Applying The Customer Buying Cycle to Facebook Advertising: Part 3 - Intent
In our third of our four-part series, we will dive into applying Facebook advertising to the third step of the customer buying cycle: Intent.Our customers at this stage of the game are not only aware of our brand or product, but have some level of consideration in what we are selling. We know this from the content fed to the customers from our consideration campaigns. Moving customers from consideration to intent can be costlier and a much smaller amount of our audience because we are now moving customers from their Facebook feed to our website.Intent is best measured in two forms. Link clicks and landing page views. These are quite similar, but different enough to discuss separately. Link Clicks – The number of clicks on ad links to select destinations or experiences, on or off Facebook-owned properties.Landing Page Views – The number of times a person viewed your ad’s destination URL (the landing page) after clicking on the ad. We obviously need a link for someone to click when moving potential customers from their Facebook feed to our website or landing page. So, optimizing our content for link clicks would make sense. The more people click on your link, the more Facebook will adjust its algorithmic feed to send your content to people most like the people who already clicked on your link. However, there is a flaw when optimizing content for link clicks… it does not account for bounce rate. You can have 500 link clicks, but when checking your web traffic on Google Analytics that number can be much smaller.Optimizing for landing page views is a much more accurate objective to optimize for. Why? Because for once for the first time in the history of Facebook advertising your Facebook numbers will align with your Google Analytics numbers. Mind blown. This is great news because we can better understand the number of people who intend to purchase our product.It is important to assess the effectiveness of your intent campaigns. What is your CPC? Who is clicking? Where are they located? What devices are they using? This is all valuable information to further optimize your content to people who are most likely going to view your landing page.Now that we have a pool of people who have visited our website from Facebook – which allows us to measure their intent with our brand we can lead these customers down to the last stage of the Customer Buying Cycle: Decision.