[Case Study] How Facebook's Native Advertising has Changed

Facebook and Instagram have 1.59 billion active users with over 800 million users active daily. You can all but guarantee that whatever type of business you run, no matter what industry or niche, a good percentage of your target audience will be on these channels. Facebook adverts are perfect for marketers looking to reach prospective (and existing) customers especially due to the sophisticated targeting options available.

It is possible to make ads that are seen by specific target audiences when they are in a fairly unique relaxed mind-set which is perfect for any business. Facebook targeting options have come under fire recently for many political reasons, but even with some of the recent changes to those options, Facebook is often still the ideal platform for reaching your audience or target audience.

One recent change in the Facebook Ads platform is a new campaign optimisation option called ‘landing page views’. Prior to this setting, campaigns statistics would report link clicks in most cases. When analysing our link click data from previous campaigns in both Facebook and Google Analytics it became very apparent that the two numbers (Facebook clicks and website sessions) are drastically different. Facebook will class a click on any button as a result, but this does not mean that a user has actually landed on your website. Most clicks are redundant in the sense that people do not even wait for the website page to load before they disappear back to the Facebook news feed. This means that optimising for a cost per clicks gives a false sense of how much you are paying to actually get someone to visit your website from Facebook adverts. Here is an example:

When analysing the numbers above you may think that you are spending as little as 11p for getting a pair of eyes in front of your site. What we do not know are how many people actually looked at the website from those 300 clicks.

Switch to landing page views and you see a much more accurate figure of how much your Facebook campaigns have spent to get a visitor to actually open and look at the content on your website. In the example below you will see our cost per landing page view is much higher than we have been paying for a link click, but this figure is a much more effective way to measure success.

If you would like to start using landing page views to optimise your Facebook campaigns you need to have the Facebook pixel installed on your website. The Facebook pixel has many great uses, but essentially it is a bit of code that tracks the actions of people who are visiting your website. This code will highlight if the Facebook advert click actually led to the user viewing the content on the landing page.

Other advantages of the Facebook pixel are that you can create campaigns that target people who have visited your website before. This is usually referred to as remarketing and is highly effective at converting leads or sales because you are targeting people who are already familiar with your product or service.

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Think Digital First are delighted to welcome Jo Phipps as our guest blogger on this topic. Jo is owner of Digital Marketing Agency, Illuminate Digital www.illuminatedigital.co.uk