Neimh has been fascinated with telling stories since she read her first book, Alice in Wonderland. Now she creates compelling campaigns and exciting stories that transform brands and fascinate clients. Neimh holds a First Class Honours Postgrad in Marketing Practice and an Honours Degree in Commerce, both from NUI Galway. Neimh previously worked in social media specialist positions for an agency specializing in hotel marketing, a government tourism body, and in the online retail sector. She has a proven track record of delivering high-value campaigns and creating innovative and compelling social media initiatives.
Instagram recently announced the launch of its new checkout feature, allowing you to buy products directly in the app, and making it easier and more convenient to buy from some of your favorite brands.
Checkout on Instagram is currently a closed beta and only available to a handful of U.S. brands, including H&M, Nike, Prada, Burberry, and Zara.
Given the brands currently part of the beta, it’s clear this feature will be heavily focused on the beauty and fashion industries. And, we expect Instagram to open it up to more retailers sooner than later.
How exactly does it work?
Tap on a product from a brand’s shopping post. Then as you’d normally do, choose from various options such as color and size. From here, Instagram takes you directly to checkout without having to leave the app.
The best thing about this is you only have to enter your billing and shipping details once—they’re securely saved for the next time you shop. You’ll receive shipping notifications directly in-app so you can keep track of your purchases.
According to Tech Crunch, Instagram “will introduce a selling fee to help fund programs and products that help make checkout possible, as well as offset transaction-related expenses.” This opens up a whole new revenue stream for the Facebook-owned app.
As for how it’ll affect advertisers, ads aren’t currently eligible for promotion with the checkout button—however, we think this will certainly change very soon, as Instagram starts to invest heavily in shopping related items. Checkout also comes at a time when Google just launched shoppable ads in Google images. Competition will heat up quickly!
We’re looking forward to seeing some of the early results of Checkout for Instagram and what conversion rates will look like versus traditional website checkout. It all bodes well for retail advertisers looking to expand into another popular online channel to maximize performance and revenue.
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If you're a retail advertiser, you're looking to reach customers at the right time with the right product, at the very point when they’re deciding:
To buy or not to buy?
Retail remains huge in the U.S. and is the fastest-growing industry across Europe, with growth expected to exceed £215.38 billion by 2017. It’s now more important than ever to keep your customers engaged throughout their entire shopping experience. With this in mind, brands now need to focus on creating a seamless user experience to help close that final sale.
Take stock of what you’re currently doing and adjust where necessary. Here are five tips to help your efforts.
Know exactly what you want your potential customers to do next, and then create a series of steps that help you turn prospects into customers. Remember that you have people at different stages of the buying cycle on your site at any given time—from people at the research stage to those ready to purchase.
People at the top of the funnel aren’t yet ready to make a purchase, so don’t ask for the sale too soon (i.e., ‘Buy Now’). Customers need to commit before they’re ready to purchase. Provide value before asking for a sale, and capture an email address and phone number that can be added to a custom audience, and then used at a later stage to retarget and re-engage with the customer.
Ultimately your end goal is to convert lookers into buyers in as few clicks as possible. Be sure to:
Publish customer reviews, as these may be the tipping point for customers on the cusp of a purchase.
Whether it’s time-based or stock quantity-based, creating a sense of urgency will persuade your customers to take action.
This seems like the simplest solution, but it’s often left out of the marketing mix. Remarketing through Facebook will help to boost conversions and reduce the overall cost per customer acquisition. Once you’ve successfully added your Facebook pixel to your website, build out Website Custom Audiences. You have several options available to you, including:
Remember Lookalikes
Remember you can also create a lookalike audience based on people who’ve visited your website. A lookalike audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to people who already are.
Use Dynamic Ads
If you’re a retailer with a product catalog, you should take full advantage of Dynamic Ads. With this ad type, you can promote any item from your product catalog dynamically to people who’ve expressed interest on your website. The main aim of Dynamic Ads is to reach more people or to retarget shoppers to complete their sale. There are many great things about Dynamic Ads, a few of which include:
To learn more about Dynamic Ads and how they can work for you, read the following articles:
Making use of available tools can help you turn curious shoppers into decisive buyers, reaching and converting the precise audience you need to influence—potential customers, existing customers, and even people who’ve never heard of you. The possibilities are as broad as your ad campaigns make them.
If you’d like help setting up stellar campaigns that attract and retain customers, just get in touch.
Tracking the performance of your social campaigns is one of the most important factors for success. The fact is that your Google Analytics data and your Facebook data will never match.
Why is this?
The only way to accurately measure your Facebook data is through Facebook reporting itself.
In this day and age, people use multiple devices throughout the user journey before any purchase is made. It takes multiple touch points before a sale is made, and this happens across multiple devices. This was all well and good when a sale happened on a single device (desktop).
For example, suppose you’re out and about and start browsing on your mobile device. You click an ad but don’t convert. Later that day, you’re sitting at your desktop computer and decide to jump onto that company's website to buy the product you saw earlier. Google Analytics would fail to attribute that conversion back to the click on your mobile device and will subsequently under-report your results.
Facebook has the unique ability to track conversions back to users instead of cookies. This means you can track the same user across all devices as long as they’re logged into their Facebook account. In comparison, Google Analytics relies on cookies, meaning all the tracking happens exactly on the browser where the cookie was dropped.
Google Analytics uses cookies to track users on a website, and doesn’t have the ability to track impressions like Facebook. If cookies aren’t enabled, you won’t be able to track those users through GA.
With Google Analytics, it’s considered a conversion when a user clicks the intended link within the ad, whereas with Facebook, a user can click any portion of the ad, convert, and still be tracked as a conversion.
If a user clears their cookies, all of that data will remain on Google Analytics. In Facebook, however, this data is cleared from your custom audiences. It’s also good to note that Google Analytics back-dates data, while Facebook collects the data from the day your audiences are set up.
This one is always a cause for concern with marketers. “Wait, my clicks in Facebook don’t match my sessions reported in Google Analytics? Why?” There are several reasons for this discrepancy.
Google Analytics uses referrer URLs to credit conversions back to ads. Facebook users browse Facebook using ‘https’ instead of ‘http’. So, if a user clicks an ad in Facebook and leaves to convert on an http website, the user can’t be recorded since they have left a secure environment. This, again, will lead to under-reporting of conversions.
This is an important one to note. Google Analytics only allows a one-per-click attribution, meaning only one conversion is counted regardless of the number of conversions that actually happened. If a user saw or clicked an ad and converted multiple times, Facebook attributes multiple conversions to the ad last clicked or viewed.
Facebook conversion measurement attributes conversions based on a 24-hour view and 28-day click-through window—so, any comparison you do against other tracking data must compare exactly the same attribution window. Google Analytics uses the last interaction model, which attributes 100% of the conversion value to the last channel the customer interacted with before buying or converting.
To update your attribution window in Facebook, click Customize Columns and choose the window that best suits your needs.
Facebook reports on the time of a view or click of the conversion, whereas 3rd party tracking tools often report on the time of conversion.
Your conversion pixel may not fire if the user has an ad blocker installed in the browser. This will cause undercounting conversions, so the number may be lower than your internal data.
Are you looking for a career in social? Or perhaps you’re already in the crazy world of social media marketing and want to upskill, but aren’t too sure where to start?
In this ever-changing world of social, it’s imperative that you keep up with the latest trends. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have firmly established a foothold in the digital world, with Snapchat and Pinterest starting to gain ground and innovation happening quickly. And, we’re sure to see some newer platforms emerging in 2017.
Social media advertising budgets have doubled worldwide over the past two years—going from $16 billion in the U.S. in 2014 to
$31 billion in 2016. Along with this, hundreds of roles are popping up in social media. How do you get your foot in the door?
Create a thriving social media presence of your own, and familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of each. Build up your own personal brand—if you can’t market yourself, how will you do this for others?
Familiarize yourself with different industries, attend conferences and industry events, and contribute where possible. You never know—it could be your awesome skills that get you noticed by a potential employer. Your professional relationships may be your most important asset, so engage with key influencers in the industry that you want to get into.
To really stand out, you’ll need more advanced skills, since your customers will more than likely manage search, social, and display. Take a 360-degree approach to your learning—to succeed and excel, keep your training up to date, and subscribe to and read as many social and digital marketing blogs as you can manage. (Be sure you’ve subscribed to this one!)
You’ll be required to have a more rounded skill set, as social teams are now being integrated across departments, companies, and agencies alike. In job description parlance, a successful candidate will possess technical, analytical, communication, and digital skills.
If you pursue a role in social media, be sure to put in great time and effort from the beginning. Applying to hiring platforms like Lensa and making sure to position yourself as a job seeker is essential, but you should first become proficient in all social channels and prove your knowledge of each one. Know the full particulars of every existing and new channel, and be expected to wax eloquent about all of them when the opportunity arises.
Know that once you dig into the details, you’ll find a whole new world of advanced features to learn and master (such as creating paid ads, upselling, cross-selling, and much more).
Keep your social channels clean and professional. Remember that potential employers always check! There’s nothing as disappointing as a dormant Twitter account.
A good rule of thumb is to not post anything on your social media channels that you wouldn’t want to see published on the front page of a newspaper. This shows that you’re professional and can write well. (It never hurts to do a spell-check, either.)
If you’re thinking a quick course in social media will be enough, think again. The world of social is changing constantly, and it’s up to you to keep yourself in the loop.
If you’re just starting out, it’s all about getting that initial experience. Be prepared to help a business free of charge—look specifically for opportunities to help businesses build and grow their social presence. Whether it’s paid or unpaid, take on an internship, as this is by far the best hands-on experience you’ll get. If you decide to pursue a digital course, make sure it’s fully accredited.
Stick with it—social media marketing is a profession where you never stop learning. Be persistent and believe in your abilities. It requires a lot of effort but you’ll get there. To summarize:
Wondering what’s happening to the Facebook conversion pixel? How will advertisers track conversions after February 2017?
Read on….
As of February 15th, 2017, Facebook is disabling the conversion tracking pixel, at which point it’ll be removed from all advertising tools. So what should Facebook advertisers do next? In a word, you’ll need to upgrade to the new Facebook pixel.
There is a whole host of features the new Facebook pixel will give you. Here’s the list in comparison to the old features.
[caption id="attachment_8874" align="alignnone" width="500"]
Source: facebook.com[/caption]
The new Facebook pixel will allow you to track conversions in two ways—custom conversions and standard events. Let’s take a look at how to migrate over.
Navigate to the Pixels section in your business manager account:
You’ll see the option to create a new pixel.
Install the pixel code on every page of your website. Validate your pixel implementation using the Facebook Pixel Helper,
available here.
Next, identify the standard events that are relevant to you, and then create them. There are nine options:
Navigate to the Pixels section in your business manager, and select the Facebook Pixel tab next to the old conversion tracking pixel.
This opens the following pop-up. Select Track Conversions With Standard Events. You can then choose from the nine standard events mentioned above. (Note: Choose this option for now; we’ll explain Custom Conversions in the next section.)
Choose the ones relevant to your business, and then have your web developer ad the code to your site on the pages you’d like to track.
Once the events are installed, use the pixel helper to confirm your tracking’s working correctly. If you see a green checkmark, then everything’s working as it should be.
If you’re using the same standard event to track multiple pages, you may want to consider using custom conversions to report separately on each event.
Navigate to the pixel dashboard, and this time, choose to track custom conversions.
Select Event from the rule drop-down, and then choose the event you want to track, along with the category.
Once this is done and you refresh your dashboard, each event should have a green active status. You’ll now be able to add these individual events to your reporting dashboard and have individual metrics for each one.
At this point, you’ll have the old and new pixels on your website. Once the new one’s working correctly, you’re ready to migrate over. Navigate to the campaigns you need to update, edit your ads to choose Track all conversions from my Facebook pixel, and save.
This piece was recently featured in PerformanceIN, the leading global performance marketing publication.
Does your Facebook advertising strategy include video? Should you include video as part of your overall Facebook advertising strategy?
If you find yourself asking these questions, this article is for you. In this post you’ll discover essential tips for killer Facebook video campaigns and how you can improve on your existing strategy.
Facebook has seen phenomenal growth in video usage over the past year—it’s now serving a staggering 8 billion video views a day. Video usage has exploded astronomically, with no signs of slowing down. On average US adults spend 1 hour and 16 minutes each day watching videos on digital devices. In a split second, they’ll make a decision as to whether or not your post is worth engaging with.
If you have no idea where to start, you’re in luck. We’re here to help you create a powerful campaign that gets you noticed and achieve positive results.
Before you start your campaign, it’s essential to understand what you want to achieve. Are you looking for brand awareness or to drive action? First and foremost, getting eyeballs on your videos should be your initial goal, but don’t stop there. You have a wealth of customer data itching to be used. Take these video viewers and turn them into actual customers (which we’ll chat about in a moment).
In general, Facebook recommends defining an audience of over 10,000 people for the best ad performance. You need to make people stop to view your video ad instead of scrolling past, so choose carefully. The more relevant your audience is the more video views you’re likely to get. We recommend creating buyer personas to identify who your ideal customers are, and then using these to define your campaign’s target audiences.
Be sure to tailor your creative for each respective persona. This also goes for separate target audiences and brand awareness versus re-engagement campaigns. Be creative and experiment with different targeting options to find the one that suits you best.
Video ads are available across desktop/mobile news feeds and Instagram. Mobile drives the most effective video views, with 65% of Facebook users watching videos on their mobile device. With mobile effectively becoming the core of Facebook’s business—having grown 82% year-over-year and accounting for 80% of its total ad revenue—it continues to attract more and more people on mobile devices. This is only set to increase with its Instagram offering.
Create engaging videos that make people want to hit that “play” button. If your ad receives high negative feedback, your video is less likely to autoplay. Have visually engaging content in the first few seconds of your video to catch a user’s attention. Sell without sound—85% of videos on Facebook are watched on silent mode, so use text overlays and a clear CTA to get your message across. Get creative with your content and cater for silent autoplay.
Allow Facebook to identify users who are more likely to watch your video, which in turn will help increase the reach of your campaign. By choosing video views as your objective, Facebook will look for people who are more likely to watch your video in full. This will then let you generate much more effective custom audiences for your retargeting campaigns.
Video is the perfect mode for prospecting, but don’t let your strategy stop there. Take your viewers on a journey through your funnel and convert them into actual, paying customers. How, you ask? Create a list of people who’ve engaged with your video on Facebook and choose from several options:
Use these audiences to retarget highly engaged users of your brand. People who’ve completed your video will represent a more engaged audience and will be more likely to take your desired action. Get your messaging right, and as we mentioned above, take your viewers on a journey through the funnel.
If you’ve shown them generic messaging in your first touch point, be sure to follow up with specific product messaging followed by an incentive to purchase if they haven’t already done so. The goal of retargeting is to place your brand at top of mind while customers are still deep in their decision-making process.
Marin launched exactly this strategy with a leading technology brand and achieved a 30% lower CPA and 11% higher CTR, plus generated the highest number of sales for the campaign overall.
You’ve followed all of the above steps and now you want to actually figure out what’s working for you. Test, test, and test some more! Ensure to test all the creative elements of your ads, including different video variations and text overlays. The number of ad variations will add up quite quickly, so it’s best to create these in bulk to save you time.
Narrow your targets based on your key objectives and buyer personas. You can break down your audiences by location, demographics, interests, and behavior specifics.
For example, if your audience size is large enough and you want to target multiple locations, run them in separate campaigns—making it easier to optimize—and see what’s working best for you. Are you targeting fans versus non-fans? Consider using different creative for each. You should always have different messaging for people who are already familiar with your brand, versus people who may have never come across you prior to your campaign.
Along with the above be sure to:
Navigate to the reporting section and monitor key metrics such as clicks, impressions, reach, CTR, and conversions. Be sure to track follow-on activity in your Google Analytics account, and measure the lift of your campaigns based on key website stats such as bounce rate, average session duration, pages per session, and goal completion. Use the results of your testing to create a powerful, results-driven campaign.
With the continued growth of video across the platform, Facebook video ads are more likely to generate increased engagement for brands. By implementing the above, you’re sure to generate conversions from your efforts.
