Refreshed a Little Bit on my Performance Marketing

Checked out a few resources on Performance Marketing. This is what I learnt.

I attended a Growth School Session chaired by Nimit Pahwa

The session was very crisp and the content had lots of actionable insights. Hats off to Nimit for this concise session. Attending this session at 11P.M. was a good decision. These are some of my notes from the session. If you are interested I would urge you to attend the session yourself at: Link

Talking Points of the Session were:

• Impact of ad creatives on CAC
• Importance of choosing suitable placement for your ads
• Create low cost impactful ads
• Hyper Personalization of ads.

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Impact of Ad Creatives on CAC

Ad fatigue level / frequency depends upon the creative, and the final objective of your campaign. It is not a one size fits all approach.

1. People are likely to take an action on your ad after seeing your ad maximum n times.
2. n=variable frequency can be considered basis upon you product funnel and goal.
3. eg: A free app that can be downloaded from the app-store. -People are likely to download this app after seeing the ad max 2-3 times, since purchase is not involved. Awareness to action funnel will be short.
4. If frequency of the ad reaches more than 2.5 times in this case, ad fatigue will happen and view retention of your ads will drop.
5. Ad is of an e-commerce app or paid product – The awareness to action funnel will be longer, frequency threshold can go up to 7-8.
6. Churn Rate #1 : Decide how long or short is your awareness to action funnel. – Frequency of the ad should be as low as 2 and as high as 7-8 depending upon the nature of the product.
7. Churn Rate #2 : As your ads reach the n frequency, replace the old creatives with fresh creatives in your ad sets/campaign. - FB(where to check your ad frequency) : Go to ads manager>campaign>ad sets>ads - If frequency is not coming in the metric columns go to customize column and add. - You need to check ad frequency to check the ad fatigue not the campaign frequency or the ad set frequency. - This is only true for conversion or app install campaign, for brand awareness campaigns frequency should be at least more than 5 for better brand recall.

If frequency of the ads reaches more than 2.5 in the case of an app-store app, it is too much.

View retention of your ad video

1. People are likely to take action on the ad if they watch it for longer duration.
2. 30% video ad view is considered impression, and as FB & other ad platforms charges on CPM, lower view retention will count in impression but your conversion will drop hence CAC will increase.

Importance of Choosing Suitable Placement for your Ads?

Answer these while choosing the ad placement and format.

1. How your product’s value can be best communicated to the target audience? -Eg : If your product is a gaming app, your potential users might want to see the demo and video placements will work best. In video ad features of game can be easily shown and demonstrated. OR If your product is a B2B and your acquire consumers through website then search ad placement might work best for you.

Alternate way of choosing ad placement

If the target audience is small, the CAC goes up as FB determines that you are targeting a small niche demographic.

To overcome is issue:

1. Create an all placement ad group in a campaign.
2. Run it on a small budget for 1 week.
3. Check the CAC of all ad placements
4. Create new ad group and ads with only the placement that gave the best results in the experimental ad group. (Short video ads are likely to work best in the current scenario).
5. What he means is that target a very big target audience which makes the fb ad cost low, but instead create creatives that are relevant to only a small segment of that audience. For example: Instead of creating a TG of only females in a small town. Create a creative for the whole state with both male and female audience. Then create creatives that appeals only to the female audience.

Exclude non performing or high cost locations/ devices/creatives/age

1. If you are running ads PAN India and there is a particular state in which your CAC is 30%-40% above average CAC, you can exclude that particular state.
2. For eg – Customers from Haryana is not too important for you but their CAC is 30% above than other states on a significant scale, you can exclude Haryana from your targeting.
3. You can similarly apply this rules on other parameters like age, devices, creatives etc.

Approach to Create low cost impactful ads.

1. Find out what your target audience might be consuming as content and where.
2. Fid out a common intersection of content in which your product can be integrated.
3. Create engaging content that has your product and your audience would love to watch.
4. To do this, find an aspiring and growing influencer with less than 20k followers on Instagram but with good quality content.
5. Collaborate with the influencer and get advertising rights.
6. Since influencers are new you can get a good production quality video at a cheap price however it depends upon your negotiating skills. try negotiating with the influencer directly by DMing. Do not reach out through an agency as such influencers are overpriced. Do your own research on influencers.
7. Cost per mille: Negotiate with influencers on how much average views their videos got on the last 10 videos not on the subscriber or follower count.
8. Ads should not look like ads. It should be sandwiched between content.
9. Don’t focus on the CTA. Convey how it solves a problem. Don’t hard sell the product.

Some other ways to make engaging and high retention ads #1

• Pickup a trending reel format that can possibly go with your product, make a video with your product, make a video that shows your product value and also looks similar to a trending reel and run it as an ad.
• If you can not find the trending format that can go with your product, pickup a trending music, make a no dialogue video and add that music to the video.

Some other ways to make engaging and high retention ads #2

1. Make sure your ad/content looks quite similar to what your target audience might already like to watch in their feed – If it looks like an ad, it won’t solve your purpose.
2. Keep the communication simple and authentic as much as possible.
3. While creating such ads think like a creator, not like a performance marketer – make it engaging and direct as much as possible.

Hyperpersonalization

• If you are targeting language based states you can try making ads in their language and content theme.
• If you are targeting, different age groups, you can create personalized ads for 13-17. 18-24 and above 25. Key is to understand what they are consuming and create accordingly.
• Note: These are all experiments and shows different results on different product, so try with a small budget. (By small budget he means 5% to 7% is a small budget of your total monthly budget. )
• Target a Bigger Audience target. Keep targeting open,
• Try with small budgets.
• Fail fast.

Bobble AI Case Study

Pre Campaign Research

• They identified what the target audience of bobble was consuming- They were watching tech infotainment videos.
• They decided to create sandwiched content for videos in the category of tech infotainment videos.
• They partnered with micro tech YouTube influencers with less than 100k views on yt.

How much they spent?

• Less than 30k were spent on Ad production (Influencer video)
• 30k was spent on quarterly ad rights from the creator.
• Total Performance Marketing Budget for the campaign was over 1 Cr.

Results:

1. Since the ad looks like content, and keywords like ‘secret, whatsapp, top 5’ helped in high retention of the ad view, resulting in reducing the CAC by 8x.
2. Product Features use case and tutorial were added in the ad, users from this campaign had 20% more retention than the other campaigns.
3. Influencer video got more than 1.5M views, pre campaign channel views were less than 100k.
4. Due to such high searched topic, the cost per view was reduced by 10x.

Important KPIs

1. Click through rate (CTR)
2. Ad frequency
3. Ad view retention : Ad view retention : Check the metric on multiple days as it might be higher or lower depending on the day.
4. Cost per Mille (CPM)
5. Campaign user retention
6. Cost per view

Next Steps

1. Understand where you stand currently on all the KPI’s.
2. Find out what problem your TG is searching for which can be solved by your product – you can use quora to check the same.
3. Decide a topic, that is answers the question of your TG.
4. Find out nano/micro good production quality, influencer whose content is relevant to the decided topic or create a low cost inhouse video.
5. Launch the campaign on a small budget.

Ending Tips

Performance Benchmark to Beat: Start by keeping a target improvement of 20% for the next 2 weeks.

During festivals your CAC might go up. So, you can shelve the creative and use it again after maybe 2 months.