This is an excerpt from our ebook, “How to Drive Omnichannel Sales on Meta.”
When running DTC ads or performance focused ads on Meta, it always makes sense to spend your dollars on your end goal and Facebook ads manager makes this really easy to follow. Simply choose Sales as your objective and follow the steps required to set up a campaign.
Despite the broad terminology, there’s no option for offline sales. If you hover over conversions in Facebook’s user interface, you’ll see Facebook makes it clear this helps “get people to add an item to their cart, make a purchase, start a subscription or take another action on your website or app.”
To drive offline sales, you need to go all the way up the funnel and optimize for Awareness as your campaign objective.
From there, your best option is to focus on optimizing for brand awareness which allows you to reach people who are more likely to remember your brand. This may seem counterintuitive if you’re a performance marketer and it might seem tempting to try and bid for a metric you feel you have more control to optimize for like video views or link clicks.
These metrics don’t always correlate to sales, especially clicks. Nielsen actually ran a study across nearly 500 campaigns and found no strong correlation between CTR and a lift in purchase intent.
Additionally, Facebook ran a study across 50+ campaigns and found that 90%+ of people who viewed ads and then bought offline did not click.
These objectives are also significantly more expensive than optimizing for brand awareness. According to Varos data, median CPM’s for link clicks were 4.5X higher and video views 2.2X higher than brand awareness.
Source: Varos.io
This largely has to do with supply and demand against your target objective. When you tell Facebook you want conversions, Facebook will optimize for people most likely to buy online.
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But there’s only so many people who are willing to buy online.
Even after the acceleration of online consumer habits from COVID, only 13% of retail sales comes from ecommerce.
That means that even though there are over 240M people using Facebook and Instagram, nearly all ecommerce advertisers are fighting to reach only a smaller, more expensive subset of those users.
That means the less action oriented a user is, the less expensive a user is to reach.
That doesn’t mean inaction on Meta leads to inaction offline. For example, you can’t click on a TV commercial and yet that ad format is highly effective in driving sales.
Brand awareness is kind of like Facebook’s version of a TV commercial, except you still have the optimization of having someone paying attention to your ad (vs say on TV being able to only pay for the people in front of their couch during a break and not in the kitchen making a snack)! It allows you to reach the cheapest users on Meta but still optimize for people who are likely to recall your brand.
What these ads are optimized for is making sure people recall your brand, that way when your consumer is in a retail environment, the association with your product is top of mind in their decision making process.
To learn more about driving omnichannel sales using Meta, including ideal reach and frequency, check out our ebook here.
