4 Media Planning Tips to Drive Offline Sales With Meta Ads

This is an excerpt from our ebook, “How to Drive Omnichannel Sales on Meta. ”

Finding success with Meta ads can be difficult if you’re trying to drive offline sales.

Without a feedback loop of transaction data from your website being sent back to Meta, it’s hard to optimize and measure for offline sales.

So how can omnichannel marketers drive more sales offline and in retail marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart.com ?

Below are 4 media planning tips (according to multiple studies) necessary to drive more omnichannel sales as an additive strategy to their existing direct response efforts.

1. Make sure you are reaching at least 5M people

According to a 2023 Nielsen deep-dive analysis of campaign best practices on Meta platforms aimed at optimizing CPG (i.e. offline performance), they found that campaigns that reach 5MM+ unique users have, on average, 64% higher ROI and 30% higher effectiveness as compared to lower reach ranges. Reaching 5 million unique consumers per campaign provides nearly double the profitability of low reach range campaigns.

While 5M is a great starting point for reach, it goes without saying the greater the reach penetration, the greater the outcomes against your target audience.

According to an?analysis done by Facebook in partnership with Oracle ?against 178 campaigns, the top reach quartile of campaigns drove 3X the number of total people impacted at 10% less cost per person impacted. Put another way, the top reach quartile drove 169% more incremental buyers and 139% more incremental sales compared to the bottom reach quartile.

2. Make sure you’re reaching people at least 2X per week

According to that same 2023 Nielsen study, to maximize effectiveness, ensure that your campaign is being executed with a weekly frequency of at least 1.3+. When ROI is the key KPI, a high frequency of 2X or greater per week is recommended.

Campaigns with 1.3-1.9 weekly frequency (# of ads per week) recorded 2.9x higher effectiveness than those with low frequency. A 2x or greater weekly frequency drove a ROI increase of 1.2x compared to low and mid frequency ranges.

As the chart below (from a prior study) shows, a low-frequency reach strategy can generate some impact, but it is a sub-optimal approach when trying to meet a campaign’s full potential impact.

3. Make sure media runs for at least 6 weeks

Selecting the duration (how many weeks a campaign is active) of a campaign is a prime component in establishing effectiveness and efficiency.?

A campaign that runs for too short a time won’t achieve the necessary reach or awareness to meaningfully contribute to ROI.?

During the 2023 study, Nielsen found that CPG campaigns lasting six or more weeks had a 16 percent higher ROI and 98 percent higher effectiveness when compared to campaigns lasting less than six weeks.

4. Use demographic and other targeting overlays to make sure you are reaching more of your target audience

Unlike with conversion focused ads on Meta, where going extremely broad can work better for driving sales outcomes, brand awareness ads should be a bit more targeted to make sure you’re hitting more of your addressable market.

For example, if you were selling baby food on your own website and in Target, targeting the entire US population 18+ can work for direct response because Facebook can do a really good job of targeting with the pixel and reach your consumers who are more likely to be new moms.?

However, without targeting guardrails on an awareness campaign, you might end up delivering a large number of impressions to the wrong demographic.