Presentations full of funny GIFs, dozens of speakers, Facebook campaigns at home and abroad, news, trends, case studies. This is how this year’s Newsfeed DAY, the only Facebook marketing performance conference in the Czech Republic, could be summarized in a few words. In case you missed it, we’ve written a report for you, so that you’re not deprived of the best of the conference.
On Wednesday, April 17th, the Lucerna Cinema in Prague was full. Social media marketers from all over the country met here to listen to other industry professionals and to take a step forward in their knowledge and skills. And thanks to this year’s theme and speakers, they were surely able to take step forward. 🙂 Who spoke on Newsfeed DAY and what did they talk about?
The conference was opened by Karel Tlusťák from Business Factory, the main organizer of the event alongside Newsfeed.cz, and from ROI Hunter, the only Facebook Marketing Partner in the field of advertising technologies in the Czech Republic. Karel revealed what Facebook and Instagram are planning for this year. Certainly every marketer in that hall has taken his message of “Don’t miss the train!” into consideration.
According to Karel, Facebook is reducing Ads Per User, which means Facebook is getting more expensive. A Facebook survey has shown that the popularity of advertising among users is declining, and so the social network will begin to limit its space. What’s up with this? Users’ attention is turning from the classic News Feed to Stories, which is gradually taking over the advertising space. In Stories, advertisers could find a solution. On average, CPM is 2.5 times cheaper than in feeds, but they unfortunately don’t work as well from a conversion perspective. New marketing opportunities are also apparent in the numbers – half a billion people use Stories every day and its growth is significant.
Karel pointed out that only 2.6% of e-commerce companies use Stories today. So there’s a great opportunity out there, but be sure to address Stories ads separately and customize the creative. Here are Karel’s 5 Gold Rules of Effective Advertising Content to Stories:
Another part of the lecture was devoted to tips on how to use Facebook to its maximum potential. Karel recommends using personalized video (created from the product catalog) instead of still photos. Also, focus on advanced measurements, track the conversion process and take into account the distortion rate between Facebook and Google Analytics. Direct conversions can be wrongly attributed, and Karel has confirmed this in his case study as well. He recommends paying attention to the Facebook Attribution tool that works across devices.
And which news we can expect? Ads will soon be on WhatsApp. Karel therefore recommends you to use a WhatsApp Business App. Messenger is also great for building your customer base. For the future, Facebook is preparing interactive advertising as it is increasingly moving towards virtual reality.
Radek from Shoptet, which offers services to 16,514 Czech and Slovak e-shops, presented different approaches to online stores in terms of how Facebook and Instagram are important to them and how online stores manage their social networks. In a survey of 1,034 respondents, he found the following:
And who manages these networks for e-shops?
Radek also recommended the Casual Impact method to determine how Facebook has an impact on overall performance.
Anton, the only English-speaking presenter of the conference, explained where he sees the future of advertising automation, and how they consulted for Joom with the help of a data scientist and an acquisition manager with an advertising budget of a few million.
Joom is a purely mobile application, so for them, marketing performance on Facebook is key and installation is equal to sales. The company operates in markets around the world and advertises for a large number of products in an enormous amount of ads – over 2,000 ad sets per day. Manual setup was no longer sustainable, so Joom started collaborating with about 40 agencies. But this wasn’t the best solution. After many bad experiences, problems, and scams, they finally decided again on an in-house solution.
It was necessary to automate the process. Anton showed how the data scientist and the acquisition manager tracked the process, and what was necessary to automate it all – audience segmentation, customer value determination, where to target to a “moderately good” target market, logarithmic approximation, and so on.
As a result, today Joom is able to customize the ad budget for each ad set daily (using Machine Learning and Marketing API), filtering and segmenting millions of products across multiple layers. Anton also recommended personalizing ad text to combine key marketing communications based on CTR. The higher ROAS also means that they change the products in their advertising every hour and the whole product sets every day. Even this has been successful. Indeed, Anton believes that even successful campaigns “get tired” and lose on performance. Regular replacement can keep the performance up.
Joom is also constantly changing and refreshing ad texts, changing the optimization model, targeting audiences, collecting data on how the product leads, and then evaluating it. As a result, they are gaining more evidence for better sales. Most importantly, they constantly test and optimize. With this work they have managed to grow dramatically in key EU markets.
Martin from Footshop showed examples of good practices resulting from their cooperation with influencers. Footshop has 16 language versions of their e-shop, so they address influencers from the Czech Republic and the whole EU. Today, they have a wide range of influencers at their disposal, divided into the following categories:
Footshop cooperates with influencers mainly on Instagram and YouTube and secondarily on Facebook and other foreign social networks such as TikTok or 21Buttons. The performance of individual influencers and the value of their contributions is assessed by the SAVE metrics (Social Ads Value Equivalency). With this metric they are able to distinguish benefits for different countries.
In several case studies, Martin illustrated specific practices and results, as measured by the increase in traffic or the influence of influencers on search conversions (because it is not always possible to directly measure the conversion effect).
So what were his final recommendations? According to Martin, influencers are a great tool for performance marketing, but you have to able to measure their impact. Evaluate activities as deeply as possible so you can make informed decisions. But don’t forget that an influencer must have a relationship with your brand. It doesn’t work without feeling.
The agency block that followed lunch began with Honza from Business Factory. He pointed out that while e-commerce is growing rapidly, the volume of purchases offline still dominates (88.9% of purchases take place in brick-and-mortar stores, 11.1% on the Internet). However, time spent in the digital environment is also growing. Therefore, Honza sees a future in messaging applications, where the bulk of e-shop communication with customers will take place. Grabbing the customer’s attention is therefore an increasing challenge. And this doesn’t mean getting a click. According to Honza, it is enough for the user to see the ad to take action.
So what does this mean? Thanks to these two assumptions (the time spent in the digital environment is increasing and that people are shopping offline), the space for offline conversion implementation is widening. This is one of the tools for measuring Facebook ad results (except Pixel and SDK). Honza showed how offline conversions can be used within Lead Ads, e-shops and purchases in brick-and-mortar stores, for which offline conversions were originally created. He explained how to identify a transaction, how to identify a user, how offline conversion looks, and how to upload data. In conclusion, he recommended measuring conversions to the real end of the purchasing process, not separating online and offline marketing strategies, and using data smartly.
Daniel from Peppermint Digital, in a case study of Skipraha.cz and Skiplzen.cz, explained how their advertising campaign combines several non-traditional parameters: a small target group in two cities, a unique service with variations in time and type of service, and a complete lack of history and audience. What lessons have they learned from this experience?
Optimize for basic metrics (Reach/Impression – Link Clicks – Landing Page View – AddToCart – Purchase) – By optimizing for conversion they reduced costs by 70% compared to previous optimizations.
Don’t narrow down already narrow target groups unnecessarily. They had a 15% cheaper cost-per-conversion before narrowing.
Test – Keep testing for optimization. Don’t worry about testing multiple sets of ads on the same target.
If you want more conversions, don’t bid – Manually bidding for a small target group is not worth it.
Positive feedback from fans – They are getting a 39% cheaper cost per conversion for ads that have positive feedback.
The agency block was concluded by Jaroslav, who invited us to see the behind the scenes of the recruitment campaigns for MetLife and ŠKODA AUTO on Facebook. Lead Generation played a major role in both cases. From the MetLife case study, Jaroslav shared his guaranteed tips for success:
How to create effective app installs? Many practical tips were introduced by Katarína from Sygic’s campaigns. According to her, people in mobile applications spend more time and are willing to invest more to acquire or buy something. Last year alone, the number of app downloads was $194 billion, and people spent $101 billion on them. The proportion of non-organic installations is also increasing (56% of total installations are paid installations). Facebook is the number one in terms of volume and quality of application downloads (via Facebook Ads).
In the case study, Katarína showed step by step how Sygic had consulted for the summer global campaign, where it advertised for offline 3D maps, their best-selling product, in 1,506 campaigns, 3,792 ad sets and 9,730 ads. And the results? Sygic managed to achieve 1.52 ROI, 0.24 EUR CPI and a 41% install rate.
What did they learn during the campaign?
Blanka talked about how Bonami, using Facebook and a pre-registration campaign, aimed to enter the Hungarian market. Users registering for the up-and-coming e-shop received credits, which in the future could be redeemed on orders.
The assignment was a budget of one million crowns, one hundred thousand registrations and 10 CZK CPA (price for 1 registered users). As a result, they launched 13 campaigns, 181 ad sets and 551 ads. 98% of the budget went to Facebook Ads ( 9.81 CZK CPA) and 2% to promote content (24.3 CZK CPA). The most popular formats were Dynamic Linkposts (7.06 CZK), Carousel (9.17 CZK) and classic Linkposts (17.14 CZK). In terms of creativity, for some products they knew what they were doing from the experience of other markets, and elsewhere they learned about success during the campaign.
What results did they achieve? Bonami managed to obtain 87,300 registrations with a budget of 800,700 CZK (CPA 9.17 CZK). 80% of registrations came directly from Facebook, 20% elsewhere.
In the lecture, Blanka also mentioned the apparent “failures” of the campaign:
Although these may seem like problems, according to Blanka, they were not significant problems and the campaign was successful. Why?
And one recommendation at the end: When you expand to foreign markets, do not rely on translators. It is necessary to have a native speaker who knows the mentality of the people there and understands the tiny nuances (e.g. Hungarians don’t understand the word credits).
A series of lectures was made by a speaker and direct representative of Facebook. Josef also dealt with the issue of expanding into foreign markets using a social network. In addition to interesting figures (for example, 1.2 billion people are associated with at least one foreign company, 360 million people have made a cross-border purchase in the last year and 56 million foreign users are linked to a Czech company), they have prepared a check-list of actions or strategies which are necessary when you work with Facebook abroad.
Do research on where you want to expand.
Create a multilingual website for each country – If you can’t, keep the site in English.
Think about the payment system – Does it work abroad? Alternatively, find local partners.
Define how you deliver goods.
Communicate with customers – how their purchase will take place, when they can expect a shipment, and so on.
Customer support needs to use native speakers – The credibility of a business decreases when you use broken language.
Use only one Facebook Pixel – You can better optimize and track it.
Use the Facebook Catalog – Facebook is working on having one for multiple languages. But now one catalog is needed for each mutation (country).
Use Dynamic Language Optimization – Facebook allows you to select up to 81 languages. You can record 6 speech versions in one ad set.
Think about whether you want to target globally or regionally – You can exclude selected countries or target multiple countries at once.
Use Multi-city Targeting – This allows you to target multiple cities.
Use a variety of foreign audiences – International Lookalikes, Multi-country Lookalikes and Value-based Lookalikes.
If you have the option of including more countries in fewer ad sets, do it.
Believe in Facebook automation (placement, bidding) – This delivers the best results.
Prepare high-quality creative – Stick to the 4 main pillars: story (what you want to say), benefit, audience and language, and customize your creative with respect to time of day, time of year (season), holidays, local events, trends or country (for example, just adding a city’s skyline increases advertising efficiency).
In conclusion, Josef revealed what Facebook is going to do in the near future. We look forward to seeing many new Instagram features that Facebook is currently investing a lot in. It also seems that the social network has found additional space for in-stream ads in Facebook Watch. It is also focusing on retail, which it has not yet paid enough attention to it.
Once again we thank all the speakers and the audience for participating in Newsfeed DAY and we look forward to seeing you again next year! 🙂
