By Lori Barrett
OK, everyone! Buckle up, it's time to get technical with the first in a series of articles discussing paid search. Today, we will focus on Meta which (in my opinion,) is a bit more user friendly, while next month we will go more in-depth on Google products.
But first, a little foundational information on paid search...
I touched on paid search in my February-issue Digital Corner column that discussed traditional vs. performance marketing. It is a complex topic and difficult to simplify for laypeople. We will do our best! Paid search is the cornerstone of performance marketing. Generally, when marketers discuss paid search, they're referring to Search PPC (Google ads,) and Social PPC, meaning Meta, the portfolio of products that include Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger and Whatsapp.
For a quick differentiation, let's consider Pay-per-click (PPC) strategy separately from Search Engine Optimization (SEO). PPC is a model where advertisers pay each time someone clicks your ad, rather than paying for an ad to be shown, while SEO tends to focus more on organic results, influencing Google (and other search engine) search results. The bulk of my columns has been focused on that SEO work, since it can be influenced with relatively minor actions directly on your website, and often without additional cost. PPC advertising is ... well, exactly what it sounds like. It costs money each time you use it successfully, but if you're selling online, PPC is one of the key drivers of digital marketing. PPC is particularly valuable to small merchants since you only pay for views that result in the action of engaging with your ad, rather than paying for eyeballs that aren't interested in your products.
For the purposes of our column this time, we'll assume that Google paid search is capturing people already looking for something, while Meta puts ads in front of people who are not actively searching for anything, be it information or a product to purchase. The general wisdom is that Google ads will have a better ROAS (remember return on ad spend? Your key metric in measuring campaign success,) than Meta, however, in my experience, that very much depends on the strength of the brand, the amount of money devoted to spending on search keyword bidding and various other factors. We can call it search-based targeting vs. interest-based targeting. Today we're looking at interest-based targeting.
Getting started with PPC on Meta:
First things first: set up Facebook Business Manager and install your Pixel!
What on God's green earth is a Pixel?
The Meta Pixel is a small piece of tracking code buried in your website that feeds Meta information on customer behavior after they click on an ad, bridging the gap between customer web activity and your Meta ad account. It tracks:
- Page views: who visited and what pages.
- Add to cart / checkout initiated.
- Purchases: completed sales, including dollar value.
- Content views: Which products and pages a customer visited.
- Any leads captured, forms filled out, sign-ups completed.
This information allows Meta to fulfill some of its most valuable roles in a marketing campaign:
- Retargeting: the value of retargeting in a PPC campaign cannot be overstated. No Pixel equals no retargeting. It is safe to say that retargeting is the cornerstone of converting interest to sales.
- Custom audiences: the Pixel builds your "visitors" group on Meta vs. your "people who added to cart," key parts of building your lookalike audiences (more on that momentarily!)
- Conversion tracking and ROAS measurement: this tells Meta whether an ad actually led to a sale, vs. a click.
This all feeds into optimization: it becomes data that informs who responds to a given ad. Optimization means how efficient your ad spend is: Are you wasting money advertising to random audiences or are you reaching people who match your customer profiles?
Regarding duration of tracking, it's a rolling window configured per audience, however, attribution for sales caps out at seven days, post-click. Historically, there was also a 28-day attribution window but that has been removed as of the beginning of the year, so if a customer sees an ad and doesn't click, but buys two weeks later, that's largely unattributed.
Objectives: pick what you want to achieve
Seems obvious, everyone wants sales, right? Choices range from Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, to Leads and Sales. Are you trying to tell customers you're opening a second location? Awareness might be your best goal. If you're using PPC to build out SEO (OMG so many TLA's- three-letter acronyms, sorry/not sorry,) driving traffic to your site to read your blog post on best gravel routes locally will boost domain authority, so Traffic may be your jam. Engagement prioritizes the long game: by boosting a Reel that draws comments, shares, and saves, Meta interprets your content to be more valuable and interesting to users generally, so worth showing more broadly.
Essentially, the objective of your PPC campaign with Meta should match the sales-funnel stage and tracking infrastructure that you have already put in place. If you have thin Pixel data for low-volume, high-ticket items, using objectives like Traffic or Engagement to create a stronger retargeting pool can be the best strategy.
Audience selection: How does Meta know who to serve ads to?
There are a couple of different ways to segment audiences for Meta PPC ads. First, we can geotarget: This is super helpful if you're wanting to advertise to a local audience. Going further, you can then segment by interest. You can sort through broad categories: "road cycling," "people who follow Outside magazine," etc. Again, efficiency lives in specificity, so the closer you can sort your audiences, the more targeted (and therefore effective,) you can make your spend. Geotargeted audiences can be a great way to build shop engagement and promote specific events, all key parts of building and supporting a customer base.
Next, using Meta-structured audiences: Facebook has four types of audiences, but the most common is the so-called lookalike audience, so that's where we'll start. This is a Meta ad targeting device, using people you already have behavioral data on as a reference: your top customers, based on sales data. The larger and higher quality the seed audience (current minimum is 100 from a single country), the more impactful a lookalike audience can be. Facebook analyzes commonalities among the group: demographics, interests, behaviors and browsing patterns, before comparing them to Facebook's trove of billions of users to find others who resemble that group. You control the size of the target audience by percentage, so a 1% audience would be a very close match to your data set, whereas a 10% match would give you a bigger, less specific pool. And to be clear, specificity is where efficient spends generally live, so that's a valuable differentiation.
The catch here is that Meta AI has its fingers in everything: the lookalike audiences are now treated more as suggestions rather than hard filters for audience selection. That being said, lookalike audiences with a strong seed group are still the best foundation for starting an ad set. Start small, see who is interested, then consider expanding your audience once you have data to support the direction of expansion.
Placement and budget: How and how often the ads get delivered
Automatic placement is great to start; this means Meta will distribute your spends across Facebook and Instagram. When budgeting, you'll have to decide between lifetime and daily spends; Meta requires approximately 50 optimization events per ad set to exit learning, the time when their algorithm is running live experiments, essentially testing which audiences, placements and creative combinations convert most efficiently. There's a fun mathematical formula that agencies use for working estimates, but let's say that it is important to budget sufficiently to exit the learning phase so that enough data is generated that ads can start to run efficiently.
Building creative: Reflecting your brand values while reaching eyeballs
Since Meta is a visual, interruption-based platform, creative content matters! Data shows that vertical videos and UGC-style content (user-generated content) often outperforms polished, ad-like productions, so that's good for the scrappy bike shops! You'll want three to five creative variations per ad set so Meta's algorithm can experiment and test what audiences respond to.
Launching your ads. AKA: patience is a virtue
Time to set those babies loose in the world! It's important here to avoid edits in budget, audience or creative in the first few days, so that Meta can run its learning sets. Every edit resets the learning phase, just delaying the algorithm's ability to find efficient delivery. If you leave the ads running for about a week, then you can go in and tinker.
In summary: ROAS is key
If you made it this far, congratulations! Interest-based PPC is an incredibly important tool to help customers discover your brand or products. Bringing it back full circle, PPC is one of the ways in which performance marketing is so powerful: since it can be measured as a Return on Ad Spend, it is (and very much should be,) self-funding, unlike many traditional marketing efforts. The user-experience in Meta is definitely simpler than those in Google analytics, so dipping your toe in PPC with social ads can familiarize you with concepts that you'll lean on later with Search-based PPC. At the end of the day, these are all stars in the constellation of actions that help you build your business and drive success on your own terms, instead of waiting for success to find you.
