Here’s one of the biggest challenges our startup partners face: Hitting growth goals with limited resources.

Now more than ever, marketers are expected to do more with less. As a marketing agency that works with startups of all stripes, we’ve seen how AI can be a game-changer for these teams, helping them work smarter and get more done.

According to a recent study by LinkedIn and Ipsos, nearly half of B2B marketers are now using AI in their strategies. And guess what? Interest in AI courses is still skyrocketing. People want to learn how to use it, particularly using tactics under the umbrella of “Generative AI.”

Our startup partners, whether they’re in education, fintech, e-commerce, or elsewhere, often wonder how they can tap into AI without sacrificing their brand’s identity. So, we’ve put together a no-nonsense guide full of the latest trends, practical tips, and best practices. It’s all about helping startups stay ahead of the curve and keep their edge in the market. Let’s dive in.

Using AI to Redefine Startup Marketing

AI has quickly become a cornerstone of modern marketing strategies, providing invaluable insights and predictive capabilities. Using machine learning and natural language processing, AI has the ability to sift through data, uncover patterns, and forecast outcomes like never before. Let’s take a closer look at the latest AI trends reshaping digital marketing and discover how you can leverage AI to supercharge your startup marketing efforts.

Personalization and the Customer Experience with AI 

Successful marketing is never one-size-fits-all, and in order to really see growth and results, you’ll need to personalize your messaging to each audience. The good news—AI has completely changed the personalization game in startup marketing.

Example

For instance, if your startup specializes in eco-friendly home products, AI can help you comb through customer data, such as purchase history and website interactions. Through AI analysis, you can discern patterns indicating preferences and behaviors.

Armed with this insight, you can craft marketing messages that resonate with different segments of your audience. For environmentally-conscious consumers, emphasize the environmental benefits of your products, while for budget-conscious buyers, highlight the cost-effectiveness and potential savings.

Understanding all of the ICPs (ideal customer profiles) that fall within your target audience requires extensive research, and tailoring your marketing message to every ICP can be challenging. But AI can help you better understand your ICPs by analyzing individual preferences, behavior, and context. 

For every partner at Tuff, we’ll conduct an audience deep dive when onboarding a new startup or scaleup partner. These deep dives give us an opportunity to work directly with our clients and get an inside look at their target audience. 

During this process, we’ll often use AI to help us gather information about each audience segment. We’ll then use this data to build out customer personas, value propositions, and message testing frameworks. You can learn more about our strategic messaging process here.

AI-Powered Content Creation and Distribution 

Creating captivating content for your startup—from blogs to social posts, emails, and ads—can be made simpler with AI platforms. (Check out our curated list of our preferred AI content production companies.) While our Content and Creative Strategists form the core of Tuff’s content production, they often enhance their efforts with AI for increased efficiency.

Our creative process at Tuff is rooted in data. This means that we always analyze our partner’s ad account data before developing creative. During this process, we’ll take a closer look at which type of content and messaging has historically resonated best with the partner’s target audience. We’ll then use those insights to inform our next round of creative. 

We also rely on AI to keep us aligned with emerging channel-specific trends, informing our creative tests effectively. Additionally, we leverage AI to conduct thorough analyses of our clients’ competitors’ social ads, gaining valuable insights into effective creative approaches.

This data-driven approach extends to our content creation as well. While our blogs and case studies are always written by Tuff team members, we utilize AI to streamline research and develop content outlines, enhancing our efficiency in delivering impactful content. In short, it allows us to jump right into writing. 

Predictive Analytics for Strategic Decision-Making

When building a growth marketing strategy for a startup, it’s impossible to predict the results and how much your advertising is going to cost without historical data. In this case, marketers often use predictive analytics to help them make those initial strategic decisions.

By using AI to gather data, analyze patterns, and foreshadow future trends, predictive analytics can help you forecast what your campaign costs and ROI will be. This information is super helpful for marketers trying to determine which channels they should activate and how much budget they need to allocate to each channel based on the predicted outcome. 

Chatbots and Conversational Marketing

Many of our startup partners have implemented AI chat bots on their websites to engage with customers and enhance the user experience. These conversational chatbots utilize natural language processing to interact with customers in real time and deliver personalized responses to each user. HubSpot recently shared their top 18 AI chatbot recommendations that integrate directly with existing HubSpot workspaces.  

Navigating Ethical Considerations in AI-Driven Marketing

In the realm of AI-driven marketing, startups face the challenge of balancing efficiency with ethical considerations. As you lean into AI to develop marketing plans and streamline processes, it’s crucial to consider ethical standards to maintain trust with your audience (or partners). Here are four steps startups can take:

• Bias Mitigation: Utilize AI tools to analyze data and uncover biases in marketing strategies. Regularly review and adjust algorithms to ensure fair and unbiased outcomes in targeting and messaging.
• Diversity and Inclusion: Leverage AI to gather diverse perspectives and insights for marketing campaigns. Ensure that AI-driven decisions reflect the diversity of your target audience to avoid exclusionary practices.
• User Autonomy: Implement AI-powered personalization strategies that respect user privacy and autonomy. Provide clear opt-in/opt-out options and transparent data usage policies to empower users in controlling their information.
• Collaborative Approach: Talk with industry peers, follow experts, and collab with stakeholders to navigate ethical concerns in AI-driven marketing. Share best practices, insights, and lessons learned to collectively advance ethical standards in the field.

By considering ethics in your AI-driven marketing strategies, startups can use AI effectively while maintaining trust with their audience, ultimately building stronger connections and moving the industry in a positive direction.

What’s Next?

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.

The post Startup Marketing in the AI Age: Tactics for 2024 appeared first on Tuff.

What was your most recent significant purchase? Did you click Purchase immediately after learning it existed? If not, it’s probably because you needed more information before fully committing.

Maybe your shopping experience looked like this:

You saw a TikTok featuring the product, found it interesting, and visited the website to learn more.

↓

A few days later, a Facebook ad reminded you of the product. You clicked on it and provided your email to receive a discount code.

↓

Several weeks later, you received an email from the company, notifying you that your discount code was expiring.

↓

Later that day, you recalled the email, launched a Google search to find the brand associated again, and went to the website to make your purchase.

💥

Most customer journeys aren’t linear and require time. That time is why multi-touch attribution is crucial for measuring marketing effectiveness. In this example, using last-click attribution for reporting would credit Google as the sole source of your purchase, disregarding all the other touchpoints that kept you interested (TikTok, Facebook, and email).

But what if you hadn’t seen the TikTok or the Facebook ad that led you to the discount offer? What if the reminder email never came? This particular combination of touchpoints highlights the importance of considering every step in the customer journey, not just the first or last.

In this blog, we’ll uncover what makes multi-touch attribution so essential to accurate and actionable marketing reporting. From tools to user experience and optimizing for growth, we’ll explore the full spectrum of tracking marketing touchpoints and building better strategies. 

Understanding full-funnel tracking in marketing

So, what is multi-touch attribution? It’s a marketing measurement that evaluates each interaction a user has with a brand. This allows marketers to assign value to every channel in the customer journey and weigh the significance of each.

Multi-touch attribution is essential for any growth marketing strategy. It provides access to full-funnel tracking, enabling analysis of which channels drive customer engagement and revenue–and to what degree. The real power lies in precision–figuring out what’s effective and what’s not. As you uncover those channels and campaigns that bring in the biggest returns on investment, you’re in control of smartly distributing your budget, making the most impact, and steering your growth strategy toward success.

Tools and techniques for effective full-funnel attribution

At Tuff, we use a variety of tools for full-funnel tracking depending on our partner and their industry. Notable multi-touch attribution tools include: 

• Google Analytics
• Amplitude
• Mixpanel
• Segment

With multi-touch attribution tools like these, you can create and customize your own dashboard to gather and analyze data across all channels throughout the entire user journey.

Real-Life Example

For example, we have an Amplitude dashboard set up for our partner Pathstream, a career mobility platform. In their dashboard, we track every interaction from ad click > website visit > sign-up > program purchase.

When we dig into the dashboard data, we’re checking out a few key data points. First, we’re eyeing the click-through rate (CTR) of the ad. Then, we’re looking at how many people go from clicking to showing interest (that’s the lead conversion rate). Last stop? We’re watching the rate of people who actually enroll or make a purchase. All this info helps us see where to fine-tune the ad, the landing page, or the emails–all to pump up those conversion rates.

Examining conversions by source like the visualization above shows the impact of paid and organic channels across various stages of the customer journey. In the early touchpoints, paid channels amplify brand recognition and ignite initial interactions. Activating retargeting initiatives across social caused that spike in mid-journey touchpoints on Facebook. The huge jump in conversions during late touchpoints shows that further down the funnel, people are more likely to convert on Google, Facebook, AND direct. Altogether, we see that different platforms have power at various stages of the user journey, and using this data helps marketers decide how to spend resources wisely for growth.

Fine Tune Your Performance Creative

With Pathstream, we utilize performance creative to analyze what type of ad archetype and messaging perform best on each channel. Our goal is to drive more revenue and decrease the customer acquisition cost (CAC). With multi-touch attribution, we could see that the Facebook ad below drove the most clicks, sign-ups, and enrollments compared to any other ad we tested. Without multi-touch attribution, we would have only been able to see the clicks and sign-ups from the ad and not the CVR from sign-up to enrollment. 

The power of customer journey insights

When you can thoroughly analyze every step of your conversion funnel and track the origins of your conversions, you’re empowered to make smarter marketing decisions that result in sustainable growth. For example, if TikTok has a higher CVR throughout the entire funnel in comparison to display advertising, we can reallocate the display budget and direct more funds towards TikTok to lower CAC and increase revenue.

When you have insights into the customer journey, you can also tailor your messaging across various channels based on where the user is in their journey. For instance, your Facebook ads might generate a strong CTR yet fail to convert on the website due to users needing additional product information. 

With this data and insight, you can create a plan on how you’ll provide more product information to the user. One solution might be to update your landing page to include more social proof or create a blog on your website that answers commonly asked questions. 

Another solution might be to add more touchpoints to the user journey so you can communicate your products’ unique value propositions. This is where retargeting strategies can prove effective. By personalizing your retargeting messages across channels, you can guide users from awareness to consideration.

Fueling growth with data-driven optimization

In a recent Pathstream campaign, we leveraged multi-touch attribution data to create a full-funnel growth marketing strategy encompassing diverse channels. These included programmatic ads, social ads, paid and organic search, conversion rate optimizations on the website, and nurture flow email campaigns. 

While not every channel led to last-click conversions, we effectively gauged the impact from each channel by assessing both view-through and click-through conversions using multi-touch attribution. Beyond validating marketing channels, this approach enabled us to precisely identify optimal messaging strategies for each channel. As a result, we increased the CVR at every stage of the funnel. 

By increasing the CVR, we increased the number of leads quarter over quarter by 86% and increased the enrollments quarter over quarter by 100%.  

Embracing multi-touch attribution for growth

Without multi-touch attribution, it’s impossible to know the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. When you make decisions based on just part of the story, you leave out crucial bits of information that unlock truths about your customers’ experience. But with multi-touch attribution, you get access to full-funnel tracking and data-driven customer insights. This will ultimately help you build a sustainable, validated growth marketing strategy optimized to scale. 

Interested in learning more about how you can create a growth marketing strategy using multi-touch attribution? Give us a shout!

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.

The post Full-Funnel Tracking Through Multi-Touchpoint Attribution appeared first on Tuff.

Is your B2B brand on TikTok? If the answer is no, you might’ve read that question and thought “No, our target audience is not using TikTok so why would we be”, or,  “Isn’t TikTok mainly used by Gen-zs or Millennials”. If any of these thoughts crossed your mind, keep reading, because it may surprise you how Tuff partners use TikTok for B2B marketing.

Oftentimes, when we’re working with B2B brands, they think the best social ads channel for their business is either LinkedIn or Facebook. Historically, yes, these have been two of the top-performing social channels for B2B advertising, but the times are changing and the way B2B brands are advertising on social media is too. Within the past year, TikTok ads have become a large portion of Tuff partners’ paid social budgets across all different types of industries, and many of our B2B partners are now joining in on the buzz. 

It’s not just Gen-z on TikTok

Did you know that only half of the users on TikTok are below the age of 30? According to Statista’s 2022 TikTok demographic stats, 41% of all TikTok users are between the ages of 30-49 and 11% of users are 50+.  

TikTok has become a popular platform where people go to unwind for the day or get a laugh during their lunch break which makes it the perfect place to connect with your audience in a creative way. 

Think about it, how often do you log into LinkedIn on the weekends or when you’re unplugged from work? 

TikTok is a different experience. A lot of our B2B partners at Tuff are discovering that TikTok is where their audience is spending a majority of their free time when they’re not working, often times even more than Facebook. 

How we approach B2B TikTok campaigns at Tuff

As a growth marketing agency, before we launch ads on any new channel for our partners, the first thing we’ll do is a channel deep dive on the audience targeting options to make sure we’re able to reach their audience on that platform. 

On TikTok, you can target users by location, gender, age, languages, interests (including industry interests like ecomm, education, financial services, etc.), video interactions, creator interactions and hashtag interactions. 

Once we’ve built out the target audiences, we’ll look into how we can reach these users and convert them into a lead and/or customer. There are two approaches to lead generation through TikTok ads. 

1. Option one: You can set up a campaign using TikTok’s native lead gen objective which will populate a form within the platform with custom fields for the user to fill out once they click on the ad 
2. Option two: You can set up a conversion campaign and send the user to your website and optimize for users to submit a lead gen form on your site. 

Once we launch campaigns, we’ll monitor the lead quality to see how the MQLs and SQLs compare to the more traditional B2B social ads channels like Facebook and Instagram. 

How Teachable is using TikTok to acquire new leads

We recently launched a TikTok campaign for our partner Teachable –– a platform that allows individual creators with an array of skills and talents to create courses and sell them so that they can teach others to do what they do. So naturally, we wanted to go after an audience that aligned with Teachable’s product––people that are likely to have hobbies and talents that they’d want to teach courses on.  So we brainstormed different interests and hobbies that we see courses being created from across the web, and we matched those up to interests available in TikTok. After some hashtag research to find effective hashtags, we combined them all into one Interest and Hashtag campaign. 

After we settled on the audience, we researched which TikTok optimization event would help us best accomplish our goal. Looking at the standard events for TikTok we saw quite a few options that could help us target people at different stages of the user funnel, but ultimately our goal was to get users to sign up for a free trial though, so we settled on complete registration, which tracks when users create an account on the Teachable website. 

Even though this campaign was going to be for a B2B audience, we didn’t want the creative to be too corporate-y and abandon the fun nature of TikTok videos. We recognized that TikTok as a platform responds well to ads that look and feel native, and we know that even though we’re targeitng a B2B audience, it’s still people on the other end. So we just needed creative that would appeal to actual people who would want to use Teachable to sell courses.

The result was an array of creative options that ranged from motion graphics to UGC. After running them for a week, we quickly saw that we had made the right decision. Our CAC numbers outperformed Facebook, and our CTR was incredible. We had two separate campaigns and our contest campaign outperformed our evergreen campaign by a pretty significant margin–– likely because it leveraged better offers and incentives than the evergreen campaign did.

Now that we know TikTok ads work for our B2B partner Teachable, we’ve continued to experiment with new creative and audience targeting, but one thing is salient for us: Treat the people on TikTok like real people. Address their concerns, show them the benefits, grab their attention, and they’ll convert just like a B2C user would. It just might take a bit longer.

How Thnks is using TikTok to acquire new leads

For our partners Thnks we knew it wasn’t going to go be as easy to jump right in and drive quality conversions. Due to this, we took a two-pronged approach to work our way into a conversion-based campaign getting potential customers to sign up for a demo using TikTok for B2B marketing. 

Our first phase was prospecting to find out exactly what audiences and creative resonated best with potential customers. For this campaign we used the Traffic objective optimization toward a view content event that fires every time someone lands on the TikTok specific landing page. 

Replicating where we have seen success on other social platforms we structured our campaign to target three main interest based audiences:

Business Growth:

Sales:

HR:

Our second phase of this campaign will be to evaluate key metrics of our prospecting campaign and determine what audiences and creative will get carried over to a conversion-based campaign. With phase one of this test being a prospecting traffic campaign we looked specifically at metrics like clicks to the site, CPC, CTR and CPM. Compared to Facebook our initial findings are that CPC was 84% cheaper than Facebook and CPMs compared to Facebook were 1/4th of the cost.

Something that gets overlooked in the prospecting phase of campaigns is the data the pixel is collecting and how to leverage it. By running a traffic campaign to start, not only are you able to drive a large amount of traffic to your site, you are also able to collect valuable data through the pixel to further target those potential customers in the conversion phase of your campaign. In addition to carrying over the top performing interested based audiences. We will also be able to build out custom pixel based audiences based on users interactions with our ads and landing page. For this client we will be building out two custom pixel based audiences to retarget potential customers. One going after anyone who has visited our specific landing page in the last 90 days and has not taken any actions. The other being anyone who has watched 50% of our ad, and not taken any action to the site. These both are great ways to re-engage potential customers and get them to take action!

How B2B Brand Visory is using TikTok to acquire new leads

For our B2B partner Visory, we did some initial research on potential audiences on TikTok and found some interest targeting options that would allow us to reach their target audience. We kicked off our campaign by identifying two main interest based audiences that we have seen perform well on other social platforms, like Facebook and LinkedIn. 

Broad interests around money management and bookkeeping:

eCommerce specific interests:

One thing we’ve learned about targeting on TikTok is that broader is usually better (for prospecting or retargeting campaigns). The reason we separated these out was because they were roughly the same size + eCommerce (alone) has been a top performing audience for us in the past.

Prior to considering TikTok for Visory, we were able to test out some user-generated content on our other social platforms, which allowed us to determine what resonates most with Visory’s B2B audience and then repurpose the top performing creative for TikTok. Creative is SO crucial on any social platform but specifically on TikTok. If you want to dive deeper into the creative world, here is an additional resource: The 5 Main Components of Effective TikTok Ad Creative.

We knew that TikTok was going to be more of a top of funnel channel for Visory (similar to how we’ve viewed Facebook), so we’ve been optimzinig our campaigns for traffic to the site. To measure success, we are looking at clicks to the site, CTR, CPC and site engagement in Google Analytics. The result? Compared to Facebook, we have seen comparable CTRs but lower CPCs. Looking in GA, we’ve seen time on site as high as 00:06:25! While we have yet to see any last-click conversions from this site, we’ve learned that more traffic to the site historically results in more conversions over time. 

Conclusion

TikTok ads are becoming very popular among B2B brands and it’s an effective & cost-efficient way to reach your target audience in a creative way. If you’re ready to see how TikTok Ads can work for your business, give us a shout!

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.

The post How These Three Companies Use TikTok for B2B Marketing appeared first on Tuff.

When it comes to driving more traffic and applications online with growth marketing, the big challenge is how to scale and which marketing channels will help you grow fastest. With limited time, money, and people, you can’t afford to waste it on strategies and tactics that are sub-optimal. 

When we first partnered with Multiverse (a start-up company that provides an outstanding alternative to college through corporate training and professional apprenticeships) as their startup marketing agency, we wanted to test different campaigns with clear metrics to figure out which ones work and then focus on scaling those channels.

In this post, I’m going to focus in our our paid social strategy, with a focus on a deep dive on TikTok ads. We’ll look at why we selected TiKTok ads, the campaign structure, the best performing creative assets, and the results compared to other channels in our mix. (Spoiler: TikTok generated 3x times more applications than Instagram with a 52% lower CPA.) 

Diversified Channel Mix 

In our growth marketing strategy for Multiverse, we prioritized testing campaigns with social ads and PPC. 

For social ads, we focused on Instagram as the primary channel where we allocated 67% of our total budget and then we dedicated a portion of the total budget (33%) to testing other social ad channels. With the Multiverse target audience being between the ages of 18-26, we were super eager to test TikTok to see if this channel would be effective in driving applications and if effective, if it would be scalable. 

Clearly Defined CPA Targets and Goals 

Our goal for Multiverse was to prioritize high-impact growth campaigns to quickly drive key learnings, then invest in additional campaigns to scale up on what works. Since Multiverse didn’t have a ton of historical data in the US for us to learn from, we did some research on competitors and the average costs for TikTok ads and Instagram ads to come up with our KPI goals. 

Instagram KPI goals (for the first month): 

• Cost-per-click: $3.00
• Cost-per-application (CPA): $65

TikTok KPI goals (for the first month): 

• Cost-per-click: $2.00 
• Cost-per-application (CPA): $80 

Identifying the Target Audience & Funnel Stage 

When launching campaigns for a new partner, our social ads team at Tuff will put together an audience targeting strategy for each stage of the audience funnel. However, since we were starting from scratch and building campaigns on new platforms for Multiverse, we knew we needed to focus on the top of funnel audiences since we haven’t built up the brand recognition or audience size to retarget users based on previous ad interactions through bottom-funnel audiences. 

For TikTok, our primary focus was targeting a large, top of funnel audience that we could then educate and convert to applicants through our video creative. 

A Campaign Structure for Scale 

For Multiverse’s US paid acquisition, we were focused on six markets, including New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Phoenix and Boston. We knew we needed to drive as many applicants on TikTok as possible in each market, so we set up a prospecting campaign for each location, that way we could control the budget at the campaign level based on demand needs per market. 

Within each campaign, we wanted to test two different audiences on TikTok: 

1. A broad audience with no interest targeting, ages 18-26 
2. Education or motivation interest targeting, ages 18-26

After a few weeks of testing, we saw that the broad targeting was outperforming our interest-based targeting with a lower cost per application. Compared to other social ad platforms,  the TikTok algorithm is extremely accurate in serving your ads to your target audience (just think about how it perfectly curates a For You Page that’s specific to each TikTok users’ interest). So removing the interest targeting allowed us to widen our audience pool and let TikTok do the work of finding the users who were likely to apply for a Multiverse application based on the algorithm data.  

High-Peforming TiKTok Ad Creative 

When it comes to TikTok creative, videos that feature trending and relevant content are the key to success (check out our tips for creating trending video content). For Multiverse, we wanted to move QUICK, which meant that we needed to develop 3-5 TikTok videos fast to be able to launch on TikTok. 

For the creative, we wanted to lean into the Multiverse value props to educate our top-of-funnel audiences about Multiverse in a fun, trending and captivating way. 

Check ‘em out!

1. Job without degree
2. College vs. Apprenticeship 
3. Student Loan Stress

Results

So how did these TikTok campaigns perform? The short answer: we far surpassed our goals for applications and cost-per-application which allowed us to scale the monthly budget on this channel by 5x. 

• Average cost-per-click (CPC): $0.47
• Applications: 357
• Average cost-per-application (CPA): $16.77

But how does this compare to the other paid channels (like Instagram)?

TikTok generated 3x times more applications than Instagram with a 52% lower CPA. 

For Multiverse, we measure apprenticeship applications based on last-click attribution in Google Analytics, so while these results far exceeded our expectations, we also wanted to see how our campaigns have helped increase non-last click conversions. 

Since launching TikTok ads, we’ve seen a 110% increase in Multiverse Google Search branded conversions in the US. 🚀

Based on these learnings, we’ve continued to scale our TikTok campaigns and have found it to be the most cost-efficient paid channel driving the lowest CPA for Multiverse in both the US and UK. 

Are you interested in launching TikTok ads to help grow your business? Let’s chat! 

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.

The post TikTok Ads for Startups: How Multiverse Drives Quality Conversions at Scale (with a CPA lower than any other channel) appeared first on Tuff.

So you’ve just signed on a growth marketing team to help you run your Facebook Ads. Now what? Before your social ads strategist can jump in and create a new strategy for your Facebook ads, there’s a crucial first step they’ll need to take to ensure that you’re set up for success.

Keep on reading for a sneak peek into how and why we conduct a historical analysis on all of our new partners’ Facebook Ad Accounts. 👇

What is a Facebook Ad Account Historical Analysis?

If you’ve ever run any social ads, it’s crucial to take a look at previous campaigns and analyze how they’ve performed. Even if you found your previous Facebook campaigns unsuccessful, there is always something we can learn from the data. 

At Tuff, a historical ad account analysis is when our channel experts sift through all of the ad campaigns that you’ve ever run on your social media accounts as well as the data from campaigns in your Google Analytics account (given that you were tracking website behavior from your social ads). This historical data allows us to quickly identify a baseline of what success has looked like in the past with social ads for your brand. During this process we will also identify the low-hanging fruit that we can quickly implement to optimize your Facebook results and see improvements right away!

Conducting a Historical Facebook Ad Analysis 101

At Tuff, we use two tools to analyze the results from your previous Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns: Facebook Ads Manager and Google Analytics. 

First things first, we’ll create a custom report in Facebook Ads manager analyzing the lifetime data from your campaigns. To do so, you’ll…

1. Go to Facebook Ads Manager and click “Create Custom Report” (find it on the right under the drop down menu “Reports”) 
2. Toggle the time frame to include all lifetime data. 
3. View your custom report which should look something like this. 👇

1. Facebook & Google Analytics Results

When it comes to identifying key metrics, there’s no one size fits all. You might be an ecommerce brand focused on bottom line revenue, an app or service focused on application installs/subscriptions or a B2B company focused on leads—every brand has their own way of measuring the success of Facebook ads.

However, we do have our own process at Tuff, so in addition to your main business KPIs, we’ll recommend keeping an eye on the metrics below to determine what’s performing well and what’s not.

In Facebook Ads manager, we’ll look at: 

• CPA/CAC – Cost Per Acquisition (purchases, leads, subscriptions, app installs, etc.)
• Link Clicks & Landing Page Views
• CTR (Click-Through Rate)
• CPC (Cost Per Click) 
• CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
• Video Engagement 

Then, we’ll compare the Facebook data to the data in Google Ads Manager, where we’ll look at your website behavior. We’ll look at: 

• Last-Click Goals/Conversions (purchases, leads, subscriptions, app installs, etc.)
• Conversion Rates
• Average Session Duration 
• Bounce Rate
• Pages/Session
• Users and New Users

2. Audience Analysis

Once we have our campaign results, it’s time to get into the meat of the historical Facebook Ad analysis—drawing insights from all the variants that have been tested to figure out what we’d like to test again and what works best moving forward. 

First, we’ll take a deep dive into the audiences you’ve tested and see which audiences are most engaged with your Facebook ads. 

When looking at the data from a historical audience analysis of our new partner Dumpling’s Facebook traffic campaigns, and saw that their top performing audiences in all of their key markets were Facebook users who fall in the top 50% household Income of their area. 

This learning gave us insight into who their audience was on Facebook, which allowed us to create other audiences targeting similar behaviors and interests as the users who fall in the top 50% household income of their area. 

3. Creative Analysis

Creative and copy play a huge role in Facebook ad performance, so it’s extremely important to know what type of images/videos and messaging resonates best with your audience. 

We recently conducted a creative analysis for Joyn and learned that videos with high-energy and big movements (like this one) outperformed their videos that were more calm, relaxed and had little movements (like this one). 

We also learned that their audience was more engaged in video ads that were created in an actual workout environment rather than video ads created in a studio with a backdrop. Since we’ve rotated in new videos that implemented the data-driven insights from our creative analysis, we’ve seen a significant decrease in Joyn’s cost per subscription from Facebook ads.  

4. Placement Analysis

There are a lot of different placements you can choose when building out Facebook Ads and oftentimes, we’ll see our partners choose automatic placements instead of analyzing which placements yield the best results with their audience.

That’s why we always analyze placements in our historical Facebook Ad analysis. For example, when we pulled the data below for our partner VIDA, we discovered that there was a big opportunity to test three new placements (highlighted in the table below) since there was an impression share available that they weren’t currently capitalizing on.

Using Data to Inform Facebook Ad Strategies

Our one final thought we’ll leave you with: 

• Paid social strategies without historical data = 🥴 
• Paid social strategies with historical data = 🤓

After we’ve created the historical Facebook Ad Account Analysis, we’ll use the data and insights to guide our strategy. The historical analysis saves us and our partners a lot of time on testing things that have already been tested in the past and allows us to focus on what’s working and how we can better optimize what’s working for growth. 

Interested in learning more about our process for social ads? Give us a shout!

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.

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