GUEST COMMENT Five Tips for Retail Success with Facebook Advertising

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Ed Stevenson, managing director EMEA APAC at online advertising management platform Marin Software, looks at how search is moving beyond Google and into other areas such as Facebook

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by Ed Stevenson

Online retailers have long been a driving force behind the growth of search marketing. As early adopters of search best practices, many now see it as an essential marketing channel. However, they undoubtedly need to continue to stay ahead of the curve to generate a return in one of the most competitive verticals in online advertising.

Having established campaigns using the traditional search engine to website user journey, retailers now need to consider adapting to cater for the ever-increasing number of users reaching websites from elsewhere. With growth in online retail slowing to 7.5% per year, the slowest performance since online sales started being recorded, it’s clear that the sector is maturing.[1] This just heightens the need for online retailers to innovate further through new channels and platforms to maintain online market share, let alone grow it. To remain competitive, it is unwise to rely solely on the website, but instead look towards investments in other outlets, especially social networking sites. And as Facebook in particular takes 55% of all social network visits, it’s definitely the force to be reckoned with.

When you consider that Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK after Google and accounts for 7.27% of all visits from UK internet users, it makes sense that brands are rushing to build a social presence on the networking site. In terms of internet pages viewed, Facebook is comfortably the UK’s biggest with 16% of all page views going to the social network – that’s twice as many as Google. Clearly the phenomenon cannot be ignored, and yet marketers are still in the early stages when it comes to advertising on Facebook. In fact, in spite of Facebook’s sizeable and growing ad revenues, many advertisers in the retail industry are still limiting their efforts to testing on Facebook to evaluate performance. So what can retailers do to take advantage of Facebook display ads? Here are a couple of best practices to drive optimum results from your campaigns.

Understand your audience
The segmentation that Facebook offers (being able to target via demographic, location, likes, and so on) is a real selling point for retail, and should be exploited. Using Facebook to integrate the online and offline shopping experience is a great example of this. Recently, a well-known multichannel retailer executed this superbly. It was looking to engage an online audience to drive purchases both online and in bricks and mortar stores. It created a campaign, which ran promotional ads on Facebook targeted at women who were in their core demographic, but crucially were also located in close proximity to their stores. By providing a special discount coupon via the ad to Facebook users that ‘liked’ the brand, the retailer was able to build out their fan base and drive measurable business to the physical stores using coupons. The technology made it easy for the retailer to target specific cities where the stores were located. More importantly, now they have expanded their Facebook Fan base, they can remarket sales and new merchandise directly to an already-interested audience.

Use keywords to identify likes
Targeting by likes and interests on Facebook allows retailers to serve ads to users who have expressed affinity for particular products, brands, or services. One best practice is to use paid search keywords and themes to identify initial targeting criteria, and this will help to determine relevant interests for targeting. You should be thoughtful about how you use these keywords, focusing on products and brands rather than individual terms, to translate search keywords into terms representing likes and interests. Not every term is going to work, and some iterations of ‘likes’ only reach a few users on Facebook, while others may not even be targeting options. Use Facebook’s advertising tools to estimate the reach of an ad with particular targeting parameters.

Make use of your existing fans
Just as retailers would want to serve an ad to a consumer on their second or third search, they should be taking advantage of users that already ‘like’ their products, page or app. Especially for well-known brands with an established presence on Facebook, a fanbase is likely already a strongly performing audience; they might just need that extra push or reminder from an ad to make a purchase.

Friends of your fans are also a great way to expand your audience to reach people likely to make a purchase. Users’ connections tend to be of similar age, status and location so that puts them in your target audience. Moreover, when targetting Facebook users’ friends, ads will mention their connection, giving it increased credibility and relevancy to the audience.

Enhance your Images
Images are important. The audience being targetted on Facebook is on the social network to interact with friends, share their photos, and play games, not to buy products – so adverts need to grab their attention. Facebook users are inundated with content and typically scan text and images quickly to find what interests them, so one trick you can use to attract their attention is to enlist the help of a creative image. Adding borders to photos in colours like orange or yellow, that contrast with the blue and white Facebook interface, is a simple way to pull the users’ eyes towards ads. Relating images to your audience, for example by serving an image of say a DVD for a Film or Television programme that users have listed in their Likes, is a good way to garner more attention than a generic image.

Keep your ads updated
Believe it or not, just standing out on a page is not enough; retailers need to make sure they are rotating ads to keep them fresh. Facebook ads are typically served to the same users multiple times, often in the same day, so they quickly tune-out repeat ads. Facebook doesn’t have frequency capping, so it is up to the marketing team to monitor the number of impressions each ad receives daily and watch for drops in click-through rates. Successful Facebook advertising requires that creative be rotated to combat the ‘ad blindness’ that can result from a user seeing an ad multiple times. Switching out images and headline copy typically helps boost click-through rates. Facebook itself even suggests that advertisers change images and copy every few days to make sure ads remain fresh to the viewers and encourage clicks.

These are just some of the early best practices on the platform. What is becoming clear is that, much like search, the retail sector is becoming a driver behind the Facebook advertising platform’s growth. However, there is still a lot of room for growth, as revenues only account for 5% of online display advertising revenues, while consumers spend 25% of their online time on Facebook[2]. So those brands that develop effective Facebook Advertising campaigns now will benefit most while acquisition costs are still low.

[1] British Retail Consortium / KPMG Retail Sales Monitor March 2011
[2] Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) full year online advertising statistics 2010

Ed Stevenson is managing director EMEA APAC at leading online advertising management platform Marin Software

For more insight you can download Marin Software’s whitepaper The Search Marketer’s Guide to Successful Facebook Ads

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Think Tank: How to snoop on employees without causing offence

“A manager wouldn’t follow an employee down the pub to check on what he
or she said to friends about their day at work. Just because they can do
something like this online, doesn’t mean they should.”

However, it does work both ways, and if an employee does publicly insult their
employer online, without applying any privacy settings, then it is the
equivalent of shouting out abuse in the town square – and they can be judged
for it. A balance definitely needs to be struck between what information is
made public and what is put behind strong privacy settings online. But,
until now, most guides have laid the onus at the feet of the person
publishing information.

The Acas guide does state that employees should assume that everything they
say on the internet could be made public and that they should think about
whether they want their colleagues or boss to read it. However, what this
guide does which stands out from the rest is address the fact that there are
contexts online, just as there are in real life. Just because a boss can
read about their staff’s private lives, it doesn’t mean they should or even
that they can use that information against them.

Indeed, the Acas guide clearly cautions employers about the risks of “Googling”
potential employees and using any personal information gleaned from the
internet, such as a person’s religious beliefs, in the recruitment process.

In no uncertain terms, managers have been warned that they risk being sued for
discrimination if they use websites such as Facebook to look into the
private lives of prospective workers and then use this information when
deciding whether to hire them or not.

In a week that has seen Jodie Jones, one of Britain’s youngest councillors,
criticised by her colleagues for drunken photos on Facebook, taken before
she assumed her post, this part of the guide needs to be taken on board by
employers everywhere.

We are entering an era where everyone will have grown up with a social network
profile. They may well have published embarrassing photos, the type that
used to lie forgotten in dusty albums in the attic and now exist in the full
glare of the internet.

Yes, privacy settings should be applied, but sometimes things slip through the
net, and so context must be applied when employers come across this type of
personal online information. Further, managers should tell prospective
employees and current staff whether they have looked at any material and why
they have done so. All “snooping” activity needs to be relevant,
transparent and appropriate.

The Acas guide also encourages employers to promote the use of social
networking websites in the workplace as a “key part of business and
marketing”.

The recommendation comes despite a study by myjobgroup, a jobs website, which
calculated that social media activity in the workplace cost the UK economy
£14bn in lost productivity last year.

Some companies have taken the rash step of banning access on work computers to
social networking sites such as Facebook, but doing so is incredibly
short-sighted as people can easily access social networks on their
smartphones. Moreover, what’s the difference between frittering away hours
online and old fashioned time-wasters such as making a cup of tea or having
a cigarette break?

Acas has advised bosses to draft their own social media policy in order to
avoid staff confusion about what is and isn’t allowed online.

But rather than these policies prescribing draconian measures which limit
freedom of speech, they should preach common sense and apply principles used
in the real world.

Every employer does need to make it clear to their staff what the company
policy is on the use of social media and employees have a duty to ensure
that any information they publish online is either not publicly available,
or benign enough for any reasonable manager to stomach.

But, equally, bosses must not abuse information that may be available to them
through the internet if it isn’t relevant.

If there is more honesty and compassion all round, the modern workplace can
evolve and flourish. Ultimately, businesses will reap the rewards in kind
through happy workers and clever digital communication.

Emma Barnett is the Digital Media Editor at The Telegraph.
Twitter: @emmabarnett

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