This is part 1 of a 2 part series, which examines how important it is for advertisers to align their Facebook media strategy to the true end goal of their business.
Most people don’t know that the Facebook ad platform is incredible at doing exactly what it’s told to do which can be extremely powerful with the right inputs and injurious to your business with the wrong inputs.
To illustrate this, below are some examples of how Facebook delivers exactly what you tell it to, for better or worse:
- If you select website clicks as your goal, your Facebook ads will reach people who are likely to click on your ads. But not necessarily buy.
- If you select landing page views as your goal, your Facebook ads will reach people who are likely to visit your website. But not necessarily buy.
- If you select Add to Carts (ATC) as your goal, your Facebook ads will reach people who are likely to add your product to their shopping cart. But not necessarily buy.
That’s not just hypothetical. In fact, we’ve seen this happen again and again with our partners. Facebook takes the campaign objective you instruct it with and it goes all in on optimizing towards it – even at the expense of other, more important metrics – like driving an actual sale.
How Facebook Optimizes Campaigns: A Case Study of Failure and Success
So in short, Facebook takes the inputs of the campaign objective setup literally. That leads to one, significant takeaway: every campaign, no matter how nuanced, has to be optimized for the ultimate end goal it’s designed to support. If that doesn’t happen, your campaigns are likely to see results like this anonymous case study we experienced with one of our partners.
One of our newer clients was selling a high AOV product, so they struggled with getting enough purchases to exit the learning phase and deliver stable results. Before coming to us, the brand was bidding for people to add products to their cart instead of bidding for purchases. Lo and behold, their add to cart volume was extremely high and their cost per add to cart was extremely efficient.
Success, right?
Wrong.
The campaign resulted in zero sales despite the high add to cart volume. A little more digging based on ad delivery insights uncovered the reason for that disconnect. The people reached by the ads, who were responsible for those ATCs, couldn’t actually afford the product.
Upon taking on the account, we switched the client campaign to an optimization strategy focused on purchases and added income targeting exclusions. This lowered our add to cart volume and increased our cost per add to cart. However, this change also caused the campaign to begin driving cost-efficient sales. While there were less people adding products to their cart, more qualified people were now shopping with us and actually buying.
That’s just one of many examples, all pointing to the same thing: Facebook is so focused on the campaign objective and bidding strategy that it optimizes everything around it. The system didn’t realize that adding products to the cart wasn’t the end outcome, and kept optimizing towards audiences that were irrelevant to the client and their high-value product.
FREE GUIDE
Digital Marketing Attribution and Measurement Roadmap
We layout a roadmap of all the measurement and attribution tools direct response advertisers should use to better understand their media’s impact.
How to Define Your Business End Goal for a Facebook Campaign
The first step for businesses to take is simple: understand exactly what end goal your Facebook campaign is designed to support.
For many e-commerce brands, it’s likely a purchase. Every campaign supporting it, then, also needs to keep purchase as its main goal and optimization mechanism. For many subscription businesses, the traditional answer has been the free or heavily discounted trial to get someone in the door.
However, Facebook is always changing and this time, it’s likely for the better. Thanks to a recent innovation, there are opportunities to optimize for a deeper, more meaningful event than the initial trial. Again, we’ll dig into the details of this in a follow up article.
How Advertisers With Low Signal or Fewer Transactions Can Optimize Towards End Goals
For advertisers who drive fewer transactions and therefore deliver lower signal for optimization, moving the Facebook campaign goal to a stage just before the sale may seem counterintuitive.
However the best approach still remains optimizing towards your ultimate end goal. Any move back up the funnel to increase signal should only be temporary, designed to add data until the ultimate goal (optimization towards the purchase) becomes more realistic again.
In addition, advertisers with low signal or fewer transactions can pull these three levers to overcome their data challenges:
- Target high-intent prospecting audiences. For example, a 1% lookalike audience of customers from your CRM can expand your potentially relevant audience, as can strong intent indicators that drive purchases of your product like tight interests and income level targeting that matches your products’ price point, etc.
- Improve your purchase tracking and data transmission. For example, conversion API integrations like Shopify have been shown to hurt businesses by providing incomplete datasets to Facebook. Using best-in-class conversion API is vital to capture all purchase-relevant targeting to optimize your ads toward your end goal.
- Optimize for a post-iOS 14 environment. Brands with a high AOV have especially suffered from the drop in conversions brought about by Apple’s iOS 14 update. Steps for high AOV brands to counter that trend include consolidating campaigns, adjusting creative, adjusting retargeting setups, and better leveraging on-platform data.
In other words, a lack of signal or conversions is not necessarily a reason to move away from optimizing your Facebook campaigns for business end goals. Instead, it just requires some tweaks and optimizations to ensure the data is there to give it the best shot.Cas
