Release V2.24: Campaigns Improvements, LocalVoice Updates, and PinSync API Enhancements
The following is a very detailed look at our V2.24 release. Feel free to just skim through to find what you’re looking for – it won’t hurt our feelings! As always reach out to your Account Manager or email [email protected] with any questions you may have. Here is a summary of what’s covered in this post:
CAMPAIGNS
Custom & Lookalike Audience Targeting
Facebook Audience Network Ad Placement
Campaign KPI Summaries
Optimization Enhancements
Cloning Campaigns
Enhanced Error Logging
LOCALVOICE
Facebook Link-Type Post Publishing
PINSYNC
API Enhancements
CAMPAIGNS
Custom & Lookalike Audience Targeting
Facebook has introduced a variety of advanced tools for targeting ad spend to reach the most relevant audience possible. One of the most powerful of these tools is targeting to Custom and Lookalike Audiences. In this release, MomentFeed customers can now target their localized ads to both Custom and Lookalike Audiences, giving brands a powerful new way to reach relevant consumers at the individual store level.
For those who might be new to these options, here’s a quick breakdown:
Custom Audiences: Custom Audiences allow advertisers to target their existing contacts with Facebook ads. For example, let’s say ACME, Inc. has 10,000 customers in their loyalty program. ACME knows that these customers are most likely to be interested in their messaging and are responsible for a significant percentage of their in-store revenue. Rather than target the broader Facebook user base, ACME could add that list of customers to their Facebook campaign as a Custom Audience.
Lookalike Audiences: Lookalike Audiences let brands target users that are likely to be interested in their business because they share similar characteristics with existing customers. For example, let’s take our list of 10,000 loyalty program members at ACME, Inc. There are likely other Facebook users that are very similar to these customers that ACME would also like to target. To expand their relevant reach, ACME can create a Lookalike Audience, made up of Facebook users sharing similar characteristics as their original Custom Audience of 10,000 loyalty program members.
Using Custom Audiences in MomentFeed
To use Custom Audiences in Campaigns, you must first create an audience. Go to Campaigns, select the “Audiences” option from the menu and click the “New Audiences” button.
This will take you to the Audience Creation page. Before actually creating a custom or Lookalike Audience, you’ll need to accept Facebook’s Terms of Service. Make sure you read the terms carefully before accepting and creating your Audience. Note that you will only need to do this once per ad account.
Once the Facebook’s Terms of Service have been accepted, you’re ready to get started with Custom Audiences. Fill out the fields for Name and Description. Select the Field Type you’ll be providing to Facebook for matching to their user base. Email is the most common. You may also choose to include an optional Opt Out Link, so users can choose not to be targeted. Finally, select the “Choose File” option to upload your audience data. The data file requirements are as follows:
The file must be in CSV or TXT format with each item separated by a newline/return.
The file should contain only one column of data. A header row should not be included.
A file should contain as many contacts as possible. Facebook requires a minimum audience of 20 for any ad set and not every contact submitted will successfully match to a Facebook user.
Email addresses and UIDs should be in cleartext. E.g. [email protected] or 9876543.
Phone numbers should be in the format country code + number, with numeric characters only. E.g. A US number would be formatted as 16502345678.
It may take up to one hour for Facebook to finish generating the Custom Audience. The status of your Audience can be monitored directly from the MomentFeed Audience dashboard. When the audience is in a “Ready” state, as indicated by a green bubble, it can be included in or excluded from the targeting for any campaign. On the targeting tab of the Campaign Creation Wizard, select whether the Custom Audience should be Included or Excluded. Locate the desired audience by typing its name into the adjacent search field.
Note that Custom Audiences are targeted in addition to other selected options. For example, a Custom Audience called “Loyalty Program Members” could be further segmented, by selecting specific interests or demographics. Proximity targeting can also be used, to only reach Loyalty Program members within a specific radius of a business location. When using proximity targeting, it will be wise to start with as large a custom audience as possible, to ensure that each location possesses an audience of sufficient size (greater than 20) to allow an ad. In cases where the Custom Audience is too small, a Lookalike Audience could be added to increase reach.
Using Lookalike Audiences in MomentFeed
While Custom Audiences are a powerful tool for targeting existing customers, these audiences might be too small to drive the expected results for a given campaign. Lookalike Audiences can be used to expand a brand’s reach to audiences that are similar to existing Custom Audiences or Fan groups. Note that the audience upon which your Lookalike Audience is based must have a minimum of 100 users. As is the case with Custom Audiences, it could take several hours for Facebook to generate the audience and make it ready for use.
The process for including or excluding a Lookalike Audience in a campaign is identical to the process for a Custom Audience.
Facebook Audience Network Ad Placement
Connecting with consumers on mobile is critical to driving awareness and offline conversion. The Facebook Audience Network allows advertisers to extend the reach of their ads to audiences on 3rd party mobile apps outside of Facebook. With the Audience Network, brands can apply the same level of local and personal targeting as native Facebook ads to a far wider range of app-based mobile consumer experiences.
Audience Network ads use a flexible creative template that can appear in one of three formats: Banner, Interstitial or Native. The good news is that you don’t need to do anything special to format your Facebook ad for the Audience Network. Facebook handles it all automatically.
Distributing an ad on the Audience Network via MomentFeed is easy. First, create an ad that includes a URL link. Currently, Facebook requires that every ad published to the Audience Network be a link-type ad. An image attachment is also required. Simply select one or more traditional placement options (Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed and/or Right Rail) then select Audience Network.
Click “Save” to generate a preview of the ad in the Audience Network.
Select the campaign targeting parameters, as you would for any other campaign and click Publish. That’s how easy it is to run localized Facebook-powered ads on third party mobile apps.
Campaign KPI Summaries
Lists of ad campaigns and their results are great for analyzing the specifics of a given campaign. Unfortunately, they’re not effective for tracking overall campaign activity and KPIs over time. To make it easier to understand campaign activity at-a-glance, we’ve introduced KPI summaries to the Campaigns dashboard. Simply filter for the desired date range, and the KPI summaries will calculate your relevant results and actions for that period.
Campaign Optimization Enhancements
MomentFeed is the first platform to deliver localized Facebook ads at scale and the only solution leveraging Local Awareness targeting at the enterprise level. As such, we’re learning more each day on how we can best optimize ads across hundreds or thousands of locations to maximize customer success. In this release, we’ve managed to significantly reduce the CPM for localized ads in MomentFeed, up to 50% in some of our early testing.
Cloning Campaigns
Experimentation with different combinations of creative and targeting is essential to developing an advertising strategy that maximizes real business results. When a campaign is successful, brands should iterate on that success by implementing similar tactics in future efforts. To make this easier, MomentFeed users can now clone previous campaigns directly from the Campaigns dashboard.
To clone a campaign in MomentFeed, simply click on the campaign status icon and select the “Clone Campaign” option. This will create a new campaign draft based on the previously used creative and targeting options. Edit as you like and click “Publish” to launch the cloned campaign.
Enhanced Error Logging
Launching hundreds or thousands of localized ads at once is a far more complex operation than simple brand-level advertising on Facebook. While MomentFeed validates as much campaign data as possible before publishing, there are still instances where an ad may fail for a given reason. An example of this might be text that exceeds 20% of the ad image. Another might be an ad that features alcohol but is not targeted to users that are of legal drinking age. In cases like these, MomentFeed now provides detailed error logging.
To access, click the status icon for the failed campaign and select the option to “View Errors.”
This will launch a modal with a detailed view of the errors.
LOCALVOICE
Facebook Link-Type Posts
Ok, this one is long overdue. One of the more regular pieces of customer feedback we’ve received over the past year has been the need to support Facebook’s Link Post type. Previously, publishing a link in a Facebook update via MomentFeed had to be done by copying and pasting the URL into the body of the text. Starting today, links can be added through the supported Facebook fields in the LocalVoice publishing wizard.
To activate a link-type post, simply paste a URL into the Add Link section of the publishing wizard.
Prior to publishing, a preview will show exactly how the post will appear when published to Facebook.
PINSYNC
API Enhancements
Some MomentFeed customers have established direct API integrations between their location data and PinSync. This type of connection ensures that the data in MomentFeed and on the search and social sites we integrate with are always as up-to-date as possible. Previously, the PinSync API supported only the basic location metadata. In this latest version, however, we’ve made it easy for brands to update any location-specific data field they like (categories, manager name, tags, custom fields, etc.), directly through the PinSync API.
If you are interested in learning more about direct API integration with MomentFeed, please contact your Account Manager. It can dramatically simplify the process of location data management.
Release V2.24: Campaigns Improvements, LocalVoice Updates, and PinSync API Enhancements was originally published on MomentFeed