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Growth Hack #1 – Search on Google for More Sales Through Linkedin:
LinkedIn allows you to search only inside your network, up to 3rd connections.
This rule can come back to bite when you are entering a new market and have a lack of connections or leads.
Here is a hack to overcome this barrier and use the platform to increase sales:
Go to Google and search any (or all) of the following:
1) site:linkedin.com/in/ AND [job title]
2) site:linkedin.com/in/ AND [company]
3) site:linkedin.com/in/ AND [skill/category]
4) site:linkedin.com/in/ AND [company] AND [job title]
5) site:linkedin.com/in/ AND VP OR SVP OR EVP OR Director OR Manager OR SalesOps
What do Facebook ad campaigns have in common with the Snuggie?
They’re both almost too good to be true!
A strong Facebook ad campaign can help you achieve results that surpass your expectations.
But, in order to be sure you’re reaching the best outcome possible, you need to pay close attention to your Facebook engagement metrics.
These Facebook KPI’s – or key performance indicators – will show you a range of data that explains just how successful each aspect of your Facebook ad campaign is.
Determining which Facebook performance metrics to use will depend on how you want to measure success.
It’s essential that you understand how and when to use this information while advertising on Facebook.
We’ve asked one of our account managers, Rocio Urena, to explain how to choose the right Facebook metrics for your next campaign.
She’s also giving us the expert insight into why these KPI’s are so important when launching your Facebook marketing campaign.
The Importance of a Facebook Pixel in Advertising
Before publishing a Facebook ad campaign, you need to install a Facebook pixel on your website.
The pixel tool keeps track of customer behavior and the actions they take on your site.
It will help you reach the right audiences, increase sales, and understand how well your ads are performing.
Facebook Standard Events
A standard event lets you track and optimize for select activities that can be performed throughout your webpage.
When used in conjunction with the Facebook pixel, you’ll be able to collect highly specific data on customer behaviors.
The platform has 9 standard eventsyou can target with your Facebook pixel to optimize campaigns:
Image source: https://www.reliablesoft.net
With the information the pixel gathers, you can see which actions your audience takes most on your site.
For example, let’s say your Facebook performance metrics indicate you’re getting a high number of add-to-carts.
You can optimize your ads for that goal by including more CTAs throughout the landing page, or by prospecting customers with similar habits.
How Facebook Breaks Down Performance Metrics & Data
Once you have enough conversions, you’ll be able to gain further insights on different areas of your campaign.
One thing Facebook Ads Manager excels at is making data easier to understand.
Ads Manager has many unique features that will help you focus in on the Facebook performance metrics that matter the most to your business.
Measuring Brand Outcomes
Brand outcomes are important to any campaign, no matter what the goal.
Let’s say you launch an ad for dog food featuring a Corgi.
It would be great if every time someone saw a corgi on the street, they thought of your product, right?
Facebook helps you measure brand outcome by focusing on how your branded campaigns are impacting and influencing users.
These tools will help you understand whether you ads were memorable, if they enticed viewers to convert, and if they successfully shifted brand perception.
To measure the brand outcomes of your Facebook marketing strategy, you should focus on the Estimated Ad Recall Lift (EARL) metric.
Image source: https://www.thomashutter.com/
Calculating Estimated Ad Recall Lift
EARL is calculated by looking at:
Relative attention: How much time people spent looking at your ads compared to other content in their news feed.
Reach: the number of people you reached with your ads.
Historical ad recall: Data from more than 300 Nielsen Brand studies that show the correlation of attention and reach to ad recall.
Estimated Ad Recall Lift will help you determine whether your Facebook ad campaign is engaging enough.
If you launch your Facebook ad campaign in the Newsfeeds of 1,000 users and only 100 remember seeing it, that’s how you know some adjustments need to be made.
You might think about incorporating bolder imagery in eye-catching colors.
Similarly, attention-grabbing copy is important.
Make efforts to emphasize the value customers will receive by clicking on your ad.
Facebook Brand Lift
Measuring brand-related KPIs such as brand awareness and ad recall of your campaigns are important.
In fact, they’re often more insightful than Facebook engagement metrics such as likes and clicks.
Rocio emphasizes the fact that,
“likes and clicks don’t really give you a clear sense of the significance of your ad. With clicks, people could click your ad by mistake. Similarly, likes don’t really convert. They just provide social proof which enables the audiences that do convert to trust your brand because of the high engagement. That’s why brand lift so useful; it dives deep to measure what matters.”
Brand polling is a tool that allows you to see how the Facebook ad campaign you’re running is resonating with your audience.
That way, you have another means of checking your campaign effectiveness.
Brand polling is useful for gathering information before your campaign launches.
Prior to it going live, people in your target audience are randomly assigned to either a test or control group.
Users in the control group will not see your ads.
Polls are then delivered throughout your campaign to both groups, any time between four and 48 hours after exposure.
Image source: https://www.facebook.com/
Facebook users can simply choose an option from a survey that appears in their newsfeed.
This gives the platform and advertisers valuable information on how successful branded efforts are.
Through Facebook brand lift, you can measure the ‘lift’ in ad recall between the two groups.
If there’s no noticeable difference in the recall between those who did see your ad and those who remained unexposed, it’s a clear sign that your ads are failing to make an impact on your audiences.
In this case, make changes!
Measuring Sales Outcomes
Facebook ads reporting allows advertisers to see how many online and offline conversions resulted from your ads.
This includes information from more than just your Facebook ad campaigns; it provides data for Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network efforts as well.
A conversion occurs when a person takes an action that is valuable to your business.
Examples range from a purchase to the installation of your mobile app or viewing of a specific page of your website.
Online Conversions:
Measure the actions people take online after they see or engage with your ads.
You’ll first need to implement the Facebook Pixel on your website and/or Facebook SDK in your mobile app.
Without installing these features, you won’t be able to see the conversion data in ads reporting.
Image source: https://support.indiegogo.com
Offline Conversions:
You can also measure the impact of your social media ad campaigns beyond the keyboard.
If you have physical retail stores, be sure to measure the number of transactions that occur within their walls.
Once your ad campaigns go live, pay attention to other offline channels – like phone and call centers.
This way, you can see how many people have seen or engaged with your ads.
Image source: https://segment.com/
Offline conversions allow you to connect your sales data – such as CRM or point of sale software – to Facebook to measure which audience and campaigns are driving sales.
Doing so will help your gain a better understanding of how offline and online customers match up, especially if you’re able to get a customers email address.
For example, you can email a customer receipt to the same account that’s linked with their Facebook.
This way, you can expose them to future ads, and determine if that influences purchasing decisions.
You can also use customer information to target them with ads based on offline purchases.
This encourages them to continue visiting your stores.
After the campaign starts delivering, you’ll need to upload your transaction data through Business Manager or integrate it directly with Facebook using theOffline Conversions API.
Image source: https://www.facebook.com/
Thanks to your data, Facebook is able to match transactions that occurred offline with their own data on who viewed your ads.
This gives you a complete picture of the customer journey and the performance of your campaign.
Over 90% of retail sales happen in brick-and-mortar stores, meaning that offline conversions still account for a major part of your overall sales.
Creating a strong omni-channel experience for shoppers means that you’ll really be able to see the impact your ads are having on customers.
The Most Popular Facebook Engagement Metrics
While there are many Facebook engagement metrics to choose from, there are some that are more used than others.
Purchases is one of those.
CPA, or Cost Per Result or Acquisition, is also popular.
This metric tells you how much it’s costing you to get the objective you’re optimize the campaign for. Rocio explains it like this: “For example, if you optimize for purchases and the CPA is $5, then you are spending $5 for every purchase.”
The total return on ad spend (ROAS) is also widely used.
This number shows you how much revenue you earn from website purchases.
ROAS is based on the value of all conversions recorded by the Facebook pixel on your website and attributed to your ads.
The metric is calculated as website purchases conversion value divided by total amount spent.
Therefore, the higher the number, the better your campaign.
For example, a 5:1 ratio means that for every $1 you spend, you’re earning $5 in return.
How to Calculate Success
Optimizing for Landing Pages
Rocio has always recommended that you build a traffic campaign that’s optimized for landing page views rather than general traffic.
“The reason behind this is that clicks can sometimes be by mistake, and this optimization option helps you increase traffic of people who will actually arrive on your website after they’ve clicked on the ad.”
You may be wondering, “What’s the difference? They both have to do with clicks, right?
But it is important to distinguish between these two, as they can show you very different results.
Landing Page Views vs Clicks
A ‘Landing Page View’ is when a person lands on your ad’s destination URL or landing page after clicking a link in your ad.
When your objective is set to “Traffic” and you optimize for ‘clicks,’ Facebook shows your ad to those people most likely to follow the ad and click off Facebook.
It’s important to have your Facebook pixel set up, as this is how Facebook tracks this data.
Image source: https://www.advertisemint.com/
Link clicks indicate that someone pressed a link in your advertisement.
This metric can be relatively unhelpful, as it doesn’t show how many users followed through and actually spent time viewing your landing page.
Choosing to focus on landing page views is helpful if you’re looking to get higher quality traffic directed to your site from ads.
That’s not the only benefit.
With landing page views, you’ll also have more insight into whether your site is taking too long to load.
This can tell you if you need to improve your overall site speed.
Metrics in Action
Here’s how Rocio optimized campaigns for different clients:
“This client’s primary focus is CPA, and their cap is $100. As soon as their CPA increases, I duplicated the campaign with an ‘initiated checkout’ objective in order to decrease it. This is a successful strategy because it is much more expensive to target customers for conversions, or lower funnel events, than it is to target those at the beginning of the client lifecycle. As you can see, ads optimized for purchases cost significantly more than those targeted towards initiating checkout. The same is true for adds-to-cart.”
Another client focuses on Purchases and ROAS.
The standard benchmark ROAS is 4:1, but this client prefers their number to be above 4.
In order to achieve this, Rocio chooses to focus on retargeting rather than prospecting new users. She explains:
“Retargeting is a strong method. You’re going after customers who are already familiar with your brand, meaning they’re much more likely to make a purchase. As you can see from the image, the retargeting ROAS is much higher than that from our prospecting efforts. It’s important to leverage retargeting so the average can be as high as the client wants it to be.”
When looking to optimize for purchases, as already stated, it’s important to have at least 50 sales a week. When this happens,
“Facebook generates similar audiences to your existing customers who are likely to be interested in your offerings. But, if you’re not reaching this target, you have to optimize for something in which you are successful, like add-to-carts. Facebook can then generate similar audiences, which should help you reach your goals and optimize for purchases.”
With some careful consideration and preparation, you’ll be ready to create your best Facebook ads ever.
By thinking about what your goals are before you create your campaign, you’ll be able to ensure that you reach success.
Growth Hack #2 – Attract Great Talent With a Human Touch:
Your growth depends on a great team, but it’s hard to compete with giants in the marketplace.
Try to include a “Who You’ll Work With” section in your job posting as a personal touch that’s rarely applied. It stands out and adds a human element in a meaningful way.
Here’s what to include:
1. Highlight the 3-4 people they’ll work closest with.
2. Place emphasis on why it’s rewarding to work with them.
3. Include at least one person in a leadership role.
Bonus:Include articles from your peers about your company culture.
Ad transparency is the name of the game for the world’s biggest social media platforms.
And Facebook is no exception.
First, they made political and “issue” ads more transparent earlier this year.
Then, the platform just announced they’d be expanding Facebook ad transparency to apply to all Pages.
This means any user can click a button on a Page to view what ads they’re running and on what platforms (e.g. Instagram, Messenger).
You can also see other Page information, like past name changes and the date it was created.
Image source: https://newsroom.fb.com/
Clearly, this is pretty momentous stuff.
Not only is this effort towards greater Facebook ad transparency major news for users, but also for advertisers.
You can now spy on competitors’ Facebook ads unlike ever before.
We’re not suggesting you steal their secrets and report their ads.
But, we are saying you can conduct a Facebook competitor analysis that takes their best practices and does them one better for your own benefit.
Yes, they can spy on your Facebook, too.
But, as long as you have a strategy in place that combines Facebook ad spying tools with your own best design practices, you’ll stay a step ahead of your competition.
We’re looking into what the new Facebook ad transparency announcement entails.
We’re also discussing how you can use this new feature to spy on competitors’ Facebook ads.
In addition, we’ll take a look at some other Facebook ad spying tools you can incorporate into your strategy.
It’s time to learn how to leverage Facebook ad transparency to beat the competition and create your best ads.
Facebook Ad Transparency: An Overview
Cambridge Analytica
You may remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal, whose lasting influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Brexit vote are still being fully analyzed.
You may also remember that it was Facebook that was used by the data-collection company to enact its nefarious plot.
The 87 million profiles that were mined for data were clearly enough of a reason for Facebook to make some changes.
The policy required Facebook advertisers to become authorized in order to run political or other “issue” ads.
The process of authorization verifies both the identity and mailing address of the advertiser.
The Second Round of Updates
Then, Facebook went a step further at the end of June, 2018.
Amidst the GDPR privacy updates and other concerns, user security and authenticity has been a priority now more than ever.
So, Facebook has expanded their ad transparency to include all Pages – not just political ads.
Under this rollout, you can view ads from a Page that are running on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and affiliated networks.
And even if a Page isn’t advertising to you directly, you can view both the above-mentioned ad information as well as any additional Page information, like date created and name changes.
The goal of it all, direct from Facebook, is as follows:
“By shining a bright light on all ads, as well as the Pages that run them, we’ll make it easier to root out abuse.”
How to Use Facebook’s New Feature as an Ad Spying Tool
So now understanding the background of ad transparency, it’s time to consider how you can use it for the benefit of your business.
First, you need to learn how to view the ads your competition is running before launching into a more comprehensive Facebook competitor analysis.
Start by visiting their Facebook Page.
Then, press the “Info and Ads” option along the sidebar (on desktop) or by the profile name/picture (on mobile).
When you think about how to spy on competitors’ Facebook ads, it doesn’t get much easier than this.
Now, you can spy on competitors’ Facebook ads right from their own Page.
Just scroll through this section to see their ads in full, both on their main Page and related ones.
3 Other Ways to Spy on Competitors’ Facebook Ads
Conducting a Facebook competitor analysis means doing more than just accessing their Page info.
As helpful as this new Facebook spying tool is, there are additional practices to keep in mind.
To make your strategy of spying on Facebook ads even more effective, consider the following three tactics.
1. See What Their Customers Love – and Hate!
You don’t need fancy software and expensive add-ons to spy on competitors’ Facebook ads.
One of the most effective (and simplest) strategies is to look at the comments on the brand’s posts to see what customers are saying.
This can range from the good to the bad to the ugly.
Just take Target’s Facebook page, for example.
It looks like one customer, Tevis, is an unhappy customer due to Target’s gift card activation delay:
“Wal-Mart is right down the street and Amazon is a click away. DONE with my Target Runs!!!!!”
If Target is one of your competitors’, take note and offer your gift cards as immediately usable.
Also notice how the brand responds.
First of all, they make the effort to respond to all customer concerns.
Then, they provide a reason or course of action the customer can take to solve the problem.
Whether it’s a positive or negative review, using these as Facebook spying tools is a simple yet efficient solution.
2. Conduct Competitor Keyword Research
Knowing what keywords your competitors are going after can help you outrank them.
By creating Facebook ads and content that you know your audience is searching for, you can better reach and engage them.
Growth Hack #2 – Don’t Be Afraid to Post on Weekends:
Ever wonder why this weekly newsletter goes out on Sunday? No competition.
You’re not busy on Sunday at 4pm, so you can open this email and enjoy.
Apparently, the same is true for Facebook.
Quicksprout analyzed8 BILLION (with a B) Facebook posts and found that the weekend is your best bet (Along with posting between 9pm and 11pm local time) for optimal engagement.
Growth Hack #3 – A 1-Minute Hack to Increase Your Email Open Rate:
Do you send mass marketing emails? We do! And here’s a trick that works for us:
1. Take the SAME email you sent and CHANGE the subject line to something new.
2. Email it out a week later JUST TO YOUR NON-OPENS.
3. Get 30%+ more opens –> Profit!
So now that the connection has been drawn between the value of Instagram and mobile video, how can you get your business ready for IGTV?
Launching Your IGTV Strategy
The Basics
Before getting started with Instagram TV, it’s important to understand the essentials of the platform.
First, who can create content?
The answer is: anyone!
Similar to YouTube, access to IGTV is free for everyone.
Those that upload content are termed “creators”, and they are also the channels.
Where can you access Instagram TV?
Currently, it’s accessible only in the app through an icon in the upper-right corner of the display.
Soon, though, Instagram will be launching a standalone IGTV app through the App Store and Google Play.
Finally, what’s the format?
All IGTV videos are vertical, unlike the landscape formats of YouTube and Facebook.
Most importantly, videos on this platform can be up to one hour long.
How to Get on the Platform Now
Even though you can’t officially run video ads on Instagram TV, you can still launch your brand on the platform.
IGTV represents an excellent opportunity for telling a more in-depth brand story.
Doing so lets you showcase more sides of your brand and engage with audiences on a deeper level.
Considering that 73% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase after watching a video, Instagram TV can be your most valuable tool.
The long-form video is also great for creating a more cohesive brand identity.
A strong brand voice has been shown to boost revenue by 23% and increase brand recognition by 3-4X.
All you need to do to get started is sign into the IGTV section of the app.
Then, click on the Settings icon and press “Create Channel”.
Go to your channel and click the “+” icon on the right-hand side.
Select a video from your Camera roll, then click ‘Next”.
Add a title and description (remember: keywords matter here!).
Add a cover photo, then post!
You can then track the performance of your IGTV video by pressing the “…” icon besides the engagement buttons on your video.
Here, you can “View Insights” like view count, comments, and audience retention.
Optimize Your Instagram TV Channel
There are a few best practices we already know to be true for IGTV.
One of them is the obvious: vertical videos only!
A 9:16 ratio is your best bet.
Another good idea is to keep a schedule for posting.
Similar to the regular Instagram app, the algorithm for the IGTV recommendation engine is thought to include how regular is the posting frequency.
Regarding the best length of a video, don’t fall into the trap of constantly posting hour-long videos.
Though an occasional long-format video is a good thing for brand awareness, your audience is still unlikely to have the willpower and attention span to watch the whole thing.
Finally, keep all content cohesively on-brand so that your Instagram TV presence complements the rest of your social media marketing strategy.
Like any other platform, IGTV does best when it works in tangent with the rest of your advertising campaign.
Instagram TV Ads are Coming
When advertising on Instagram TV is finally made available, make sure you’re ready.
Launching your IGTV channel now is an excellent place to start.
By the time video ads are unveiled on the platform, you’ll know what your audience likes to watch on your channel, the average retention rate, and how many people are already engaged.
