5 Most Valuable Social Advertising Tips from +$10 Million in Ad Spends

1. Connect your social ad campaign goals to tangible business goals.

The dark age of social media measurement is behind us. With the evolution of paid social capabilities, businesses should no longer view their success on social media platforms through a social-centric lens. New followers and post engagements are great, but these metrics should be viewed within your larger marketing funnel, not in a standalone capacity.

While this is true of organic measurement, it’s even more critical to think beyond your follower count when you’re setting goals for paid social campaigns. By focusing on tangible business goals like site traffic, lead generation and sales, you’ll not only be able to easily show a return on your paid campaign investment, you’ll also be able to compare the return of your paid social campaign to those of other marketing channels.

How It Works IRL

Let's say you have a paid social budget of $500 a month. It may be tempting to use your entire paid social budget to boost your organic posts. You put a lot of effort into creating content for the organic feed and without a paid boost, your reach per post does not justify this investment. Boosting organic posts can absolutely be beneficial to your business, but in order to make the most strategic use of your paid social budget, it's helpful to identify the real value of post boosts and assign them a proper place within your marketing funnel.

Post boosts most commonly result in one of these two upper-to-mid-funnel outcomes:

1. Increased reach

2. Increased site traffic

Now that you have identified results that translate back to your funnel, you can view your post-boosting activity as just one component of a well-thought-out paid social plan. Let's think back to our total budget of $500. A solid media plan could assign $300 to post boosts, with a focus on posts that have the most broad appeal and therefore, the greatest potential to increase reach or site traffic with the paid boost. You can then use the remainder of your budget to retarget users who have engaged with a post or visited your site with an offer. Now you have a paid social budget that supports both your organic content and your company's bottom line.

2. Identify qualified audiences through signals of purchase intent.

The excitement of being able to tie your ad campaigns directly to your core business goals can unfortunately lead to a desire to skip the funnel and get right to driving sales. While brands with broad reach and very accessible product price points may be able to drive a return through awareness activity, investing in a full-funnel approach is key to scaling your sales month-over-month.

In order to create a working sales funnel, you’ll need to identify purchase intent signals. This may take some trial and error, but it’s the most valuable insight you can gain from your early campaign performance.

So, what is a signal of purchase intent? This varies by industry, brand and product, but simply put, it’s an action that a consumer takes that brings them closer to purchase. One of the most common and valuable signals of purchase intent is subscribing to your email list. This action is an even greater signal of purchase intent if the consumer was provided a purchase-related offer in exchange for their email subscription.

How It Works IRL

You take actions of intent every day online. Visit almost any retail site. Just by visiting the site, you’ve already created an intent signal and you’ve likely been added to their target audience of site visitors. Additionally, when you landed on their site, it's very likely that you were offered a discount in exchange for submitting your email. If you submitted your email, you qualified yourself even further than your initial site visit. You’re no longer just a site visitor, you’re a site visitor who has indicated that you’d like to be informed by email of promotional offers. For most businesses, this is a very strong signal of purchase intent.

Site visits and email subscriptions are the two of the most common and most widely applicable signals of intent, but signals of intent vary by industry and by the ultimate conversion ask. A media company promoting a new show may place a high value on users who watch a show preview clip to completion, for example. A local gym may know that getting you to walk into their location is the key to converting you into a customer and may view store visits as their signal of purchase intent. As you can see, there are likely several actions of intent your customers take and the value of each may vary. It may take some time to identify and evaluate each of these, but doing so is critical to building a functioning paid social sales funnel.

3. Test small, learn big.

A client tendency I often try to dissuade is the desire to launch with a big spend as soon as the media plan is approved. I always advise against a large upfront spend, particularly if it’s the brand’s first paid social campaign. Why? No matter how much research has gone into creating the media plan, if it’s your first spend, it’s still a best guess. I know, you paid an expert to build this media plan, so it better be right. It’s likely that it’s very close to being right, but there are still insights you can’t possibly know until you test the plan with your target audiences.

The good news? You can learn a ton very quickly with a small budget. I’ve gone through this exercise by default with enough small businesses to know it works and to now use it as a best practice regardless of the overall campaign budget. You can learn as much from $500 as you can from $5,000, so why not pay less to learn before you ramp up spend?

How It Works IRL

If you have a media plan built, you'll simply launch with a fraction of the budget for each campaign. I like to allow test campaigns to run for at least one to two weeks in order to see and react to early results.

What if you don't have a media plan? How can you build a test campaign? As a general rule, I recommend setting aside at least 3x the cost of the product for your conversion campaign budget. I then recommend setting aside at least 2x the conversion campaign budget for your upper funnel campaigns.

A successful test campaign will have the following results:

• Several audience and creative learnings that can be used to update your media plan ahead of the larger campaign launch
• Benchmarks for results across each part of your funnel
• Proof that your funnel works either through purchases or actions that signal purchase intent (Add to Cart, for example)

4. Wait… before you optimize.

You’ve started seeing results, so now what? Typically, you can get a good feel for audience and creative performance within 24-48 hours of spend. However, just because you have results to analyze, this doesn’t mean you’re ready to shift spend based on these preliminary insights. Why not? Let’s look at an example.

How It Works IRL

Your campaign is live! You take a look 48 hours in. You don’t have a purchase yet in your conversion campaign, but you notice something very interesting in your awareness campaign. Women ages 25-45 are clicking through to your site for a lower cost per click than your other targeting groups. You may be tempted to shift your budget away from the other targeting groups, but doing so this early in the campaign is not recommended.

Why not? You have yet to see your full funnel actualize. Yes, women ages 25-45 are currently coming to your site at a more efficient cost per click, but you don’t know yet that this demographic will ultimately convert. Optimizations are key to achieving the best results possible, but optimizations that are made too early and out of context of the full funnel, can actually set your testing back, costing you more money in the long run. Be patient and keep your eyes on the larger goal, before you start making optimizations.

5. Use proxy metrics with caution.

Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about the definition of a proxy metric. A proxy metric is any metric outside of your primary campaign KPI.

You can only optimize toward one metric per campaign, so while proxy metrics can be helpful in telling a more complete story of campaign performance, they can also completely derail a campaign if they’re given more weight than the primary campaign KPI. Let’s look at an example.

How It Works IRL

Proxy metrics are most useful when they’re used in an additive manner. Let’s say you’re running a traffic campaign because you know that site visitors are likely to convert. You have two types of creative running: a video link ad and a carousel. Your video link ad creative is driving a much lower average cost per click, but the carousel creative is driving 5x more post engagements.

What do you do? First, remind yourself of the campaign goal: to drive traffic to your site as efficiently as possible. While it’s great that your carousel creative is resonating with users in a different way, it’s not driving your desired results. An easy solve? Move your carousel creative out of your traffic campaign and use it in your more broad awareness campaigns. Good job. You’ve just used a proxy metric to your advantage without losing out on those very valuable site visitors.

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