Facebook to Marketers, It’s Time for a Click to Action

You Like me…you really Like me. Wait. Maybe you don’t really Like me after all. According to our Facebook engagement metrics, only 1% of you actually react when we post. So, to keep the numbers up, our team posts more often, asks questions, runs polls, curates content, introduces more and more contests, and asks for your help to submit your pics and videos as part of our “user-generated” content campaigns. 

We measure success by the Likes, comments, shares, the number of conversations, and reach. While the Likes are rising, we’re starting to recognize the pattern…I guess we never really defined why you should “Like” us beyond the initial click. We just took for granted that a Like equated to an opt-in.

This general scenario is more common than you may think. That’s all about to change however. Marketers must now rethink their Facebook strategy to define click paths and results. As Josh Constine recently reported, Facebook is now giving advertisers access to its API to improve post-click actions. In his post, Constine walks through a series of various scenarios for brands, developers and also local businesses to take advantage of the new Ads API. Here, we’ll talk more about how to start with strategy.

With the updated Ads API, advertisers must now think beyond the “Like.” Facebook’s Ads API will allow advertisers to present ads most likely to take specific post-click action such as content sharing, in-app purchases, Facebook Offers, among a list of other actions (see below). In the great pursuit of ROI, Facebook is also taking a lot of the guesswork out of ad campaign development and deployment to enhance desired performance. The new improvements give Facebook advertisers an unprecedented opportunity to connect with specific market segments based on intelligence to introduce more informed campaigns that trigger relevant clicks, conversions, and return.

What does “more informed” actually mean? Facebook is studying the behavior of its consumer population and as it does, it will provide deeper insights to brands seeking specific actions, such as those who are more likely to be a virtual good buyer, someone who actively shares content, who attends events, individuals who appreciate deals and offers. Over time, ads can be optimized for audiences based on this behavior as well. As such, brands must not only compete for attention and clicks, but also context and relevance based on behavior and preferences.

For brands and agencies, advertising based on keywords is no longer good enough. Now that you have a better shot at reaching the right people based on behavior, advertisers must now also become architects of experiences and outcomes.

Now advertisers can specifically optimize for…

1. People talking about this page

2. Page likes

3. Page post likes

4. Page post comments

5. Page post shares

6. @ mentions

7. Check-ins

8. Photo tags

9. Offers shared

10. Offers claimed

11. App installs

12. App used

13. Credit spend events (number of times someone uses credits in the app)

14. Credit spend amount (value of credits that were spent in the app)

15. Number of RSVPs

This is a click to action…

Designing campaigns now require brands and advertisers to think about the “click to action” they want to encourage. I refer to this as the A.R.T. of Engagement, where brands intentionally design campaigns to provoke relevant actions, reactions, and transactions. To take advantage of Facebook’s API, brands must now employ sophisticated advertising approaches that combine segment and contextual research, segment-specific strategies, app and channel development for each approach, UX, creative design, and real-time conversion metrics, review and optimization.

It’s more than Likes or forcing people through Like-gated apps or campaigns. Now it’s about performance and conversion science where…

1) Contextually relevant content appears in front of qualified and desirable audiences that…

2) Triggers a defined, useful action that…

3) Leads to optimized click paths that result in material content or activity, which then…

4) Motivates conversions to preferred outcomes and…

5) Delivers a more integrated, consistent, and efficient experience.

To engage more effectively through Facebook’s social advertising platform requires that all strategies and campaigns commence with a stated purpose. I believe that the best way to outline these scenarios is to begin with the end in mind and work backwards from there. By starting with the end in mind, the ability to research desired behavior and who to reach as a result becomes incredibly clear…and also inspiring.

The dimensions of engagement you’ll need to define are 1) what are you trying to accomplish, 2) what the experience looks/feels like, 3) what benefits you’ll offer and what they mean to the people you’re trying to reach, 4) the desirable outcomes you wish to measure, 5) How people feel as a result of the A.R.T. experiences you evoke, and 6) What the experience will look like in the most prominent channels of your connected customers.

This is why you’re now an architect of experiences and outcomes. It takes vision. It takes design. It takes measurement and optimization. The A.R.T. of Engagement is realized through a Social Experience Framework that starts with intentions and ends with resulting sentiment…not just the outcome.

There’s an old saying, “it’s not the gift that counts, it’s the thought behind it.” The same is true for social advertising, marketing and well, business overall. Intentions count for everything. Therefore your intentions must be realized as experiences where technology serves as the enabler to creatively and contextually engage to create experiences that meet or exceed expectations and ultimately inspire desirable outcomes.

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How Well-Run PPC Campaigns Reveal Valuable Inside Information to Competitors

Although it seems counter-intuitive, the better PPC campaigns are managed, the more they actually reveal about the company’s inside information. Those individuals who effectively manage these campaigns, at first glance, seem like they are doing great things for their companies. In all actuality, they are unknowingly releasing a world of practical, usable data to their direct competitors, but only if competitors know how to find it. 

Let’s pose a hypothetical to illustrate exactly how a singular piece of datum from one company can yield multiple pieces of usable, practical information for its direct competitors. Take large credit card company like Capital One, who has numerous competitors that exist in the same market and have roughly comparable numbers in terms of responses to direct mailers. The more comparable the businesses, the more accurate the estimates will be.

All of these companies use the same type of direct mail, which includes three separate options to apply for the credit card: online, phone, or snail mail. So, Capital One includes the URL of “application.capitalone.com,” on the mailer which customers can reach by either typing the given URL into the address bar at the top of the screen, or typing the URL into a Google search.

Let’s imagine we are Chase, a competitor of Capital One. We know that our data is comparable to Capital One’s data. Thus, at Chase, we can apply our own data to each method of response for a direct mailer: online yields 70 percent of the referrals, phone bank calls yield 20 percent, and the remaining 10 percent of the referrals are snail mail. These numbers would be ubiquitous throughout comparable companies in the credit card industry.

Given that Chase has about the same information in terms of responses, we can utilize Google Keyword Tool to find out exactly how many potential Capital One customers used a Google search to locate the URL in the direct mailer.

By performing a search for the keyword “application.capitalone.com” it reveals that approximately 18,100 people in a given month reached Capital One’s page by typing the URL into Google’s search bar. Being that we have comparable companies, we can apply the 18,100 customers to Chase’s internal company data that approximately 40 percent of our customers reached our application URL by using a Google search and that roughly 70 percent of respondents to Chase’s direct mail use the online option to apply.

Let’s do some math: 18,100 divided by 40 percent divided again by 70 percent = an estimated 64,642 applicants responded to Capital One’s Direct Mailer in all three methods (online, phone, and traditional mail). With this example, we see one piece of seemingly innocuous datum has given a competitor a window into Capital One’s closely guarded information. Despite Capital One’s best efforts, their well managed direct mail campaign allows for their competitors who analyzing the available PPC data to make more prudent decisions about their own direct mail strategies.

This type of research driven decision making is not just applicable to multimillion dollar corporations. For example, let’s suppose you own a small online business that sells body piercing jewelry and you have a competitor who has a business comparable to yours, but they have recently ventured into selling piercing tools in addition to body jewelry. You have considered moving into selling the tools like your competitor, but you are unsure if this is a sound business decision.

It’s definitely time to roll out the heavy artillery and use a site like SEMrush, SpyFu, or KeywordSpy (disclosure: I am COO of SEMRush). Using one of these tools, we extract the relevant data and make an informed decision: Should I or shouldn’t I start selling piercing tools?

If you knew how much of their advertising budget your competitor was allocating for their new advertising campaign over a series of months, couldn’t you then make the decision to enter the market or just stick to selling just the jewelry? With one of these services, you can look at the proportional increase or decrease of the advertising budget that your competitor is allocating for their new line of piercing tools.

Suppose that in one month your competitor allotted 7 percent of their advertising budget to selling the tools, next month they move to 15 percent, and 20 percent the following month. Keep in mind; the money being put towards the piercing tools campaign is also money that is not being put into advertising the jewelry side of their business.

Moving away from one product line and investing more in another is a huge decision on their part and should be a clear indicator to you as a business owner. An indicator of what though?

Excluding the possibility that they’re an eccentric millionaire and enjoy throwing their money away on unsuccessful advertising, it’s much more likely that your competitor is expending more of their budget on the piercing tools side of the business and less on the jewelry because it’s yielding positive results for them. By looking at the data for their advertising of piercing tools, we can see that this campaign is clearly making them very happy because they are steadily increasing the amount of money allocated to it every month. Also, according to the data, they are only getting happier with each passing month that you aren’t in the market, but they won’t tell you that.

So, these companies who desperately try to guard inside information, unintentionally reveal their inside information and are really only left with two choices: begrudgingly accept that your competitors will eventually know your secrets, or drop their online component. Companies, both small and large, can choose to jump headfirst into the unknown, or make an informed, data driven decision for less than a $100/month that gives them access to immediate, usable information with openly available tools.

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