel offering, you should select a partner who can adequately address these questions and considerations:

1. Does the platform ingest product feeds to Google and Facebook for dynamic remarketing, cross-sell, up-sell, and prospect targeting? For enterprise advertisers with thousands or even millions of SKUs, a feed-based management solution should be a requirement, as it’d be a very tedious task to manually upload that information.
2. Does the platform offer cross-channel cloning capabilities from Google to Facebook to streamline the campaign creation process? For example, does it have the ability to clone Google Shopping campaigns to Dynamic Ads on Facebook in one workflow?
3. Does the platform offer the ability to create custom audiences based on search behavior on Google? Audiences that have expressed interest in a specific SKU or brand are high value, as they’ve shown intent.
4. Does the platform provide cross-channel attribution to the media spend beyond just last-click attribution?
5. Does the platform offer bidding and budget management capabilities across channel, or the ability to forecast performance based on one channel’s impact on the other?
6. What type of vertical expertise does the client services team have? Do they have experience executing campaigns on both Google and Facebook?
7. Does the client services team provide assistance for more technical components of cross-channel campaign management, such as product feed standardization, conversion pixel deployment, and attribution?
8. Ask for examples of what a report would look like that captures performance data from campaigns that were executed with the goal of incremental lift on Google and Facebook.
9. Ask for case study examples of how the cross-channel features impacted performance.
10. Ask for any insights that can be shared into the cross-channel roadmap to better understand the areas where the platform intends to drive near and long-term innovation.

The digital advertiser typically has a one-word goal: growth. These 10 best practices illustrate how to coordinate Facebook and Google campaigns to deliver superior results.

Planning

Coordinate your story across channels.

Develop a narrative that includes consistent messaging across channels. For example, if you’re running a direct response initiative to drive e-commerce sales, make sure the call to action in your Google text ads mirrors messaging in your Facebook prospecting ads. Think about how you’d react if you saw these messages in both channels in sequence and if the action you’re being asked to take is clear.

Align objectives and formats across channels.

Include formats across both channels that reinforce your objectives. For example, if you’re a direct response retail advertiser looking to promote a store-only offer, include Google’s Local Inventory Ads and Facebook’s Store Visits objective into your media plan.

Allocate budget between new vs. existing customers.

Use Google’s Customer Match and Facebook’s Custom Audiences to differentiate messaging between customers and prospects. Exclude customers in all of your prospect-oriented campaigns with monthly refreshes. (We’ll discuss using naming conventions to roll up performance in the Measurement section.)

Run a test.

Skeptical about the impact of incremental spend in either channel? Run a test and let the data tell the story. This can be helpful when working across siloed organizations.

Execution

Use search intent data to optimize campaigns on both Google and Facebook.

Users are telling Google exactly what they’re looking for. Use this information to tailor the ads they see on Facebook by creating audiences based on their search query. Here are some examples of how search intent can influence your Facebook ads:

• A user searches for a brand term. Change the messaging in the Facebook campaign to leverage their brand affinity.
• You could convert non-branded queries related to your offering into highly relevant ads across the Facebook universe. For example, if people are searching for hotels in San Francisco around a specific amenity such as ocean views, walking distance to downtown, or outdoor pool, highlight the amenity in your Facebook ad copy.
• Leverage lookalike audiences aligned with type search queries to enable targeted prospecting on Facebook.

Use social engagement data on Facebook to inform your paid search strategies.

• Use Facebook’s Audience Insights tool to perform analysis of your customer base to generate insights like age, gender, likes, purchase behavior, and interests. Then, use these insights to craft your copywriting strategy.
• Use top-of-funnel strategies on Facebook—like driving awareness with a video ad with specific keywords referenced—to increase paid search volume and conversions.
• Create audience segments on Google based on engagement insights on Facebook for more precise bidding/targeting. For example, if women converted at a significantly higher rate than men on a Facebook campaign for a particular product, then you could add female demographic targeting to your Google ad groups and bid higher in these groups.

Design the account structure for feed-based ad delivery.

Align the account structures of your Facebook Dynamic Ads and Google Shopping campaigns. For example, break out top products to allow for greater control and visibility.

Cross-sell across channels.

Someone just converted on search? Increase their lifetime value by cross-selling them complementary products on Facebook.

Measurement

Use a standardized naming convention.

If your paid search and social teams implement standardized campaign naming, it’s easy to roll up across channels.

When creating a standardized naming convention, include attributes like target prospect or customer, test details, placement, or references to a specific initiative. Your campaign name should match your UTM structure in your URLs to coordinate with your analytics tool.

Align on a multi-touch attribution model.

Many search and social teams still operate on a last-click conversion, which doesn’t take into account all of the interactions that took place prior to purchase. Teams should align on an attribution model that takes into account each touch point to conversion with a common conversion window.

Introducing Dynamic Ads for Travel

About a year ago, Facebook launched Dynamic Product Ads to attract mostly e-commerce advertisers looking for a more efficient way to launch remarketing campaigns, without having to manually create hundreds of link ads and custom audiences per SKU. Facebook now just refers to this solution as Dynamic Ads, with a unique offering available to travel advertisers called Dynamic Ads for Travel (DAT). With DAT, you can automatically deliver ads at a product level from your hotel and destination catalogs with unique creative based on a person's click events on your website.

For example, you could dynamically deliver ads across all hotel destinations with imagery specific to the location that people are searching for. People who searched for hotels in Maui on your website and didn’t convert would be delivered a very unique offer, compared to those who searched for, say, hotels in Minneapolis.

Dynamic Ads for Travel - Thousands of Relevant Ads in Seconds

As you can imagine, it’d be near-impossible to create all of the possible permutations of audience segments paired with unique creatives for each destination or hotel that people are searching for manually. Dynamic Ads for Travel improves campaign performance in several ways:

• Relevancy: More intelligent ads that capture details such as price, check-in date, and destination relevant to what people are searching for and where they want to go. You can personalize landing pages with redirect URLs specific to these details.

• Automated delivery: Ad creative is deployed automatically from your catalog feed, meaning you don’t have to manually create each individual ad.

• Improved targeting for optimal ROI: Target people who are searching for a hotel in a certain place or flight on a specific date. Cross-sell people who’ve booked a flight with a complementary offer on a hotel.

• Scale: Remarket to people across all placements including mobile news feed, the Audience Network, and Instagram.

So How Does Dynamic Ads for Travel Work?

There are two key components that enable Dynamic Ads for Travel to work:

1. The Facebook Pixel to enable “Website Custom Audiences” and track click events on your website
2. A feed that includes details on all items you sell, as well as creative (description, price, availability, etc.)

The click events that the Facebook Pixel captures allow travel advertisers to deliver more personalized ads to audiences based on a variety of user signals such as search activity, browsing history, and purchase behavior on your website. You can further enhance these audiences with a few parameters in both your exclusion and inclusion targeting:

Pixel Parameters For Travel Companies




























HotelsFlightsDestinationsContent TypeContent TypeContent TypeDestinationOrigin and Destination AirportSuggested DestinationsCheck In and Out DateDeparture and Return DateTravel Start and End DateCurrencyCurrencyRegion, City, and Country


To determine which ad creative to trigger when a pixel event is fired, you need a travel feed with information from a catalog. You can either upload the catalog manually with a .CSV file or have the data retrieved programmatically from a feed in .XML format.

The good news is that many travel advertisers already have a feed that they use to deploy campaigns on Google, where the practice of retrieving this information for Facebook is very similar. Facebook currently supports the following catalogs with plans to roll out a flight specific-solution in the near future.

• Hotel: A list of details specific to each hotel such as room availability, pricing, star rating, guest rating, and image URL with support for up to 20 images
• Destination: A list of details specific to each destination such as longitude location, neighborhood, price, price change, and image URL with support for up to 20 images

If it seems a little hairy, not to worry—Dynamic Ads for Travel is one of the most advanced Facebook advertising features available on the platform today, so mastering it takes a bit of practice. The opportunities are truly endless, however, with all of the possible configurations that are available with this ad type.

Just note that some of these variables such as price and availability need to be updated in real-time, meaning to get your campaigns ahead of the curve, you should use a Facebook Marketing Partner platform—such as Marin Social—that’s developed this capability into its offering.