3Q Digital: Holiday Facebook ads can win with clear CTAs, Website Custom Audience targeting

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the largest annual sales events. Digital marketing agency 3Q Digital analyzed the performances of Facebook advertising campaigns for two of their clients during this period — a leading children’s educational toy subscription service and a leading online jewelry supplier. For one client, Black Friday ads produced a 326 percent higher clickthrough rate and 60 percent lower cost per click than their normal evergreen ads. 3Q Digital Senior Director of Social Dayna Moon blogged about the results: Desktop News Feed ads proved costlier with increased competition, even as mobile accounted for the majority of traffic. Tailored and holiday focused ads with a clear call to action, combined with Website Custom Audience targeting, produced tremendous performance for the jewelry supplier’s “burst”-style sale. And campaigns for both clients showed the challenge of scaling performance across audience segmentations of different sizes. The first client was a leading children’s educational toy subscription service. Their Black Friday ads produced 326 percent higher CTR and 60 percent lower CPCs (cost per clicks) than their normal evergreen ads. Mobile accounted for 75 percent of the traffic on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, however CPCs on Desktop News Feed ads outperformed those on mobile by 89 percent on Black Friday and 71 percent on Cyber Monday. In addition to retargeting audiences (fans, existing customers, and Website Custom Audiences) 3Q Digital also measured lookalike audiences, utilizing the full range of percentages (1–10 percent, with 1 percent being the most relevant or similar to the seed custom audience and the 10 percent audience less relevant but at a far larger scale). CPCs were consistent across all the lookalike audiences despite the variation in their relevance. However, not all clicks are equal because the CPA (cost per acquisition) of the 10 percent audience was double that of the 1 percent audience. The most notable findings were that the CPA of the 5 percent audience was almost the same as that of the 1 percent audience, and the 4 percent audience had the worst CTR, which came in 41 percent lower than that of the 10 percent audience. These findings indicate that it’s better to test the range of audiences rather than making assumptions about their responsiveness based on Facebook’s determination of relevance. 3Q Digital goes on to share the revenue sources for the campaigns of their second client, a leading online jewelry supplier. On Black Friday, lookalike audiences (cold traffic) accounted for 8 percent of revenue, while retargeting existing audiences accounted for the remaining 92%. The results for Cyber Monday were similar. Lookalike audiences accounted for 14 percent of revenue and retargeting accounted for the remaining 86 percent. Readers: How have lookalike audiences performed for you? Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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3Q Digital: Holiday Facebook ads can win with clear CTAs, Website Custom Audience targeting

Alexander Ernst

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Alexander Ernst