Facebook ad insights from Digital Summit Denver

This week I attended Digital Summit Denver where I watched some of the top minds in digital marketing share their expertise. Speakers included superstars like Seth Godin, as well as accomplished corporate marketers like Cisco's Tina Shakour and Facebook's Jason Dailey. Below I've shared a summary of some of the top Facebook advertising insights shared at the conference.

Facebook is pay to play

Just two percent of business pages’ audiences are reached through organic methods, according to Tina Shakour of Cisco. However, paying to play is worth it as long as you are on the right (relevant) platform for reaching your audience. Social advertisements generate an eight times higher click through rate than display on desktop and a nine times higher CTR on mobile, according to Shakour.

Facebook is cheaper than other social media ad platforms

Good Facebook campaigns should be run for under $1.10 cost per click, says Shakour, and the average is under $.50. This compares to an average of $5.74 on LinkedIn. This is not to say LinkedIn can’t be incredibly valuable for B2B ad campaigns even with its higher cost, however.

Pay attention to Facebook’s relevance score

Facebook’s relevance score ranks the relevancy (not quality) of your ad — i.e., how relevant it is to the audience you are serving it to. The more positive interactions with your ad, the higher its relevancy score. Shakour says to aim for a score of 8. The key takeaway is that higher your relevance score is, the lower the cost per click is and the better the click through rate.

Facebook can drive more search

Facebook ads drive more mobile search volume, according to Jason Dailey of Facebook. In addition, he says combining Facebook ads with search campaigns can increase return on ad spend and conversions. His point — integrating your Facebook ad campaigns with your search strategy will generate better results.

First-party data is your competitive advantage

Your first-party data is your competitive advantage in both your Facebook and your search campaigns, according to Dailey. Everyone can access Facebook’s interest, partner, and demographic data, but your audience data is yours. Leverage this data in Facebook remarketing and Google retargeting campaigns.

It’s a mobile-first world

It is important to consider device targeting in your paid campaigns and to remember we are now in a mobile first world. Marketo’s Mike Tomita says he has found mobile traffic to be higher via social than search (34 percent v. 17 percent).

Look at which channels are producing more traffic from mobile vs. desktop and run campaigns accordingly. In addition, test square images vs. horizontal in your campaigns, particularly those you are running for mobile.

Do you have comments or questions about the Facebook ad insights shared at Digital Summit Denver? Post them in the comments section below.

Matched Audiences: An Overview of LinkedIn's Much-Anticipated New Audience Targeting Features

This week, LinkedIn finally released features we’ve all been waiting years for: website retargeting, targeting of your existing database using email addresses, and targeting of key accounts in your customer database. Called matched audiences, these new features could be a gold mine for B2B marketers, especially those pursuing an integrated account-based marketing strategy.

Website Retargeting: Facebook and other digital ad platforms have offered website retargeting for a long, long while, which is why it is so surprising it took LinkedIn this long. LinkedIn’s website traffic audiences tool requires you to paste insight (tracking) code into your website footer. Once the code is in place, you can create retargeting audiences based on visits to a specific page url or a word contained in the url, much like Facebook.

Contact Targeting: To create an audience for contacts, you have two choices. With the first, you upload a spreadsheet of emails for contacts in your database and LinkedIn will match those with users’ emails. Then, you can target those matched users with your ads. Using the second method, you connect your LinkedIn advertising account with your database. LinkedIn currently connects with Marketo, Oracle Eloqua or LiveRamp.

Account Targeting: With account targeting, you can upload a list of accounts within your database using the company name. This is an excellent tactic to include in your account-based marketing strategy to target your key accounts.

Two digital marketing tools to grow your network & increase conversions

Today, there are so many new digital marketing tools available, and I thought I'd share some favorites I've discovered recently.

Sumome: Sumome's WordPress plugin offers several apps that enable you to more easily grow your email list, promote content and track user interaction with your site. While Sumome's features are all free, to integrate it with your email client, you will need a pro subscription. Benefits of Sumome include:

• Heat Maps: Heat maps enables you to track user engagement on your pages, showing you where people are clicking.
• Smart Bar: Smart Bar creates a bar at the top of your page with a call to action and a button or email address entry form. You can use it to build your email list or promote another webpage or blog post. You are also able to A/B test different bars with different messages and designs.
• Scroll Box: Scroll Box enables you to create a pop-up form to grow your email list. You can choose which pages the pop-up appears on and where the pop-up appears on the page.

ManageFlitter: Remember Tweetadder? ManageFlitter is like Tweetadder, but it complies with Twitter's policies. Benefits of ManageFlitter include:

• Unfollow accounts that are inactive, spam (fake), don't follow you back, and more.
• Follow accounts who follow you and have engaged with you (pro feature)
• Create lists of users you never want to unfollow/follow (pro feature)
• Search accounts by keyword
• Schedule tweets for the most optimal times for your network