3 Simple Steps that Amplify Your Facebook Ads

Reach the right audience with the right message – at exactly the right time.

That’s the golden rule of direct response advertising. Marketers live and die by this concept. But when it comes to digital media? We struggle – simply because it’s physically impossible to reach millions of people with personalized messages. We give up easily and convince ourselves that digital media has limited value beyond basic brand-building.

This perspective is wrong.

With the right technology –AdParlor’s tool for dynamic News Feed creatives– advertisers can use Facebook as a conversion-generating, direct response engine. The process follows a straightforward, three step formula:

Step 1: Find the Right Audiences

• Segment your existing database to pinpoint existing customers on Facebook using Custom Audiences.
• Use attribution data from on-site and in-app activity to create granular sub-segments of your audience.
• Create Lookalike Audiences (who are likely to be interested in your business) based on your strongest performing customer segments at as granular a level that you can.

Here’s how the process works with some of our largest e-commerce clients:

We look at internal CRM data for different types of buyers, based on products that they’ve eyeballed or purchased. We then group these users into like-minded segments. We then use Facebook Custom Audiences to match your CRM database to Facebook users and identify similar audiences based on demographic and interest-based characteristics of these segments. All of a sudden, we have access to new audiences with these same qualities.

We can even control the precision of our Lookalike segments. We can choose to reach ‘similar audiences’ – the 1% of Facebook users who look like our Custom Audience. ‘Reach audiences’ expand this group to the 5% of Facebook users who look like our Custom Audiences (so there is slightly less precision, but a greater market reach).

Step 2: Deliver the Right Creatives

• Once you’re confident in your segments, you can serve them with personally relevant creatives.
• This stage involves rigorous testing made possible through AdParlor’s tool for dynamic creative. In other words, we can build creatives and tailor them to audiences in near real-time (It’s the actual ad creation process in which our technology can help). Keep in mind that by bucketing the segment of users who have expressed interest in a particular brand or product type, you have already narrowed down what types of creative will be most important in the testing process.

The experiment begins. We worked with an e-commerce retail client to create two audience groups:

• Lookalike Audiences based on the advertiser’s entire user base
• Lookalike Audiences based on users who have purchased or expressed interest in specific products

We planned to target group 2 with highly targeted creatives, suspecting that focused messaging would yield higher performing ads. And we were right.

Among product-specific Lookalike Audiences, CTR was 43% higher, and CPA was 82% lower. In other words, we targeted users with messaging that was likely to pique their interest – and it really worked.

Step 3: Drive the Conversion Home

• Ad creatives are only part of the marketing equation. Now you need to focus on driving a transaction by sending your Facebook audiences to your website or mobile app.
• Product-specific landing pages outperform generic landing pages. Advertisers that marry product-specific creatives with product-specific landing pages see a major improvement in both conversion rates and CPA compared to generic landing pages — i.e. if a user clicks on an image of shoes and the brand has those same shoes on the landing page, the probability of a conversion event will be higher than what it would have been on a generic page.

We tested this concept with two subscription-based advertisers (see below). When we married product-specific creative to product-specific landing pages, we witnessed 50% lower CPA costs and 60% higher conversion rates (compared to using generic landing pages).

The moral of the story? Audiences know what they want. The most powerful way to boost conversions is to speak to their unique needs – it’s basic psychology, amplified by technology.

Final Thoughts

Effective advertising is more than just reaching the right audience. You need to communicate your value proposition to the right people in a way that drives a measurable conversion event. With technology, this process is possible at scale – and it works. Want to get started? Just start testing.