12 December 2017

Drive action effectively on mobile

Optimise direct response campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network.

Topics

Advertising Insights Media planning and buying Europe, Middle East and Africa North America

Whether it's Cyber Monday or a typical Tuesday, our mobile phones are buzzing with notifications and alerts to subscribe, download or install something from our favourite brands. And these interactions are influencing how people act. In fact, 56% of shop purchases are influenced by digital interactions and 66% of those interactions are happening on mobile¹ This has marketers wondering: "How do I capture people's attention and drive action on mobile?"

With more people using Facebook and our family of apps and services than any other platform, there is an opportunity for marketers to allow our ad delivery system to optimise their campaign across our platforms according to their objectives. This approach can lead to better business results with marketers seeing greater reach, more converters and more conversions than delivering to a specific platform alone. Download the full white paper on our research and findings to use for your next campaign.

Optimise audience buying on Facebook platforms

We wanted to help marketers understand how they can optimise their advertising pounds and achieve success based on their business objectives. In 2016, Facebook IQ published research from the Facebook Marketing Science team that revealed that placement-optimised campaigns on Facebook and Instagram benefited from larger reach and a lower cost per lift for brands.

But what happens if you freely distribute budget across Facebook platforms wherever the ad delivery system identifies potential converters? To find out, the Marketing Science team explored whether direct response campaigns optimised across Facebook platforms were more likely to see larger reach and experience effective outcomes when compared to Facebook alone.

From August 2016 to March 2017, the Marketing Science team studied 11 campaigns within retail(5), gaming (3), financial services (2) and charity (1) using randomised control trail methodology. For each campaign in the study, we split the budget equally into a Facebook-only test cell and a placement optimisation test cell prior to the campaign launch. The campaigns that targeted audiences primarily in the US,² were optimised for the following objectives:

Mobile App Installs (4)
Conversions (3)
Purchase (4)
Website clicks (1)

Effectively drive action from your audience

Eight of the 11 campaigns were found to have statistically significant incremental lift when optimised across Facebook platforms. Reach in the placement-optimised campaigns were as much as 7% higher than Facebook alone and generated 1.67 times incremental converters with 3.45 times incremental conversions. We believe that the delivery system was able to identify potential converters not only on Facebook but also on the other platforms in real time because of the larger audience base.

Comparisons between placement optimisation cells and the Facebook-only test cells

Deliver cross-platform impact

In addition to the efficiency gain, being exposed to ads across multiple channels can help drive people to act. We saw that campaigns with placements across the Facebook platforms outperformed campaigns on Facebook alone. Campaigns within this analysis that launched on Facebook alone not only missed audiences but also missed the activities that occurred across the platforms during the campaign flight.

Effectiveness by placement optimisation

For example, exposure across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network positively correlated with a person's likelihood to convert in the largest campaign within this study. For this campaign, audiences who saw impressions across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network had conversion rates of eight times higher than audiences only exposed to the campaign on Facebook. This finding aligns with other cross-platform research published by the Advertising Research Foundation and on Facebook IQ on the positive impact on memorability of an ad when it is run across different channels compared to a single channel.

For an expanded discussion of our analysis including methodology, results and what it all means for marketers, download the white paper.

What it means for marketers

Advertisers have the opportunity to effectively optimise ads across Facebook platforms no matter their objectives. They should explore extending into additional placements to increase business outcomes of their campaigns. When marketers consider running a placement optimisation campaign for direct response objectives, there are several considerations:

Identify your objectives to define placements.
In order to maximise the value of your spend, you need to make sure that you are you running your ads in the best placements for your objective. However, this does not always mean equal delivery across platforms. For optimisation across placements to work correctly, make sure that your ad objective matches the end business result that you care about and plan to measure. For example, if you care about the lowest cost per conversion, use the Conversions objective.
Set expectations from the start.
Based on this initial research, be mindful of ensuring sufficient campaign spend, keep a large audience and understand the frequency of a campaign event. Setting expectations for rare conversion events is necessary. The more infrequent an event (e.g. low-funnel objectives, such as Sales), the more time and larger audience size is needed for a placement optimisation campaign to fully explore the value across the different platforms.
Test, learn and iterate.
If you didn't achieve the desired outcome or are unsure of your results, we recommend that you test your campaign. A/B Tests, such as the randomised control trails used in this analysis, are the best ways to conclusively determine how running ads across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network will impact your success.