Let’s take a closer look at how performance social campaigns work.If you’ve been living under a rock for the last 4 years, you may not have noticed that Facebook has ads on the right sidebarWebtrends did a study of 11 thousand Facebook campaigns and found that click through rates are 7X higher when you target your fans vs. targeting by interests alone. So, for this campaign, Motorcycle Superstore bought ads that were targeted at their fans.To optimize their campaign, they segmented their ads into smaller, more focused targets. They did this because ads with higher click through rates have lower costs per click. So, they looked at their Webtrends data for the states that had the highest order volume, which were basically the good weather states: California, Florida, Texas, etc. Then, they separated those states into their own ad groups because they will likely have a higher click through rate and therefore lower cost per click. On top of that, they segmented by gender and age ranges for additional optimization.Fans of Motorcycle Superstore were then served ads like this one and when they clicked…
fans were taken to an app on their Facebook page that displayed their holiday deals.If you’re not familiar with Facebook apps, they are iframes that allow brands to create fully customized experiences.This landing app is powered by Webtrends Social, which is a social marketing suite. Perhaps you didn’t know that Webtrends has this product? Then you likely haven’t looked at Webtrends in the past couple of years. So, why did Motorcycle Superstore drive the ads to an app instead of directly to their website? Webtrends has analyzed many Facebook campaigns and has learned that driving Facebook apps to a landing app inside of Facebook lowers bounce rate and increases conversion.Now that fans have more context about the deals, they can click to buy.
To review, Motorcycle Superstore’s campaign targeted fans with ads, then drove them to a Facebook landing app, which then linked back to their ecommerce site. But, it took a couple pieces of magic to make this possible.First off, you can’t use a standard analytics tag on Facebook tabs because they strip off query parameters. Webtrends spent several months working with Facebook to solve this problem using Facebook approved parameters.Secondly, the conversion took place on a different domain than the ad was linked to. Standard analytics on the website would only have known that the traffic came from a Facebook app, but would not know which ad the visitor clicked on prior to the app. So, Webtrends leveraged their patented cross domain tracking capabilities to track the user from ad to app to site.On their very first performance social campaign, Motorcycle Superstore had a return on ad spend of about $3.60 in revenue for every dollar they spent on ads. And, social was their 2nd highest average order value, which was higher than search. They were so pleased that they have decided to keep their Facebook deals tab and continue to roll out deals for every holiday and are improving toward their goal of $6 of revenue for every dollar spent on ads.
To check in on the success of the campaign, advertisers login to Webtrends Analytics.Our reporting will show the user all of their campaigns, including Facebook ads, so they can see which ads are driving business value actions like ecommerce purchases and lead generation.Here is the campaign hierarchy for the Motorcycle Superstore report:Demand Channel > Campaign Partner > Marketing Program > Marketing Activity > Campaign Description > Campaign Creative > Campaign Name
