How to use Context to Boost Your Facebook Advertising Performance
You have to use context to boost the effectiveness of your Facebook Advertising efforts.
For instance, look for fans when they are most likely to listen to you.
It seems like an obvious course of action but I have the numbers to back the statement up.
Keep reading!
One of the best features of Facebook Ads is the ability to show them at a time of your choosing.
You want to reach users at 3am? You can.
This is important for marketing messages that are time sensitive.
I will show you how you can discover when your advertising budget is more effective.
To achieve this goal you need to pay extra attention to the concept of ‘context’.
It does not make much sense to advertise icecream in winter?
Or skiing equipment in the middle of summer, does it?
Think about when YOUR message should reach your target audience.
Maybe customers buy your product at weekends.
Maybe peak hour for your service is on Monday morning between 9 am and 11 am.
You have to run your own experiments while here I share the results of mine.
I wanted to check the best time to engage with Facebook users to gain followers for my main Facebook Page.
Italiansinfuga is an online resource dedicated to Italians wishing to live and work abroad.
I set up an experiment that modifies the message of an ad depending on the time of day of its delivery.
First of all the baseline.
The somewhat utilitarian headline reads ‘Resources to live and work abroad’.
Not the most exciting but it works better than many others.
Trust me, I have tried.
It achieves:
- a Click Through Rate of 1.69%,
- a Facebook Ads Relevance score of 9 and
- a Cost per Page Like of $0.17.
Facebook delivered this ad throughout the day.
I then set up four different ads to be delivered at different times of day.
Morning Ad
The headline now reads ‘Improve your morning with Italiansinfuga!’
I chose to deliver this ad between 6am and 10 am.
Would this work better by better using context?
Yes, it does!
It achieved:
- a Click Through Rate of 3.71%,
- a Facebook Ads Relevance score of 10 and
- a Cost per Page Like of $0.05.
To be clear, the ad improves CTR by 120% while reducing acquisition cost by over 70%.
Notice how the ad is also less descriptive when compared to the original.
Yet it performs better.
Day Time Ad
The second ad reads ‘Improve your day with Italiansinfuga’.
I chose to deliver it between 11am and 3 pm.
The results are still impressive.
It achieved:
- a Click Through Rate of 3.20%,
- a Facebook Ads Relevance score of 10 and
- a Cost per Page Like of $0.05.
An inferior CTR when compared to the Morning Ad yet a marked improvement on the Original Ad.
Evening Ad
The third ad reads ‘Improve your evening with Italiansinfuga!’
It was delivered between 6pm and 10pm.
Its performance is inferior to the ‘earlier in the day’ versions.
It achieved:
- a Click Through Rate of 1.98%,
- a Facebook Ads Relevance score of 8 and
- a Cost per Page Like of $0.14.
Night Ad
The fourth ad roughly translates as ‘Improve the night with Italiansinfuga!’
It was delivered between 12 am and 4 am.
It achieved:
- a Click Through Rate of 1.74%,
- a Facebook Ads Relevance score of 7 and
- a Cost per Page Like of $0.22.
This performance is similar to that of the Original ad.
But wait, there’s more!
Just to further prove the effectiveness of proper context, I created an ad with a ‘wrong context’.
What if we displayed the ‘Morning Ad’ at night?
The results re-inforced the power of context.
The ‘at the wrong time’ ad achieved:
- a Click Through Rate of 1.59%,
- a Facebook Ads Relevance score of 6 and
- a Cost per Page Like of $0.22.
What have we learned from this experiment?
- ‘Improve Your Life’ messages work better in the morning when we have more energy
2. using context to adapt advertising delivers significant performance improvements
3. taking context into account delivers significant bottom line results
What experiments have you run using the concept of Context?
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