Facebook Ups Their Attribution Modeling Game

Recently, I noticed Facebook has updated the Facebook Business Manager interface with additional functionality. One area that caught my interest was the Attribution section as you can see below:

Settings

I went ahead and configured the settings for one of our clients. Facebook’s Attribution tool set up has four components:

• Diagnostics – shows you any errors with your Facebook pixel, lets you know if data is being received correctly or not.
• Data Sources – displays your pixels and events.
• Referring Domains – similar to Google Analytics, you can exclude referring domains from reporting (such as paypal or other payment processing third-party domains).
• Ad Platforms – this is where you can connect other ad platforms and pull in their data for a fuller picture of how your advertising is doing across all the publishers.

As you can see in the snapshot below, Facebook has a decent number of connectors to various ad platforms.

Adding Tags and Import Mapping Data

In order to see the click and impression data from your Bing or Google ads, you need to copy and paste what are called ‘Click Tags’. These tags send data back to Facebook when someone clicks on your Bing or Google ads, giving Facebook a better picture of your advertising not just on Facebook but Bing and Google as well.

As you see below, this process is not very user friendly and the click tags are very confusing:

The final step involves ‘mapping’ your Bing data and sending that data to Facebook via a somewhat confusing set of steps that basically have you set up, within Bing reporting,  a daily report (csv format) that is emailed to Facebook daily!

I guess this is a first iteration of this Facebook Attribution tool but I would have rather seen this integration be done via a more seamless api integration between the two systems rather than a daily csv email!

Facebook Attribution Reporting Results

Well, we are still waiting for the BingAds data to be imported into the Facebook attribution tool. As of this post, we haven’t seen any BingAds data. I will update this post with more information as we continue to test this new, exciting feature.

Have you tried the Facebook Attribution report? What sort of results have you received? Would love to hear from you!

It’s all about Objective-Based Advertising

When you create a new campaign on any of the major digital ad platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Bing and Google, you will be taken through a guided series of screens, the first of which is to select the objective of your campaign.

The most common objective types I see are:

• Awareness – you want brand new eyes on your products
• Traffic – increase site visitors
• Engagement – get users engaging with your content (social engagement)
• Conversions – bottom of the marketing funnel users who want to purchase

The current Google Ads screen is shown below:

You can see the Facebook ads screen is quite similar:

When this type of “objective-based” guided approach started appearing a few years ago, I didn’t like being forced to go through these steps, telling myself: “How dare Facebook and Google put these road blocks up! I know what I am doing!”  But over time, I have grown to like the discipline these tools force on you. I am even using that type of approach when reporting and planning digital media ad campaigns.

Objectives and the Marketing Funnel

I’ve been putting on this “objectives-based” hat more often now when budgeting client media spend across the marketing funnel. This helps me figure out the right ratio of spending across those objectives based on where we are in the shopping season. For example, you may want to ‘heavy up’ (increase spend) the budget at the bottom of the funnel (‘conversion’ objective) during the Christmas season to maximize revenue when people are ready to buy. However, if we didn’t allocate budget to the top of the funnel early on in the year, we wouldn’t have enough users in that ‘conversion’ bucket to even target.

By segmenting an annual media budget by objective type, you can quickly see if your spend is too much on the conversion end or awareness end of the funnel.  I typically try to maintain a 65% prospecting/35% conversion budget ratio most of the year and then heavy up on the conversion objective spend at that high season mark.

Here’s an example of a Facebook account analysis of the ad budget by objective, you can see the conversions objectives has about 35% of the spend while the rest is distributed across middle and top of the funnel campaign objectives.

So, what are you doing with your digital advertising spend across your company’s marketing funnel? Are you always spending some money on prospecting or are you focused mainly on the bottom of the funnel converters?  Let us know!

Have you started using the new campaign level conversion tracking feature for GoogleAds?

This campaign level conversion tracking functionality finally brings Google Ads to the same conversion tracking capabilities as Facebook Ads has had for years.

Now you will be able to turn on Google’s machine learning optimization tools to drive more events that have meaning for your business. Prior to this release, if you wanted to set up a campaign to drive more newsletter sign ups, you had to turn on that particular google conversion in your account. That would inflate your other purchase conversion numbers.

Automate

• Don’t over-automate!
• Make your automations modular, automation 1 spawns automation 2, 3, etc
• Sometimes you don’t need to automate at all – don’t forget to use a more human touch
• Collect and qualify using ActiveCampaign forms
  • Use form drop-downs to help you segment
  • Keep form fields to name, phone, email at most
  • Then use automation to get more info later
• Send notifications to alert team members of new campaigns, changes to your account
• You can send one-one, personal emails as well

Building modular

• Break up automations by function
• One automation for each objective or purpose
• Automation map displays how automations are connected
• Automation map tool is really helpful to troubleshoot what is going on with an automation
• Use an automation for monitoring clicks, maybe start monitoring
• Be sure to make notes within your automations! Just like commenting when writing code

Understanding goals

• CPA method:
  • Condition – “Jump to this action when …”
  • Position – “And when this goal is …”
  • Action – “If the contact does not meet goal conditions…”
• Goals help you avoid sending wrong emails, help you make sure your sequence works for all users and that they have taken action desired
• Goal built from bottom up – always listening so prior automation steps
• Takes the place of a pending wait event
• Goals instead of wait-else-if – you can use goals to create segments

Foundational Automations

• Welcome series
• Engagement tagging
• Event reminders
• Sort through data collected

Welcome email

• welcome email 1 (consider adding some type of action oriented content)
• wait 1-2 days
• send email 2 – maybe send with a form to collect interests of subscriber
• wait 1-2 days
• send email 3 – personalized with info from email 2

Remember engagement rates decline over each sequential email so don’t wait to publish your great content.

Engagement tagging

• Two part automation, strangely the start trigger is in Part #2
• Part 2 – just listening
• Part 1 – just tagging

Find non-engaged tagged users and try to re-engage them with a lead magnet or more engaging content.

Event Reminder

• Webinar reminder series
• Webinar follow up
• You can use a multiple goals in the flow:
  • 30 days until webinar
  • 2 weeks until webinar
  • Day before webinar
• Each goal is like a ‘bucket’ holding users until they hit that goal

Sorting Automation

• Segmenting by product

Sales Automation – ‘Deals’

• Deal = qualified lead, a ‘scored’ lead qualified for next step in customer journey
• Lead scoring to create audiences based on engagement
• A contact can have multiple deals per contact
• Lead
• In contact
• Purchased product
• follow up
• repurchase

Contact & Lead Scoring

• Scores assigned to individual contacts based on their actions
• +20 pts for us customer tag
• +5 pts for visiting home page
• +40 pts for starting a free trial
• Lead scoring 102 article: https://www.activecampaign.com/learn/guides/lead-scoring-102/
• Make sure your score has an expiration date
• Can score based on almost anything:
  • open email
  • achieves goal
  • purchases product
• You can also remove points from users based on :
  • they become disengaged
  • no longer visit site

Integrations

• AC integrates with over 150 applications
• Common integrations:
  • Zapier
  • Deep eCommerce integration
    • Woocommerce
    • Shopify
    • BigCommerce
  • Abandonned cart
    • 75% consumers abandon carts
  • Online calendars:
    • Calendly
    • Acuity Scheduling
  • Webhooks:
    • Uses a unique URL to pass data to other apps

Measuring your Marketing

• Test your automation
• Email performance
• Goal reporting
• Attribution

Test automation

• personal email
• send myself thru automation

Email performance

• Look for trends by hour and day
• New feature  – optimize send by user

Goals

• Allows you to measure how successful your automations are
• You can figure out your sales cycle using goal reports

Attribution

• Trace each customers path, where they came from

Deal, CRM reports

• Run sales reports by deal

Digital marketing has really evolved more and more towards targeting audiences that you can customize to meet your marketing goals. The “magic” of this audience targeting is revealed when you use the “Similar” or “Lookalike”  audience functionality within Facebook or Google. By using machine learning algorithms, these advertising platforms discover additional prospects for your business. Just like magic.

To become a Lookalike audience magician, here is one workflow I use that may work for you.

Create a Great “Seed” Audience

With both Facebook and Google, their algorithms work best if you provide a high quality “seed audience.” A seed audience is a list of your best qualified customers, or potential customers, which the platforms use to find additional new prospects.  Some of the most common seed audiences come from your customer lists but also can be created from your website pixel data.

The following is an example of how you would create a list from your highest lifetime value customers.

• Create a csv file with 500-1,000 of your most valuable customers (highest lifetime value). Add as many fields of customer attributes as you can (name, phone number, DOB, gender, address, etc).
• Upload the list as a “custom audience”. The platforms will present the match rate within 15-30 minutes.
• Select “Create Similar Audience (“Lookalike Audience)
• Choose that Lookalike audience to make your ad campaign

Configure Included and Excluded Audiences

When you’re ready to use your similar audience, you need to make sure you understand the concept of “included audiences” and “excluded audiences”.  You’ll use your similar audience as an included audience but you’ll need to exclude certain types of audiences as well.

What I typically do is exclude users who’ve already made a purchase on the site, or users who are already customers.

Test and Optimize

Finally, you want to make sure that you’re monitoring your similar audiences campaign and making adjustments as needed. You can also take advantage of the “experiments” or “A/B test” features in the ad platforms to test different similar audiences at the same time to see which works the best.

Go ahead and try out the Lookalike audiences feature for your company’s digital marketing and maybe you will see the magic as well!

How we miss the early days of directory link building

In the early days of SEO (late 1990’s, early 2000’s), directories were an easy way to generate links. Submitting to directories was part of that outdated link building methodology whose primary objective was to increase the number, rather than the quality, of links.

Fifteen years ago, getting links from directories worked. But Google has gotten smarter and devalued this type of link. Especially after the Google Penguin update, directories no longer enjoy their status as a link building tactic.

So where does directory submission stand today?

Well, it is definitely of a much lower value as a pure link building tactic, but there is one area where you still do want to submit your directory listings properly, and that is with local directories. You also want to make sure those listings provide a consistent name, address and phone number (“NAP”).

Local directories and name, address, phone number (NAP)

Getting your site listed in directories is still valuable for local SEO, where you can send the search engines signals about where your business is located. The trick is ensuring you are sending search engines precise data about your business name, address and phone number (NAP) using these local directories.

There are several directories that are really effective for NAP syndication. Getting your site listed accurately and consistently in these directories will help your business visibility for local search queries.

Here are some local directories worth submitting your website to for local SEO:

• https://www.google.com/business/
• https://www.bingplaces.com/
• https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local
• https://www.yellowpages.com/
• https://www.hotfrog.com/
• https://www.superpages.com/
• https://www.merchantcircle.com/
• https://www.elocal.com/
• http://www.brownbook.net/

For our readers who are looking for more information on the ever evolving field of link development, here’s a great compilation of link building articles from 2018 that I have found useful:

• Linkbuilding for SEO: The Definitive Guide (2019 Update) by Backlinko –  A comprehensive guide on the how and why of link building. Very newbie friendly.
• What is the Cost of Buying Links by AHREFS – Looking into buying links? Read through this guide that is backed by research and data on how much each link costs (which depends on what industry) and also looks at the question:  “Is buying links really the easiest and most effective way of getting links?”
• How to Earn More Links and Social Shares: Insights From 759 Content Marketing Campaigns  by Moz – Insightful article on content marketing and using content as a link building tactic!
• 13 Killer Linkbuilding Strategies by Robbie Richards – Step-by-step tactical guide!
• 13 Best Linkbuilding Tools by AHREFS – This list is a pot of gold in evaluating link building tools to see what works well for your needs.

Great news for you B2B marketers!  We are finally seeing some benefits from Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn a few years ago! Checkout this BingAds article: “LinkedIn Profile Targeting.”

Some users (it’s not a fully rolled out release yet), will be able to target users based on their LinkedIn profile attributes like:

• Industry
• Title
• Job function.

You select LinkedIn audiences from within your BingAds account as I show below:

This ability to target B2B users based on their LinkedIn profile settings will be a real distinguishing factor for Bing Ads versus Google AdWords!

The BingAds article indicates that using this targeting option will not limit your audience size. The bidding will be set up as ‘bid only’ not as a targeting only type setting like ‘bid + targeting’ but I am sure this limitation is only temporary.

Looking forward to testing out this new LinkedIn targeting feature for our clients asap!

I’m a true believer in Facebook as a viable ad platform for driving bottom-line ROI results. That’s especially the case with their ad targeting capabilities.

Facebook has ALOT of targeting options

As someone who manages both Facebook and PPC accounts, I spend a lot of time making sure that our agency’s client accounts are set up with proper targeting. In the past, Facebook was limited in their targeting options, especially when it came to custom and re-marketing audiences. Those limitations have mostly disappeared.

Lookalike audiences find you more customers

One Facebook ad platform feature that stands out to me is their wonderful ‘Lookalike’ audience tool. You can create new prospect lists that ‘Look-like’ your existing customers – by a variety of ways.

For example, you can use ‘custom audiences’ using data from your website visitors or you can upload ‘seed’ audiences of your highest Lifetime Value customers.

We are looking forward to continued Facebook advertising feature releases and using them to improve our client’s ROI!

I just rediscovered this “Live blogging notes” post I had drafted but never published. Still rings true. Another great social media presentation by the Social Media Club of Kansas City. The event topic was entitled: “The Chiefs Social Media Playbook” and the presenter, from what I can remember (sorry I haven’t been able to get this information), was the Kansas City Chiefs football team social media director.

Note: This “Live Blogging” format is more of an outline format so you can see the major points and ideas.

Inspiring campaigns

• Red Bull has taken on Coca Cola, has owned the word ‘adrenaline.’
• Under Armour “Woman” campaign.
• Always – A brand that speaks about something universal in all of us as humans.

All of these brands created social media campaigns that were based on inspiring values that were greater than their product.

The commonality of all three:

• Authentic
• Something is communicated that inspires us, tell a bigger story than our products.
• “You can be the underdog and still win.”

What areas can you win in? What is KC Chiefs playbook?

• Win with engagement -Create content people want to engage with
• Expectations – Be careful “in the wild” – one tweet wrong and you are toast
• Stay true to brand values – Jeep – freedom, authenticity, adventure, passion)
• Chiefs values – Win with character, unite our community, inspire fans, honor tradition – we always talk about what the chiefs are about
• Hashtag – this is #ChiefsKingdom -amplify the core values – passion, heat, loud
• Its a mixture of things – Short gains, but big plays once in a while.

Chiefs playbook

P – people

O -objectives

S-strategy

T-technology

Audible for your audience

• Fan avidity – how do i build a content plan to reach out to the passive fans, get them to step up to avid fans (research shows women are a demo to focus on). 37% of fans used wifi in stadium overall in NFL most on facebook than twitter. use this for understanding audience
• Best performing audience – when you realize ur the only team to beat.

Z Trips Right

• How do we tell a story on social media (this is the true art of social media)?
• ex: Eric Berry visited after practice with future lymphoma survivor
• Eric berry shares a moment with his mother before hitting the field – speaks to those core values, goes beyond football

65 Toss Power Trap

• How to tell will shields story – video of will shields block on ray lewis, powerful story – ‘lewis thought he was being blocked by two people but it was just one! what a story…. 62% video completion rate.
• Twitter video – ‘welcome back eric berry’
• Twitter video really taking off now… very powerful.

Option Read

• Can’t measure snapchat right now.
• jamaal charles on snapchat drawings

Receive Pick Play

• Retweet to win Bose headphones
• Simple to execute content ‘retweet for your chance to win’

Hook and Ladder

• Florida hockey team – ‘we play for cancer’, #HockeyFightsCancer

Celebrating with the royals – how to interact with other teams

Celebrate fandom

• Have fun – #fitForAKingdom

Influencer marketing

• How do we work with influencers
• Connect with them and reward them
• Ask them to share their experience with their followers