After multiple Facebook campaigns, several ads, and an endless amount of adjustments to fully optimize content, we have finally brought our potential customers to the end of the road. It is time to make a decision. We’ve made our target audience aware of our brand/product through brand awareness ads, we’ve retained their attention through engaging content, piqued their interest enough for them to visit our website and now we can create conversions (aka sell some stuff). Disclaimer: you’ll need an ecommerce site for everything I’m going to lay out below.Before we create conversions, we must define our conversion. It seems simple enough, but we need to tell Facebook exactly what a conversion is to us so that Facebook can optimize our content to people most similar to our other customers who have already converted.According to Facebook there are two ways to convert on Facebook which are Standard Events and Custom Conversions. Below are their definitions of each.Standard Events – “Track conversions and optimize ads for them using one of our 9 standard events.”Custom Conversions – “Track and optimize ads for customized actions without adding anything to your Facebook pixel code. You can also use custom conversions to apply rules to stand event traffic.”I’ve always preferred Custom Conversion over Standard Events because of two reasons. 1) Less coding. Always a good thing. We don’t have to make any adjustments to our Facebook pixel if we use Custom Conversions. 2) All you need is the URL to your “thank you” page after a purchase is made. For example, if your winery just released a new vintage of Pinot Noir we will need the URL to the page that thanks the customer for their purchase. This is our conversion page because only when someone purchases this wine online will they see it.Once we start selling wine, Facebook will further optimize our content for our custom conversion. Thus, we sell more wine with a cheaper Pay Per Click. In my experience, conversion campaigns are not nearly as successful when you do not walk the customer through the entire customer journey. If you jump in right away with “BUY NOW!” you won’t sell a thing.Walking your customer through awareness, consideration, intent and finally decision is by far the most effective way to use social media advertising. We no longer need to rely on likes to our page or shares as our only measuring stick for our social ROI. With an ecommerce site, we can measure your actual return on investment from social media. Yup, you read that right.
Beau Baumbach is the Marketing and Social Media Specialist for TIV Branding
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TIV Branding is a boutique branding firm in Sonoma County, California. We specialize in building brands by using traditional, social and digital channels in unison. If you would like to discuss a project or find out more about how we do what we do, please email us at info@TIVbranding.com.
