By Olivia Melcher, Paid Media Strategist, Digital
Social Media advertising, specifically on Meta is part of an ever-changing landscape. With the additions of the policies around wine and spirits, finding ways to advertise, let alone optimize, this may seem like a challenge.
However, with the right tools and tips, running social media ads on Meta can increase brand awareness, market share, and sales. It all starts with deciding on which campaign is right for the brand.
Meta Advertising: Campaigns
There are six main campaign objectives available in Meta: Awareness, Engagement, Leads, Traffic, App Promotion, and Sales. In the United States all campaigns promoting alcohol the age must be set to 21+.
Awareness: Increase brand recognition by reaching the maximum number of people in the selected target audience.
Engagement: The goal is to get users to interact with the brand through interacting with posts, page likes, video views, ect.
Leads: Gather information on users, such as phone numbers, names, and emails, to create a customer list.
Traffic: Drive users to the website through a targeted audience to learn more, visit, or purchase.
App Promotion: Advertise your app with the goal of user downloads.
Sales: This campaign is used for direct transactions; users are most likely to purchase on the website through a catalog of items.
Sales and Traffic Campaigns: What is the Difference?
Although Sales Campaigns have been around for a while, earlier this year Meta changed their policy to allow alcohol to be advertised through Shopping Campaigns. (This differs from an Instagram Shop, which is not allowed).
Since users can transparently see products as listed on the website including, pricing and descriptions before taking an action (visiting the website) people who interact with the ad already have a higher intent to purchase or add to cart. This results in a lower number of link clicks, but an overall increase in intent and purchases, when set up correctly.
It is important to connect the Meta Pixel to the e-commerce site. The e-commerce either needs to be a partner of Meta, or the website will need to be hard coded to transfer the sales data back to Meta for the ads to run with their full optimization potential. See the list of Meta partner platforms here.
With a traditional ‘Shop Now’ Traffic Campaign the intent to purchase is lower, but the number of link clicks will be higher than with a Shop Campaign. This type of campaign is great for getting users to visit and interact with the website, but it can also be used for a total of twenty different campaign goals such as learn more, book now, ect. While Traffic Campaigns are extremely effective, it is important to look at the brand’s overall goal when deciding between the two.
Best Practices: Awareness, Sales and Traffic
Start by determining the budget and budget breakdown per campaign. Look at the goals of the brand and the phases these should be executed. Once this is decided, create or choose creative depending on the goal, time of year, and any sales.
Campaigns are most successful when they are broken into different ad sets based on creativity and audience. The majority of these creatives, especially low-performing creatives should be changed monthly to avoid fatigue within the targeted audience. Also, each ad set should have a minimum of three ads and a maximum of ten.
Best Practices & Set Up: Awareness, Sales and Traffic
Awareness Campaigns bring attention to the brand and increase brand recognition. This will help users identify the brand and increase the intent to interact either virtually or in person when the user sees the brand again. This campaign is important to funnel users into the Sales or Traffic Campaign by creating a retargeting campaign.
Awareness will be the top of the funnel for your campaigns and this content should be interesting, relevant and intriguing. Choose creative that is captivating and informative. It is also recommended to add a ‘learn more’ link to these ads directing the user to the website, although it should be expected that the click-through rate (CTR) will range between 0.01% and 0.25% on industry average since this is not the goal of the campaign.
The indicator for success when looking at Awareness Campaigns will be the reach and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). If the CPM is running high, resulting in the number of accounts reached lowering, check the suggested optimizations as well as the targeting, budget, and ad assets. It is expected to have a high CPM during the first one to two weeks the campaign is running while the ads are still in the ‘learning phase.’
Before any ads start running make sure that the Meta Pixel and Conversions API (CAPI) are installed correctly on the website. Once installed, start to create custom events and conversions to track specific actions that users take on the website. For example, creating an ‘add to cart’ event on the website and a custom conversion within Meta, can then be used to target users who visited the add to cart page.
This data can be used for retargeting campaigns, especially for traffic and sales campaigns. If you are running a traffic or sale campaign be sure to double check the targeting. Many alcohol brands do not ship to every state and the campaign should only target states or zipcodes where shipping is available.
Best Practices: Engagement
If there are certain groups of users on Facebook or Instagram that you would like to include or exclude, creating custom audiences is crucial. For example, when running an Engagement Campaign for Page Likes, users following the page should be excluded from the audience. This can also be replicated when running a Boosting Campaign where a custom audience can be created to exclude users who are following Instagram or Facebook.
When running a Page Likes Campaign, the ad sets can be separated into multiple ad sets, but it is not necessary, as these ad assets should remain general to the brand and the content that is being shared throughout the month. It is recommended to create and publish multiple ads within this ad set to increase optimization and decrease the learning phase time.
Boosting Campaigns are adding spend to an existing in-feed post to increase the post engagements or video views. These campaigns generally have one ad per ad set so the audience can be changed and tailored to the post that is being boosted. When creating this ad set using manual placements and selecting only the platform the post is living on will help overall page growth.
The Meta interface, best practices, and policies on alcohol are always changing and updating within Meta. If you are interested in learning about more Social Media Advertising for your brand or are interested in becoming a client of Colangelo & Partners please contact us here.
