As social media companies have grown, they have discovered a new stream of revenue: display marketing. We, at Booyah, have carried out an experiment with one of our retail clients to test the efficacy of this marketing channel on Facebook.
Facebook display marketing has some neat features that can be used by marketers to achieve the greatest results possible. This includes, but is not limited to, targeting your clients’ Fans, the Friends of their Fans, and specified keywords. Our hypothesis was that just by seeing an ad, Facebook users in each targeting group would be more likely to purchase from the retail clients website (regardless of click behavior). By segmenting our targeting groups into a test group (that sees an actual ad) and a control group (that sees a Smokey Bear PSA), we were able to measure the lift in conversion rate by the display marketing.
Overall, we measured a 37.4% lift in conversion rates with no change in average order value. Within this, we measured a 90.4% lift (nearly double!) for Friends of Fans and a 58.2% lift for the Keyword targeting group. We measured no significant difference for the Fans of the client. However, Fans were 12 times more likely to purchase than the other targeting groups regardless of advertising!
Since Fans are much more likely to purchase, branding exercises and follower campaigns to grow your client’s Fan base are important, but remember to not advertise to them once they have become a fan of your client’s brand. This will also increase the pool of Friends of Fans whose purchase behavior improves dramatically from display marketing on Facebook. It is also a good idea to dig for users that may have common interest in your client’s brand and not be aware of it by targeting specified keywords within their profiles.
