How Facebook Ads Improve Cross-Channel Campaign Performance

Have you jumped on board the paid social media train yet? If you haven’t, you should. We’ve previously covered how powerful a driver social media is, accounting for 38% of customer acquisition for polled marketers. Statista reports a full 78% (over three quarters!) of the US population has at least one social media profile. As Facebook is by far the world’s biggest social network, advertisers who use Facebook are likely tapping into most or all of that 78% of Americans. This is a massive audience, and through the granularity and interactivity of Facebook Advertising, they can be more engaged and involved with brands than ever before.

That’s why Facebook – easily the biggest social earner out of all the major social media platforms – has dedicated their Facebook Marketing Science team to discovering just how much more potent social media advertising can make traditional search advertising. In a report released last December, the team dove deep into “Making Search Work Harder” through advertisements on Facebook. Here are some of the major highlights.

• 25% of campaigns showed statistically significant lift in search referral traffic when audiences were exposed to Facebook Ads. Significantly, most of these ads were on mobile devices, pointing to the increasing power of mobile as a platform.

• Audiences exposed to Facebook Ads were more likely to search for cost-effective brand keywords and less likely to search for expensive unbranded keywords. This behavior makes advertising more efficient by significantly lowering spend while retaining or increasing ad engagements.

• Use of Facebook Ads created demonstrable lift in lower-funnel KPIs, such as online sales.

Let’s look at these results through a practical application. Say you own a furniture store and you’re looking to boost sales through your Ecommerce store. To do this, you start running targeted Facebook Ads in conjunction with the search advertising you already have in place. Because you’re running both types of campaigns at the same time, your business experiences a 5% increase in mobile conversions due to more visitors clicking through to your page. Your costs also drop as your new Facebook Ads inspire users to search for inexpensive branded keywords. Overall, you see your business hit more of your KPIs than you were reaching before, all thanks to the cross-channel efficacy of Facebook Advertising.

So what are the takeaways to consider here? Primarily, it’s that exposure to Facebook Ads makes audiences more likely to convert, especially if that exposure takes place on mobile. Thus, cross-channel, integrated campaigns that make use of social as well as search and other forms of digital marketing are statistically more likely to experience a lift in results.

Facebook and Wpromote recommend all advertisers take these three steps:

1. Coordinate your campaign planning across channel.
2. Measure your results holistically (that is, base your measurement on people and on cross-platform usage).
3. Test and evaluate budget reallocation across all your channels.

If you’d like to see more specifics and recommendations, you can read Facebook’s report over here. Or, if you’d like to check out what Wpromote can do with Facebook, check out our Facebook Advertising page.