Learn How To Scale Your Facebook Advertising From Zoosk

By Zachary Reiss-Davis

At Dreamforce this year, our client, Zoosk, took the stage to share how to run a great ad campaign on Facebook. This was a great, in-depth session on how you can emulate their success, and we’re glad to provide some highlights to everyone!

Zoosk is a dating app and site with 35 million worldwide members, and is the top grossing iOS dating app globally. They started back in 2007 as a Facebook app, and quickly and successfully evolved into first an online dating site, and then a mobile dating app.

If anyone knows how to do advertising at scale, it’s Zoosk, with a massive volume of ads to its customers in 80 countries — but the information that Daniel Mori gave apply equally to any size advertisers.

Daniel started out by pointing out that while Zoosk started out advertising specifically for installs, they now also have a strong focus on inbound marketing as well as direct marketing.

He described how much of the advice for how to do Facebook advertising today is just a long list of tactical tips and tricks which are all great advice, but don’t provide strategic guidance. He recapped the best of that tactical advice as the following list:

• Set measurable goals
• Know who you’re targeting and have a retargeting strategy as well as custom audience targeting
• Use videos in your ads, because as Daniel said, “When Facebook pushes something heavily, they usually make it successful, and Facebook is pushing 2015 as the year of the video.”
• Use fan-created content, content with quotes, and always include a call to action, although he warns “your audience doesn’t want you to shout at them; if you shout at a user, the user will usually reject it.”

At Salesforce, we were extremely excited to go deeper and more strategic with Daniel in the second half of his session, because we agree that is a key way to improve as advertisers and marketers.

Daniel laid two main principles for how to manage the “new advertising challenges that your team of marketers need to understand and solve.”

Daniel’s first principle is to have a good grip on your technology, because you need to track your ad performance on a very granular level — “Zoosk tracks every ad dollar and every impression through to the user and their engagement, so we know how the lifetime value of the user is related to the ad spend that initially captured the user.” It sounds simple, right? But as Daniel said, many people don’t get this right. “You need to have a strong attribution model to determine how each element of your marketing mix contributes to your bottom line.”

You also need technology to scale — we were very happy to hear Daniel say one of the reasons “Zoosk works with Salesforce Social.com is for our ability to help companies like Zoosk scale their campaigns.”

Daniel’s second principle is the need for a great team of marketers to help you experiment with new things each and every week. Those marketers need to deeply and intuitively understand the bidding system of every platform on which they buy ads; on Facebook, he walked through an example of how effective CPM (eCPM) works. At Salesforce, we have made our own example for customers.

As part of those learnings , Daniel talked about a new concept, Responsive Ad Design. Much like how Responsive Web Design forces designers to think about their websites across different display formats, Response Ad Design requires designers to think about ad placement across different formats. As Daniel said, “today, when you upload an ad to Facebook, it could look very different from what you envision because of the Facebook Audience Network.” The same ad can show in the Facebook Newsfeed, as a banner on a mobile game, or as an interstitial. Daniel thinks the day will come where Facebook will dominate each of these ad formats through the Facebook Audience Network, and savvy marketers need to be ahead of the change.

We’re really glad to have hosted Daniel and Zoosk at Dreamforce this year, and encourage you to learn more about how the Facebook Auction works with our guide to the Facebook Auction!