Jana is Customer Engagement Director Team Lead, Social, in Marin’s UK office. In her role, she’s responsible for managing a portfolio of client accounts, with the goal of fostering long-term business relationships and continued growth. She lives and breathes social, and factoid—she was a professional athlete for over five years. Jana holds a master’s in Business Communications from Università degli Studi di Siena.
Although Instagram Stories is the fastest-growing Facebook product, and more and more consumers are shifting to the stories format, most businesses are still lagging behind.
If you haven’t adopted the Stories ad format on Instagram yet, now’s a perfect time. This ad format is an easy, great way to stay ahead of the competition. In this post, we offer tips for using Instagram Stories to build your brand. For the basics, check out A Brief Guide to Advertising with Instagram Stories.
Before building ad campaigns and adapting your existing assets to Stories, it’s important to understand how people engage with this format.
According to Facebook, video represents over 40% of Instagram Stories, with over 60% of these being sound-on.[1] And, about one-third of the most viewed Stories are from businesses, meaning that people on Instagram are open to engaging with you!
If you’re new to Instagram Stories, start with the basics: tell your brand story with awareness objectives, such as reach, reach and frequency, brand awareness, and video views. Keep a few pointers in mind to maximize success:
Finally, be sure to consider your measurement tool. Make sure to properly implement tracking so that you gather relevant data, but also gain an understanding on how people interact with your brand. This will allow you to focus more specifically on achieving your target objectives and KPIs.
Be bold, understand the format, and create alluring ad campaigns with Instagram Stories. If you’d like to learn how Marin can help, contact us today.
[1] Instagram internal data, 2016-2017.
For a long time, lift studies were considered a Facebook feature only available to large advertisers with high ad campaign budgets. Just recently, Facebook released a ‘test and learn’ feature that enables all advertisers—large and small alike—to help answer the big question: How do I know if my ads are driving incremental sales or conversions?
The self-serve solution allows you to run as many studies as you need to determine Facebook’s value to your campaigns. Now, Facebook advertisers have another way to not only understand, but also act on their lift study results and continuously test for optimal performance.
Here’s a rundown of how the test works, and best practices for achieving the most statistically significant results.
Unless your Facebook account manager sets up a specific test and learn study, the study runs on the whole ad account. Facebook splits the study into two random groups: One will be served Facebook ads, and the other one won’t. The size of these groups is determined by various factors such as ad account reach, ad study schedule, and budget.
Using a random number generator and linking it to each Facebook user ID allows Facebook to create random groups, and ensures that people are staying in the dedicated group regardless of which platform and device they’re using.
When you run the test and learn study, you can select from a couple of options:
Once you select the objective and optimization event, the data gets passed to Facebook via the Facebook pixel. Facebook then compares the conversions in the test and control group to measure the lift.
Once Facebook analyzes the results and measures lift, you’ll see the outcomes on your Ads Manager.
To get the most out of your lift studies, be sure to implement these creative and optimization tactics.
On the Creative Side
On the Campaign Optimization Side
Even if you’re confident about incremental conversions that Facebook is driving for your ads, the test and learn solution is now widely available. Jump in and try it out! Feel free to run it in the background to give you additional visibility on how your campaigns are performing.
If you’re a Marin customer, be sure to consult with your account manager to get personalized recommendations. If you’re new to Marin, get in touch to learn more.
Facebook is constantly introducing new features to help advertisers scale activity. Testing new stuff is exciting, and can often distract us from our main tasks. That said, a best practice is to allocate 70% of your budget to core campaigns and 30% to testing new features.
What steps should you take to ensure your core campaigns perform efficiently, and that your campaign structure’s up to date? Don’t be afraid to shake things up and re-structure your campaigns to identify more opportunities and improve results.
Before you re-structure anything, it’s crucial to analyze your current core activity—in other words, a gap analysis. This happens in three stages:
Depending on the size of your account, you can either analyze all of your campaigns or concentrate on the top performers. In either case, follow the steps below to complete an initial assessment of your campaign structure. The campaign elements we’re using are just an example—tailor the specifics for your business.
In our example there are a couple of observations:
Our Main KPI is Purchase and goal CPA is €35.
As you’re noting observations, you’ll likely identify a few opportunities to improve your account structure. Let’s put our knowledge into action.
The final and easiest step is based on our action points. Here, we create our new campaign structure.
Management and optimization should be easy, whether manual or automated. Allow more budget for your ads to deliver and push the best performing ones.
When your campaign starts to experience fatigue, pause underperforming ads and let your top performers continue delivering results. Create a campaign with new segments to ensure you have the right volume.
Your own campaign structure and goals may differ from our example. Look at your strategy from a full-funnel perspective, and implement the most efficient campaign structure for your particular needs. If you’re a Marin customer and need help, contact your account representative. They’ll be able to assist with a full gap analysis and provide the best recommendations for your campaign restructure.
Living in a mobile-focused world has changed the way people discover and buy products. To keep pace with this mobile shopping revolution, Facebook continually develops new mobile ad formats to deliver a smooth user experience and that allow advertisers to exhibit a wide range of available products. Collection Ads is one such format.
Facebook Collection Ads empower advertisers to “Tell a story and showcase relevant products and features—all in a single Facebook ad.”[1] Although Collection Ads are focused on retail and
e-commerce, they’re easy to implement for any business with a product catalog that links to an online store. Advertisers are increasingly adopting this ad type, which allows them to combine video or images with other images from a product catalog.
To stand out in the digital crowd, advertisers must create Collection Ads that ‘inspire’ and ‘optimize’.
Facebook recommends that advertisers use Collection Ads to drive and optimize for conversions. So, inspire users to convert by having your main asset tell your brand story. Use complementary images from your product feed to drive home the brand message and to highlight a variety of your products.
Keep these things in mind as you create your ads:
Collection Ads are mobile-only, so optimizing for the experience is key. It’s also important to optimize the content itself, following a few guidelines:
Want to know how to create Collection Ads on Marin Social? Read how in our support center article. Or, if you’re new to Marin, just request a demo.
[1] Facebook Business, https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-create-ad-collection.
You may have noticed the trend towards Facebook flexible placements (i.e., placement optimization). Are these worth incorporating into your account?
In this article, we cover the main advantages of placement optimization and why you should include it in your marketing strategy. The benefits sound a lot like common business goals: timesaving, efficiency, and expanded reach.
Saving Time Through Predictable Performance
When you run your campaigns only on what you consider to be the best-performing placement or split individual placements, you’ll most likely see fluctuating performance. And, it may be challenging to achieve low CPA or delivery in a specific placement. Manual adjustments become an ongoing struggle as you try to get the most out of your campaigns.
Optimizing for more placements, on the other hand, will save you some time when you create and refine your campaigns. This produces better delivery, enhanced performance, and expanded reach.
Saving Time Through Robust Tools
There are duplication and mass-editing tools that allow you to clone ad sets or campaigns, automatically make changes to placements, and run Facebook and Instagram campaigns independently. With these tools, there’s no need to create everything from scratch or reinvent the wheel.
However, what if you’re running full-funnel activities, from branding to retention? What if you’re also advertising in multiple markets, plus variations for those audiences?
Here, placement optimization can help save you tons of time. Instead of targeting and setting up every placement, you can let Facebook do it for you, clearing more time for strategic planning, optimization, and further testing.
Saving Time Through Insightful Reporting
As for reporting, Facebook provides the option of seeing the placement breakdown, allowing you to determine which placement drives the best performance. But, don’t rush to divert all of your budget to the best-performing placement by separating placements again, as Facebook will optimize for the best performer, anyway. Which leads us to efficiency.
When you’re developing your strategy and creating your Facebook ad campaigns, one aim is to provide as much information as possible so that Facebook algorithms know your goal and optimize for it. This includes indicators like objective, promoted object, and bidding type.
Why should you let the algorithms deliver ads in placements that bring low CPAs? Because they’re flexible, serving your ads on Facebook, Instagram, or Facebook Audience Network (FAN) when there’s the greatest likelihood of the cheapest CPA and highest volume.
[caption id="attachment_9878" align="alignnone" width="500"]
How placement optimization works (Source: Facebook)[/caption]
Audience size plays a key role in achieving the cheapest CPA, meaning that if there’s a possibility to increase reach, it’s always a good idea to do it.
With placement optimization, you have the opportunity to reach more users with the same budget, which can solve cost effectiveness and single-placement delivery issues.
How does placement optimization work? Easy—it takes advantage of Facebook’s algorithms that dynamically search and serve your ad to the placement that’s most cost effective at any given time, whether it’s on Facebook, Instagram, or FAN.
More time, better use of resources, more brand awareness and revenue. Placement optimization is one of the best strategies for putting your marketing dollars to effective use.
When your day-to-day is all about getting those numbers under targets, it’s easy to get mired in ongoing improvements and ignore quick wins. Your creative can be one such victory. Tweak your creative strategy in just the right way and follow a few Facebook ads best practices, and watch what happens to your monthly metrics.
First off, determine the message. You know your brand and product better than anyone, but how do you effectively communicate these to a purchasing public?
A great first step is to clearly define your brand and product. Who are you? What does your product do? Why should people care? Communicate the importance of your brand through tone of voice and profile targeting, and apply this to your creatives. How does the image reflect brand and product values?
If you need inspiration, look to the industry. Your competitors are doing similar things, so take a peek at their ads. (You should be doing this anyway for competitive intelligence.)
Always remember to tell a story, make it interactive, and experiment.
Next, make sure the images are the right format for your objective and ad type. It may sound like a no-brainer that you should avoid any image being squeezed or distorted, but make sure you’ve done your homework.
To this end, be sure to reference Facebook’s ad guide any time you’re communicating an image request to design team. This will go far in saving time before ad creation, and you avoid resizing an image or hounding your designers about format changes.
So, you have the right size and format for your ads. Now, how do you capture the attention of the more than one billion people visiting Facebook every day?
Consider this a checklist you can use to implement the above four-pronged strategy.
Think Brand
Identify your brand’s unique point of view. Use brand colors, relevant icons, and your logo to engage your audience. For ad copy, use your brand’s unique tone of voice, keeping things clear and concise.
Tell a Story
Introduce a character, preferably someone representing your customer. Feature the character in all imagery to build a story over time. Show that she’s enjoying the experience, so that others will, too. Create a storyline—a visual treatment that persists through all of the ad campaign’s content.
Align the ad copy with this story. You may want to include perks and comments on the user experience, or examples of customer wins.
Make it Interactive
Use cinemagraphs and different visual formats. Ask questions—create a dialogue with targeted audience. You can also include games, apps, and contests, inviting people to join your community and interact with your brand.
via GIPHY
Experiment
Some funky things you may want to try (remember to keep it simple):
Facebook has plenty of ad types you can use to drive attention and help you accomplish your goals. Here are further ideas for video and carousel formats.
Video Ads
Video ads are a great way to jumpstart your branding activity and boost your direct response campaigns.
TipHow to Nail ItConsider the Mobile Feed
Go deeper into the silence
(sound-off)
Frame it
Experiment
Carousel Ads
Carousel ads allow you to show multiple images and links. You can use this ad type to drive demand and move leads down the funnel.
TipHow to Nail ItFeature different productsUse one image on each cardTell a storyDepict a process
Show a workflow in a series of stepsUse a panoramic imageUse one image, split into a few cards
Remember, Facebook is a channel that ultimately combats boredom. By personalizing every impression, you bring your brand, its story, and the interactive user experience fun. And, when you experiment and frequently try new things, you make it memorable.
[1] Note: about 95% of Facebook users view videos with no sound.
You’re beaming, proud, and ready to rake in a massive amount of leads. Why? Because—you’ve got two brilliantly designed sets of ad creative and you’re ready to set ‘em loose to the hungry, scrolling consumer masses.
How do you know if your campaign will be a boom or bust? Can you even test such a thing in an easy and straightforward way?
Time for some split testing....
For those who haven’t yet implemented split testing to increase conversions, an explanation is in order. Simply put, split testing (also known as A/B testing) allows you to test different advertising strategies on commonly divided audiences to see what works and what doesn’t.
Want to see which bidding option, creative, or ad placements perform best? Split testing is the answer.
The Facebook split testing API does several great things:
First, let’s start with a simple example. Let’s go back to those two stellar ad creatives. At this point, of course, you don't know which one’s going to perform better. The first thing you should do is set up your two ad sets, with each one of your creatives in each ad set (in other words, one ad in each set for a total of two ads). Keep the copy the same for each ad.
For the purposes of this example, then, our plan is straightforward:
To run the split test, you’ll need to set it up in Facebook. (If you’re a Marin customer, contact your account manager for help with this.) The test can be 50/50 or 33/33/33, etc., depending on the testing variables, but note that 50/50 is the most commonly used model. So, if an audience has 10 million people, the ad sets will have 5 million people in each audience.
From here, we select the image as the variable to test. Our main KPI is conversions (downloads), and we’re allocating $5,000 per ad set. As we mentioned above, our audience is 5 million per ad set. We’ll run the campaign for two weeks to ensure we have a broad reach, high budget, and long duration.
Since we want to see positive results before we extend our campaign to other markets, we’ll start only in the UK first.
Ready, set, test, measure.
When scoping your own split test, make sure that the test will have value for you, and that you’ll see clear results that you can use to refine and improve your campaigns.
The first questions you should answer include:
Back to that riddle—is it a boom or a bust? To determine which test worked best, choose the variable that has the highest efficiency level based on your objective.
In our example, our objective is conversions and the main KPI is downloads. So, we can consider the ad set that has the lower CPA as the best performing.
And there you have it. Easy, right?
Best Practices and Recommendations for Maximum Success
If you’d like to dig deeper (and we recommend that you do), here are a few best practices.
Define an acceptable confidence level
Before you create a test, determine an acceptable confidence level. Test with larger reach, longer schedules, or higher budgets.
Choose one variable to test
This allows you to define the exact difference in ad creative that drove better performance.
Define main KPIs before the test
This will allow you to determine the best performing variable.
Ensure both test sizes are comparable
When testing for volume metrics such as number of conversions, scale to ensure both test sizes are comparable.
Start testing on one specific market or campaign
This will allow you to monitor and analyze the test results more efficiently, which will in turn allow you to draw better conclusions. If you find this useful, you can conduct further tests on different variables and expand to other markets.
Test based on one large audience
The audience should be big enough to be split and to allow you to gain sufficient insights.
Allocate the same budget to the test groups
If you’re running your splits at the campaign level, make sure both campaigns have the same lifetime budget. If you’re testing on the ad set level, both ad sets should have the same lifetime budget.
No changes to the test groups
Any changes could compromise the split testing and prevent you from seeing clear results.
Lookalike audiences are the Facebook feature when it comes to audience targeting. If you’re looking to scale your campaigns and more, it’s a must-consider option.
You can use lookalike targeting to find similar users to your core audience based on interests, click behavior, and conversion habits. The smaller the percentage of your core audience, the more similar your lookalike audience will be.
A lookalike percentage says, “Give me x% of the selected country users who are most similar to my seed audience.” For example, if you create a 1% lookalike in the US, the output will always be around 2.1 million profiles, since this is more or less 1% of the total number of Facebook users in the US.
However, depending on the seed audience, the profiles may greatly differ—for example, a 1% lookalike of your most valuable lifetime users will be different from a 1% lookalike of all website visitors. Therefore, seed quality is the most important factor for success.
You have several options from which to generate lookalike audiences:
When segmenting/choosing seed audiences, think quality over quantity. Although quality can be subjective, there are a few generic size benchmarks (guidelines) for your seed audience.
For example, let’s take our previous 1% US lookalike. Our audience has 2.1 million people. When we create our lookalike audience, Facebook compares the people in this audience against how similar they are to our seed audience of less than 50,000. In other words, we’re magnifying the seed 40 times. If the seed isn’t high quality, then the magnification won’t produce the best audience.
As you can see, you have a lot of choices to test different audience types and associated performance. The key challenge is to segment and structure the audiences to avoid overlaps and achieve the best delivery.
Something to note: Since frequency caps limit the daily number of times you can deliver an ad to a user, lookalike audiences won’t increase your overall reach. And, you’ll have less predictability when it comes to which ad wins each auction.
There’s a way to overcome these challenges, however. Make sure your strategy includes nested lookalikes and smart exclusions. Let’s go into more detail.
Let’s start with an example, where we exclude the next-highest percentage audience from our targeted lookalike audience. So, if you’re targeting lookalike 3% and lookalike 5%, then exclude the 3% audience from the campaign that’s targeting the 5% one.
Nested lookalikes:
Smart exclusions:
With smart exclusions, we exclude the targeted audiences that we’re already using in other live campaigns. For example, if you’re running campaigns with 1% lookalike and 3% lookalike and want to launch a broader targeting campaign, then exclude the 3% lookalike.
When you’re planning your targeting strategy, make sure you’re segmenting your lookalike thresholds according to the value of the user, and excluding the targeted audiences from campaigns to avoid overlap. This’ll allow you to use lookalike audiences from different sources, increasing the overall reach and scalability of your campaigns.
For example, if you’re running a retargeting campaign based on a Website Custom Audience of all your site visitors, exclude this campaign from all of your acquisition initiatives, along with the associated lookalike audiences.
Here’s another scenario. Suppose you’re a travel website and the user funnel includes two conversions—registration and booking. You would segment the audiences based on your goals—perhaps based on the custom audience of the previous month's bookers, conversion pixel data, and Website Custom Audience of people who registered but didn’t book. Your segmentation would look like this:
Custom audience segmentation:
You can use all of these audiences for your acquisition campaigns, along with interest-based and other targeting options.
Here’s the final campaign planning structure for this example. This takes into account that retargeting campaigns are running based on your Website Custom Audiences.
Fine-tuned campaign planning structure:
Creating effective lookalike audiences takes a bit of cunning and patience, but it’s not rocket science. With continued practice, refinement, and measurement, you can scale your campaigns to ensure you’re targeting audiences with the most relevant ads at the most relevant time, in a way that works the best for your business. If you haven’t yet implemented this feature, we strongly recommend you get started today!
Online gambling is one of the most profitable digital industries, and it's constantly expanding. Yet, it’s also one of the most challenging markets for digital advertisers. As technologies improve and strategies develop, the competition grows fiercer each day.
At the same time, the rise of social media forms a perfect marriage between a gaming industry that’s exploded and an advertising channel perfectly suited to what online gambling providers want to achieve—an even larger market and more players.
Advertising strategy for online gambling depends on many factors, differs according to specific brand requirements and goals, and requires a lot of testing to determine what works best. The key to success is to have a clear strategy and apply a few general best practices.
In this article, we look at an example of a robust gambling strategy, discuss challenges, and offer recommendations for campaign optimization.
You should include four essential phases in your strategy:
To make sure you’re staying ahead of the competition, it’s important your strategy covers all phases of the typical online gambler journey, from the branding to retention, and that you use ads and targeting tactics that are the most useful in each phase. Any tweaks to the strategy will depend on your budget and resources, but having a clear structure makes planning easier and your ad campaigns more successful.
Further, there are a few things to note in order to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns:
Here are several great advantages from using this strategy, plus a few more tips for how to get the most out of it.
Branding
Acquisition
Retargeting
Retention
Once your strategy’s clear and your campaigns are live, you’ll likely run into a few challenges. Here are a few common ones and how to handle them.
For a real-life example of how an online gambling site hit the jackpot with their CTR and saved big on CPAs, read our Leo Vegas case study.
Facebook offers several great options for retargeting, allowing you to segment and remarket to people who’ve engaged with your product. These tools include:
These features let you granularly segment your audiences, ensuring you’re targeting users with the right messaging and products.
What happens when search teams up with social? Combining search intent with Facebook retargeting allows you to segment and target users on Facebook, based on the search ads that drove them to your website.
How can you fit this tactic into your overall retargeting strategy, and how is it beneficial to your campaigns?
Let’s tackle that last question first.
Since search is an intent-oriented channel, you can retarget users based on what they’re looking for. With this knowledge, you can drive them to a conversion by offering them exactly what they want.
Once you know your audience’s intent, you can align this information with your goals to create high-value user segments, then target accordingly. This affords you the opportunity to target larger audiences using lookalikes, then scale even further from there. No matter the size of the audience, using precise, tailored segments ensures the highest audience quality.
And, if your goals change and you no longer want to target a specific audience, you can always exclude it from your campaigns.
Search intent allows you to adapt creative elements on Facebook—by knowing what the user wants, you can show more appealing images and messaging to increase CTR. You can also apply tiered bidding and budget, concentrating on higher-value audiences.
There are an infinite numbers of ways you can segment audiences based on your overall strategy and goals, or even for a particular event. Here are a few use cases.
A large brand is planning to launch a massive TV campaign, and wants to engage with people, via search and social, who possibly saw its TV ad. Since users are most likely to search for the brand after seeing the ad, the brand splits its search campaigns into brand and generic segments. This way, the brand can understand its audience and target them with specific messaging, across channels.
An ecommerce site is trying to attract users based on search criteria for its fashion styles. It tags the keywords romantic and classic to reach those users on Facebook, showing them relevant content. The site complements this tactic with its Facebook DPA campaigns.
A direct advertiser is looking to improve its social optimization strategy based on search activity. It segments search campaigns according to users who search for high ROI and low ROI keywords, allowing it to target those users on Facebook, and adjusting bids and budgets accordingly.
A travel website wants to lower CPAs for search and social channels. It creates a 100% bid RLSA group for very expensive but high volume keywords, tags the users who’ve clicked these keywords, and excludes them from repeated searches. To achieve lower costs, the website targets those users in social.
Want to see a real-life example of how it works? Read about how a loan comparison website cut its cost per acquisition by 3.5x with Marin’s search intent retargeting on Facebook.
