Tag Archive for: social media

Choosing the right social media platform article header image of social websites

Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for your Business

Audio Version — 8:19

The Rise of Social Media Platforms

choosing the right social media platform social web illustrationDigital technology, devices, the surging popularity of the internet, and the human need to stay connected have given rise to many social media sites and other virtual communities over the past 20-years. Social media’s popularity continues to accelerate with no sign of slowing soon, allowing marketing professionals to connect their brands with customers.

Ninety-two percent of marketers in companies with more than 100 employees plan to use social media for marketing activities in the coming years, according to statistca.com. The current data shows that more than 91% of marketers use social media platforms to connect with customers. With so many different social media sites, the question remains, should you be on every platform, and how do you select the right social media platforms for your business?

In this article, I guide you through choosing the right social media platform for your brand and answer the age-old question of should you be on every platform, specifically, the popular ones.

When Your CEO Tells You the Company Needs to be on All Social Media Platforms

It’s a story that transcends social media itself — or it feels that way at least; your CEO walks into the marketing office and cluelessly suggests that the company should have a Twitter presence. You look perplexed, thinking to yourself that your high-target value does not congregate on the social media platform. You quizzically ask, “Why?” He responds, “Because XYZ company is on Twitter, and I think we should be too.” 

The CEO exits your office, leaving you confused and bewildered. You ponder the idea of whether you should add the platform to your marketing communication mix or how you’ll inform him that you should not waste marketing resources to explore that platform.

If this scenario sounds remotely familiar, you’re not alone. I cannot tell you how many CEOs I worked with that suggested which social media platform I should direct the company to because their wife, kids, or friends suggested the social site. CEOs — or anyone for that matter — armed with just a little knowledge of social media can be and are dangerous enough to derail your marketing strategy — or stall your plans temporarily

I am going to arm you with information for choosing the right social media platform for your company. Then you will have the necessary information to help persuade your boss why you should or should not participate in specific social media platforms, perhaps saving valuable marketing resources.

Why Marketers Use Social Media: Advantages and Challenges

Social media has proven to have advantages and challenges for marketers. Advantages include:

  • Social media offers a targeted and personal approach to consumers, allowing marketers to create and share tailored content with specific target audiences and communities.
  • It provides a channel for dialogue (complaints, compliments, and needs) between customers and the brand.
  • It’s immediate and timely. Marketers can reach customers anywhere and at any time, making social media indeed a global communication channel.
  • Social media is cost-effective compared to print or television. Small businesses can embark on a social media campaign for almost zero marketing costs.
  • Social media platforms are best for encouraging customer engagement and sharing, allowing marketers to expand their brand message and content through a word-of-mouth strategy.

Conversely, social media presents a few challenges for marketers. The biggest challenge is walking a fine line between promoting the brand and engaging customers with relevant content. Because consumers drive social media through their positive and negative interactions, brands need to earn the right to be on any specific platform. Marketers that jump right into social media promoting products are often met with resistance by consumers. To gain acceptance and trust amongst consumers, making them a part of the brand conversation, marketers need to produce targeted, valuable content for consumers to digest.

Before you can create valuable content, you need to know where your customers congregate online and what they value. Thus, the question remains, what are the right social media platforms for your business?

Finding the Right Social Media Platforms

target illustration for right social media platform articleIdentify your key customers

Determining the right social media platform requires that you understand your audience. You need to know their likes, dislikes, needs, and where they “live” online; what social media sites they frequent. In other words, you need to identify your ideal buyers, also referred to as buyer personas

Research the Channels Audience

If you are new to marketing or have not yet identified who your ideal customer is and where they may spend their time online, you will want to research each channel you plan on engaging. Researching each social media channel may be daunting, considering thousands of social sites exist, ranging from the mainstream ones like Facebook and LinkedIn to niché social media sites like Reddit and smaller, specialized online communities.

High-quality third-party online sources are also suitable for researching social media statistics and the types of consumers that utilize the platforms. The following are a few research websites for learning more about social media platform audiences and trends:

  1. eMarketer. Part of Business Insider Intelligence is a research firm targeting decision-makers such as CMO’s a comprehensive source of information on operating in a digital world, offering transparently sourced and vetted data from thousands of sources. 
  2. Pew Research Center. Pew Research is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world. 
  3. Social Media Examiner. The information on this website helps businesses discover how to use social media to connect with customers, drive traffic, generate awareness, and increase sales.

Top Social Media Platforms Demographic Overview

The chart below offers a glimpse into some demographic data about the listed social media platforms. It’s an excellent place to begin your research in your potential audience demographics. However, keep in mind that to improve the success of generating a following on the social media platform, you will need to develop a few profiles of the ideal buyer (personas) to develop better content that engages your audience.

I have included several mainstream social media sites along with a few niché platforms. As a general rule, if you are unaware of what platform to start with, it’s good to craft your messages on the most popular social sites. For example, Facebook and YouTube are the most prominent social media platforms, with 81% of users stating they have used Facebook and 69% reporting using YouTube at some point, according to the Pew Research Center.

However, the top two most active social media platforms marketers use to connect and promote their businesses or products are Facebook and Instagram. Below is a list of leading social media platforms ranked according to popularity for marketers, based on the Social Media Examiner’s 2021 Industry Report. The demographic data comes from the Pew Research Center.

Social Media Demographics and Stats Chart

FacebookInstagramLinkedInTwitterSnapchatYouTubePinterestNextdoor
Users2.7B854.5M740M187M265M2.1B459M27M
Adult Men61%36%31%25%22%82%16%10%
Adult Women77%44%26%22%28%80%26%16%
White67%35%29%22%23%79%34%15%
Black74%49%27%29%26%84%35%10%
Hispanic72%52%19%23%31%85%18%8%
<$30K70%35%12%12%25%75%21%6%
$30K-$49,99976%45%21%29%27%83%33%11%
$50K-$74,99961%39%21%22%29%79%29%12%
$75K+70%47%50%34%28%90%40%20%
High School or less64%30%10%14%21%70%22%4%
Some College71%44%28%26%32%86%36%12%
College +73%49%51%33%23%89%37%24%
Urban70%45%30%27%28%84%30%17%
Suburban70%41%33%23%25%81%32%14%
Rural67%25%15%18%18%74%34%2%

Data Source: Pew Research Center 4/2021

Summary

Since the explosion of the internet and digital technology, social media has gained and continues to gain popularity. The question marketers have is, should they be on all social media platforms or narrow their choices down to a few high-target value sites? Suppose your company has the resources to deploy content to all of the significant and niché social media sites. In that case, the answer is, yes, participate in all of the social platforms. However, the reality is that most firms do not have the resources and must narrow their selection down to the right social media platforms for their business and products.

Understanding who your customers are by developing two to five buyer personas can help you narrow which platform is right for your message. Targeting the different social media platforms requires research and sometimes trial and error in crafting the right message for the right audience.

Digital Marketing Channel article header image

Five Common Digital Marketing Channels and How They Are Used to Engage Customers

Audio Version — 12:07

Digital marketing, to many small business owners and B2B leaders, is still something of an enigma. They acknowledge its existence and importance but often do not understand how the digital communication channel, and all that it offers, functions to their benefit. These leaders understand terms such as SEO, analytics, PPC, and social media. However, they fall short of understanding how each digital channel operates independently and together to deliver customers and profits at a fraction of traditional marketing channels’ cost.

Without overwhelming the reader with elaborate details, this article addresses the most common digital marketing channels and how they communicate their brand value and engage customers. The list is not exhaustive but a primer for business leaders looking better to understand the digital landscape and the types of information and content typically communicated to their audiences.

The Digital Marketing Channels Advantage

digital marketing channels illustration of bits and bytes on a trayDigital channels, more commonly known as digital marketing, is marketing that uses digital technology or digital media. The medium has revolutionized marketing due to its unique ability that allows the marketer to target online customers precisely. Before the digital marketing revolution, marketers would create advertisements that broadcasted to large target audiences. The firms would distribute their marketing campaign through print advertisements, radio, and television. In other words, marketers engaged in undifferentiated marketing — or marketing where the firm created a single message for their entire target audience.

The commercial advertisement below demonstrates a typical ad that firms would broadcast to millions of viewers with the hopes of increasing brand recognition or increasing sales. However, the single message ad to their entire audience was challenging to track. Companies did not have an easy way to track their audience reaction or target specific demographic groups like they do today with digital media.

The following commercial for Friskies Cat Food from 1969 aired over television to a broad audience with the hopes of capturing cat owners with little to no control for specific targeting based on precise demographics or psychographics.

Now, imagine the above commercial advertisement distributed through digital channels. Marketers would have greater control over who, where, when, and how viewers watched the ad through advanced analytics and online targeting tools, like google analytics. Today’s digital tools provide advanced ability to target and track customers with precision results due to the rise in popularity of the internet.

As online expenditures increased, more customers turned to online retailers for their purchases. According to Statistica.com, There were nearly 228 million online shoppers in 2020, with a steady yearly rise in new online shoppers, primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic. People turned to online retailers to avoid going out to physical stores for fear of exposing themselves to the virus.

With digital technology and online shoppers, digital marketing implementation gives marketing managers access to tools that specifically target online customers. Furthermore, marketers can target specific customer segments with digital targeting tools based on personal interests and affinity groups (groups of people with similar interests). The precise targeting and analytics allow marketers to measure their campaigns, often in real-time, and determine the success or failures of those campaigns. In other words, marketers can determine what’s working and what is not working. Monitoring campaigns in real-time saves the marketing department resources while fine-tuning low-performing campaigns or duplicating their successful ones.

Popular Digital Marketing Channels

While digital marketing is an umbrella term for all digital marketing functions and technologies, people often categorize digital marketing into a few popular categories. These categories include:

  • Social media marketing.
  • Search engine optimization/search engine marketing (or SEO/SEM).
  • Display advertising.
  • Email marketing.
  • Content marketing.

Each of these digital marketing categories provides a different way to communicate through their respective digital channels.

Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing (SEO and SEM)

Purpose: SEO helps drive organic traffic to your owned digital assets. In contrast, SEM helps make your products and services discoverable to customers.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are often confused by people who do not fully understand the two strategies’ contrast. While SEM includes SEO, SEO focuses on driving traffic to your website organically. In other words, SEO is the practice of using keywords and different strategies to improve your company website’s chance of showing up on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

However, SEM does include SEO as part of its strategy and has paid and non-paid activities. As an example, purchasing ads through Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns is part of SEM. So is developing engaging video content for your YouTube channel and creating a social media influencer strategy. 

In short, SEM is the practice of making your products discoverable through the SERPs and other digital channels.

The example below shows Google’s search engine results for the keyword bookshelves. Notice the images in the upper Google Ads feed? Five different ads for bookshelves appear, followed by the organic listing for websites that offer bookshelves. The ad images result from deliberate ad placement (or paid advertisement). The information below the ads is organic results, a product of SEO. Together, the ads and organic results are part of a firm’s SEM strategy.

digital marketing channels article SEO and SEM example

 

Social Media Marketing

Purpose: Helps brands connect with their audience in a non-sales way to better understand their audiences’ likes and dislikes. Also, to provide content solutions to the audience’s pain points.

As its name implies, social media are social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, to name the more popular ones. Social media channels help brands connect and engage with their customers. Social channels like Facebook are excellent places for the brand to interact and “listen” to their customers. 

What is meant by social “listening”? 

Social media platforms allow customers to comment and brands to ” listen” or read their comments and respond to understand customers’ likes and dislikes better.

The example below shows the Facebook feed for Nordstrom’s department stores. In the feed, customers leave comments, likes, and dislikes about Nordstroms as a social media specialist responds, allowing a two-way dialogue between the retailer and customers.

digital marketing channels social media Nordstroms example Facebook

 

Social media platforms are more for engagement and less for selling. The social channels are ideal for delivering content that helps solve customer’s problems without a hard sell. The example below comes from Southwest Airlines Facebook page. Their social media team shares research from a Harvard University study on mask usage and the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The virus is a topic that weighs heavy on almost every passenger’s mind when flying during the pandemic.

Southwest airlines facebook feed example

 

You can look at social media as a friend’s backyard barbeque social gathering. Friends and family attend the event and socialize, sharing stories, ideas, and helpful solutions to problems they may openly discuss. Rarely do you see or hear a guest delivering a sales pitch to people at such social gatherings. They may share their places of employments and discuss what they do. Still, people generally do not attend a friend and family gathering to conduct hard sales.

Display Advertising

Purpose: Display advertising helps build brand recognition and target specific customer segments online to deliver your product offerings.

Display advertising is advertising represented and broadcast through websites, apps, and social media. Display ad formats may include text advertisements, images, flash, video, and audio.

Distribution of display ads occurs through websites that partner with ad platforms, such as Google. They may also appear in your email inbox or through apps on your phone. The example below shows display advertising through the Google Partner website.

As part of a search engine marketing strategy, the primary purpose of display advertising is to deliver your brand message or product offerings to website visitors.

 

display advertising example

 

Email Marketing

Purpose: To stay connected with your customer base or help potential customers move along the marketing funnel toward conversion.

Email marketing is one of the oldest and most cost-effective forms of digital marketing. Early on, Email marketers would purchase or harvest email addresses and broadcast product messages, filling millions of recipients’ inboxes. Later, legislation passed prohibiting marketers from sending unsolicited Emails. 

Today, marketers are leveraging Email to customers who sign-up to receive information about your company, products, or helpful solutions to their problems. Marketers use Email to connect to customers, to keep them informed about new products, specials, and to better their lives with the products.

The newsletter below is one example of email marketing. Petco, a popular pet store (in the USA) selling various items for pets, sends their newsletter to current customers. The newsletter keeps their customers informed about new or on-sale products and helpful information about keeping their pets safe and healthy.

 

Email marketing example

 

 

Content Marketing

Purpose: To provide valuable information to customers or potential customers about how products and services may solve their pain points. Content is more informative than sales-oriented.

The fifth popular form of digital marketing is content marketing. It has been the buzzword in digital marketing for several years now. However, content marketing is not new. Companies like Coca-Cola have been content marketing for over a century.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach where content is created and distributed, intending to attract customers to a product or service. The key to content marketing success is that the message does not overtly advertise the product or service. Instead, content marketers focus their message on delivering informational or educational content to increase interest in a product. 

Content may be in the form of a written article, video tutorial, infographic, case studies, or any communication that helps inform or solve a customer’s pain point. 

The advertisement for Carnation Milk below is an example of content marketing in 1943. During World War II, food was in short supply in Europe. To help send food to their allies, the USA launched a program promoting gardening at home, which encouraged Americans to plant food for their use while the government sent food supplies to Europe. The Carnation Milk company was one of many advertisers that took advantage of the Victory Garden campaign by promoting their product using content marketing.

In the example, Carnation discusses the benefits of growing your food along with a helpful recipe using their canned milk. The content addressed how consumers might prepare a meal with the food they grow and a can of milk.

1945 Carnation Milk Content Ad example

 

Summary

Whether you call it marketing or digital marketing, it is all the same. The only difference is that digital marketing uses digital channels to communicate brand messages. These digital channels are found in various formats across all digital devices yet serve a specific purpose for delivering brand content. Additionally, the digital marketing advantage is that brands can target specific customer segments and get fast analytics to better serve their customers.

Facebook ad KPIs

Catapult Your Sales by Setting the Right Facebook Ad KPIs

Audio Version — 13:35

Measuring Facebook Ad KPIs

facebook ad KPI hand drawn illustrationIf you have ever spent money advertising and promoting your product or service on Facebook, you undoubtedly had an objective in mind. For example, maybe your goal was to generate $10,000 in sales from a specific campaign or that you wanted to sell 500 units of your product or, perhaps, sign up ten new clients.

Whatever your goal was, have you ever measured your ad campaign performance relative to your objectives? That is, did you establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine if you are on track toward reaching your goals? Don’t worry; if you have not, you’re not alone.

As social media advertising spend amongst business owners and marketers increases yearly (see eMarketer.com chart below), so does the competition. To give you a competitive advertising edge, I discuss several Facebook ad KPIs to monitor when advertising on the social media platform. I also discuss why they are essential to your sales success.

Facebook ad KPIs social media spend chart

 

What Are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?

Before I dive into the Facebook sales KPIs, allow me to provide an overview of what a KPI is; for those that need a refresher explanation, of course.

A KPI is a strategic objective that targets where you want your company to be by a specific date. It helps you monitor where you are at the present moment with where you want to be in the future.

One example of a KPI may state, 

 

“We will increase revenue for product “A” by 10% by the end of the second quarter.”

 

Notice that the stated objective is to increase revenue for a specific product. The target is a 10% increase by a particular date. The more specific you write your KPIs, the easier it is to measure them.

Facebook Ad KPIs

As part of an ongoing ad campaign management process, I recommend two essential metrics for your Facebook advertising success. The first metric is the Cost-Per-Action (CPA) metric.

Cost-Per-Action (CPA)

Cost-Per-action, sometimes referred to as cost-per-acquisition, is perhaps one of the critical KPIs that you want to track for ad spending. CPA allows the advertiser to pay for only the actions a user makes due to your ad.

An action can be any one of the following:

  • Purchase from your E-Commerce site.
  • App download.
  • Newsletter Signup.
  • Registration for your webinar or conference.
  • Or just about any other activity that requires a visitor’s engagement.
facebook call to action image example for facebook ad kpis article

A sample ad from Facebook desktop news feed shows the advertiser using CPA advertising to increase downloads of their article.

 

For example, you can use CPA to monitor and control costs for visitors who click on your ad link versus paying for cost-per-impression (CPM). 

Note

Depending on your ad and desired action, CPA could cost you less than deploying a CPM ad strategy.

A high CPA cost can lead to higher costs and indicate that your Facebook ad is not performing well. However, the caveat is, you may experience a high CPA in the initial days that your ad is running. It is best to allow your ad to run for at least three days before checking the CPA. Suppose your ad CPA is still high after a few days from its initial launch. In that case, you need to make adjustments to your ad visuals or headline, target group, or Placement.

 

Example Facebook CPA Ad KPI

A written Facebook CPA ad KPI may read like the following:

 

Reduce Facebook CPA by 20% over the next three months.

 

The KPI assumes that you are past the initial ad launch by at least three days and that your CPA is higher than usual. Note that the KPI has a strategic objective to improve ad costs. It states a measurement strategy to reduce costs and has an explicit target within the next three months. 

 

CPA Calculation and Formula

To calculate CPA, divided the advertiser’s cost by the total conversions (or actions taken due to your ad). 

cost per action formula

 

As an example, let’s assume that the total cost to advertise is $1,000 for a campaign. You receive 25 actions for that $1,000 campaign. 

 

CPA= $1,000/25

 

Your CPA in this example is $40 per action. Some may regard this as expensive. However, compared to industry benchmarks, if you are in the auto, home improvement, or finance and insurance industry, the CPA is considered lower than average. If you are in the apparel industry, your CPA is high, and you must make adjustments to reduce your costs.

 

CTR Facebook ad KPI illustrationClickthrough Rate (CTR)

The clickthrough rate (CTR) metric is vital to monitor, especially for ads running two weeks or more. Although CTR is a simple metric, it is a telling one. 

A CTR drop may indicate that viewers are passing on looking at your ad in their Facebook feeds. Like products, ads have a shelf life too. For example, suppose you experience a 1.6% CTR for beauty products with a specific ad. In that case, your ad performs at the industry benchmark. If your CTR drops to below 1.6% and continues to decline over time, it may be necessary to change your ad’s visuals or the headline, or both.

Suppose your ad does not generate any clickthrough. In that case, it’s also an indication that there are possible issues with your ad’s visuals, headline, or target market. One suggestion is to turn your ad off and run several ad tests to determine which ad generates an increase in CTR.

Example Facebook CTR Ad KPI

An example Facebook CTR KPI may read something like the following:

 

“Increase our CTR on ad “X” from 0.8% to 1.4% over the next three weeks.”

 

CTR Calculation and Formula

To arrive at the CTR, divide the total number of clicks by the total number of impressions.

clickthrough rate formula

 

As an example, let’s assume that your ad received 200 clicks from a total of 1,000 ad impressions. That’s a 0.20% CTR rate; it’s low for almost all industries where on average, the CTR is 0.90%. In this example, you missed your 0.8% CTR (as noted in the above KPI example) and would need to adjust your KPI and tactics to reach the 0.8% CTR before trying to accomplish the 1.4% CTR. Your new KPI may read like the following:

 

“Establish a 0.8% CTR benchmark in the next two months.”

 

On the other hand, if you reach your KPI, you will want to set new goals.

Optimization

Facebook ad KPI success illustrationTo optimize is to make something as good as possible. Our goal is to consistently “tweak” the ad until it is as good as possible for Facebook ad optimization. When optimizing an ad, aside from changing the visuals and copy, headline, or call-to-action (CTA), there are five key optimization areas to focus on:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Country/Region
  • Placement
  • Frequency 

Additionally, for new Facebook ads, it’s best to allow the ad to gather data for at least five days after launching the campaign before you begin the optimization process. For older advertisements that were once successful and are now showing a lower CTR, take a look at the visuals, copy, or headline before optimizing any of the above criteria. (See the section on CTR above.)

Age

You’ll launch your ad campaign targeting a specific age group. However, you may find that your highest converting age target group is something else. Facebook allows advertisers to target subscribers from the age of 13 to 65+.

As your ad matures, examine your best-converting age groups. Are they what you expected? Did you discover an entire age segment with a higher conversion rate than your initial age target group? The strategy with age is to move your entire budget to the highest converting age demographic. 

Two possible key performance indicators for age demographics may read like the following:

 

Increase CTR in the age demographic (ad your age range here for the best converting CTR) to 35% conversion within the next 30-days.”

or

Increase sales in the secondary age demographic by 5% in the next seven days.”

 

The first KPI addresses the highest performing CTR age demographic. In contrast, the second KPI addresses growing the second-highest age demographic to increase your revenue.
Once you have established your highest conversion age demographics, the focus should be on growing the second-highest demographic by optimizing your ad visuals, headline, color, or copy.

 

Gender

Facebook allows the advertiser to target a specific gender, men and women. Following the same guidelines as with the age demographics section above, examine which gender category is converting more. Suppose one gender demographic is higher in conversions. In that case, it may be wise to move your ad budget toward that gender category.

Your product may not be suited for both genders. If it does apply to both genders, optimizing the ad for the poorly performing gender demographic may be required.

An example KPI for this demographic may read like this: 

 

“Improve conversions for (gender with low conversions) by 25% of the higher-performing gender category within two weeks.”

 

Country/Region

Targeting different countries or regions can pose challenges for new advertisers. It can also pose challenges for advertisers entering into new markets. The more regions/countries you target, the more the ad can potentially cost you or not perform as well due to a variety of reasons.

It’s best to begin your ad campaign targeting one specific region, providing that your product or service is suitable for that region. Allow at least five days to pass before reviewing the CTR for the ad. If your ad is performing poorly, your options may include optimizing the ad image or headline. 

Once you have mastered and increased the Facebook ad CTR of a specific region, begin experimenting with other same language regions. If you target countries that are non-English speaking, your ad will need to reflect the native language.

Two possible key performance indicators for the country/region metric may read like the following:

 

To increase ad conversions in (name of country) by 25% in the next two weeks.”

or

To enter into new territory (name territory) and have sales earning $500/month by the end of February (or whichever time frame you decide to specify).”

 

Placement

The Placement KPI (or Place) is one of the 4P’s of marketing. Placement identifies where you promote your product or service. 

Facebook offers several ad placement locations on its desktop and mobile platforms. The key is to find the optimal Place on their platform that delivers the highest conversions for your ad. 

As a general rule, ads performing lower than 1% conversion may need further monitoring and continue to underperform, optimize the ad, or eliminate its Placement. 

Another good practice is swapping the low-performing ad spot with a higher-performing (converting) ad to see if the Placement is driving down conversions or the ad itself.

One possible KPI for Placement may read like this:

 

Increase ad conversions of the Facebook right column ad to 10 complete sales per week by the end of the month.”

 

The KPI assumes that you are running several ad placement spots and want conversion improvement on the right column ad.

Frequency

Frequency refers to the number of ad impressions shown to an individual. Frequency becomes essential when the ad shown continues to increase and your conversions begin to decrease. The cause is likely one or several of the following:

  • Your ad has been seen too many times by the same target group. 
  • Your audience size is too small. 
  • The ad’s image needs refreshing. 
  • Your offer is “tired,” and you need a new offer.

Frequency also correlates with increased ad costs. As your frequency number increases, so too does the cost of the ad.

A possible KPI for Frequency may read like this:

 

To reduce our ad Frequency from 8 impressions per person to 3 impressions per person by the end of the week.”

 

The KPI addresses the increased impressions the ad has and the goal of reducing the impressions per person to reduce ad expense and increase conversions per impression.

Frequency Calculation and Formula

Calculate Frequency by dividing the number of impressions by the ad Reach (how many ad exposures per unique individual).

ad frequency formula

 

Summary

Facebook advertising can be lucrative for your business if executed effectively. Setting useful KPIs, monitoring them, and making the necessary adjustments along the way to correct for low-performing ads is essential to your ad success. The key to successful optimization is to monitor and fine-tune your progress consistently. When something is not working, test and adjust until it does work.