With thanks to Lauren Vaccarello, VP of Marketing at AdRoll & Aaron Levy, PPC Team Lead at SEER, for their interactive session at #SESSF about Social Advertising.
If you’ve ever wondered how to make profitable use of social advertising, then you should buy these guys a drink and pick their brain. Short of that, you can read the rest of this post as I interpret their sessions at #SESSF. Lauren & Aaron took us though how to optimize both Twitter and Facebook advertising to obtain maximum engagement, which leads to lead generation and most importantly, return on investment.
Optimizing Twitter:
Twitter is great for driving engagement, using Promoted Accounts, Promoted Tweets, Twitter Cards, and Expanded Cards.
The key is to take advantage of the immediacy of twitter. Engage on the go during:
- Webinars
- Conferences
- Concerts
- Live TV
- Big Sporting Events
- Etc.
For targeting, use extremely relevant #hashtags and target influencers in your space. Tools like LittleBird can help you find influencers among your own followers and find their friends.
Be aware that ads have a short shelf life. Twitter generally shows ads to users for less than 5 impressions before stopping. You need to have current and fresh content or always have a new audience to target. Expect to be changing ads every hour.
To optimize, make sure your audiences are real engaged, twitter users (unlike Lauren). Building an audience who doesn’t engage with who they follow, or twitter is just a waste of cash. Tools like FollowerWonk help you keep an eye on the quality of your followers.
Optimizing Facebook:
Facebook is great for ongoing engagement and brand building while doubling as a lead generation platform. The basic targeting options are as follows:
Age & Gender – What I’m going to call the bear necessities of Facebook targeting, Age and Gender are the most basic segmentation types and should be used most of the time, if only to customize the ads a little better within small audiences.
Geo Targeting – Obviously if your business is based in a certain location you should only target it, be sure to stay large by using major cities/states, don’t narrow to the ZIP level.
Interest Targeting – Use combinations of broad and precise targets to focus your targeting better, so if you target #Fantasy and Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, your’ll find Tolkien fans with a broader interest in Fantasy Books.
Education – You can use education to attempt to target higher income users, you won’t find a lot of broke Ivy League Graduates, but I’ll find you plenty of broke former and current CEO’s.
For ads, try to customize based on your demographic and psychographic targeting. For example:
- Alpha type personalities will want to hear all about the best money can buy, most beautiful, fastest, etc.
- Beta type personalities will want to hear more practical call to actions, get these jeans for 20% off, meet new people locally, fun things to do this weekend for cheap.
Be aware of the new News Feed Ads, they are fricken awesome – the newsfeed is the largest real-estate on the FB page plus the statistics make the newsfeed is a must have channel:
- 49% higher CTR than Right Hand Side ads (RHS)
- 54% lower CPC than RHS ads
- 1,150,000,000+ users
Pro Tip: Use Dark Post for news feed promoted posts
And that brings us to Facebook Exchange.
Facebook Exchange
Facebook Exchange accounted for 28% of US ad impressions last year and is exclusively used in retargeting. Need I remind you that retargeting is one of the most successful ad types? After Brand PPC… usually.
Use your own intent data to fulfill demand on FBX and boost your retargeting campaigns performance. You should make use of advanced segmentation to drive your strategy. Consider:
- How many times have they come to the site
- Time spent on site
- How many page views
- Recency segmentations
- 24 hours
- 7 days
- 14 days
- 30 days
- etc
Case Study Examples:
Udemy course conversions increased by 600% in one day with Facebook news feed while achieving a CPA 60% below goal and a 20% click-through conversion rate.
Betabrand drives 5.5x ROI by improving bottom-of-the-funnel conversions.
They achieve this by using LiquidAds to create custom ads at scale and grow engagement for their model citizen program. With 102% increase in clicks, 51% decrease in costs.
For more tips be sure to check out Aaron’s own notes where you’ll find details about optimizing LinkedIn.
What other techniques have you used to maximized your Social Advertising ROI?
