Summary: In the “old days” of Facebook marketing, many of us marketers took a similar approach to our ad account structure as we had previously done in our paid search accounts; that is to say, we broke down our campaigns and ad sets to as granular a status we could manage, in order to better manage performance across different audiences. However, over the last couple of years it has become clear that Facebook’s ad algorithms perform best for advertisers when ad accounts are simplified and audiences are broad, rather than hyper-targeted. The sooner Facebook advertisers test this for themselves, the better their results could be.

The “Old Days” Of Facebook Ad Account Structure

Back when I first started out in Facebook ads, I was the king of going too granular with my ads. My usual approach was to break down (multiple) campaigns per activity by at least location, age & gender. A typical campaign might have looked like this in my ad accounts, at that time:

As you can see, it starts getting a bit unwieldly quite quickly… and that’s only the ad sets for a single gender for 2 states, when you have a nationwide or international campaign (and start adding in a “Male” focussed campaign, “interest-based” campaigns, “life-stage campaigns” and so on) you can imagine just how complicated your ad account could become.

Still, the fact was a lot of us structured our campaigns this way. I think, in the early days, a lot of us marketers were so in love with the fact that Facebook knew… well, pretty much everything about its users… we couldn’t imagine structuring our campaigns any other way. Of course we wanted to break it down to the nth degree… because where else could a platform provide us that kind of data?

The problem was also, in a lot of ways, our egos.

Honest reflection time: I think (apart from our paid search backgrounds) it took most advertisers a while to figure out that this might not be the best way to go because of our egos (and sales tactics). Because there was so much data to be used on the Facebook ads platform, it became both a sales tactic (“look how complicated this is to do… we’ll do it for you!”) and an ego thing (“look how smart we are that we can target females in [city] who have recently become engaged and have a birthday coming up in the next 7 days who have just moved out of home!”)

Because we’d trotted those lines publicly, it became hard to admit that… well, eventually, Facebook knew better than us… and that our carefully constructed, complicated ad set targeting may not perform as well as a Facebook algo that can take broad targeting and optimise towards conversions in real time better than our expected audience segmentation.

How my accounts look these days

Campaign-level

Firstly, it’s worth a reminder here that your objectives are set at a campaign level. So, it goes without saying that I structure my campaigns and number of campaigns depending on the marketing funnel and objectives per stage of the funnel. As the below shows, campaigns should be driven by objectives, rather than audiences or creatives.

So, for example, whereas in the early days of Facebook ads I might have gone overly granular on a campaign basis (for example, having separate campaigns for males and females), these days this is most definitely not the case. One campaign per objective. That’s it. The purpose of campaigns is to organise your objectives, so my suggestion is to avoid  overcomplicating this stage; really think about your marketing goals and your objectives. Be clear about what the ultimate goals are, and organise your campaigns accordingly.

Ad-set level

Here’s where things really simplify down. Although in the past I might have had upwards of 40 ad sets in a campaign, these days I try to keep them to 3 or 4 at the most. Now, obviously the set up will change depending on the campaign, the product, and available audiences; I’m not attempting to give you an example here that would apply to every campaign. But, generally speaking, my 3 ad sets might look something like the below:

Now again, please don’t assume I’m saying the above is the same ad set structure that can be applied across all campaigns; what I’m attempting to show is just how much more “broad” the ad sets are. Essentially, what we’re breaking it down by in the above is by creative based on user-journey progression; rather than by demographics, location, interests and the like.

While this would no doubt grate many of the paid search specialists out there, going broad like this and trusting in the Facebook algorithms to auto-optimise towards the best performing segments within those broader target groups has been working better than an ultra-granular approach now for at least 15-18 months. The broad approach allows Facebook to use its audience data at scale, to gather enough data points

Ultimately, that’s why helped me learn to stop worrying and trust Facebook’s ad simplification process; the results. And the results have been consistent for some time now.

Facebook’s Advice? Simplify Your Accounts

Quite apart from our own experience, Facebook are now strongly advocating for advertisers to follow a simplified account structure. At a recent invite-only event down in Sydney, Facebook unveiled what they are calling the “Power 5”.

The full list of Facebook’s “Power 5” is:

• Account simplification
• Campaign budget optimisation
• Automatic placements
• Dynamic ads
• Auto advanced matching

While account simplification is only one of the five “Power” points, it is an incredibly important one.

How about you? How granular are you going with your Facebook ad campaigns these days? Have you tried a “broad” targeting approach yet? Let us know in the comments!

The post How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Facebook Ad Account Simplification appeared first on Conversation Media.

Summary: Facebook recently made a major shift to its News Feed, allowing users transparency into why they are seeing particular posts in their organic newsfeed, along with minor updates to transparency around their ad targeting. In addition, and importantly, Facebook are positioning this change as a means for users to “influence” their own News Feed, and what shows up… so marketers need to pay attention to this.

Why Am I Seeing This Post? Facebook Makes a Major Change to its News Feed

Thanks to Facebook’s desire to appear more transparent, Facebook users now have an additional tool in the platform to understand how content is prioritised in their News Feed. For more on the release, take a look at the below video:

As Facebook state in the video, “The ranking of most News Feed posts is impacted by three signals: who you interact with, the media type, and popularity. While these are known signals, the ability to now see how this impacts your News Feed on a per-post basis now allows marketers to do some serious testing into how they might optimise their own posts for News Feed performance.

From the official post:

Helping You Understand and Control the Posts You See
The goal of News Feed is to show people the posts that are most relevant to them. “Why am I seeing this post?”, which can be found in the drop down menu in the right hand corner of a post, explains how your past interactions impact the ranking of posts in your News Feed. Specifically, you’ll be able to see:

• Why you’re seeing a certain post in your News Feed — for example, if the post is from a friend you made, a Group you joined, or a Page you followed.
• What information generally has the largest influence over the order of posts, including: (a) how often you interact with posts from people, Pages or Groups; (b) how often you interact with a specific type of post, for example, videos, photos or links; and (c) the popularity of the posts shared by the people, Pages and Groups you follow.
• Shortcuts to controls, such as See First, Unfollow, News Feed Preferences and Privacy Shortcuts, to help you personalize your News Feed.

During our research on “Why am I seeing this post?”, people told us that transparency into News Feed algorithms wasn’t enough without corresponding controls. People wanted to be able to take action, so we’ve made it easy to manage what you see in News Feed right from this feature.

Updates to “Why Am I Seeing This Ad?”

In addition to the updates on organic News Feed prioritisation, Facebook have also made an update to the “Why am I seeing this ad?” functionality:

We’re also making updates to “Why am I seeing this ad?”. Since we launched this feature more than four years ago, you’ve been able to see how factors like basic demographic details, interests and website visits contribute to the ads in your News Feed. Now we’ll include additional details about the ads you see when information on an advertiser’s list matches your Facebook profile.

Businesses can reach their customers by uploading information they already have, such as emails or phone numbers. We then try to match the ad to the most relevant audience without revealing any identifiable information back to the business. “Why am I seeing this ad?” will now provide details such as when the advertiser uploaded the information or if the advertiser worked with another marketing partner to run the ad.

Tips for Marketers

• As part of Facebook’s drive to provide better transparency for  users, they’re giving away more insights for ‘users’ – that us marketers can use
• You can understand why you’re setting certain posts in your organic feed (by virtue of you liking pages, being friends with people, liking their posts etc) to influence your own News Feed better and better position organic content in groups and pages
• Use the additional data to dissect ads from competitors or accounts you want to understand better, by seeing how they targeted you.
• This is on top of Facebook allowing you to search for ads using their library tool and viewing all running ads at a Page level
• Start your own collection of “Swipe Files”. I’ll personally be using this in a dedicated Slack channel that I can share with team members, that we can use for inspiration.

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Summary: Every month on the Conversation Media blog, we like to take a look at current ads we’re seeing in a particular vertical. We pull these into a post, so that you can see what others are doing (rightly or wrongly), and hopefully take some inspiration for your own Facebook ads. This month we’re looking at the Real Estate vertical.

Real Estate Advertising on Facebook

Facebook is a fantastic channel for real estate advertising. From its granular targeting options (location, demographics, interests, life-stage etc) to the fact that it is an inherently visual platform, it lends itself particularly well to lead-generation for realtors. With that said… it’s easier said than done.

To help out with that, here’s a selection of interesting local real estate ads we’ve come across on Facebook recently, to help inspire you take your listings and turn them into compelling ads. Some of them are ideas of what to copy, others are ideas of things to be wary of.

Example #1 – Alex Phillis Luxury Real Estate – Video + Emoji + Messenger Lead Capture

In this example, Alex Phillis are employing a few methods that realtors could consider:

• They employed emojis to break up walls of text
• Employed obvious benefits with the “This could be your next cash cow” line
• The video is an enticing, short piece that features aerials of the area, as well as a piece to camera from the agency describing the property
• The call-to-action sends you to a Facebook messenger chatbot, which is a great lead capture channel. What some people may not be aware of is that, as soon as the user replies to the chatbot (so, for example, clicking the “How much is the property?” button, or any other interaction) that then allows the advertiser to see any of your Facebook profile information that you’ve made public, such as email addresses, age, location etc.

Example #2 – LJ Hooker Burleigh/Mudgeeraba/Robina – Be careful of repetition

Now, I’m as much a fan of finding a template that works as the next person, but this one is an example of being careful of repetition.

Now, without seeing the results of these ads, I obviously can’t speak to their effectiveness. With that said, things to bear in mind for them would be:

• Facebook is already a feed overflowing with posts. Whether that’s from your friends or family (or brands), we all compete for the same amount of attention. Attention is not in infinite supply, so we – as Facebook users – can only give so much attention. So the danger with using the exact same format in each of these ads is that the user will very quickly develop “banner blindness” to these. With nothing differentiating them, a user will very quickly stop paying attention to any of them, wasting this ad spend.
• Slightly mixed messaging may confuse some of their target audience. The first line is around a home currently listed in their area, but it’s being used as a hook to pull in a seller to list with the agent. The trouble is, not only might the first line not speak to a prospective seller, but it’s also solely about the agent… not about the target customer. Again, I can’t speak to the effectiveness of the ad, but making the ad about the customer could yield higher response rates.

Example #3 – Stuart Legg Re/Max 4213 – Keep filling up your upper funnel

Stuart Legg is, in my opinion, one of the smartest realtors using social media on the Gold Coast. In the below, he’s utilising classic upper funnel marketing, with a video providing a quarterly report for buyers and sellers:

A couple of things to note here:

• With the use of video, Stuart’s employing classic “upper funnel” marketing. The video provides valuable information and insights to prospective buyers and sellers (his target market). Not only does this associate his “brand” with value, but it also allows Stuart to create “custom audiences” of users who have viewed his ad (and also qualify them on engagement… eg. people who have viewed 50% of the video may be more qualified than those who only watched 10%). He can then remarket to these viewers at a later stage with more “direct response” messaging.
• Stuart uses video heavily… I’d encourage you to check out his videos to see more about how simple these can be, but how effective they can be too.
• Stuart is also using a “Send Message” CTA, sending people through to messenger to continue conversations.

Example #4 – NGU Real Estate Gold Coast – Carousels

Real estate advertising seems to be full of video ads (and rightly so, as video performs well) but it seems like most real estate agencies have completely forgotten about other ad formats. One that’s still highly worth trialing is the carousel format, like NGU have done below:

• Property details are included upfront in the ad copy, also incorporating emojis
• Although you can’t tell from the image above, the carousel includes a total of 11 images, each a compelling image selling unique features of the property. They also include a floor plan as the final image in the carousel.

Free tips for Real Estate Agents Using Facebook Ads

• A few thoughts as to how realtors might be able to use Facebook & Facebook Ads to promote their listings:
• Consider using Facebook Lives for a walk-through of the property. Facebook lives lend authenticity and immediacy to the listing.
• Consider setting up events for your open homes. When people have a lot of different showings to attend, an event ad makes it easy for people to sign up for yours right away.
• Similar to the point about carousels above, consider testing out the Collection format for your ads, which allows people to see 4 photos at a glance, highlighting more of the property.

The post Real Estate Facebook Ad Ideas appeared first on Conversation Media.

Summary: Facebook announced today that they’ll be making several changes to the way they report on “Relevance Score” in their ads manager. These changes are a great thing for advertisers, allowing you to closely diagnose opportunities to improve your ads.

First, what is Facebook’s Relevance Score?

Just like Google Ads has their Quality Score metric, Facebook has their own “Relevance Score” metric. The relevance score metric aggregates various ad quality and relevance factors to give you an idea of how relevant your ads are to the people in your target audience compared to other ads targeting that same audience.

It’s important to note that relevance score is an output, not an input. In other words, Facebook aggregates the factors and converts them into the 1-10 scale in order to give you a general idea of your ad’s relative relevance. However, when your ad enters an auction, the 1-10 number is not part of the “total value” calculation that determines which ad gets shown. Because of this (and the fact that the number is relative), Facebook doesn’t recommend focusing too much on raising your relevance score. They do, however, recommend using it to get a sense of your ad’s relevance, and then focusing on improving your targeting and creative.

Let’s talk about improving your Facebook Ads

Before we get into the actual changes, I wanted to take a second to talk about some of the way we think about improving Facebook ads. For a while now, we’ve been preaching the importance of making sure your ads, audiences and landing page experience work together to improve your ad performance. Too often, marketers focus on just one of those aspects, expecting that one aspect will secure their ad campaign’s performance. But when your ad creative, your targeted audience, and your landing page experience/conversion rates all work together, that’s when the magic happens with Facebook ads.

Ok, so what’s new with Facebook’s Relevance Score?

In a nutshell, Facebook are now breaking down their relevance score reporting (previously a single figure) into more granular parts, specifically reporting on 3 metrics. In their own words:

The diagnostics are:

• Quality Ranking: How your ad’s perceived quality compared to ads competing for the same audience.
• Engagement Rate Ranking: How your ad’s expected engagement rate compared to ads competing for the same audience.
• Conversion Rate Ranking: How your ad’s expected conversion rate compared to ads with the same optimization goal competing for the same audience.

Ad relevance diagnostics are default columns in the Performance column preset but must be added manually to custom column presets. To ensure ad relevance diagnostics are accurate, ad relevance diagnostics aren’t available for ads with fewer than 500 impressions.

These metrics will help you diagnose underperforming ads across the 3 dimensions of relevance: quality, engagement and conversion. Reviewing the diagnostics together gives you more insights than reviewing each diagnostic individually.

Looking at each of those in more detail:

Quality ranking explains how your ad’s perceived quality compared to ads competing for the same audience. Facebook will measure ad quality through feedback from people viewing or hiding the ad and assessments of clickbait, engagement bait and other poor user experiences.

Engagement rate ranking explains how your ad’s expected engagement rate compared to ads competing for the same audience. The expected engagement rate calculates the likelihood that a person will click, react to, comment on, share or expand an ad. Engagement-baiting (for example, asking for likes, comments, and so on) will not improve your ad’s performance.

Finally, conversion rate ranking explains how your ad’s expected conversion rate compared to ads with the same optimization goal competing for the same audience. The expected conversion rate calculates the likelihood that a person who viewed your ad will complete your optimization goal. For example, the optimization goal for a campaign with the Video views optimization goal would be 10-second video views.

Why you should care

This is a great step forward for Facebook and its guidance for Facebook marketers. The new, granular approach to reporting on relevance should offer advertisers more nuanced insights into predicted performance and where to focus optimisation efforts.

Again though, remember… relevance score is an output, not an input. Don’t look to improve these metrics simply for having the highest score possible; but looking at these metrics to get more of the results you care about or to lower the cost of those results is definitely where it’s at!

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Post Summary

In this post, we’ll learn:

• Why understanding your customers’ interests is important
• How online video advertising can help segment your audiences
• How to implement this activity on both Facebook and Google

Why understanding your customers’ interests is important

Knowing what your audience is interested in is one of the prerequisites for providing relevant, targeted communications. While targeting everyone in the world (or “blanketing”) can still have its uses, the assumption that absolutely everyone will be interested in buying your product is a time-consuming, inefficient and expensive strategy.

Amongst other things, profiling & segmenting your audiences can help your business:

• Improve marketing efficiency – Breaking down a large audience makes it easier to identify your target audience and launch campaigns to the most relevant people, using the most relevant channel.
• Improve your messaging – Once you have identified the interests of your audience, you’ll be able to tailor your communications to them and provide more relevant messaging.

A quick aside on Online Video Advertising

Personally, I find online video advertising gets a fairly bad rap among smaller to medium-size businesses. Most seem to assume that it is the strictly for larger enterprises who invest heavily in brand advertising. But apart from brand-awareness activity – which of course the medium is innately suited for – I find online video advertising has a very useful (but less well-known) purpose: audience profiling.

First off, let’s get one thing straight: online video ads do not have to be expensive. No matter how much people tell you they are the purview of large brands, online video (OLV) can definitely be run at low costs. As a standard, these days I am achieving anywhere between a $0.02-$0.03 cost per view (CPV) across most of my activity now for completed views of 15 second videos. At that cost per view, it’s an incredibly quick and easy way to scale up to large audiences.

How online video advertising can help segment your audiences

So we know that OLV can help us reach large audiences very quickly. And, when done right, we know it can be done cost-effectively too. But how, exactly, does it help us profile audiences?

Quite simply, you observe their reaction to your video content, infer their receptiveness to your messaging, and create audience lists based on their observed behaviour.

Let’s take a look at a very basic example to make this slightly more tangible:

Let’s say you run a sporting goods store, specialising in ski and snowboard gear. You know that video platforms are cluttered, so you want to deliver something that offers entertainment and utility. So you create a short series of 30-second video vignettes, with “how to” tips for beginners on  starting snowboarding. Importantly, the video isn’t about your product, but of course your product becomes a natural part of the narrative.

The theory behind the practice

You create a video views campaign through Facebook or Youtube. The video piece you are using is 30 seconds. Our hypothesis, for this scenario, is that a user who watches at least 50% of the video (or 15 seconds) is a more engaged user than someone who keeps scrolling past it, or who only watches a couple of seconds before losing interest. We want to target our marketing to these more engaged users, as they’ve shown some form of affinity for our product by their interest in our video. We’re assuming, in this scenario, that these more engaged users will have a higher propensity to convert for us.

The second way this can be used is if you offer a wide range of products or services. For example, in the sporting goods example above, they may offer both skiing and hiking gear. So they create two videos: one focussed on skiing, the other on hiking. They then promote the videos to their intended geographic market, and observe how people engage with the videos. Those who engage with the skiing video go into a “Ski” bucket, and are remarketed to with skiing-specific ads. Those who engage with the hiking video, go into a “Hike” bucket, and likewise are remarketed to with hiking-specific ads. See how this practice can help you create audiences of people specifically interested in your product or service, and then even further segment them down into more granular interests?

How can this be used to create audience lists on Facebook?

Here’s a step-by-step instruction on creating this custom audience of engaged users for Facebook.

1. Go to your Audiences.
2. Click the Create Audience dropdown menu and select Custom Audience.Note: If you’ve never created an audience, you’ll see a Create a Custom Audiences button, not a dropdown menu. Click this button to create the audience.
3. Click Engagement.
4. Click Video.
5. In the Engagement field, choose the type of content you want to use to create your audience. For example, “People who viewed at least 15 seconds of your video”.
6. Click Choose videos.
7. In the window that appears, open the dropdown menu and select Campaign, Page or Instagram business profile.
   • Campaign: Use the search bar to find a campaign (active or inactive). Then, check the boxes next to the video(s) you want to use.
   • Page: Select a Facebook Page and check the boxes next to the video(s) you want to use.
   • Instagram business profile: Select an Instagram business profile and check the boxes next to the video(s) you want to use. You can choose multiple videos from multiple business profiles for one audience.
8. Click Confirm.
9. In the In The Past field, enter the number of days people will remain in your audience after they engage with your video(s). People are removed from your audience after the set time period unless they engage with the video(s) again.For example, if you tell Facebook to go back 30 days and a person engaged 29 days ago, they’ll be in your audience. However, if they fail to engage the next day, they’ll be removed from the audience. Anyone new who engages within the time period you choose will be added to the audience. This means that the audience is constantly being refreshed, so you don’t need to edit or create a new Engagement Custom Audience unless you want to change the time period or the type of engagement.
10. Add an audience name and description (optional).
11. Click Save.

When you finish, Facebook will start building your Engagement Custom Audience and notify you when it’s ready. You can then use the audience when creating an ad.

How can this be used to create audience lists on Google?

Before you can use remarketing for video campaigns on Google, you need to link your YouTube account to your Google Ads account. You can do this from either the YouTube channel or from within your Google Ads account. Click here to find out more about linking YouTube and Google Ads accounts.

Once you link accounts, you can create remarketing lists that reach people who have done the following YouTube-related actions:

• Viewed any video from a channel
• Viewed certain videos
• Viewed any video (as an ad) from a channel
• Viewed certain videos (as ads)
• Subscribed to a channel
• Visited a channel page
• Liked any video from a channel
• Added any video from a channel to a playlist
• Commented on any video from a channel
• Shared any video from a channel

You can then use these lists in your targeting settings for new or existing campaigns.

Once you’ve done that, here’s a step-by-step instruction on creating custom audiences of engaged users for Google.

1. Access your Google ads account.
2. Click the tools icon  in the top right corner of your screen.
3. Under the section labeled “Shared library”, click Audience manager.
4. From the page menu on the left, click Audiences lists.
5. Select YouTube users.
6. Create an Audience name.
7. Choose your List members from the dropdown.
8. Select the YouTube channel.
9. Select the initial list size and membership duration.
10. Click Create.

Once your remarketing list has gained interactions from at least 100 viewers, you can use it for your ads and campaigns. Select the remarketing list you want to use while creating a new campaign or as a target for an existing video campaign.

How to add a remarketing list to an existing ad group/or video campaign

1. Select Audiences.
2. Click the pencil icon .
3. Select Campaign or Ad group from the dropdown menu.
4. Click Select a campaign.
5. Select the ad group or campaign you want to add a remarketing list to.
6. Choose Targeting or Observation.
7. Select the Audience you want to target and check the specific boxes related to the chosen Audience.
8. Click Save.

Recap

In this post we’ve learned about why you should segment your audience base, and how to use video audience lists to do this, for the purposes of reaching the most qualified audiences with the most relevant messaging.

But this is just the start of what can be done. For example, the above method can be used to create sequential marketing campaigns. Let’s say your path to purchase for your product is a long one, and you know users need to be exposed to multiple marketing messages before they convert. Using the above method, you could “shape” the story, to ensure that once a user has been exposed to your first video, they then see your second video in the series… and the third, and so on. Using this method ensures the customer sees your message in the order you want them to see it.

But that’s a post for another time…

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Here’s a super quick, actionable tip for ecommerce owners out there: did you know that earlier this year, Facebook released its Video Creation Kit? Did you also know that they’re now offering Christmas specific templates that are pretty much perfect for driving Christmas purchase behaviour?

About the Video Creation Kit

The Video Creation Kit is yet another example of Facebook looking to make it as easy as possible for advertisers. In Facebook’s own words:

With the Video Creation Kit, you can create mobile-first video ads that use your existing photo assets, text overlays and logos. The Video Creation Kit offers templates that you can customize in Ads Manager or from a Facebook Page, and then use in your ads that run on Facebook or Instagram. Each template aligns to a different goal, whether you’re promoting a new product or telling a brand story.

About the Templates

The tool offers the ability to create both square and vertical videos, and also provides a number of templates. Here’s a summary of the generic templates available:

Promote a Product (6-sec duration)

Focus on one product to generate interest and sales. This template works best with:

• 2 to 5 images
• A brand logo and tagline
• A product image with a text overlay
• A message with a call-to-action

Drive Product Discovery (15-sec duration)

Inspire people to explore and shop by showing what makes your products unique. This template works best with:

• 1 to 6 images
• A brand logo and tagline
• 4 images with 4 text overlays
• A message with a call-to-action

Sell Multiple Products (6-sec duration)

Show a selection of products to promote a special offer or drive sales. This template works best with:

• 4 to 7 images
• A brand logo and tagline
• 4 product images with 4 text overlays
• A message with a call-to-action

Show Product Benefits (15-sec duration)

Highlight key features, show different uses or explain how it works. This template works best with:

• 5 to 10 images
• A brand logo and tagline
• 4 product images with 3 text overlays
• A message with a call-to-action

Special “Christmas-time” Templates

As you can see from the below screenshot, when creating video ads you’ll now have the option to select their “Holiday” templates:

It’s as simple as choosing the template you want to use, swapping out the images you’re after, changing the test to specifically talk to your product, and then finally choose the effects (frames, stickers etc) that you want to use.

The end result is simple, but effective. Here’s an example of what the end product would look like:

Hopefully you can see how this kind of simple video creation can be used to raise awareness of your product, without the usual production budget requirements.

Where to find the Video Creation Kit

Steps for locating the Video Creation Kit in Ads Manager

1. 1. Go to Ads Manager.
   2. Click +Create.
   3. Choose an objective that supports video and then click Continue.
   4. Choose your targeting, placements and budget and then click Continue.
   5. In the Formats section, click Single Video or Slideshow.

1. 1. In the Video section, click Use Templates. This opens the Video Creation Kit.

Steps for locating the Video Creation Kit on a Facebook Page

1. Go to a Facebook Page you manage.
2. Click Publishing Tools.
3. Click Video Library.
4. Click Use Video Templates. This opens the Video Creation Kit.

Conclusion

Video is an important part of any marketer’s Facebook arsenal… and Facebook continue to make video creation easier and easier for all operators. Will you be employing video in your marketing this Christmas season?

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Most Facebook marketers are well aware of the dangers of audience fatigue when it comes to your ads. A campaign that can be running extremely well for a couple of weeks suddenly just… stop performing. Quite often (and especially when you have larger budgets targeting smaller audiences), it’s simply a case that your targeted audience has simply been exposed to the same ad creative too many times, and have stopped responding to it… or, worse, they start actively “hiding” your ad in their feeds, leading to poor relevancy and feedback scores, increasing your costs.

Likewise, most Facebook marketers are aware of the “Frequency” metric available in Facebook reporting, and keep an eye on this metric to get a very high-level overview of how often people in their chosen audience are seeing their ad on average.

However, what I find most marketers aren’t aware of, is that they can get far more granular insights into potential audience fatigue by using Facebook’s “Delivery Insights” tool.

Keen to find out more? Read on…

Where to find Facebook Delivery Insights

The first thing to note is that Delivery Insights are only available with your Ads Manager at an ad-set level, so don’t bother looking for it at the upper campaign level. Once at an ad set level, you’ll note that your active ad sets either show an “Active” or “Active (Learning)” status under the “Delivery” column.

If your ad set is still in the “Learning” phase, you won’t be able to access your delivery insights yet, as the ad is still gathering data to optimise from. If, however, your ad is out of the learning phase, you should see something similar to the below when you hover over the “Active” in the delivery column:

Obviously from here, you want to click on the “See Delivery Insights” link to… well, see the delivery insights!

What Delivery Insights Can Tell You About Audience Fatigue

Once you’re inside the Delivery Insights tool, you’ll see the below four tabs for Audience Saturation, Activity History, Auction Overlap and Auction Competition.

Almost all of these deserve their own posts, but for today we’ll just focus on the “Audience Saturation” tab.

A reminder: what we’re looking for here is an understanding of how fatigued (or tired of seeing our ads) our audience is becoming. The Audience Saturation tab gives us the exact metrics we need to start getting a more granular idea around that fatigue.

Here’s an example of the daily table you can find on this page:

In particular, 2 columns we want to look at are the “First Time Impression Ratio” and “Audience Reached Ratio”.

First Time Impression Ratio

Put simply, this ratio tells you what percentage of people are seeing your ad creative for the first time.

It’s simplest to think of it this way: when you first launch your ad, it will start off with a number of 100%, ie. 100% of people are seeing your ad for the first time. As people see your ad more and more, that number will decline. Now, there’s no hard and fast rule as to when you want to have a cut-off point (after all, you don’t want to focus on individual metrics over actual sales!), but as the Facebook tip itself says above, “If your first time impression ratio is dropping significantly along with your ad set’s performance, this may mean it’s time to broaden your audience or find a new one”… or, alternatively, simply refresh your ad creative.

Audience Reached Ratio

This metric will tell you how much of your potential audience you’ve reached.

Again, taking our example above: if you’ve just launched a new ad, the “Audience Reached” ratio will start at 0%, and climb upwards as more people see your ad (so the reverse of the “First Impression Ratio”). As this number begins to climb, this means more and more of your audience has been reached, and fewer people are seeing your ad for the first time. Again, if performance of your ad set drops as the “Audience Reached” ratio climbs, it might be worth considering broadening your targeted audience.

Once You’ve Identified Audience Fatigue, What Are Your Options?

Essentially, the two options you have are fairly obvious:

1. Change your ad creative to show new ads to the existing audience
2. Extend your audience/target new audiences

These don’t need to be as difficult as they may originally sound. For new creative, changes as simple as new images or new headline combinations can lead to a completely new experience for the user. And in terms of audiences, using existing audiences that have performed well for you to that point as a source audience for more lookalikes can be a simple and effective course of action to take.

If you’ve been experiencing issues with a previously-well-performing ad set, and then make these changes and see better ad set performance along with a higher First Time Impression Ratio, it’s likely you’ve identified the problem. Keep on monitoring the above metrics to make sure your audiences (or, alternatively, your ad creative) are fresh.

Have you had any issues with audience fatigue in your Facebook ads? Let us know in the comments below!

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The post Diagnosing Audience Fatigue With Facebook’s Delivery Insights appeared first on Conversation Media.

Welcome to a new series on this blog, “Small Business Marketing Tips“. This series is very specifically aimed towards small businesses just starting out on their digital marketing journey, and aims to provide practical advice and actionable insights.

Points we’ll be discussing in this blog post:

• Why your marketing shouldn’t necessarily always push for an immediate sale
• The different stages of customer intent
• Matching up your marketing creative with the 3 stages of intent

Why your marketing shouldn’t necessarily always push for an immediate sale

In a real world setting, people seem to understand this without question. When you walk into a store, or into a car sales lot, or when you’re inspecting a house for sale… most people have an immediate aversion to the pushy salesman, right? We all know the sort, who immediately begins pushing their sales line on you. For the small percentage of people who have made up their mind about the purchase already, this goes well… but for the majority of folks who are still exploring their options, it tends to backfire and pushes the potential sale further away.

We see this every day in the “real world”.

However, when it comes to the “online marketing space”, it seems like we all seem to forget what it’s like to be harrassed by that pushy salesman, and we do it ourselves to our online users.

Maybe it’s because it’s easier to be pushy when not face to face. Maybe it’s because we’re impatient. Regardless, we need to remind ourselves of that experience we had with the real estate agent who called 20 times on Sunday to see if we’d had any thoughts about the property we just viewed 24 hours ago, and the owners already do have another 5 offers on the table (honestly, but 3 have conditions attached), so if we’re looking we really do need to make a commitment right here and now on the call, and the agent can come around in the morning to sign, because… ahem. Sorry. Bad flashbacks there.

What I’m getting at is, if we remember those experiences, we have to understand the same thing happens online. And we need to understand that people may not necessarily be in a position where they are receptive to a “sales” message up front. At least… not yet. Because they may be at a different stage of the intent funnel.

The different stages of customer intent

First off, most would be aware that there are a ton of frameworks that talk about the “customer funnel”; these generally talk about moving customers from awareness to consideration to purchasing. Personally, I’m a fan of Avinash Kaushik’s “See, Think, Do” framework.

Essentially, the framework allows us to understand how our marketing messages should adapt to a user’s intent.

Let’s use a hypothetical scenario to demonstrate Avinash’s point here:

After pulling on a pair of jeans, Ethan realises that he’s vaguely dissatisfied with the only pair he owns. He couldn’t tell you what it is, but something just doesn’t sit well with him. He doesn’t know what exactly he’s looking for yet, but he knows he’s not all that happy with what he has currently.

A few days later, Ethan’s reading an online fashion blog, and comes across a page that has two ads on it. Both ads are promoting stores that sell jeans. One ad has a big “Buy Jeans Now” button on it, while the other ad has a “Find Your Perfect Pair of Jeans” button on it.

Because Ethan is only thinking about buying some jeans, he doesn’t respond to the “Buy Jeans Now” ad, because he actually doesn’t know what he wants yet. But the ad that offers messaging around “Find Your Perfect Pair” does resonate with him, as it’s promising to help him explore different kinds of jeans, therefore easing him into the buying process.

The point here, obviously, is that – like Ethan – not every customer is ready to buy at this exact point in time. So we have to be cognisant of that fact when creating our digital ads, and ensure we’re catering to those different customer groups.

And here’s where the framework of “See / Think / Do” comes in handy.

The “See” group is the biggest and broadest audience. These people might be similar to your existing customers, but they may not have come in contact with your brand before, and may not be in the market to buy your product right now.

With this group, you want to grab their attention. You want to focus on introducing new audiences to your brand, and helping them get to know you.

To do this, you’ll want to make sure your advertising creative is focussed on branding and awareness. This doesn’t mean that you’re showing your ads to all and sundry, though. Make sure that you’re qualifying this initial audience by looking at websites that they visit, content they engage with and the searches they’re making.

Make sure that the content on your website contains links to your email newsletter, or social profiles. This enables you to potentially continue the conversation with these people at a later date.

With this audience, you’d want to make sure you’re keeping an eye on metrics like ad views, ad interactions, social media activity and website visitation.

The “Think” group includes people who are at least thinking about buying a product like yours, but aren’t quite ready yet. With this group, you want to communicate the value and benefit of your particular brand, and your ad creative should reflect that. Here’s also where you want to actively encourage people to sign up to your newsletter and social channels, because this is your chance for longer-term engagement. Encourage people to sign up to get notified when you next have a sale on the product they’re interested in, or offer the ability for people to save products to their “wishlist”.

Here you’re looking at metrics like ad click through rate, site visitation and bounce rates, add to cart/save to shortlist, newsletter sign up, email notification sign ups, email shares of a product, product review reads.

Finally, the “Do” group are those people who are very close to making that purchase decision. You want this group to choose your brand, and you want to provide them with the quickest and easiest path to buying your particular product.

Your creatives should definitely have strong calls-to-action at this stage (eg. the earlier-mentioned “Buy Now” button), and feature specific products. Remarketing (showing ads to people who have visited your website as they browse other websites) is a prime marketing tactic at this stage of the intent funnel.

Metrics here? Conversion rate, cart abandons, sales and revenue. Nice and easy.

Post Summary

1. Just like in real life, not every customer is ready to buy immediately. You need to cater your marketing accordingly.
2. 3 stages of customer intent to consider are See, Think & Do.
3. Optimise your marketing and content for the different stages of intent.

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The post Small Business Marketing Tips #1: Matching Customer Intent appeared first on Conversation Media.