Utilizing Social Media Advertising During the Holidays

Start with your website

Think about your end goal. What is it that you want users to do?

• Purchase a product?
• Invest in a subscription?
• Sign up for a newsletter?
• Attend a webinar?

The options are quite literally endless here. So, pick your end goal and work from there. For the purpose of this post, we’re going to use, “Purchase a product” as our end goal.

Let’s begin with the Meta basics:

Do you have a Facebook Business Account?
Learn how to set up one here.
Have you set up an Ad Account and connected billing?
Learn how to set this up here.
Do you have the Meta Pixel or Conversion API (CAPI) Pixel installed on your website?
The Meta Pixel is a small piece of code that is inserted into your website’s header. It tracks user activity on your site, however, if users have opted out of cross-platform tracking, we have found this avenue of tracking to be less reliable. Historically, the Meta Pixel uses IP Address + browser data to track behaviors such as purchases, so we’re sure you can see why this data is well… necessary for advertisers. If users have opted out, then the Pixel is “blind” to that user’s data and behavior information.

Luckily, there’s a supplemental option!

We highly recommend having your developer (or outsourcing a hire) to get the CAPI installed because that is going to track user behavior using server data rather than the historic IP data. With this installed and prioritizing conversion events, you’ll get better data around user behavior on your website.

Being able to collect data on both Social Media Platforms and your website will ultimately pay off. Not only will you be able to utilize this data for remarketing tactics, but you will also be able to create lookalikes of higher intent audiences to incorporate into your top of funnel efforts. (thus, warming up that audience ever so slightly)

Is your Landing Page optimized for Mobile?

We recommend that your landing page make sense with the ad you are wanting to run, as well as be 100% mobile friendly. If it’s not, users may exit before they’ve even considered the ask. According to Statista, more than 98% of users on Facebook use the Facebook App for their mobile phones so ensuring that your website loads quickly, gets to the point, and does so in a visually appealing way is paramount. No pressure, right?

Showcasing your product or service in a clear, concise way is key for a successful user experience and shopping journey from point a to point checkout. Here are a couple of examples of excellent eCommerce landing pages.

Know your audience, but if you don’t, Meta’s got your back.

Your greatest advertising asset is the audience you already have. Even more so if you have a hot audience. If you don’t know what that means, it’s users who actively comment, like, share, and purchase from your organic content.

However, a great litmus test for gauging who you should be targeting is to look at your current social media engagement.

• Who follows you?
• What do they like?
• What are they interested in?
• And most importantly, of your content, what do they engage with the most?

If you haven’t taken the time to assess your audience or, to take that one step further, create personas for your ideal customers, now is the time! Being in tune with your audience and ideal customer is essential. If you don’t know who you are advertising to, how are you going to know how to talk to them?

In the meantime, Meta Audience Creator is able to do a large amount of the heavy lifting for you. You can simply build those audiences based on platform, and choose the level of engagement within a certain timeframe.

To give an example:

You can select:

Instagram Engagement

 
Everyone who engaged with this professional account
Anyone who visited this professional account’s profile
People who engaged with any post or ad
People who sent a message to this professional account
People who saved any post or ad
Retention rate: 365 days or less
Include or exclude any other people

For example, you may want to exclude people who have purchased within the last two weeks.

Now that we’ve established who is going to see your ads, we can move on to the what of it all: Utilizing Facebook Ads.

Ad Creative, Copy, and Tracking Success

This one is fairly open ended, and actually easy. Really. According to Statista, 43% of users are most likely to begin their holiday shopping in the middle of October. Crafting your ad can be the easiest part of the process. You’ll just need an ad creative, preferably video, a compelling reason why people should purchase, a strong call to action, and a solid landing page. It’s a good idea to keep a weekly pulse on how users are interacting with your ads. Positive performance metrics to look out for include:

• Link Click-through-rates above 1%
• Cost-per-link-clicks below $0 .30
• Cost-per-1000-impressions below $1.00
• Frequency of 4 or less
• And of course, purchases from ads

Another easy way to track on site conversions is to ensure that you are utilizing UTM parameters. We love this free and easy UTM builder, but have also found a lot of success using this piece of code that automatically populates data into Google Analytics for us.

&utm_source={{site_source_name}}_&utm_medium=paidsocial&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}&utm_term={{adset.name}}&utm_content={{ad.name}}

Meta Shops

If you are an eCommerce business, it’s going to be a high priority that your Meta Shop is optimized for holiday shopping. Meta Shops has a help article for making sure your shop is holiday ready, but we simplified it. Here is a quick checklist of maintenance tasks in preparation for the shopping season.

• Make sure your catalog is up to date and synced.
• Use several eye catching visuals
• Utilize product tags
• Use Shop Ads Solutions