Data: The Secret to Maximising ROI With Facebook Advertising

Over two billion people worldwide have a Facebook account. This means that Facebook’s advertising tools are particularly lucrative to advertisers and marketers. Combined with their audience network, which allows adverts to be placed on partnered websites, Facebook is second only to Google in holding monopoly over the digital advertising market.Lots of people are using Facebook to advertise, but using it successfully - generating a good return on investment (ROI) - requires more than a general, scattergun approach. In this blog we set out how to get the most out of Facebook advertising by combining strategy with data to reach the people most likely to convert.What you’ll need:In order to get the most out of Facebook advertising, you will need the following:

1. CRM platform

A CRM (customer relationship management) database will store all of your data.2. High quality, clean data listYour data list will be the building blocks of your campaign. You want data to be clean and of a high quality. Facebook matches people by their email addresses or telephone numbers, so you want as many contacts with this data as possible.3. Facebook’s Power EditorPower Editor is Facebook’s in-built advertising tool. We recommend using this over Ad Manager because it makes it easier to build more sophisticated campaigns with lots of advert sets.‍

Before you begin

‍Before beginning any campaign, you want to ensure that you have done enough planning and audience research to put together a comprehensive strategy. This means first of all establishing what your goals are: what is it that you are trying to achieve? Try to make goals as precise and quantifiable as possible, as this will enable you to track and measure how successful the campaign has been.Knowing your audience is at the heart of any successful marketing campaign, and it’s no different when it comes to Facebook advertising. Know who it is you are targeting: Facebook allows you to upload CRM data and use its audience analysis tools to get key information about those people on your list such as what demographic they belong to (age, location, job type), and what pages/brands they have already liked so that you can get a better idea of the type of person you are targeting.

Once you know who it is you are targeting, you want to evaluate whether you have enough pre-existing data in your CRM to build an effective campaign or whether you could benefit from having a larger amount of data to target. Larger amounts of data mean more people to target, which in turn means more potential conversions. But it also means having to increase budget in order to reach all of those people, so it is important to know your budget, your goals, and to align your strategy accordingly.One way to get more data is to use Facebook’s Pixel. This is a strip of code that can be placed on the pages of a website to gather data on those who land on the page.

The pixel ‘fires’ each time somebody views a page, and Facebook collects this data into an audience that can be used for targeting.Once you’ve figured out your strategy and built your audience, you’re ready to start creating the campaign. We would usually also create a specification at this point - this would set out all of the technical details of exactly what we’re going to do. This ensures that the strategy is followed and that it can be passed on to whoever is building the campaign.

‍Implementation

‍Once you have completed all of your preparation, it’s time to begin creating your campaign. Facebook’s Power Editor makes it easy to set up multiple advert sets so that you can allocate different budgets to different audiences, and also display different copy and images to each audience you are targeting.The key to a successful campaign, other than good planning and strategy, is monitoring and adjusting once the campaign has been set live. It’s important to keep an eye on your advert sets to see which ones are performing best. For the ones that aren’t performing well, ask yourself why: is the copy or the image/s you have used not resonating with your audience? Is your audience too broad? Or perhaps the problem is with the landing page you are linking to, meaning that people are not converting at the final stage.

The benefits of using data - either CRM data or that generated by Facebook’s pixel - is that you are targeting people who you already know have some interest in your brand. You’re targeting warm leads, rather than targeting anyone within a certain geographical area or age range who may or may not be interested in the products or services you are selling. This is why it is worth investing in data - and in carrying out the prior planning before launching into an advertising campaign. Following these steps ensures best practice when it comes to using Facebook advertising to generate a good ROI.Airship were tasked with creating a Facebook advertising campaign for a French restaurant chain for New Years Eve. Cote had a small budget (£250) and just a week to target people to book their New Years Eve menu.

We took Cote’s email data list and used this to create a custom audience and a corresponding lookalike audience of 1%, targeting ages 25-65 as we knew from our audience analysis that these made up the majority of Cote’s audience. This meant that the audiences we used were highly targeted, targeting as few people as possible who were unlikely to at least have an interest in Cote Restaurants. The second benefit of this was that the cost per delivery was lower, since the relevance score (a number that Facebook assigns based on how relevant your advert is to your targeted audience) was high: this meant that we reached more people for less money than we would have with a less highly targeted audience. The campaign delivered a ROI of 7.5, delivering £7.54 for every £1 spent with us.Another client saw a 34% increase in loan applications after we used their CRM data and Facebook’s pixel to re-target those who had reached a certain stage of the journey but not yet completed their application.Airship are experts in using data and technology to build effective marketing campaigns: we carry this through to our social media strategy, producing significant ROIs for our clients. For a free consultation, contact us today.