Facebook recently surpassed a monumental 3 billion individual users in 2023. In the past year, the advertising platform has undergone a series of transformations, ranging from subtle refinements in the Ads Manager interface to more substantial overhauls, such as the revamping of their campaign objectives. Whether the changes are small or large, Facebook consistently adapts its advertising platform to remain at the forefront of innovation. 

Drawing from our experience of these changes over the years, Tuff is here to equip you with the insights and strategies needed to navigate the forthcoming year.

Welcome to the 2024 Facebook Advertising Guide, where we delve into the ever-shifting realm of Facebook advertising and provide you with a glimpse of the strategies that will define the year ahead.

Facebook Ads Landscape in 2024

A Bird’s Eye View: How Facebook Ads Have Transformed

Facebook is constantly evolving many aspects of its advertising platform–from smaller changes like elements of the Ads Manager interface to larger changes like removing certain targeting options or introducing new placement features. Over just the past three years, we’ve encountered changes that have made a serious difference on the platform, such as:

• The switch to standard events and Aggregated Event Measurement with the release of Apple’s iOS 14.5 in early 2021
• The restriction of viewing ad metric reporting limited to the preceding 37 months
• The removal of several detailed targeting options including sensitive options referencing health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation
• The introduction of Facebook/Instagram Reels, a new video-first format

In addition to these specific changes, Facebook has also been moving to Meta Advantage products. These tools automate certain aspects of your ad campaigns, making the most of AI to optimize the value of your advertising investments and the visibility your ads receive.. Advantage+ placements replaced Automatic Placements; Advantage+ campaign budget replaced Campaign Budget Optimization; Advantage+ catalog ads replaced Dynamic Ads; Advantage+ detailed targeting replaced detailed targeting expansion. And those are only a few of the ways Facebook is moving toward automatic options. 

Key Trends and Predictions: What Marketers Can Anticipate

Facebook has already started announcing other changes rolling out next year, including simplified campaign objectives, which will be introduced in early 2024. While Facebook has updated its campaign objectives before, this is significant because they will streamline the existing eleven objectives into six new ones: sales, leads, engagement, app promotion, traffic, and awareness. Some of the objectives that are being phased out will become optimization tactics that you can select within the new objectives.

Marketers can anticipate Facebook to keep moving toward a more user-friendly ads platform, one that includes more AI-related features. The Advantage products have given us a taste of how AI can be of use on the platform, but Facebook is also beginning to release generative AI-powered features for ad creatives that will be fully rolled out in 2024. The intent is for these features to “unlock a new era of creativity that maximizes the productivity, personalization and performance for all advertisers.” Put simply – Facebook is jumping on the capabilities of AI to make life easier for advertisers. They aim to be the go-to platform for those looking to promote their products or services.

The New Normal: Ad Costs, Competition, and User Behavior

You’re probably asking yourself, “How much do Facebook Ads cost?” or “How will I stay competitive?” These are great questions, and we’ll provide some guidance throughout this article.

At Tuff, we analyze performance data from all of our partners every quarter to create updated benchmarks of what we’re seeing across industries. Here is the latest data we’ve found:

2024 Facebook Advertising Benchmarks by Objective

2024 Facebook Advertising Benchmarks by Industry

With competition being fiercer than ever, it’s important to come to the table (the Facebook table) with fresh new ways to get in front of your target audience. New automatic and generative AI features in-platform are making advertisers feel more confident with advertising on Facebook by saving time and resources. 

Ready to keep diving into the nitty-gritty of what you can expect from Facebook Ads in 2024? 

Granular Facebook Targeting

2024’s Advanced Targeting Options

There are a multitude of targeting options available on Meta. You can drill down on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by location targeting and detailed targeting. Digging into what these options entail… 

• Location Targeting: This includes the ability to target users by their country, region or city (or have recently visited). 
• Detailed Targeting: This is comprised of age ranges, genders, languages, demographics, interests, behaviors, and custom audiences.
  • Age Ranges: Users ranging from 13-65+
  • Genders: Women, men, or people of all genders
  • Languages: Specific languages to accommodate localization strategies
  • Demographics: Education, employment, household, and lifestyle details
  • Interests: Interests, activities, the Pages they have liked, and closely related topics
  • Behaviors: Purchase behaviors or intents, device usage, and more
  • Custom Audiences: Users who have already shown an interest in your business or product – You can choose from your owned sources (website data, app activities, catalogs, customer lists, offline activities) or from Meta sources (video engagement, lead forms, instant experiences, shopping, FB/IG accounts, events, on-Facebook listings)
    • Pssst, custom audiences are the sources that lookalike audiences are created from!

Let’s go a step beyond what Meta offers on paper and talk through how you might get creative and put these into use in a campaign for your business. 

Beating the Competition: Leveraging Unique Targeting Strategies

There are many components of a successful Meta campaign. Your targeting strategy is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to getting in front of the right audience.

At the end of the day, you could be optimizing your campaign for the right objective and have the best creative assets – But if you’re not targeting the right audience, you’re never going to see the results you want.

Let’s chat through how you might use unique targeting strategies to get in front of the right audiences and beat your competitors. 

Prospecting

• Interests and behaviors
  • Instead of targeting: Health and wellness interests and engaged shoppers behaviors
  • Think: Health and wellness interests narrowed by engaged shoppers behaviors
• Lookalike audiences 
  • Instead of targeting: LAL off of past purchasers
  • Think: LAL off of past purchasers with a higher-than-average product price 

By implementing these modifications in your prospecting strategy, you can enhance your chances of reaching audiences with a stronger interest in your products or services and increase the potential for conversions.

Retargeting

• Custom audiences – Your sources
  • Instead of targeting: Website visitors
  • Think: Website visitors of a specific landing page with a frequency of 2+
• Custom audiences – Meta sources
  • Instead of targeting: All video viewers
  • Think: People who have either completed or viewed at least 15 seconds of videos in a specific prospecting campaign

These improvements mean you can optimize your ad campaigns to reach users who have demonstrated a higher level of engagement and interest in your brand, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

By drilling down more specifically on these targeting options, you should be able to:

• Allocate your ad dollars towards the most qualified users
• Increase your ad frequency, brand awareness and recall
• Pair specific creative messages and assets with specific audiences
• Increase conversions, improve CPAs and strengthen CVRs

Transitioning to the next section, we’ve covered the significance of unique targeting strategies and the optimal management of ad frequency. Now, let’s dive into setting up a robust testing framework, followed by measuring and scaling the results of your Facebook ad campaigns for success in 2024.

Optimizing Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

Pro Tips: Effective Use of Facebook Pixel in 2024

As you begin your journey with Facebook advertising, one of the first things to do is to set up a pixel in your ad account and place it on your website or app.

You can do this in a few ways, such as placing it via a tag manager, like Google Tag Manager, or placing it directly in the header of your website. You can make sure that it’s firing effectively on your website by using Preview mode of Google Tag Manager or installing the Meta Pixel Helper Chrome extension. Facebook also offers a Testing Tool you can utilize in Events Manager!

Once your pixel is placed, you can begin setting up either standard events or custom conversions (events) to track specific actions happening on your site, such as page views, add to carts, purchases, leads, or registrations completed. 

Facebook offers a default list of standard events that you can readily configure to match activities on your website. . But if the action you want to track isn’t on that list, you have the option to create custom events, such as tracking button clicks, form submissions, or interactions with unique features.

We may find advertisers beginning to utilize these custom events even more in 2024 now that Facebook no longer requires you to lean on the standard events and prioritize them to your pixel (this was a process that was rolled out when iOS 14.5 was released a few years ago). 

After your pixel is correctly placed and events are configured, you can start gathering data about visitors coming from your ads and monitor their activities on your website. You can also startbucketing them into your retargeting audience to serve ads to them again later. 

Ad Frequency Matters: Striking the Perfect Balance

Facebook’s ad frequency metric refers to the average number of times a particular ad is shown to a unique user within the timeframe you’re looking at in Ads Manager. TLDR – the amount of times someone is seeing the exact same ad of yours. And while showing the same ad to the same user is a good thing and necessary to break through the noise, it can also be a negative thing if your ad frequency is too high. Ad fatigue happens when individuals encounter an ad so often that they begin to ignore it and simply pass it by without paying much attention.

If your ad frequency is too low, it can result in fewer conversions and a higher CPA because people don’t see your ad often enough to generate interest and take action. Conversely, having a too high ad frequency can lead to a lower click-through rate because some people might not be interested in clicking, despite repeatedly seeing your ad, resulting in more impressions but fewer clicks.

Our general guideline is to maintain an ad frequency between 1 and 6.

The ideal frequency depends on several key factors:

• Number of Ads: If you’re running multiple ads in your campaign, you’ll have a more extensive pool of creatives to show to your audience. This naturally keeps individual ad frequencies from becoming excessively high.
• Audience Size: In smaller audiences, there are fewer people to show your ads to, so the same individuals are more likely to see them repeatedly, potentially leading to a higher frequency.
• Budget: A higher budget enables you to generate more impressions, which can, in turn, lead to a higher frequency.
• Creative Quality: If your creative content is of low quality or hasn’t been updated in a while, this can result in a higher frequency, contributing to ad fatigue.

Facebook used to offer a cap that you could set for frequency to limit the number of times the same user saw your ad, but this feature is no longer available. We recommend you monitor this metric on your campaigns and individual ads closely, and if you find that your frequency is approaching the high end of the recommended range, you make optimizations such as refreshing your creative, layering more ads in, expanding your audience, or adjusting your budget.

Testing Framework

Now that we’ve talked about some of the most important components of a successful campaign, let’s dive into how to set up a solid testing framework to get the results you’re looking for.

To get the most out of all of your tests, it’s important to isolate variables. Whether you’re testing campaign objectives, bid strategies, audiences, messaging options, creative assets, different calls-to-action, or landing pages, it’s crucial to focus your attention on one to get the cleanest and most accurate results.

If you want to determine which campaign objectives are best for your business, you might structure a test like:

• ⭐ Optimize for different campaign objectives ⭐
• Allocate the same budget and bidding strategy
• Use the same key audiences
• Run for the same length of time
• Test the same creative assets, messaging or CTAs

If you want to determine which key audiences are best for your business, you might structure a test like:

• Optimize for the same campaign objective
• Allocate the same budget and bidding strategy
• ⭐ Test different key audiences and tailored creative / messaging ⭐
• Run for the same length of time

If you want to determine which creative is best for your business, you might structure a test like:

• Optimize for the same campaign objective
• Allocate the same budget and bidding strategy
• Use the same key audiences
• Run for the same length of time
• ⭐ Test different creative assets, messaging or CTAs ⭐

Logistically, you can use Meta’s A/B testing functionality in-platform to minimize competition (against yourself!) – Specifically if you’re testing audiences.

You’re not limited to just an A/B test – You can test up to five campaigns or up to five ad sets against one another. If you want to test different ad designs or messaging, it’s a good idea to separate this process into different ad sets. This allows you to focus on the most important groups of people, making sure you get the most value out of your advertising budget.

Something like this: 

This structure ensures you’re focusing on the variations between creative vs. grouping them altogether in one ad set and having the algorithm dedicate all of the budget toward one variation. 

Analytics: Measuring and Scaling

Choosing how to optimize your campaigns successfully is arguably the most important piece of the puzzle – Measuring your results success rate and scaling what worked. If something’s working for your brand, you want to be able to replicate it, iterate upon it, and continue to test and learn new things (the cycle never ends!). 

Starting with measuring results –  We typically think about campaigns in two buckets:

• Brand – Building your brand, whether that is with awareness or recall
• Performance – Driving specific results 

With brand campaigns, we’re focused on top- and mid-funnel metrics like impressions, CPM, landing page views, cost per landing page views (CPLPV), click-through rates (CTR), ThruPlays, ThruPlay Rates, and ad frequency. Whereas, with performance campaigns, we’re focused more so on bottom-funnel metrics like conversion volume, cost per conversion, conversion rate, return on ad spend (ROAS), and revenue.

Once you’ve determined what works, you’ll get to work on scaling it. For scaling, we also think about this in two buckets: Scaling vertically or horizontally.

• Vertically – Pump more money into what you know works, aka existing campaigns.
• Horizontally – Identify opportunities outside of what you know what works, aka new audiences or creative.

While vertical scaling may initially appear to be cost-effective, long-term success often comes from horizontal scaling, which opens up new opportunities and growth potential for your campaigns. With a strong foundation in measuring, optimizing, and scaling your campaigns, let’s now delve into the specific ad formats available in 2024, examining their advantages and disadvantages.

2024’s Facebook Ad Formats: Pros and Cons

Now, let’s dive into the world of Facebook ad formats in 2024. In the section below, we’ll break down the pros and cons of each format to help you make informed decisions about your advertising strategy. It’s all about finding the right fit for your business and making the most of your marketing efforts. Let’s get started!

The Future of Advertising on Facebook

Facebook is always introducing new features to continue growing and engaging its user base. There are countless opportunities for all different brands to show up strategically, build their brand presence, and ultimately increase profitability. 

If you’re wondering where to start, what to focus on, or what your advertising journey might look like on Facebook, then hit us up! Our team of paid social experts is here to assist you. We have the experience, expertise, and creative chops to supercharge your campaigns. We’ll ensure your brand stands out amidst the digital noise.

Kate Theobald

Hey there! I’m Kate, the Head of Social at Tuff. I specialize in crafting paid social campaigns and testing performance creative to drive business results. Outside of Tuff, I enjoy tackling home renovation projects, skiing, and nerding out over the Enneagram (personality test)!

The post 2024 Facebook Advertising Guide appeared first on Tuff.

The Internet is constantly evolving with a new platform or a new tactic or a new feature coming out nearly every week. This means that growth marketing is also constantly evolving, and it’s really easy to want to jump onto every shiny new toy as they roll out. Our expertise here at Tuff is in a variety of areas and especially growth and performance marketing. Therefore, we’re always looking for new ways to diversify our partners’ channel mix to utilize their digital ad spend to drive the best, most efficient results possible.

How to choose channels to diversify your digital ad spend

If you’re considering trying out a few new platforms, we recommend asking yourself some key questions before you decide which ones to explore:

• What is the budget I have to work with, and what do I feel comfortable spending on a daily basis in a given channel?
• Who is the audience I’m trying to reach? How can I reach them – by interest, demographic, groups they’re apart of?
• What type of creative do I have access to or what can I create? 
• What kind of time do I have to manage these campaigns and make optimizations? 

Once you’re able to answer some of these questions, you’ll be able to figure out quickly which channels you have the resources and bandwidth for. Now for some ideas…

TikTok

This may seem like a no-brainer at this point, but we have a lot of partners who come to us looking to diversify their channel mix who are not yet running paid ads on TikTok! This is usually the first channel businesses who have just started to scratch the surface of paid social want to explore next, and for a good reason: TikTok reported that they have 150 million monthly active users in the US in March 2023 – up by 50 million in just 2 years. 40% of users have reported that they don’t have a Facebook, so if you’re looking to get in front of an audience that you haven’t tapped into just yet, they are likely here. We’ve tested TikTok for both B2C and B2B businesses and have seen success with both!

TikTok is a great channel to explore if you’re looking for a way to promote your product or service with creative video assets. The best part? They don’t even need to be super-produced or polished. In fact, the audience on TikTok gravitates toward ads that appear more native to the platform, like scrappy UGC testimonials, the green screen feature, and trending sounds. We’ve even seen success with ads made for TikTok on other channels, like Facebook and Instagram, which shows that people are looking to consume this type of content.

You have the ability to target by age range, gender, geographic locations (states, cities, or DMAs), interests, hashtags, behaviors, and more (hint: we have a lot of success with broad targeting, meaning no additional targeting outside of geographic and age targeting 😉) You can even leverage an ad format called Spark Ads, which allows you to run an already-existing TikTok video from your own organic account or influencers’, appearing even more native on the channel.

Pros: possibilities to be more creative with your video assets due to the nature of the platform; large audience in mostly every age range

Cons: limited geographic targeting (no postal codes or radius targeting); strict ad policies; higher daily budget necessary to make a mark than other ad platforms

Perfect For: B2C or B2B advertisers looking to generate awareness and conversions through video creative to a very engaged audience

Reddit

In an age of both community and curiosity, people are very often looking toward platforms where they can ask questions, learn new things, and interact with like-minded individuals, and Reddit is the perfect place to do all of the above. Reddit is a social media channel but also a forum and news site where people can join hundreds of thousands of communities, or “subreddits,” that usually fall within a specific category. 

Reddit users are typically very active and spend time on the channel every day – it’s expected that 55.79 million people will use the channel daily this year. This means the reach you’d have access to is pretty massive. Reddit users are pretty tuned into whatever it is they’re reading or talking about in subreddits, and they also tend to be more skeptical of advertising on the platform. It’s important to really make your creative native to the platform and to target very specifically so that you make sure you’re reaching the right audience. Targeting options include communities (subreddits), interests, custom audiences (like lists, remarketing audiences, and lookalike audiences), and, as of June 2023, keywords. 

The platform also offers a wide range of ad formats, including text ads, image ads, video ads, carousel ads, and even a product called Conversation Placements, which sit within a conversation thread under a post but above the first comment, appearing like a native addition to the conversation. The key to success in optimizing your Reddit ad creative is to make sure you’re producing assets that do not appear too much like an ad but rather a way to make a valuable contribution to the subreddit. 

Pros: exposure to a highly-engaged audience; a variety of targeting options (and you have the ability to do audience research directly on the platform by perusing subreddits); less expensive than other ad platforms

Cons: not every subreddit that exists is available to target as a community; Reddit users may ignore ads more than users on other ad platforms; very simple ad formats

Perfect For: advertisers looking to reach a niche audience where they’re already spending time (like people interested in career development, shopping, fitness and health, personal finance, etc.)

Programmatic

“Programmatic” has been a buzzword for a while and we’ve certainly been hearing more and more partners who are interested in testing it out as of late.

In essence, programmatic advertising allows advertisers to reach very specific audiences outside of Google and Facebook/Instagram.  Notable programmatic platforms include StackAdapt, The Trade Desk, and Criteo, though there are many others.

Ad types include standard display, video, CTV, audio, and native display, making it easy to repurpose assets used on other channels before investing into platform-specific creatives.  Using benchmark data from legacy platforms will help inform early optimizations and the overall effectiveness of the strategy. If you’re looking to tap into a platform that can massively scale your digital ad spend, programmatic may be just the thing for you. Let’s take a quick look at a few of our favorite platforms.

The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is the biggest player in the programmatic space. This is the home of more traditional Media Buying. You can go here to advertise on all of the big networks you are familiar with. Fox, ABC, ESPN, CBS and everything in between are available for placements. Out of all of the programmatic platforms, Trade Desk has the largest inventory available out of all of the possible programmatic platforms, but also the highest minimum spend thresholds. 

With revenue over $1B annually, they are certainly a giant in the space, but it makes sense as to why they are so large. They are used by agencies, large media companies, and many enterprise level companies. Their open API makes Trade Desk a perfect fit for a team with a large swath of data to analyze and utilize. You can plug directly into the platform and get to work immediately with all of your data at your fingertips. 

Pros: Virtually unlimited inventory, multiple integrations with other platforms, open API.

Cons: High monthly minimum spend not achievable for smaller businesses. 

Perfect For: Media buying agency or enterprise level company.

Criteo

When we think about Criteo, we think about dynamic retargeting. If you are an ecommerce business, Criteo may be just right for you. It makes it incredibly easy to retarget users who have been to a product page, but have yet to convert. They have placements all over the internet that engage users throughout the full buying journey. Criteo is truly a powerful option for nurturing people who are familiar with your brand or product, but need that extra nudge over the finish line.

According to the company, they serve over 5 billion ads per day. Although retargeting users is one of Criteo’s strongest assets, they offer solutions for demand generation, customer acquisition, and brand awareness. Their platform is as easy to use as any of the top competitors in the programmatic space, making this a viable option for just about any advertiser.

Pros: Quality machine learning, high end placements, detailed remarketing

Cons: If you are not an ecommerce business, this may not be the most effective platform four you

Perfect For: Ecommerce business looking to retarget users with product related ads.

StackAdapt

There’s lots to love about StackAdapt. It’s an easy to use programmatic platform that allows brands to advertise on Display, Video, Native, CTV, and Audio placements all over the web. Their reporting is top notch and can easily integrate with any internal CRMs, pixels, or preferred tracking platforms while also providing an accurate representation of data directly in the platform. 

One of the best selling points of this programmatic platform is that there is no minimum to run campaigns. This can be added easily to any media plan. Many others have minimums of $50,000 or above, but with StackAdapt, you can do powerful testing on a limited budget. Their access to audiences is another key area that Tuff utilizes when advertising for our partners. We have access to over 300,000 audience lists for both B2C and B2B users. Regardless of the business or budget, StackAdapt may be for you when thinking of running any kind of brand campaign. 

Pros: Variety of ad formats, lots of creative options, massive reach of users, effective targeting options, no minimum spend required, self serve platform.

Cons: Easy to get lost in the weeds or overspend on ineffective placements.

Perfect For: Business of any size looking to test programmatic on a large or small scale. 

MNTN CTV

We’ve been hearing for many years now that linear TV advertising is out, especially with the rise of social media and the Internet, where we’ve unlocked other avenues to advertise to an audience. However, when Connected TV advertising about 5 years ago, advertisers quickly saw the value of promoting their content through the channel. As of July 2022, a report from Nielsen reported that streaming platforms accounted for just about 35% of total TV consumption, beating our cable and broadcast TV.

CTV advertising refers to video ads that are delivered to an audience over the Internet as they stream movies and TV shows through their Smart TV or devices like an Amazon Fire Stick or Roku. You’re able to reach people with the impact of traditional TV advertising but with the precision and measurement capabilities you’re used to having access to through digital advertising, like audience-based targeting, IP-based targeting, and multi-touch attribution. You also have access to a self-service advertising platform where you can navigate everything from campaign set-up to adjusting our daily budgets to generating customizable reports.

Pros: ease of use with an intuitive advertising platform; customizable campaign set-ups; finetuned audience targeting; customizable reporting options; accurate, real-time multi-touch attribution 

Cons: you need to work with a CSM to create and set up your account; more expensive than typical digital advertising on social and programmatic platforms

Perfect For: advertisers who have polished, produced video assets they’re looking to get in front of a large audience 

Nextdoor

Nextdoor advertising has become an attractive option for many advertisers, with 1-in–3 of US households being present on the platform.  Data indicates that these users make 90% of their purchases within 15 miles of their work or home, and predominantly from local businesses.  

When Tuff works with partners that have more of a local target audience, Nextdoor is one of the first non-traditional PPC tactics we explore. 

While Nextdoor is a great emerging channel for diversifying your digital ad spend, we do run the disclaimer that it likely won’t be a major part of your media budget. With limited placements and a growing userbase, it’s hard to spend a large amount of money on Nextdoor in any given month – although this could change in the near future as they continue to grow. 

Pros: Hyperlocal targeting, affordable CPMs, engaged local audiences

Cons: Smaller userbase, limited placements

Perfect For: Businesses with local presences

Pinterest

Pinterest can be a great option for advertisers, especially for ones that already possess a strong paid search strategy.  This is because the Pinterest platform allows you to use keyword targeting.  Since Pinterest is used as a search engine, this makes sense and can allow for incredibly targeted advertising.

The platform also has other traditional targeting methods that mirror Facebook, Instagram, and Google audience targeting, such as interest-based targeting.

Pinterest is a largely untapped platform, especially for ecommerce brands and service businesses. Since Pinterest users are planners, we recommend using their larger attribution windows (30 / 30 / 30) and using it as a mid-funnel tactic to increase consideration for your brand, and having it be a smaller part of your digital ad spend. 

Pros: Visually appealing ad formats, very active userbase, lots of targeting options (intent + demographic)

Cons: Low last-click activity, longer attribution windows

Perfect For: Businesses trying to reach users in the consideration stage of the funnel

Spotify

Spotify should definitely be considered when attempting to diversify ad spend and reach new audiences.  As one of the largest podcast and music streaming services in the world, the reach is massive and the audio ad-format adds another method of communicating with your target audience.

However, the targeting on Spotify can seem somewhat limited when compared to other platforms. Though reduced targeting options may cause an advertiser to shy away from the platform, it is still worth testing as a top-of-funnel awareness play due to its tremendous reach. 

Pros: Good ad formats, affordable CPMs

Cons: Limited targeting options, secondary platform

Perfect For: Businesses trying to scale top of funnel reach

Microsoft Ads

Formerly known as Bing Ads, this platform is an obvious choice for businesses or advertisers looking for incremental conversions for their product or service. Microsoft Ads has basically the same offering as Google Ads. You can advertise on Bing with Search and Shopping Ads easily by importing campaigns directly from Google into Microsoft. This import feature makes this platform highly accessible to businesses of all sizes. 

Even though search volume is of course much smaller than Google Ads, Bing has some unique offerings that make it a great option to add to your marketing mix. According to Microsoft, they own 17% of desktop market share, meaning that there are over 600 million PC users available to reach. This equates to over 13 billion monthly searches. Yes, that is 13 billion! Google is obviously the main player when it comes to online searches, but Bing has a significant reach that cannot be forgotten about. 

Users of Bing also tend to be older and have higher incomes than the average user on Google. With 36% of its users in the top 25% of household income, Bing’s audience has more buying power for your product or service. We tend to allocate around 10% of the overall paid search budget to Microsoft Ads at the start. Learn what works for your business on this platform and scale from there!

Pros: Tends to bring in cheaper CPCs than Google Ads, lots of desktop traffic, substantial buying power from user base.

Cons: Less overall search volume than Google Ads, user interface is sometimes hard to navigate

Perfect For: Business with an older target demographic, or one who is looking to find incremental conversions to accompany other paid search and shopping efforts. 

Things to Avoid While Diversifying Digital Ad Spend

While testing new channels and tactics for your digital ad spend, it’s important to remember that channel diversification can take many forms and isn’t a one-size fits all. It’s also not a panacea – testing a new channel and finding a strategy that works for you will take time. You shouldn’t expect to see immediate results on a new channel by copying the strategy you have on one of your primary channels – it will take testing, learning, and refining to find the right tactic for you.

Here are some common mistakes we see in digital ad spend diversification that you should try to mitigate: 

It takes time to optimize

Most tests and experiments on new channels don’t work in the sense that they are a completely new tactic, and take time to master. Don’t try to diversify ad spend and expect to get the same results you’re seeing on other channels in week, or even month one. 

Don’t forget to account for extra management

Adding new channels can increase the complexity of reporting, optimization, and overall management. Instead of checking Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Google Analytics, for example, now you’ve got to learn how to incorporate new channels’ data and reporting dashboards into your existing systems and processes. 

Don’t over-diversify

While diversification of spend and strategy is a great idea, over-diversification is a thing and can present issues of its own.  If spend is spread too thinly across multiple new channels or platforms (or even multiple campaigns or ad creatives in one platform), it will take longer to gather actionable data and will be much more difficult to gauge the effectiveness of.

Want to Diversify Your Digital Ad Spend?

Tuff has managed ads on just about every platform imaginable, with budgets from partners ranging from a few thousand dollars, to one million-plus a month. Whether you’re in scale-up mode and wanting to try some new tactics or channels, or you want to optimize your advertising efforts on your existing channels, we can help. Let’s talk!

The post 8 Channels to Diversify Your Digital Ad Spend appeared first on Tuff.

When we first started working with Pathstream – a Series A startup that offers online certification programs that help people level up their careers, they were spending nearly $1m each quarter in ad spend to hit their lead volume goals, but with a ROAS right around 1.10. They were hitting their application targets, but they were breaking even doing it. 

By restructuring ad accounts, testing creative, audience targeting, and different conversion events, we were able to help decrease Pathstream’s CAC by 59%, leading to their most efficient quarter ever and hitting their ideal LTV to CAC ratio for the first time. 

For 80% of our partners, we take a blended approach to reducing CAC – we focus on decreasing costs on ad channels to send more traffic to the site with the same amount of money, and we create a CRO strategy to improve website conversion rates. 

The exception? When development capabilities are limited or a partner has a custom CMS. That was the case for Pathstream. We weren’t able to implement robust CRO tests in order to improve CAC – we had to get creative when it came to optimizing Facebook and paid search campaigns on Google to hit those CAC targets.

Facebook

When we first partnered with Pathstream, a majority of their ad spend was dedicated to Facebook ads, but the cost per lead, cost per application and cost per enrollment were extremely high and they knew they needed to drive these costs down in order to keep investing a large majority of their paid spend into Facebook. 

With this goal in mind, our social ads team immediately started diving into the Pathstream ad accounts and analyzing the existing data to identify opportunities or “quick wins” as we call them, while also simultaneously working on a longer term strategy for driving down Facebook costs. 

Here’s a sneak peak of how we drove down their Facebook CPL by 63% year over year. 

Testing new audiences 

We tested a handful of new audiences over the past year for Pathstream from job titles, to interests, demographics and lookalikes. We found that our most successful audiences were based on interests for specific Pathstream programs (Asana, Salesforce, Digital Marketing, Data Analytics) and a lookalike of 5% based off of previous Pathstream students who have enrolled in one of their certification programs. 

Since some of the program interests we were targeting could possibly have overlap (Example: Digital Marketing and Data Analytics), we used the audience overlap tool to ensure that the overlap wasn’t greater than 40% so that our program specific audiences wouldn’t be bidding against each other.

After we discovered that these were our top performing audiences, we tested a combination audience that targeted both the interest audience and the lookalike in one ad set. This ultimately did not perform as well as the two audiences segmented out into their own ad set. Based on this learning, we segmented each audience back into its own ad set and set the budget at the campaign level which allowed Facebook to allocate the daily budget to the audience with the lower cost. 

Optimizing for Higher Funnel Conversion Events

When we first launched campaigns, we were extremely focused on driving down the cost per enrollment, so all of our campaigns were optimized toward the “purchase” conversion event. We soon realized that most Pathstream students don’t immediately enroll in a program when they first find out about Pathstream. In fact, it could take weeks or even a month for someone to enroll in a Pathstream program after first expressing interest. 

This led us to switch up our optimization strategy and test out a higher funnel conversion event (submit application), which fires once someone enters their information, becomes a lead and also completes a quick application. 

By switching to a higher funnel conversion event, we were not only able to increase the total number of applicants, but we were able to drive down the cost per impression, cost per click, cost per lead and cost per enrollment by bidding on a higher funnel action –– which is less expensive and in return gives the Facebook algorithm more data to target users likely to submit an application. 

Developing new conversion-driven creative

A large part of our Facebook strategy we put together in our initial research for Pathstream included new create asset ideas based on a creative analysis we pulled together with what’s working well and what’s not resonating as well with the Pathsream audience. 

💡We create data-driven ad creative at Tuff, and have an entire blog post about how we approach that for our partners. Check it out here!

We wanted to test a mix of image and video assets that showcased Pathstream’s value props in an engaging way that would get our audience to click on the ad. We tested a combination of school-branded assets and pathstream branded assets and found that all of the assets that mentioned “100% online” and “get a project management/digital marketing/salesforce certificate” in 6 months were our top performing static ads. 

We also tested UGC style videos (like this one) and saw a 56% increase in CTR and decreased the cost per lead by 37% once we rotated those into our campaigns. 

Paid Search

With an ad account this large, we ended up restructuring campaigns twice since we started partnering with Pathstream.

Phase 1 Account Restructure

Initially, Pathstream had over 30 different Google Ad accounts they were running campaigns from. Pathstream partners with different universities to offer their certification programs covering curriculum on Facebook Digital Marketing, Salesforce, Tableau Data Analytics, and Asana Project Management. They had a separate ad account for almost every university + certification program combination. 

Our first step was combining the campaigns across 30 ad accounts into one to increase the amount of lead data in one ad account to make the Google algorithm work smarter for us.

Even though we culled down campaign structure significantly in phase 1 of our account restructure, we still had over 40 different search campaigns, each with minor differences. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Many partners have similar account structures and are certainly successful, and Pathstream was finding success early on with this approach as well. With the goal of getting CAC even lower though, we set out to restructure things again after a few months. 

Phase 2 Account Restructure

At this point, we were utilizing many automated, conversion focused aspects of Google Ads. Max Conversions bidding strategy, Data Driven Attribution, Dynamic Search Ads. With these campaign features, Google works best when there is an abundance of data, specifically conversion data flowing into each campaign. 

If campaigns are too spread out, only receiving a few conversions per month, you may be underutilizing the true power of automation. This was partially the case for Pathstream.

By condensing campaigns from 40+ to 15, we allowed more conversion data to feed into fewer campaigns, in turn making our ads more efficient. We did not limit targeting. This was not designed to decrease our volume or impression share at all. We were not looking to lighten our workload either. Instead, limiting the number of campaigns gave Google more conversion signals, gave Tuff more opportunity to experiment and learn quickly,  and also allowed for better informed expansion across channels in the future.

For starters we left our highest performing campaigns alone. The ones bringing in the most conversion volume and most search volume remained mainly untouched. The big changes were with the campaigns that had the least amount of monthly search volume. Many of them we grouped together into a catch all campaign. What was 10 separate campaigns all converting only a few times a month became one larger structure that converted much more often as a whole. 

Only 3 weeks after our account restructure we saw these results:

• Conversion Rate increased 26%
• Cost Per Lead decreased 38%
• CPC dropped 21%
• CTR increased 8%

This was only the beginning. Performance continues to improve week over week while we gather more data in a much less congested structure. From here, we can start to expand our reach by efficiently pivoting what is working best for us in the short term and beyond. 

Have a complicated Google ad account structure you could use a second set of eyes on? Or need help reducing your costs on Facebook? We’d love to help!

Kristin Dick

Kristin is a senior growth marketer and COO at Tuff. After working in a variety of agency landscapes, Kristin found her way to Tuff to work with teams who make make marketing decisions rooted in data and tied to revenue growth. When she’s not building growth strategies or working with the Tuff team to improve our processes, you’ll find her chasing her two kiddos around the house or playing fetch with her dogs.

The post How We Decreased Pathstream’s CAC by 59% YoY appeared first on Tuff.

With attention spans shortening and the fast-paced world of social media speeding up, figuring out what type of marketing works for your audience can be tricky. As a growth marketing agency, we dissect all sorts of data points every day to single out which metric(s) will tell us what we need to know. The more specific we can get, the easier it is to improve what we have and plan out what we need. 

Growth on TikTok is a new marketing tactic for many businesses. Determining 1) whether the platform works for your business (and if you’ll find your target audience there), and 2) what kind of content they want to see, can be very difficult in the beginning. That’s where ad hook rates come in. 

Ad hook rates (AKA thumb stop rates) are vital to benchmarking success on TikTok. They’re a reliable way to evaluate video performance and whether your ads actually stop thumbs from scrolling past them. Calculated by 2 second video views divided by impressions, it is a key indicator of what’s successfully capturing your audience’s attention.

Ad Hook Rate = 2-Second Video Views / Impressions

Think of it like this: Of all the people who were presented with your video ad, what percentage of them stuck around for at least 2 seconds? The first few seconds of an ad are really what determines whether someone will give you their attention at all, making the “hook” arguably the most important part. We consistently see that raising the ad hook rate improves the rest of the performance metrics. So the more people who stick around for 2+ seconds, the more people will watch the full ad, click, and eventually, convert. Here’s what that looks like.

Ad Hook Rate in Action

In order to better understand TikTok ad creative performance, we took a 6-month look (January 1 – June 30, 2022) across 11 TikTok accounts we manage. The average ad hook rate across accounts was 30.66%, with several in the 40% to 45% range. This means that for most partners, less than a third of the people who saw their ad watched the video for 2 seconds or more. 

After taking a deeper dive into the accounts that had the highest ad hook rates, we noticed some interesting trends. 

Insight: Client 1 was able to get the main message of who they are and what they do across within the first 2 seconds of the video. See an excellent example of this here.

What to do: Test, test, test! Testing the same video concept with slight tweaks helped Client 1 find the best version of their ad (AKA what was resonating the most with potential clients). In this instance, we found that user generated content worked better than stock video.  After analyzing hook rates further, we also were able to determine that videos that proposed a question to draw in users had better hook rates compared to other video concepts that were more drawn out in getting their message across.

Insight: Client 2 utilized trending music and saw significantly higher hook rates in their video ads by doing so. Videos that used stock background music or even no music at all had significantly lower hook rates. Check out an example here.

What to do: Stay up to date with what’s trending on the TikTok platform. A study done by SEMrush found that “more than half of viral TikTok videos used music as their primary backing sound in the first three seconds.” The addition of trendy music to your video ads help draw potential customers in and keep them engaged throughout the remainder of the video.

Insight: Client 3 found success with the use of text overlays and voiceovers. Right at the start of the video, it got the attention of their audience and brought them on a “journey” through their product. See this storytelling journey in action here.

What to do: By using text overlays and a voiceover, the audience could see and hear the full user journey. Create an engaging journey that draws the audience in and makes them want to continue watching until the end. 

What This Means for TikTok Ad Creative 

In the digital world of social advertising, using key metrics like ad hook rate can be an incredibly useful tool to take your marketing strategy to the next level. Utilizing this simple metric can give you a better idea of what content resonates with your audience the most, helping you create an effective creative strategy and ultimately increase performance in the long run. If TikTok is something you are interested in (or struggling with), reach out and talk to us!

The post Benchmarking TikTok Video Ad Hook Rates appeared first on Tuff.

We sometimes get questions about how other clients work with Tuff to reach their growth goals — so we’re sharing some stories to help bring our services to life.

Author’s note: This post was originally published in 2018, it has since been updated for 2022! 

Thnks is a platform designed to help users build business relationships by sending thoughtful gestures of appreciation. With a curated catalog of gifts, personalized messages, and more, Thnks is helping sales organizations, marketing groups, customer success teams, and more grow their business.

Why Thnks Tapped Into Paid Social Acquisition

Any company looking to grow through paid social has to consider a few things before getting started.

First, you have to work towards building your audience in the right channel. Secondly, understand that it takes time.

Scaling growth requires you to be rigorous about the channels you experiment with in the early stages of your business. It might seem easy to find one right away and then dump all your money into that one tactic but that almost never happens. Testing, analyzing, and optimizing is a great three-prong approach to finding the recipe for success.

We found the most success with user acquisition for Thnks with social ads, specifically Facebook. With a wide range of targeting options to help businesses find the right niche to reach their target audience,  Facebook ads can be a highly cost-effective channel for customer acquisition. We launched Facebook and Instagram campaigns with highly specific interest and demographic targeting with ads that were relevant to those audiences. Our goal was to help grow overall user growth, while also finding efficiencies along the way. 

The Three-Step Process

Step 1: Conduct user research and identify key audiences to target

Figuring out the right targeting is key to reaching the audiences most likely to convert. As an agency, you can lean on your client’s customer-facing team members. If you’re in-house, partner with your support team to learn more about your customers and their goals and interests. This background information is vital in crafting audiences that can attract and convert your target customer.

For our core audiences, we relied heavily on interest and demographic targeting. Knowing that sales and human resources are Thnks primary customers and highest converters, we did testing of different variations of demographic and interest targeting to create the perfect mix of both to find the ideal audiences. In addition to core interest- and demographic-based audiences, we also built out lookalike audiences using website traffic, used existing customer email lists as well as leveraged pixel data from our ads, and created lookalike audiences of people who successfully submitted leads or interacted with our ads.

Step 2: Develop custom creative for each audience

Once we were confident that our targeting options were set up to attract the right audience, we then had to look at the end product–the ads. Knowing that we were going to be targeting specific people in the sales and human resource fields, we needed to build ad creative and copy that spoke to those people.

The major difference between the two ad designs is that the sales creative relates to people in that specific role that are looking to prospect new clients and close deals. The human resource ad calls out use cases for people in the role to “welcome new employees”, keep current employees happy, and show them you care. These differences may not seem like a lot at first, but speaking directly to these audiences with this messaging showed an immediate lift in performance. 

Step 3: Analyze and improve

Looking back on your data and analyzing results is one of the most important steps of the whole process. Figuring out what is and isn’t working is the first step to being able to scale and grow users. Through this process, we were able to scale what was working and optimize away from what was not. As a result, we were able to scale Thnks users by 81% in just 30 days.

Sales Audience Growth:

Human Resource Audience Growth:

At the end of the day, there really is no secret sauce to finding success through paid acquisition.

It’s only with meticulous research on your target audiences, testing different creative and ad copy, and analyzing and optimizing based on your data you can find success. Growth is a journey, not an overnight magic trick. 

The post How To Scale User Growth Using Facebook Ads appeared first on Tuff.

In the new landscape of paid social advertising, most customer success representatives and account managers (whether they are at Meta, TikTok, or Snapchat) are pushing broad prospecting as the new “meta” – pun intended. As a growth agency, we are approached from these representatives often, and historically speaking, advice from these representatives can be super hit and miss. They can generate some good recommendations here and there, but it’s always a good idea to validate their advice and make sure it aligns with the goals you’re trying to accomplish. In the post-iOS 14 paid social ecosystem, we’ve had ample opportunity to test this new strategy, and have created a list of general “do’s and don’ts” of broad prospecting to keep in mind. 

What is broad prospecting in paid social advertising? 

Broad prospecting, as we define it for this exercise, is the intentional effort of creating minimally constructed audiences. These audiences have very few parameters on them: maybe some loose demographic targeting, and a few interests or data points to reference to. These can get up to 10m+ in size, depending on the different parameters included, and are used predominantly on social ads. 

Why should I use broad targeting as a part of my paid social advertising strategy? 

Casting a wide net at the top of the funnel allows you to show your products to a variety of people that might not have otherwise seen them. The running hypothesis for leaning on broad prospecting as a strategy is that the pixels associated with your ad account are much, much smarter than the advertiser running the ads.

Ironic, right? 

The theory has some merit: a pixel associated with your ad account collects thousands of data points, and is constantly learning. We equate it to cast iron: the more data it collects, the more seasoned it becomes, and the better the result. The whole premise of machine learning depends on the pixel being smarter than what we can come up with manually. Every bid, every ad placement, every conversion feeds the pixel more information. In theory, each action creates a larger data subset for the pixel to continue to optimize, and get better. 

The do’s and don’ts of broad prospecting: 

Do: 

• Use a variety of  lookalikes
• Test various broad prospecting techniques
• Choose a conversion oriented objective 

Don’t: 

• Use broad prospecting for new ad accounts
• Optimize for in-platform events 
• Wait too long to make a change

The “Do’s” of Broad Prospecting:

Use Large Lookalikes: 

Lookalike audiences are a powerful way to reach new people in your potential conversion pool. Work smarter, not harder. By using data you already have access to (think: past purchasers, people who have visited your website, people who have engaged with your accounts, etc), you can strategically build lookalikes of this data. Once you pick the source for your lookalike audience, you’re able to go a step further and select the percentage (of lookalike) you want to use, ranging from 1% to 10%. We have seen some of the strongest performance for our eCommerce partners with combining a mix of percentages – Example: Targeting a 1%, 2%, 3%, 4% and 5% lookalike audiences. By combining different levels of intent, you’re able to more broadly target potential customers and maximize your brand’s exposure in one fell swoop.

Test Various Targeting Techniques:

Whether you are doing light demographic guardrails, implementing various interest or behavior based targeting, or using lookalike data for your broad prospecting, we say this: move fast, test fast, learn fast. It’s the motto of David, one of our Paid Social channel experts, and I say it daily. Isolate your variables, test things in a consistent manner, and apply your learnings to your next iteration. If you have a winning strategy, isolate it into its own campaign, and continue to use the test campaign  to try  new ideas and refine your broad prospecting strategy. By isolating new techniques into a test campaign, you’re able to work around pushing all of your campaigns back into the learning phase (which can sometimes negatively affect performance).

Choose a Conversion Oriented Objective

Don’t waste time and money optimizing for lead generation, or one of the other productive optimization strategies on Meta. For example, if you are an eCommerce store, optimize for purchases or add to carts! If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that the pixel delivers ads based on the objective and the selected conversion event. 

By choosing purchasers, you’re reaching an audience that is the most likely to purchase. If you’re optimizing to add to cart, you’re reaching an audience that is most likely to add a product to the cart. If you’re broad prospecting, adding a simple guardrail of a conversion-oriented objective gives the pixel enough guidance to find the right subset of users you should be targeting in addition to your other parameters. 

The “Don’ts” of Broad Prospecting:

Don’t Use Broad Prospecting for New Ad Accounts and Pixels:

The whole theory behind broad prospecting is that it uses machine learning to optimize and deliver your ads. If you have a brand new ad account, or pixel, then the machine doesn’t have enough information to create accurate and insightful learnings. We’ve mentioned “guardrails” a few times in this article: those guardrails serve the purpose of pointing the pixel in the right direction. If you have a brand new pixel without much data, there aren’t enough guardrails built in to deliver your ads effectively, and you’re better off manually targeting the audience you want to deliver ads to. 

Don’t Optimize for In-Platform Events 

Take for instance, lead generation ads as an example of an in-platform optimized event. In some instances these ads can be successful – But typically for highly specific goals paired with pretty narrow targeting, think retargeting people who have previously engaged with one of your leads ads. While these ads can be simple and require little effort from the user, they add a step to the process of being able to maximize the potential of this purchase intent. What do I mean by that? Well, when someone fills out your lead form then this data is typically collected in the platform. Once you have that data then you need to download the leads via Ads Manager or your Facebook Page. This seems simple enough, but generally speaking, attention spans are short. If someone is ready to convert, it’s best to capture the intent as instantaneously as possible. If you keep people waiting, the interest begins to wean off and leads might fall through the crack.

Don’t Try to Sell to Everyone

You may be speaking to a broad audience, but that doesn’t mean you should water down your message. We recommend using compelling creative that is user-generated to tell the story of your brand and why people should care. Hone in on those value propositions of your business, and test out different messaging. If you water down your message while broad prospecting, you won’t appeal strongly enough to anyone to get valuable insights for continued optimization. Pro-tip: Not sure what type of creative works best for your audience? Check this out!

Looking for help when it comes to paid social? 

Look no further. Whether it’s a kick-ass creative strategy, a need for structured testing, or guidance on how to find your target audience on paid social, we’re here to help. Let’s talk! 

Kate Theobald

Hey there! I’m Kate, the Head of Social at Tuff. I specialize in crafting paid social campaigns and testing performance creative to drive business results. Outside of Tuff, I enjoy tackling home renovation projects, skiing, and nerding out over the Enneagram (personality test)!

The post The Do’s and Don’ts of Broad Prospecting appeared first on Tuff.

Do you remember where were you on the day that the digital advertising world stood still? Do you remember what you were doing when iOS14.5 loaded onto scores of devices overnight before their owners even reached onto the nightstand to grab them and open up their social media app of choice? Our growth marketing agency jumped into the brand new world of paid social advertising and have taken away a few key learnings for the post iOS14.5 world. 

The Fallout of iOS14.5 

On April 26, 2021, Apple followed through on its promise to prioritize privacy with App Tracking Transparency. This update prompted users to either “allow” or “don’t allow” apps on their iOS devices to track their activities. 

Paid social advertisers in particular felt the blow like they were brave enough to step into the ring with Mike Tyson in his prime. Much of the targeting that advertisers had become so reliant on was either gone or no longer effective. Despite Apple and Facebook (now Meta) warning for months: so many marketers were drastically affected. 

Sure with the change, you could still target Android users, and Facebook did roll out new aggregated events to limit the fallout Some damage control measures went into place, but it goes without question that Apple had delivered a near-fatal blow. So, scrappy Facebook advertisers have had to look for new ways to find their target audience online. 

From that scrappiness, new audience targeting strategies emerged that could help social ads strategists and media buyers cut through the crowd and reach their audience. At our growth agency, we’ve identified two lookalike audiences that have proven to be super valuable. Even better, they’re accessible to anyone with Google Analytics installed on their website.

The First Lookalike: Pageviews 

The first audience we’ll discuss today is a lookalike audience based on pageviews. 

Imagine you’re looking at your analytics and you see that you have 347 transactions this week for a product. For a lot of advertisers, they either stop there or ask the question, “How can I get this number higher?”  before they close the tab and move on. Scrappier advertisers take it a step further.

Looking at Google Analytics’ acquisition report we can see the traffic generated from various channels and campaigns.

If you add in a custom segment of Purchasers, you can look at the metrics based on people that have made a purchase on the website. From there we want to know the pages per session.

In the case of this e-commerce company, the Purchasers had a drastically different behavior than the larger pool of all users. And this is where the beauty is.

From the data, we can tell that Purchasers visited 11.47 pages per session. They were more engaged. They clicked around, they viewed a few pages, and they inevitably visited the cart followed by the checkout page. 

We can take an educated guess that a cohort of users with that same behavior pattern would be likely to purchase as well. And that’s what we’re betting on for this first lookalike.

So back in Facebook (still not used to Meta), we’ll make our way to the audiences module within the business manager. Here we’ll be creating a custom audience.

To do this follow the following steps:

•  Choose Website as your custom audience source. 
• Choose the pixel you want this based off of
• Instead of selecting all website visitors, select PageView from the events dropdown. 
• Click the Refine by dropdown below, and select frequency. We’ll leave the middle drop-down as “is greater than”….
• Change the number to the number of pages per session the Purchasers normally have minus 10-20% (so, if it’s 10 pages, then make it 8). We’re subtracting 2 or 3 because it gives Facebook a buffer so that they can have a large enough audience to build the audience from. 
• Click Create audience, and then create a lookalike from that audience.

The Second Lookalike: Time on Site

The second lookalike audience uses analytics as well. Remember that the Purchasers segment spent around 11 minutes on the site. So again, we can safely assume that Purchasers spend more time on the site.

So the second audience we want to create is a lookalike based on time on site. To do this, create a new custom audience. This time instead of choosing PageView from the dropdown of events, we’ll select Visitors by time spent. 

 For the percentile, start by leaving it at 25%. If the data suggests otherwise in the future, then you could always drop it to 10% or 5%.

Be warned though. As you move to higher percentiles the audience will shrink even more. Once you’ve created this custom audience, go ahead and create a lookalike based on this one too.

The Real Trick to Using Analytics to Build Facebook Audiences

And just like that, you have two audiences based on data that you could target using your first-party data. And this is just the beginning. There is a myriad of different audiences you could build from the data. 

You could narrow the custom audience further by switching the parameters from Include people who meet “Any Of” the following criteria to Include people who meet “All Of” the following criteria.

You could create custom events and conversions in your pixel based on events that are important to you and build an audience based on their behavior.

You could select specific web pages to narrow your time-on-site audience. 

The possibilities are vast. The important thing is learning how to use analytics to understand your audience beyond the bottom line numbers. From there, you can segment your audience in the way that makes the most sense for your business goals.

Looking to leverage your existing data for your ecommerce site? Our growth agency is happy to dive in and work with you on a growth strategy. Let’s chat! 

The post How to Use Google Analytics to Discover Lookalike Audiences appeared first on Tuff.

As a growth marketing agency, Tuff is always looking for new tools and tactics to continue to elevate our paid marketing efforts for our partners. In the Fall of 2021, Tuff began working with Black Crow, an AI tool that creates predictive audiences to allow marketers to scale their prospecting campaigns, and make their remarketing efforts more efficient.

Since implementing Black Crow across various partners, Tuff has managed over $1,000,000 in ad spend for Black Crow audiences for our ecommerce partners and has generated key takeaways on how to best leverage their AI marketing tool.  In this post, we’ll outline what we’ve learned and our recommendations if you’re looking to scale traffic and revenue with advanced targeting options for Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. 

What are predictive audiences, anyways? 

Black Crow uses an artificial intelligence tool to score users in real-time based on their likelihood to buy. This score predicts the value of the user and allows marketers to bucket them on three tiers of purchase likelihood: high, medium, and low. High intent users are users who are most likely to purchase, and low intent users are those who are considered to be unlikely to purchase. 

This form of machine learning uses first-party data only, which helps marketers avoid the restrictions and limitations of third-party data enforced by iOS 14.5. The best part of predictive audiences, however, is that the more data that it generates and collects, the more efficient it gets – as we’ve seen with our various e-commerce partners at Tuff. 

How can I use predictive audiences in my paid acquisition efforts? 

There are two main ways you can incorporate predictive audiences into your paid marketing efforts. At Tuff, we often break our tactics on paid acquisition down into two main categories: prospecting, and retargeting. We use Black Crow for both types of targeting. 

For Prospecting Efforts: 

After installing Black Crow and letting it generate enough data to begin to use (usually within a week based on our experience, but it depends on traffic volume for your website to ultimately decide), you can create lookalike audiences of the high, medium, and low intent users. These lookalike audiences can be used to reach new users who match the characteristics of your most (and least!) likely audiences to purchase, and allows you to scale ad spend horizontally to new audiences without guessing what characteristics they contain. 

For Retargeting Efforts:

The majority of your audience that visits your website isn’t going to convert. Let’s face it- most websites have a bounce rate between 50-70%, meaning that between 50-70% of the traffic leaves the website within a minute without visiting a second page. Usually this rate is even higher for prospecting traffic. 

Since Black Crow allows marketers to use their predictive audiences to bucket users by intent – high, medium, and low, you can control your spend and efforts by the quality of users you’re targeting. It makes sense to focus on users who are more likely to convert, and then remarket education and engagement-based creative to less likely to convert users to increase their intent. These sorts of efficiencies free up additional spend for even more prospecting, increasing your overall marketing reach. 

Do predictive audiences work for eCommerce marketing?

In summary, YES.

After managing over $1 million in spend for Black Crow specific audiences, we can safely say that Black Crow is very effective in scaling prospecting efforts and making retargeting efforts more efficient. (And no we aren’t a partner with Black Crow and they didn’t ask us to write this post). 

So we answered the question that these Black Crow audiences do, in fact, work for ecommerce and that they’re effective. Now let’s answer the question of how effective? Let’s put our money where our mouth is. Since incorporating these audiences, we saw cost per purchase drop and our conversion rates jump across the board over the course of 90 days:  

• Prospecting = 48% decrease in CPS and a 55% increase in CVR
• Retargeting = 53% decrease in CPS and a 16% increase in CVR

Like a cast iron skillet, the more the pixel was used, the better our predictive audiences became (in both prospecting and retargeting). It stands to reason that predictive audiences refine the accuracy of their lookalike data, as well as create better predictive scores for a more refined user targeting experience the more it is used. 

Alongside these Black Crow audiences, we were running broader interest/behavior audiences and other retargeting audiences. To further put into perspective the effectiveness of Black Crow:

• Prospecting = 23% of total prospecting purchase volume came from two Black Crow audiences
• Retargeting = 58% of the total retargeting purchase volume came from three Black Crow audiences 

By utilizing Black Crow predictive audiences across different paid platforms, we were able to get a comprehensive look at the significant impact these audiences had (and are still having) on performance. 

What advertising channels can I use predictive audiences for? 

Any advertising channel that supports the use of first-party data should allow you to use predictive audiences as a part of your targeting efforts. At Tuff, we use Black Crow for a variety of paid acquisition channels, including: 

• Facebook (Meta)
• Instagram (Meta)
• TikTok
• Snapchat
• Pinterest
• Google Search (as an observation audience)
• Youtube

Ready to use predictive audiences in your ecommerce marketing strategy?

Want to unlock further ecommerce scale and efficiency, or learn more about how to leverage predictive audiences for your ecommerce scaleup? Let’s chat!

Kate Theobald

Hey there! I’m Kate, the Head of Social at Tuff. I specialize in crafting paid social campaigns and testing performance creative to drive business results. Outside of Tuff, I enjoy tackling home renovation projects, skiing, and nerding out over the Enneagram (personality test)!

The post Do Predictive Audiences Work? We Managed $1.1M in Ad Spend for Black Crow Audiences to Find Out appeared first on Tuff.

Imagine someone is preparing for a trip to Oahu for the first time. They’ve never been a big traveler and they honestly can’t remember the last time they took off from work for a week and took a vacation. They don’t know what to do when they get there. They don’t know how to pack. They don’t know much about the different airlines and they certainly don’t know what workouts they should do to prepare for the incredible pictures they plan to take. So what do they do?

First they go to Google, as anybody would when they have a question. They scroll a bit and see some pretty commercial articles, so they decide “ehh, I’d rather read something else”. They click a couple YouTube videos in the search results, and those help a lot! The problem is, they saw all of these fun things to do but there are still so many questions. So what now?

Well, they take a scroll on Pinterest to find the answer to all of their questions. They find articles on traveling to Oahu, and pins about outfits to wear. They look up what to pack for their trip and they come across this pin about this incredible revolutionary thing called packing cubes from this company called Away. It piques their interest, so they click it and after reading a pretty good article, they’re absolutely convinced they need packing cubes otherwise their trip won’t be as good. 

So they do what any reasonable 20 something old would do. They head over to Amazon to look for packing cubes. They scroll and scroll but for some reason they can’t make a decision. All of these cubes look great! And they look the same! But in the back of their mind, they’re thinking about those packing cubes from Away. So after spending way too much time on Amazon, they go back to Pinterest and look up which packing cubes are the best. Again, they see this pin from Away! This time they’re convinced it’s fate. So they type in Away into the google search bar, land on the website and buy themselves those packing cubes from Away.

This is the beautiful power of Pinterest and Pinterest Ads for brands. Pinterest, one of the largest social networks, is a visual based social network that allows people to share all kinds of video and blog content in the form of Pins.  These Pins are shared over and over giving brands a plethora of exposure as users scroll through looking for inspiration for their next endeavor in life.

Benefits of Pinterest Ads

There are so many reasons why Pinterest ads might just be worth the squeeze. With a growing audience, it’s no wonder why advertisers are flocking to the social media site to place their products in front of prospective customers. As an e-commerce growth agency, this is a channel we’re constantly testing and optimizing as we look to diversify the overall channel mix. 

Your next customer is on Pinterest

It’s true. Your next customer probably uses Pinterest for inspiration, recipes, or finding new workouts to make them look like a pro in the gym without setting off the lunk alarm. In fact I’d argue that the odds are in your favor. Pinterest has over 475 million monthly active users and between October 2020 and March 2021, there were over 1.2 billion total visits. So, the numbers are there.

But Who’s Really On Pinterest?

Well the easy answer is everyone. And for the parts of everyone that aren’t there yet, they’re coming soon like a long awaited Marvel movie. While over 75% of users on Pinterest identify as female, male users have grown 40% year over year and continue to grow. 

No matter what age your target audience is, chances are that Pinterest has them covered too. Gen Z Pinners are up 40% year over year, and Millennial Pinners are up 35% in the same period. Over a third of Pinterest users are 50+ years old and another third falls into the 30-49 year old camp. The last third represent us Zillennials (too old to be Gen Z but too young to be Millennials) and our oft confused colleagues, Gen Zs.

But Does Pinterest Drive Purchases Though???

I hear you. I hear you. Having users is cool, but the real question is does Pinterest drive purchases, or leads, or conversions?

Fortunately there’s an answer to that quandary.  It is no secret that many Pinners come to the platform for inspiration. In fact, 89% of users reported using the platform for just that very purpose. The behavior that followed though may be enough to make you clean your glasses.

98% of Pinners reportedly go out and try ideas they see on Pinterest (*cough* ab workouts and birria tacos?? *cough*). And that’s not even the most exciting part for brands. Let’s make things more interesting eh? 

89% of users use Pinterest for purchase inspiration, and according to Pinterest, 80%…yes EIGHTY percent of weekly Pinners make purchase decisions on Pinterest. Zooming out just a wee bit, and about 50% of all Pinners have made a purchase after seeing a Promoted Pin.  Add in that  2/3rds of Pinners have discovered a new brand, service, or product they might not have otherwise known about thanks to a Promoted Pin, and it gets harder to deny the obvious potential here.

So How Do Pinterest Ads Work Then?

That’s a bit of a loaded question don’t you think? But I’ll answer it as best as I can.

Bidding on Pinterest

 For starters Pinterest, like most other paid acquisition channels, use bidding to decide what ad to show and at what cost. In Pinterest you can either set custom bids, or you can let them do it for you. 

With custom bids, you set the maximum you want to spend for a particular action or bid. Then Pinterest will attempt to get you the most results that it can given your maximum spend limit. You can adjust and tweak this as often as you’d like throughout the day.

With Automatic Bidding, Bids are updated by Pinterest automatically throughout the day. Pinterest aims to get you the most Pin clicks at the lowest possible cost per result while also spending your entire budget. This may sound fantastic, but automatic bidding comes with its own risks. There is a potential for price fluctuations as Pinterest works to learn what customers to go after to get the best results and adjusts for competition.

Keyword Targeting On Pinterest

One of the really cool things about Pinterest ads is that the platform allows you to use keywords. In fact Pinterest is one of the largest search engines in the world after Google and YouTube. So it makes sense that there would be some search engine like functionality in the ads platform right?

Well there is, and using this correctly definitely makes a difference for both paid and organic pin strategies. We’ll stick to the paid for this discussion though.  

Keywords can be an incredibly powerful arrow in your arsenal. It is so powerful in fact that there is a small legion of bloggers across the web that swear by keyword only campaigns. They may have a point. There are over 2 billion searches typed in on average per month and 98% of searches are unbranded. That’s a lot of opportunity to get in front of customers that are looking for inspiration and new solutions to their problems.

So maybe that aforementioned blogger legion has a point but I’m more keen to use all the tools to get the job done instead of settling for Maslow’s hammer.

Interest Targeting On Pinterest

That’s where interest targeting comes in. Inside of Pinterest’s ad platform, you have the option to target interests. Pinterest, like TikTok, has a list of interest buckets that you can target. Users and content are placed into those buckets based on their search history and interests. Then you can target them. The problem is the interest targeting is a bit limited. There’s not as expansive a list of interests to target on pinterest as what you’d find on Facebook Meta but, there are quite a few options that could move the needle.

Ultimately, the name of the game is testing. Test Fast. Learn Fast. Move Fast. Setup AB tests to determine which strategy works best for you. Maybe it’s an only interest campaign. Maybe it’s a keyword only campaign. Maybe it’s one set of keywords vs another set. Maybe what works best for you is to use both interests and keywords in the same ad group! With paid social, try not to get too hung up on what worked before in one platform. Instead keep an open mind and try different things intentionally.

Pinterest Ads In Action 

This is exactly the approach that we took with one of our Ecommerce partners, let’s call them Brilliance to keep their identity anonymous. Brilliance sells a product that is absolutely perfect for women of all ages, especially women with some disposable income. The product positions incredibly well beside coffee and tea products. 

So we came up with a theory. We theorized that if we combined interest targeting with keywords, we might just be able to get our product in front of people that would actually purchase it. We quickly came up with a plan that would include keyword targeting and combined targeting. We opted not to test interest targeting in this instance because we had seen bad results with it in the past.

The results were better than we hoped. We initially launched with the combined targeting and after the first week, we saw a CPA (cost per acquisition) that was 50% of what we saw on Meta. 

Not trusting our eyes, we gave it another week, and again results came in strong. We weren’t done learning yet though. So, we created the keyword only campaign. Out of the gate it struggled with CPAs about twice as high as Meta results. 

We knew that Pinterest used view-through conversions though, so we decided to give it up to a week in accordance with our attribution window of 7 days post click. The results?

I’m glad you asked. The CPAs DID drop as time passed and Pinterest learned more about the right customers. So we did what anybody would do when they struck gold. We added more shovels! Well in this case we added budget incrementally. As we did this, costs rose slightly but the results continued to hold.

Custom Audiences On Pinterest

Along with the option to target specific keywords and interests on Pinterest, as an advertiser, you also get the opportunity to target custom audiences. These custom audiences will look familiar if you’ve used any other ad platform before. From prospecting audiences like act alikes to retargeting audiences, there are choices for you to accomplish your goal.

Act Alike Targeting 

Think of this like a lookalike on Facebook. This is an audience that looks and acts just like the audience you used as the source. This is a great way to find an audience that has behavior similar to people who already took an action you like.

Engagement

This audience goes after people that recently interacted with your Pins. This audience can be super powerful for a bunch of reasons. Since I’ll explain it later in another less lengthy post, I’ll summarize here. This audience uses in platform behavior signals, and that means that Pinterest has full ability to track them. Engagers also interacted with your content recently so they’re warmer than somebody that never heard of you. As far as retargeting goes, there aren’t many better options.

Site Visitors

This audience targets people who have visited your site and been tracked via the Pinterest tag.  This is a great audience because it means that the person is definitely familiar with you and probably lower in the funnel if they’ve visited your site.

Customer List

This audience targets people who have a pinterest account and are on a customer list you upload. This can be a great way to retarget prior purchasers with a new offer, or product launch. There’s even some evidence that suggests that Pins with the word New on them see a pretty substantial engagement lift. 

Should You Use Pinterest For Your Business?

Pinterest is definitely not for everyone and every business. That caveat being said, there is definitely opportunity there for ecommerce brands and service businesses. The important thing to remember is that people come to Pinterest to look for inspiration, and not necessarily to buy a product or service. So before you decide that Pinterest is right for your business ask yourself a few questions:

• Who is my target audience?
• What products or lifestyle activities does my product or service fit next to?
• What DIY problem am I solving? 

And always remember that social ads and digital marketing is always about testing. If you answer the above questions and still feel fuzzy just follow my mantra: Test Fast, Learn Fast, Move Fast.

The post Advertising on Pinterest: Ad Formats, Campaign Types & Best Practices for 2022 appeared first on Tuff.

Scaling effectively is one of the hardest things to do with your Facebook ads. As a growth marketing agency, one of the problems potential partners come to us most often with is that they’ve gained some sort of traction with their Facebook ads, but don’t know how to efficiently ramp up spend. 

To someone not well versed in Facebook advertising, this seems like an easy solution. You’ve got campaigns that are working, so just jack up your daily budgets and start counting your profits! Makes sense right?

If only it were that easy….

Anyone who has experience running Facebook ads knows just how fragile account performance can be. A number of different factors can take your performance for a roller coaster ride, and changing ad spend is one of the largest ones. Growth Marketers are on a seemingly endless quest for stability and predictable results. While that quest will likely never be completed, being mindful of how we adjust our spending on Facebook and our other ad channels will get us one step closer to the promised land of steady results.

Before you can begin increasing your spend on Facebook you need to answer an important question.

Is my ad account ready to start scaling?

One thing we really stress here at Tuff when looking at budgets for our social ads channels is that adding additional budget at an underperforming channel or campaign won’t help your results. There are many problems in life that can be solved by throwing money at them, but poor advertising results isn’t one of them. 

There are three stages to running campaigns on Facebook when you’re looking to achieve success at scale:

1. Traction 
2. Scale
3. Profit

To sum these steps up, traction is where you put in the work to achieve consistent profitable results, scale is where you increase budgets steadily while still maintaining profitability, and profit is where you swim in your money Scrooge McDuck style.

You’ve got to walk before you can run. The traction phase is where you define what profitability looks like from an account results standpoint. This benchmark will vary greatly depending on your business model. It could be a specific cost per lead, ROAS number or cost per new customer. Whatever it is, you need to understand this tipping point before considering scaling up your budget. This should really be figured out before running ads at all, but that’s for another blog post.

Once you’ve defined your profitability metrics, you’ve got to go out and hit them. Go test audiences, ad creative, and copy combinations until you’ve determined the targeting and messaging needed to hit your profitability metrics.

Before you start scaling, you’ll want to be sure you’re hitting these numbers with some consistency. With how volatile Facebook advertising can be, it’s very likely that you can hit these goals one day, and not even come close the next. You’ll want to see results above your profitability threshold for a significant amount of time before you begin scaling. The amount of time will be different depending on what budget level you start at, but a good rule of thumb is 2-3 weeks of hitting KPIs before increasing your budget.

So now that we’ve got traction, it’s time to look at increasing our budgets, which is the whole reason you’re reading this article. As I mentioned earlier, scaling up too quickly can shock the Facebook algorithm and tank your results, so we always look to scale methodically to avoid that. There are two methods of scaling that we use, which we refer to as vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. We use a combination of these to increase overall budget. Let’s get into what they are. 

Scaling vertically

Vertical scaling is the easiest way to increase your ad spend on Facebook. When you scale vertically you’re taking your existing campaign structure and increasing the daily budgets for those campaigns or ad sets. In reality, this is just fancy marketing speak for taking your budget and making it larger, but there is some nuance involved.

It is possible to kick your ad sets back into the “Learning Phase” if you increase your budgets too quickly. An ad set being in the learning phase is an indicator that the algorithm is still working to stabilize your results. While in this state you can expect more volatility and higher than normal costs per action. An ad set leaves the learning phase after about 50 conversion events, at which point performance stabilizes a bit.

Needless to say we want to get out of the learning phase as quickly as possible and stay out of it.

“Large edits” to a campaign or ad sets will move ad sets back into the learning phase, with large increases to budget being one of those possible edits. Specifically, more than a 20% increase in spend to a campaign or ad set will be enough to get sent back to learning phase time out. 

All of this is to say keep your daily spend increases to 19% or less of your budget if your ad sets are out of the learning phase. If your ad sets aren’t out of learning just yet, it’s probably a good idea to wait for that to happen before increasing spend.

Scaling horizontally 

There is always going to be a point when scaling your existing structure starts to yield diminishing returns. As much as we’d like to scale effective campaigns and ad sets to infinity, there comes a point where you’ve maxed out the amount of spend you can pump into a campaign structure before you have to expand outward to find new efficiencies.

Horizontal scaling is where you look for opportunities outside of your existing structure, usually in the form of new audiences, to spend budget. Audience testing is a huge part of being successful with Facebook advertising and chances are if you’ve made it to the point where you are scaling up your budget, you’ve done your fair share of audience testing already (remember finding traction?)

You’re definitely going to want to find these avenues of potential scale before you need to, so as you’re scaling vertically, it’s always a good idea to test new audiences to see if you can gain traction outside of your existing structure. 

When introducing new ad sets, it’s generally best to set the daily budget equal or lower than what your other campaigns/ad sets are at. The last thing you want to do is introduce a new audience at a really high daily budget only to see no traction and burn through a significant amount of ad spend without much return.

Once you see traction from a new audience, you can apply the vertical scaling principals I outlined earlier in the article, rinse and repeat.

Conclusion

Facebook loves consistency when it comes to running an ad account. Want to make a big change to an existing campaign? You’re usually going to get punished in the form of higher costs for a period of time. When scaling up your spend, make sure to stay below that 20% per day threshold to avoid having your ad sets get kicked back into the Learning Phase. Seeing rising costs as you’re scaling your existing structure? It’s probably time to look to scale horizontally with some new audiences.

Want to learn more about how we help our partners achieve results at scale? Set up a call with our team to discuss how we can apply our growth marketing expertise to your business! We’d love to hear from you! 

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post How To Scale Ad Spend Quickly (Without Spiking Costs) appeared first on Tuff.