Holiday shopping season officially kicks off this week, with Black Friday, Thanksgiving weekend, and Cyber Monday right around the corner. With retailers turning to Facebook to reach, engage and drive traffic and sales this holiday season, we wanted to highlight the most popular new Facebook ad products being leveraged by our Facebook advertising platform customers:
1. Facebook Offers
This holiday shopping season you’re sure to find more people frequenting their Facebook News Feeds than panning through newspaper insert after newspaper insert. With Facebook Offers, retailers can say goodbye to the days of expensive direct mail campaigns and printed coupons, and hello to the power of social referral and discovery.
The offer delivery and claim process on Facebook is seamless for both retailers and consumers alike. Retailers can choose to promote their offers as an amplified page post, offer ad, or offer claim Sponsored Story. All Facebook targeting is available with Facebook offers, and marketers can indicate whether the offer is for in-store or online redemption. Consumers simply click “Get Offer” on the ad unit and the full offer is delivered instantly to their email.
Retailers benefit not only from targeted distribution, but additionally from the virality built into this product: the offer claim story is featured on timelines and can be shared with friends (unless privacy settings restrict otherwise). In fact, among the 100 most popular offers on Facebook, 75% of claims came not from the people who were initially targeted with an offer, but people the offer was shared with.
Offers are also available for delivery on Facebook mobile, as shown in the example to the right from our customer Coastal.com, the largest online retailer of eyeglasses and contact lenses in North America. Nearly half a million people have claimed their offer since it launched!
2. Facebook Mobile Ads
87% of marketers plan to increase emphasis on mobile in 2013. And we know first-hand that retailers are capitalizing on the Facebook mobile marketing opportunity this holiday shopping season. With Nanigans’ Facebook mobile advertising solution, retailers can see the true ROI of their mobile ad spend: that is, how many purchases and how much revenue is generated after people engage with Facebook mobile ads (contact us to learn more).
Delivered in the News Feed, Facebook brings to mobile unprecedented reach (a 600 million person mobile audience, with the average American spending 15 minutes a day on it) and targeting (by demographic, personal, social and device information). Retailers are leveraging Facebook mobile ads to connect, engage and influence more people, more effectively on mobile. These mobile ad products include:
- Mobile app install ads: Target and acquire high-value users for your mobile app in core customer segments. These engaging app units can include social context, boast rich creative from your app’s timeline page, along with a strong “Install Now” call to action. Upon engaging with the ad, Facebook users are directed to the Apple App Store or Google Play.
- Sponsored Stories: These ad units are ideal for driving fan acquisition and brand influence. Like Sponsored Stories on desktop, these mobile ad units take the engagement of a fan with your brand and amplify it into an ad unit. From page post Like Sponsored Story to question sponsored story, prominent social context makes these mobile ad units relevant and compelling.
- Page post ads: These ad units are tailored to retailers with goals to generate and drive awareness, engagement and brand equity. The ad unit converts a post on your brand’s page, such as a photo, into an ad unit that can be delivered to a broader audience than would have viewed the post organically in their News Feeds. (Read on to learn the additional benefits of dark page post ads).
Retailers can learn more about Facebook mobile advertising here.
3. Custom Audience Targeting
Looking to reach and remarket to your current customers on Facebook? Look no further than custom audience targeting, which enables retailers to match their CRM data (email addresses, phone numbers or user IDs) with Facebook user profiles that contain the same information.
With custom audiences created, retailers can tailor and deliver more relevant remarketing messages to specific sub-segments. For example, a retailer could create a custom audience of customers who have not yet Liked their page or who have registered for their site but not been active in several months. Companies have seen Facebook advertising campaigns leveraging custom audience targeting deliver higher ROI as compared to standard Facebook interest targeting (read more, including a case study, here).
4. Dark Page Post Ads
Dark page post ads layer an additional benefit for marketers than standard page post ads this holiday season: the post itself never publishes to your Facebook page.
Retailers leveraging dark page post ads benefit from the flexibility and rich creative of standard page post ads, without concerns of over-posting to their fan base. With content generated from within our Ad Engine software, your media buying team (often separate from your page management team) can independently leverage the ad unit.
Dark page posts further enable retailers to tailor creative and messaging to specific audiences. For example, a retailer could deliver a promotion with different creative and messaging for females than males. This was not possible with standard page post ads unless the marketer were to publish duplicate posts on their Page (read more here).
5. Facebook Exchange (FBX)
Retailers with retargeting goals have a new, massive channel to tap into this holiday shopping season with the launch of Facebook Exchange (FBX). Allowing retailers to retarget potential buyers on Facebook who have visited their websites or other online properties, Facebook Exchange enables real-time bidding on Facebook at an individual impression level.
Facebook Exchange assists retailers in more efficiently finding and targeting potential customers who have already showed intent. For example, retailers leveraging Facebook Exchange can select to deliver ads on Facebook to people who have added items to their carts but not yet purchased.
Facebook Exchange is complementary to other Facebook ad products available only through the Facebook Ads API, such as Facebook’s rich targeting data and social ad products like Sponsored Stories. In addition, Facebook Exchange only provides access to the right-hand side of Facebook desktop inventory, and not in Facebook’s News Feed or Facebook mobile. Coupling Facebook Exchange buys with Facebook Ads API buys maximizes impact and engagement (learn more here).
Are you running Facebook advertising campaigns this holiday shopping season? What ad products are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments!
