Different channels are better at reaching different members of your community, and based on an ad’s primary call-to-action, will perform differently. Before you determine market spend for a particular campaign, be sure to identify specific goals, order them by importance, and then establish how your ads will support those. For example, do you hope your campaign (and by extension your ads) will…
- Sell more of a specific product?
- Expand your social network? (Gain Twitter followers or Facebook fans?)
- Produce fresh, indexable (maybe user-generated) content for your Web site?
- Strengthen the bond between your community and brand — maybe via a contest, festival, or through a guest speaking, training, or webinar opportunity?
Once you identify your primary goal(s), think about your avenues and which ones will work best. Try to divide your market spend accordingly, but as soon as your ads launch: stop guessing! Systematically optimize your ads real-time according to traffic quantity and quality. Document your findings, and then use those to incrementally improve your ads right out of the gate next time.
Here are two examples of how; the first using Facebook’s proprietary “Insights” Tool, which provides data points similar to those provided by most publishers and e-mail service providers, and the second using vanity URLs in Google Analytics, which work similarly to vanity URLs in most analytics packages.
Sweet Leaf Tea: Granny’s Almanac Summer Promotion 2011
Springbox uses targeted Facebook ads to drive traffic to Sweet Leaf Tea’s site and contest-based microsites. This summer, we ran five such ads to promote their Granny Almanac summer promotion, which featured coupon and concert ticket giveaways, as well as the opportunity to write the next “grannyism” (which refers to the sayings under the caps of Sweet Leaf Tea.) By monitoring daily click-through rates, we not only killed poorly performing image-copy combinations, we also took note of the best performing copy and images, enabling real-time optimization.
The first set of ads we ran generated CTRs from .016%-.021%, which was average for ads Sweet Leaf had seen in the past.
Based on the performance of those ads, we combined the highest performing image with the highest performing copy.
Central Market Hatch Chile Festival 2010
But ad optimization is about quality too. In addition to working to procure more traffic, we also work to procure better traffic. Using vanity URLs, which, if you use Google Analytics, you can generate using Google’s URL Builder Tool, we’re able to see what actions people from specific sources take — for example, different ads from Facebook.
In 2010 Central Market ran a campaign to collect Hatch Chile recipes for a recipe contest. They also ran a concurrent contest for opportunities to judge those entries. We ran Facebook ads to support their efforts — one with a CTA to enter to judge and one with a CTA to enter a recipe. We pulled the recipe contest ad and funneled that budget into the judge ad after noticing two things:
- The recipe ad was averaging a CTR of .016% while the judge ad was averaging a CTR of .024% — which spoke to quantity of traffic.
- The traffic from the Facebook recipe ad to the Central Market site didn’t enter the contest as often as the judge-based traffic entered to judge. (“Goal completion” for judge entries was higher than for recipe entries.) Judge traffic had a submission rate of 5.89% (entries/visits from judge ad), while the traffic from the recipe submission ad had a submit rate of just 1.56% (entries/visits from recipe ad) — this speaks to quality of traffic.
Not only was the judge ad sending more traffic, but it was better qualified according to its primary call-to-action. In the end, the Facebook judge ad accounted for over a quarter of the total judge submissions. Interestingly, their newsletter saw the opposite effect. Their newsletter procured more and better qualified recipe contest entries, which further supports the importance of optimizing by source and by call-to-action.
Document lessons over time and use them to incrementally improve your campaign spend year-over-year. For example, we’ve been tracking Central Market’s Facebook ads for over a year now. Their most recent campaign, Brewtopia 2011, produced the highest CTR to date at .130%.