How to Improve Your Social Media Ad Performance

There’s no denying that social ad spending is on the rise. In fact, according to eMarketer, 2016 is expected to generate $13.43 billion in social ad dollars, with social networks set to account for 20 percent of U.S. digital ad spending.

Social giants like Facebook and Twitter are going head to head for a piece of the pie by offering marketers the newest, shiniest ad formats with the promise of higher ad recalls and lower CPEs.

Here are a few formats that we’ve seen great returns on.

Twitter Video Campaigns

Distributing your videos on Twitter is an effective and cost efficient way to increase the reach and frequency of your video buys.

When you run a paid video campaign on Twitter, you pay-per-view. Twitter considers a video view chargeable when a video is 100% in-view on the user’s device, and has been watched for at least 3 seconds.  What makes this so efficient is that you only pay for the real engagement verses paying for impressions.

Twitter, in attempts to establish themselves as a key player in the video ad game, rolled out video autoplay functionality last year. During their initial beta test they were able to find.

  • People were 5X more likely to prefer autoplay videos over other viewing methods (including click-to-play and video preview thumbnails).
  • They have better video recall with autoplay. In fact, we saw a significant 14% lift in video recall over other video formats.
  • For brands, during our autoplay tests we saw a 7x increase in completions of Promoted Videos.

Run the Same Ad on Facebook + Instagram Simultaneously

Internally, Facebook has been referring to this strategy as #CheckTheBox, which simply means that in order to run your ads on both platforms all you have to do is check a box in the ad set level of Power Editor.
Social Ads
What this will do is allow brands to not only have a presence on Instagram, but also help reduce the costs of their Facebook campaign by giving the creative more opportunities to reach customers throughout their day.

Your ad will be optimized based on the objective you choose. For example, if you choose Send People to Your Website (Clicks to Website), your ad will be optimized to get you more clicks to your website. By running your ad on both the Facebook placements and the Instagram placement, your ad will be optimized to show on the placement that gets you the most clicks to your website at the lowest cost. (Tip: With this option, it’s recommended you choose the same budget for each ad set and set each budget equal to your campaign spending limit.)

Since this feature was introduced in Q4 2015, Facebook says they have seen a 5-15% delivery on Instagram with these types of overarching campaigns.

(It’s also worth noting that you are not required to have an Instagram account to sponsor an Instagram ad. All you need is a Facebook page.)

Facebook Carousel Ads

Another great way to improve overall ad performance is with Facebook Carousel ads which allow you to showcase multiple images and links in one ad. Carousel ads can be used in a variety of ways across any campaign objective depending on your brand.
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According to Facebook, carousel link ads drive 30%-50% lower cost-per-conversion and 20-30% lower cost-per-click than single-image link ads.

Another great feature of carousel ads is that Facebook gives you insights to which links in the ad are performing best and give you the option to optimize the order of the images based on engagement.

Which social Ad formats have you found to be the most efficient for your brand or business? Share with us in the comments below.



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