targeting Archives - BlitzMetrics

How To Use Facebook Audience Insights To Discover New Targets

In our last blog post about how to use Facebook Audience Insights, we blew the lid off how to understand the treasure trove of data available.

Today, we are building upon that to show you HOW to actually use the tool 🙂

How To Set Audiences in Facebook Audience Insights

In the navigation, go to Audience Insights

Select ‘Everyone On Facebook’
Set the audience Age, Gender, and Location

Set any interest targeting

3 Audience Insight Pro Tips

#1 – Under the Advanced audience settings, you have access to eight other types of audience filters. Use this to get into people’s lives. Leverage information such as their relationship status, parental status, or even political leaning for deeper targeting.

You can pick out and analyze very precise targets

#2 – Get insights into your own Pages by adding in the Page connection filter. Please note you won’t be able to get data if the page doesn’t have enough Likes. Use this to find natural affinities between your business and other brands.

#3 – If you find an audience you want to run some ads at, use the Save button to create an official Audience asset.

Now, you not only know how to read the data, but also how to create your own audiences that can be used in your ad campaigns. Remember, this isn’t limited to the targeting either. Take what you have learned and use it in the content of your ads as well!

How To Use Facebook Audience Insights To Understand Targeting

By Paul S Leave a Comment

If data is the future, Facebook is sitting on a whole mountain of it. Smart business owners can actually mine for insights all they want, for free. The only cost is your time and brain power.

There is a tool called Audience Insights, and not many people know HOW to use it.

My goal for this article is to share how you can leverage this robust data sifting tool to find new and exciting targeting opportunities. One can also use this tool to validate customer avatars as well, if they are so inclined.

In over-simple terms, Audience Insights gives you a looking glass into the corpus of user data available. Not all the user data, but certainly enough to do the job.

On the left of the tool are your audience settings (which we will dig into in another blog post). On the right of the tool, are all the tasty data available in different slices. Should you find an audience slice you really like, you can create a formal Audience to run ads at the top of the tool.

Facebook Audience Insights gives you access into four distinct views of the Facebook users you’ve chosen in the audience settings. Later we will dive much deeper into how these views work. The four views you can see are:

Demographic information such as age, gender, relationship status, education level, and job title.
Page Like information such as top categories and relevant pages.
Location information available by city, country, and language.
Activity information such as how often the selected audience comments or likes a page; also see device usage in this view.

For some of these views, you can also see how your chosen audience compares to the average Facebook user.

As an example, when you look at people who like Coca-Cola in America, they are 27% less likely to be married than the average Facebook user. A simple insight such as this can help you refine your ad targeting. A competitor soda might exclude married people from their ad targeting to try and take some of Coke’s market share.

I believe that most people get confused about Audience Insights because they aren’t sure WHY they are using the tool. The various ways you can tune and select audiences leads to nearly limitless possibility, which can add to the confusion.

To demystify things, let’s look at how to read each view once you have selected an audience (which we show how to do later in the article).

#1 of 4 – How to Understand Demographic View of Audience Insights

The Demographic view shows your audience, the blue bar, and how it stacks up against the average Facebook user. You can hover over the bars for more information. You can even click the bar to add those audience filters to your existing selection.

For those who like Coca-Cola, they are generally younger and not married.

Scrolling further down shows the Job Title and industry information. The bars work the same except they are horizontal. The compare column shows how much more likely your selected audience is to be in that industry. Running ads that are segmented by industry is a great test to see who is really responding to your content.

Food and restaurants employment are 52% more likely than the average Facebook user for people who like Coca-Cola.

# 2 of 4 – How to Understand Page Likes View of Audience Insights

The Page Likes view shows two main chunks of data. First, you can see the top page categories liked by your selected audience. The tool will show 10 categories by default, and you can show more than 30 if you click ‘See All’. Second, you can see related pages and their audience affinities.

Coca-Cola fans really love Hershey’s and Steak ‘n Shake. Targeting these brands might be good for top of funnel awareness if one were a soda competitor.

The relevant pages and affinity section can be sorted by relevance, audience size, and affinity. This can expose other potential targets for advertising.

People who like Coca-Cola are 1,097x more likely to also like Gold Peak Tea- another member of the Coca-Cola brand.

Sometimes, you can find unexpected targeting opportunities. For example, a soda competitor would probably have good luck targeting a specific brand given the data above. That might not be super obvious before one looks at the data.

#3 of 4 – How to Understand Location View of Audience Insights

The Location view allows you to view your selected audience by top cities, countries and languages. This one is pretty self explanatory.

Fun tip: use this to sleuth out popular local places because you can click on the bars. Again, another rich source of potential targeting opportunities.

Indiana, Tennessee, and Texas are the biggest states for Coca-Cola.

I clicked on the Indianapolis bar and went to the Page Likes. These are all popular local places that are enjoyed by people who like Coca-Cola. One might consider geo-targeting these locations for highly targeted ads.

#4 of 4 – How to Understand Activity View of Audience Insights

The Activity view allows you to view your selected audience’s behavior on Facebook as well as some device information. While you can’t click on any of the bars in this view, the behavior data is still highly valuable.

Compared to the average Facebook user, Coca-Cola fans are much more inclined to Like a page, like a post, leave a comment, share a post, or click on an ad.

The only thing notable about American Coca-Cola fans, are that they are 19% more likely to use an iPhone/iPod than the average Facebook user.

There is a setting to change to the Primary Device usage in the upper right of the pane. This means that you are looking at the most used device by a user, rather than the combination of devices (i.e. phone, computer, tablet).

However, if we are only looking at the primary device, a Coca-Cola fan is more likely to be an Android user.

Now that you understand how to read the data, hopefully you can see how this information would be valuable to your business.

Again, there is a LOT of information here. Don’t get overwhelmed. Pick an idea and go with it.

Want to split test Apple vs. Android users? Try it out. Want to only go for single people because the data says so? Give it a shot.

The best part about running social ads is that you can take many shots on goal. By gleaning insight from this tool, you should be able to take more educated and profitable shots at goal.

In a future article, we will show you the best part of this tool…setting audiences!

For now, play around and see what you can discover 🙂

How to create, edit, share, and boost a WHY video

By Kurtis Daems Leave a Comment

Do you have a WHY behind what you do? People are more likely to buy from someone who has a story or mission that they identify with. We believe that the best way to share your stories or mission in an engaging way is through the use of a WHY video. A WHY video defines your reason, or your passion, and it is important to utilize the power of video content and social media to effectively share this with your desired audience.

Video is the most powerful ingredient of your personal brand, starting with your story and amplified by the stories of your ambassadors. It starts with you. Whether you’ve been regularly creating content for 10 years or have never written an article in your life, you’ll be able to easily create a WHY video by following this step-by-step process.

Before filming your WHY video, it is important to consider what your strategy is. There are three main components that make up your strategy: your goals, content, and targeting. When you go to produce or distribute a piece of content, think about what your end goal is. What type of content do you need to produce to achieve this, and what demographics or audiences should see this content? This is the idea behind Goals, Content, and Targeting, or #GCT. By considering these components for your own strategy, you will be able to produce and distribute much more effective video content.

Once you have an idea of what content you’d like to create, it’s go time! There are 4 main components to filming your video. The first is to begin with a hook, or something to quickly capture your audience’s attention as they scroll through their feed. This could be done by movement or something you say. Once you have their attention, you must retain it by bringing them along a journey that will ignite pain or pleasure for them. Here you could tell a story, show a success or failure, or clarify a benefit. At this point, the audience is ready to be presented with a solution or resolution to the story, and you can show that what you offer is that solution. Now the audience is ready to be given a call to action. What should they do as a result of hearing your message? Although these 4 components are more general to any one-minute video you make, they can be applied to producing a WHY video and should be considered when making your own.

In making any video, the key is not to overcomplicate it. No need for fancy equipment– have a friend film you on a cell phone camera, or if you’re by yourself, you can take a selfie video. We have found that vertical or square videos with captioning often perform best due to the fact that they fill most of the screen on mobile devices, which is where the majority of social media users will be. This style of video also comes across as more feed-like and personal, and something people will be much more inclined to stick around and watch as opposed to a professionally-made advertisement.

The biggest issue we see people run into in making their videos is camera shyness and overthinking what they’re going to say. These can both be overcome with repetition and practice, but our biggest piece of advice is to allow yourself to speak from the heart. We believe that sharing your authentic self is much more natural and powerful, because people trust people. As our CEO Dennis Yu says, “Being real is more important than being perfect.”

If necessary, you can edit your video with a headline, captioning, lower-thirds, etc. These help to optimize your videos for views even when people don’t have their sound on.

Once you have the final version of your WHY video, you’re ready to share it. You can upload your video to multiple places, including your Facebook public figure page, LinkedIn page, Twitter, etc. We call this process of sharing a piece of content to multiple platforms “cross-posting”, and by doing this, it will help you to reach more people. Write compelling copy, add automatic subtitles if you don’t already have captioning, and click “Share”.

After publishing your post, the final step we recommend is to boost your post on your Facebook public figure page using the Dollar a Day strategy. (If you have not already created a Facebook public figure page for your business or personal brand, we highly recommend doing so). Boosting is when you put some spend behind a post to help it reach more people who you’d like to see your content. By spending as little as one dollar per day, you’ll be able to gain enough information after several days to help you determine if the post will be a likely winner, based on how it compares to the Standards of Excellence. This low-spend strategy also allows you to test multiple posts and audiences at the same time without breaking the bank, so you can then determine which is receiving the best engagement and should continue to have spend put behind it.

Congratulations! You’ve just successfully created, edited, shared, and boosted your WHY video. This same step-by-step process can be applied to creating any one-minute video, and we highly recommend following this process of determining your goals, content, and targeting and amplifying your video using the Dollar a Day strategy in order to effectively produce, publish, and distribute content going forward.

(P.S.– To see examples of WHY videos, be sure to check out the many videos we have on the “Why” section of our website)

Age Doesn’t Matter: Why Age Restrictions on Your Facebook Page Won’t Hurt Your SEO

By Dan Pasker Leave a Comment

In an effort to keep young people safe, Facebook now requires you to add an age restriction to your page if you are displaying content related to subscription services, student loan services, or dating apps.

In other words, anyone under the age of 18 will not be able to view your Facebook page.

Setting an age restriction is often necessary to comply with Facebook’s guidelines. Obviously, this will restrict how many Facebook users are able to view your content. The question is this:

Will setting an age restriction on your Facebook page impact the organic results you get from people doing Google searches?

Believe it or not, the answer is no!

Here’s why:

Google only identifies Facebook home pages in its search results, not individual posts which may have restricted content. A comparison of Facebook pages with and without age restrictions shows that the organic traffic sent over from Google follows the same pattern for both types of page.
If we’re being honest, then we’ll admit that Google isn’t too interested in displaying Facebook content in their search results anyway. In the same way, Facebook isn’t too interested in displaying Google content (including YouTube videos) in their feeds either. So restricting views in one area really doesn’t have much of an effect on the other.

Bottom Line: When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and online visibility, age really doesn’t matter.

Don’t waste your time going through every old post and scrubbing out every reference to guns or other 18+ content – it won’t impact your search engine activity and just isn’t worth the time or the energy you’ll spend!

Nor is it worth agonizing over how to get more Facebook organic traffic results from Google searches. This is a waste of time. It will not help you keep your marketing priorities in line, grow your business revenue, or increase your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

When it comes to optimizing your search engine results, age really doesn’t matter!

Automotive Social Media Charlatans Exposed

By Marlena Solomon Leave a Comment

I have been a part of the automotive aftermarket for over seven years now. Companies and brands of all shapes and sizes are realizing the relevance and power of social media. While their efforts are admirable, many are not capturing the characteristics of the aftermarket that make it unique from all others. That being said, there is a stark contrast within the measurable, mechanical world of the automotive aftermarket with the fluffy, mysterious world of social.

Bobby Likis host of the Bobby Likis Car Clinic radio show.

So I was wondering…
Does the mechanic ask you what type of wrench to use in fixing your car?

Would you trust a Ferrari mechanic who has never seen a Ferrari before?

Pros fix your problems, have legitimate certifications, and can provide a well-defined outcome with reasonable certainty.

But in social media, we have no such thing yet.
So to avoid being a self-proclaimed social media expert, focus on being a driver (no pun intended) of business value in your area.

There is an assumption that if you know how to post to a social media account is sufficient.
This ability alone does not make you an expert.

The automotive aftermarket segment is like no other, with companies that operate as B2B, B2C and hybrids of both.
Knowing the tone and personality of the brand, and having an understanding of the customer base and audience will allow for good content and even better targeting.

If you don’t know about antifreeze, you’re not going to be able to credibly write content for Prestone.

If you don’t know about how to modify Corvettes for maximum performance, you’ll fail responding to die-hard Lingenfelter fans.

The social media expert dies

Sure, there still will be colleges offering degrees in social media.

And the need for strong measurement in social isn’t going to go away either.

But the one-dimensional social media expert will be extinct.

If you don’t have deep vertical expertise for a particular client, you can’t help them in their social media.

Sorry. Just won’t work.

Your knowledge of how to pin and tweet won’t make up for lack of vertical knowledge.
Same is true for whatever set of tools you employ.

Here’s Rob Schermerhorn, who is a Ferrari mechanic.

Because he’s able to post content that Ferrari owners relate to and because he knows where Ferrari owners hang out (Ferrari Chat), when he runs ads, he gets leads.
This is the GCTA viral cycle:

Goals: Drive leads for his Ferrari tuning service
Content: Lots and lots of examples of him tuning Ferraris over the last 20 years– going faster for cheaper. You’d be surprised at what penny pinchers these guys are, but that’s another story.
Targeting: Ferrari owners, not the 18 year olds who are fans of the Ferrari page. Choose the right interests and demographics. Income works, too.
Amplification: This is where we run ads, but we call it “amplification” instead– the combinations of content and targeting to drive relevant traffic.

These are the mechanics of social media amplification.

Miss any part of this cycle and the wheel collapses.
If you don’t have awesome content, all the analytics and targeting in the world won’t save you.
If you don’t have proper targeting, no amount of measurement or content will win.
If you have clear goals, solid content, and strong targeting, but no amplification– well, you still might win, but you’ll be running on a donut tire.

How are you doing against these factors?

They’re not magical.
It’s just that not many people get this owner’s manual when they get their Facebook page, twitter account, or whatever network profile.

How does a marshmallow and dried spaghetti relate to social media?

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

We wanted to know what happens when you take several professionals who are leaders in their fields and ask them to make a free standing structures out of spaghetti and a marshmallow?

Here are the rules:

You get 20 sticks of dried spaghetti, 1 yard of string, 1 yard of tape and one marshmallow.

The goal is to make to strongest freestanding tower with the marshmallow on the top in 18 minutes or less

Here’s what happened:

We had 6 teams of 4 people building structures, all of them using slightly different designs.

Almost all of them started with a plan. Most of the teams talked it out before hand, developed a plan and a few minutes in started to build. Some even drew their plan on paper.

For almost all of these, they started at the base and worked up according to their plan, and then at the end they added the marshmallow.

And for almost all of these teams, as the towers stood and the teams carefully placed the marshmallows on top, they would slowly let the tower go and watch as it slowly crashed to the ground.

The one exception was the team that started out testing what it took to hold the marshmallow.

The successful team took the tower and tested it, step by step to see what would hold.

So how does this relate to social media marketing?

The way most people view advertising is to make a plan and execute it once, but when it comes to social media it’s not a one shot chance.

In traditional advertising, groups of people will get together and made their best guess as to what will be successful, and after arguing back and forth for a time and eventually coming to a consensus, they will launch the campaign.

Luckily, when you are advertising on social, you don’t have to just rely on a guess. When amplifying your content on social, you get the opportunity to try out a variety techniques and targeting.

Because you are not limited to a fixed, unmovable campaign like you would be with newspaper or magazine advertisement, you can try out a large mix of content and targets and see what works.

But you still don’t want to waste money. On top of that, there are so many options, so how do you start?

Look at your goal(s).

In the marshmallow challenge, the goal was getting the marshmallow to the top.

The group that succeeded started by testing the strength of the spaghetti against the marshmallow then built up from there. Once they discovered how many pieces of pasta it took to hold a marshmallow, they would then keep testing different things to see what would hold.

With social, you can do the same thing. You can start with your content and target it against several different targets that you think may work. After several days, you will see which targets are doing the best. Once you narrow that down, you can test what creatives and content work best.

In the marshmallow challenge, every move that the winning team made had the goal in mind. When optimizing your campaigns for social, you have to do the same thing. With every move you make, you need to have the goal in mind.

If you need a little guidance how you would break this down check out how we believe it should be broken down here.

When amplifying on social, So many people will fail once and then quit, but what they don’t know is that in social, we get a chance to fail many times, at minimal cost, and learn from the failure and apply it to the next campaign.

With the constant “test and tweak” method, you are able to evolve your campaign and determine what is the best content and best targeting so that in the future you will know what will work well. As a result, the process becomes quicker and more cost effective.

Determine the right audience size by using friend-of-fan targeting

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

We previously talked about using exclusion targeting to refine your campaigns, now let’s delve into how to find the right size for your audience.

This technique is not exactly a negative filter, but one of my favorite tactics when choosing audiences is to use friend of fan targeting.

Let’s say that this audience of 68,000 is too big for my budget.

By the way, the rule of thumb on how big your audience targets should be is this: take your daily budget in pennies and multiply by 2 to get your daily audience size. So if you have a $10 daily budget, then you have about 2,000 people you can reach each day.

Assuming you’re managing 10 ads at any one time, then you can have a reach of 200 people in each, giving you a total reach of 2,000.

And since half of Facebook users log-in each day, you could go for an audience of 400 people, which gives you a net 200 people each day.

This audience of 68,000 gives us an effective reach of 34,000 (since half of folks log in each day). And at our average newsfeed CPM of $5 (the pennies x 2 trick above), it would cost us $5 x 34 to reach them daily, which is $170.

But in my example, I have only $10 a day.

So I want to hit a more precise audience. And now I’ll use friend-of-fan targeting to filter it down a bit.

I’ve now got 16,800, which is slightly on the high side.

Some people will say that there’s no downside to targeting an audience that is more than you have dollars to reach.

To which I say– why waste money unless it’s not yours? By adding in the connection target, I’m showing ads to people who have friends that are fans of BlitzMetrics.

All else equal, people who are fans of Mari Smith AND have a friend who is a fan, too, will be more motivated to click than those who don’t have a friend’s endorsement.

What should ultimately be governing my budget is profitability. If I’m making money on margin, then I should keep expanding until my margin cost is equal to my marginal revenue. That’s first semester economics for you!

I like to use FOF (friend-of-fan) targeting in nearly every ad. Having the magic combination of social trust as well as topical relevance (they’re interested in what I have to offer) is what drives conversion.

The only times I break this rule are:

When the client just wants a lot of fans– quantity over quality.
The audience is so small that the FOF filter makes it too small.
I’m trying to manipulate the media— when I workplace targeting, the goal is to get the impression, not necessarily a click. The audiences are usually quite small, except for those targeting Facebook as a workplace (too many users listing this).

Hope this helps you in your targeting escapades!

Let us know how this works for you.

How Will Facebook Graph Search Change Sponsored Results?

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

With Facebook’s announcement of Graph Search, marketers anxiously awaited to see how they could take advantage of the new real estate. Look at all that space!

Last fall, “Sponsored Results” started appearing in the search bar. Even though there isn’t much traffic, these ad units are surprisingly powerful. We’ve seen CTR in the 5-10% range, and CPCs of $0.05 – $0.10. Advertisers can use this ad unit to “brand bid” on competitors’ names, or what’s even more powerful is to target a set of users and bid on a wide range of popular keywords.

This is especially sneaky because we’re not really bidding on the keywords, we’re bidding on a set of users to search for anything.

See how Degree Tree and Oxford Seminars come up when I start to search for Coca-Cola?

So will these ads be effective with Graph Search? Let’s take a look at old vs. new:

At first glance, Graph Search is a much wider bar – wide enough for them to have replaced the Facebook logo with just the “f”!

The ad still looks pretty good, and it’s not in a “Sponsored” section like before, but they’ve added the “Sponsored Software” badge to let users know it’s an ad. Will this affect CTR? As Graph Search is released to more and more users, we’re expecting:

Search volumes to increase, since Graph Search one of the 3 pillars of Facebook, as mentioned by Zuck. Might search on Facebook be bigger and more effective than RHS (right-hand side ads)? We think so.

Graph Search expands search from a single term to social connectedness, geography, and actions. How will us marketers choose to serve ads within this framework?

We think sponsored stories are even more important, since graph search is based on a user’s context ¾ what their friends have done.

How do we get more results in graph search, paid or not? Get more social actions ¾ likes, comments, check-ins, offers claimed, and so forth. We’re way beyond the days of just growing fans.

Matt Prater spends his professional life managing Facebook marketing campaigns, training agency partners, and working closely with brands such as Nickelodeon, Nike, Viacom, and PBS. His area of expertise includes ad campaign management and project development. Earlier this year, Matt was a featured speaker at several social media workshops for agencies in Bogota, Colombia as a part of the BlitzMetrics Certified Partner program. He graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder with degrees in Economics and Political Science. Outside of work, Matt is an avid tennis player and enjoys rock climbing, cycling, and travel.

Creative Ways We Use Custom Audiences at BlitzMetrics

By Dennis Yu 2 Comments

Custom audiences are one of the many Facebook marketing tools we use to do thoughtful analysis that makes a real impact. The purpose of a custom audience is to target your entire list or specific segments of your list exclusively but the application of custom audiences goes far beyond that.

To create a custom audience, prepare your list (or segment) as a single column .csv and download Facebook’s Power Editor plugin. There are several options for custom audiences: email addresses, phone numbers, user IDs, and app user IDs.

Keep in mind that you can upload different list segments and do all of the below for each segment – the level of granularity is up to you. Uploading your entire list can work in ad targeting and has some practical use with custom audiences but think about trying some segments like:

Customers who have purchased
Frequent and reoccurring customers
Hot leads and report opt-ins
Webinar attendees
Conference/speaking engagement attendees
Customers who came from various traffic sources (SEM, Facebook ads, display ads, YouTube, etc.)
Unsubscribe list (gray hat)
SMS text messaging list
Get creative – there are unlimited possibilities!

Alright, Tom. I’ve got my custom audiences uploaded to Facebook and I’m ready to do this thing, what’s next? Here are some of the more creative ways we use custom audiences internally at BlitzMetrics:

Analysis against social interests

If you take a look at our documentation on social affinity for ad targeting you can do something very similar with custom audiences. Instead of finding the overlap between your brand and a particular interest you can see how many of the people within your custom audience have certain interests.

Determining how social your list is

After uploading your custom audience to Facebook, you can find out exactly what percentage of that list is on the social network. This is very useful for determining how social these people are and in some cases can help determine if marketing your brand on social media channels will be effective.

Demographic breakdown of segments

Did you know you can also do demographic breakdowns of a custom audience the same way you pull ad counts for precise interests? How much of the list is men? Women? What states and regions are they from? This information can eliminate up to 80-90% of wasted ad spend and help create an ad targeting strategy.

Lets say you upload your hot prospect list which only contains leads that have opted-in for a free white paper and clicked one of your ads within the last 30 days (we can accomplish this with InfusionSoft). You might find that 85% of the list is women, over 50% live in California, and 100% of the list is between ages 20 and 35. Knowing this you can target exclusively women that live in California between ages 20-35. This isn’t only useful for Facebook either, but all other channels as well.

Lookalike audiences

Another feature many marketers ignore on Facebook is lookalike audiences. The way it works is you upload your list and Facebook automatically matches the demographic qualities of your list with other related users.

This helps get your brand in front of new prospects that are similar to your existing audience. There are 2 options for lookalike audiences: reach and similarity. Reach will give you a larger list of people to target but similarity will match the interest and demographic profile of your list as closely as possible, likely creating the greatest efficiency. Both are worth testing!

Lead nurturing

How well rounded is your lead nurturing program? Sales funnels, especially for high priced or high value items are not 2 steps. You need to provide value up front, then provide more value and thought leadership, then nurture your leads by staying on their radar. I don’t care what business you’re in, nurturing your leads is going to make your marketing more effective.

Then, when the time is right figure out how you can help them and take action. If you’re doing nothing more than sending a “thanks for signing up” email you need to rethink your strategy. Use marketing automation to regularly rotate in fresh prospects once the existing leads are lower in the funnel due to your nurturing efforts.

Did this post give you some ideas? You don’t have to use the tools available “as is” – think of creative uses to maximize your output, make your targeting more effective or more granular, and most importantly drive measurable ROI. If you think of any other uses for custom audiences I didn’t mention let me know in the comments!