How to — Facebook & Instagram traffic (Link clicks) campaigns
An essential campaign for any digital marketer
--
This edition of our ‘How-To’ blog series covers the many and varied benefits of Link Clicks campaigns and how you can map data from the traffic destination back to your ad campaign to help optimise targeting and minimise budget wastage.
Check out the brief video below showing how to launch a Link Clicks campaign with Leaf Grow.
A Staple Tactic For Digital Marketers.
Traffic, or Link Clicks campaigns, are widely used across many different industries. They’re a versatile pseudo-conversion campaign that can be incredibly effective but can also be a super-massive black hole for ad spend if approached naively.
A traffic campaign, as the name implies, is a great way to drive audiences to a destination of your choosing, whether it’s a website, landing page or media platforms like Spotify or YouTube. You can use this type of campaign for a whole host of objectives — driving sales, signups, streams, testing the UX of your platform, testing the performance of ad creatives and gathering data for audience segmentation and profile building.
Having a clear idea of your target audience or better still, some solid data on audience engagement with your brand/product will give you a head start. Even still, results can be elusive.
Traffic campaigns are particularly useful for when you can’t install a Facebook pixel at your destination.
They can provide more reach and more data, in a shorter time frame than a conversion campaign, if exposure and/or time are key considerations.
It’s vital that you have at least some basic analytics installed at the destination you’re sending people to. Without it, you’re flying blind and will end up throwing good money after bad, without any clue whether it’s all worth it. Analytics help you map user journeys and identify those audiences that go on to take high-value actions at the destination, such as a purchase, click-through to a streaming platform or email signup etc.
The ideal scenario is to have a Facebook tracking pixel installed so you can optimise for conversions, create segments and funnels (using Facebook analytics) and retarget the audiences that are flirting but not yet converting.
Leaf Grow automatically creates custom retargeting audiences from your pixel data, such as people who’ve visited your website, people who’ve triggered your chosen conversion event (‘purchase’ for example) and lookalikes of those audiences. It’s very quick and simple to set up and with Leaf Grow’s auto-optimisation, will deliver maximum return on your ad spend.
Launching Link Clicks Campaigns With Leaf Grow
In our recent video promotion blog, we discussed including a link in the video post so that it could also be used for sending people to a website or streaming platform. In Leaf Grow you can easily grab that post again either by selecting it from the drop-down or by simply pasting in the post URL or post ID as per the below.
Combine this post or posts with some dark ads to see which perform the best in terms of clicks, click-through rate and cost-per-click.
Because this campaign type only tracks clicks on the ad you will have to compare the clicks and CTRs for the audiences coming from the ads, with what’s happening at the destination in terms of additional actions, such as clicks through to streaming platforms or purchases. Make your adjustments to your ad targeting according to this data and what you’re seeing at the ad and ad set levels.
Cheapest Isn’t Always Best
This is where you have to be very careful. Facebook will generally throw money at the cheapest audiences for the campaign objective you choose. In this case, link clicks. Correlate the performance of your ad campaign with the data on those taking desired actions at the destination and make adjustments to targeting according to those audiences which are performing best.
Example — if you are sending people to a landing page which then directs people to a streaming store of their choice (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube etc) the platform should at the very least tell you the best performing locations in terms of click-through to the stores. The objective of your campaign is to drive the highest conversion rate from people clicking on the ads, landing on the page and clicking through to a store. After a few days of running ads, you’ll have a benchmark average click-through rate (make sure you have plenty of data — at least 50 results for your best -performing ad-sets in a 7-day period). Take all the locations (if you have age and gender data as well then even better) that are performing above the average click-through rate and refine your ads targeting to focus on these locations. Also cross-reference this with what you’re seeing in your Spotify or Apple Music for Artists dashboard. Don’t go too narrow too early and be mindful to group together just those territories which have a similar cost per impression. See our blog on smart territory targeting for best-practice here.
Don’t Fear Attrition
Expect a large portion of the audience to drop off as they click through the journey; ad-page-item-checkout-purchase etc. This is normal for most user journeys from an ad to somewhere. Tracking these actions/events can provide valuable insight into where you’re losing the audience along the user journey, enabling you to make adjustments, whether it be to the messaging in the ad, the loading time of your website or the user experience once it loads. The audiences that are dropping off are useful — they provide invaluable data about who your core audience is.
Just because something didn’t work, it doesn’t mean it’s a failure. It means that you’ve learnt something. Finding out what doesn’t work helps you to find out what does.
Interested? Learn more and request a demo today.
