Over the next few years, Facebook’s advertising share is expected to grow from 22.7% in 2018 to 28% by 2021. With 40.2m users predicted to be on the social platform by the end of this year, this accounts for approximately 77% of the UK adult population. Facebook is therefore key in any advertising strategy, especially considering you can reach a high percentage of your audience on a very engaging platform.
However, some marketers doubt the capability of using Facebook to drive incremental revenue. And it’s true, it can be a hard channel to get working. There are many elements to a good Facebook campaign, for example, creative and targeting are key. Another element which can make a big difference is the attribution and optimisation method used.
Optimising towards Facebook’s standard attribution window will very likely not give you an accurate view of success, especially if you’re running other media outside of Facebook. The conversions reported in Facebook are renowned for being a lot higher than the ‘true’ value. Why is this? Well if Facebook is reaching around 77% of the population, chances are in a user’s journey around the digital ‘sphere’, they’re going to be on Facebook at some point. It was reported in the ‘2018 Global Internet Phenomena Report’ that Facebook is in the top 10 when looking at upstream traffic share.
So, what is the solution?
All Response Media viewpoint
Before you start any Facebook campaign, you need to consider a few things:
- What is your main objective?
- What system is being used to measure the objective?
- What attribution method is used?
- Is the end goal measurable through the site? Or is the end goal achieved offline?
Facebook isn’t the bad guy; it’s just using the data it has access to. As an agency, we, therefore, need to ensure we get the answers to the above questions so that we can ensure Facebook is optimizing towards the ‘true’ value of success. Or at least optimising to something as close to the ‘true’ value as possible!
A couple of recent examples show how optimising towards the true value is very important.
- ‘Client A’ used Trionic to optimise towards a floodlight conversion instead of a conversion recorded by Facebook. From using this, they saw CPL drop by 50%!
- ‘Client B’ uses an in-house attribution method. Through analysing different attribution windows in Facebook and our floodlight tag we saw there was no consistency or pattern. The best solution for this client was to, therefore, use offline conversions. This is a solution where you can upload offline conversions daily/weekly and Facebook can then optimize towards these conversions.
In conclusion, every client is different and understanding measurement and attribution is key to running a successful Facebook campaign. Don’t discount Facebook straight away – it can work and if you don’t find success in the first test, then try, try and try again! We know it’s highly likely your audience is using the platform, so we just need to find the best solution to finding them and converting them.
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