Chris Stark, Product Director at Infectious Media, explains why Facebook’s recent launch of Facebook Exchange (FBX) is a massive opportunity which marketers should capitilise on.
For marketers, the Facebook advertising proposition is increasingly compelling. The site boasts 1B users globally which includes almost 65% of the UK online population. As a site built by users rather than publishers, Facebook is a rich source of consumer data. And because pages are designed individually for each user there is rarely a clash of ads, making Facebook a great brand-safe outlet.
Facebook launched its Ads Marketplace a few years ago to provide a channel that leverages its immense store of users profile data. Aimed at increasing activity within the Facebook environment, this display advertising gives marketers extremely precise targeting options. In combination with the personal connections that Facebook enables, marketers can raise awareness and keep their fan base engaged.
However Facebook Marketplace lacks the ability to reach the bottom of the sales funnel. So by supplying the same inventory via an open exchange model, Facebook’s recent launch of Facebook Exchange (FBX) is a massive opportunity for marketers with retargeting strategies. FBX does not make its own data available, but crucially it allows buyers to utilise their 1st and 3rd party data sets and bid optimisation technology to participate in the inventory auction.
Facebook is different from other inventory sources because its inventory is ‘always on’, with users accessing it regularly throughout the day. In contrast, other RTB inventory is often weighted towards the evening. As a result, any activity requiring high frequency touch points will benefit from being run on FBX; for example, basic retargeting, creative and message testing, and ‘bench testing’ 1st party segments.
With Facebook adverts there are no viewablity issues, even though the ad-size (100x72) is smaller than IAB standard ads, they are always visible on the page. Incompatibility is not a problem because the site provides a high standard of consistency and appropriateness to the user. For the marketer, this means that a larger proportion of ad spend is focused on media costs, and not on site qualification or viewability metrics. The reduced ‘overhead’ means better ROI for simple retargeting.
So how does this work in real life? For e-retailers FBX allows for rapid re-acquisition. Many customers do not complete a purchase after visiting an e-retailer site; they may abandon their cart, get distracted, or stop their product research. The objective here is to get their attention, remind them of the purchase intent, and encourage them to complete the transaction. But e-retailers face cutting through an excess of online noise, in a limited amount of time, to reach these customers effectively.
The question is how long does the purchase interest last after the site visit? Two days? Five? The best retargeting campaign is one that can reconnect within hours. A good percentage of customers will be on Facebook for a few hours each day, so can be reached while they are still considering the purchase. So for e-retailers, marketing through Facebook Exchange allows for site visitors to be re-acquired faster than ever before.
For hotel chains, people become prospects the moment they begin to plan a trip. This planning is often motivated by reading about holidays or seeing friends posting pictures of travel abroad on Facebook. The benefit of FBX is you can apply external data sources to decide on the best time to serve travel ads. For example, we apply weather data to capitalise on a user’s increased desire to travel when it’s raining or cold.
There is also a real benefit in this industry, in running hundreds of small, sophisticated tests of pricing and travel packages in combination with the external data. Not only can you find the right customers, but the right messaging and the right opportunity as well. There are rarely simple combinations of creative and data that work all the time, the scale of FBX allows for the speedy optimisation of campaigns, minimising the cost of acquiring new customers.
Infectious Media has many years’ experience working with Facebook, serving sophisticated awareness-building adverts on the Facebook Marketplace via our own integrated tool, Impression Desk Social. We use this experience to maximise the benefit that can be gained through the Facebook Exchange, combining detailed knowledge of your customers, our robust optimisation and analytical techniques, and creative that can adapt to engage the audience in the most effective way.
Our integrated approach of FBX, Facebook Marketplace and non-Facebook RTB, offers a ‘whole that is greater than the sum of its parts’. We define and test your target audience with Facebook Marketplace advertising. We then drive them at scale to your site using larger ad formats on external RTB inventory. This audience is then retargeted when they go back to Facebook via FBX, well within the effectiveness window, and with a message optimised to their interests. As the system learns, it becomes more effective, optimising over time to produce better and better ROIs.
A common mistake is to think of Facebook advertising as similar to social media marketing. It is more accurate to think of Facebook advertising as a vast source of inventory and data, allowing the benefits of scale and consistency to be brought to bear to meet advertiser goals, making it one of the most effective advertising channels.