FB AD CARPET BOMBING – DOES IT WORK?
The question of whether or not blanket marketing with FB ads is a good idea came up yesterday inside the Academy…
For those of you who aren’t aware of the term – it’s also referred to as “carpet bombing” and is basically when you don’t select any interest/behavioural or demographic parameters for your Facebook ad campaigns. Meaning, you’re essentially giving Facebook a free for all with the targeting within a specific location or age bracket.
It’s a top of funnel tactic used to segment potential interested leads and is a poplar tactic used by the likes of Tai Lopez and many ecommerce brands.
Go out, blast out, then retarget.
But does it work?
The answer: Yea and nah.
Basically – ”you need balls of steel” to roll with the strategy (direct quote from Tom here haha)!
When you’re running a campaign on FB and trying to optimise for a specific action (such as a like, video view, or purchase), you are using what is called oCPM (optimised cost per mille). Basically, you’re tapping into one of the world’s most powerful AI engines – Facebook’s data powered optimisation algorithm.
But this algorithm is also very hungry, and there’s one thing it craves endlessly – data. ?
Case and point, a recent update from FB announced that your conversion objective campaigns should now be getting at least 50 event triggers per ad set per week in order to fully optimise!!!
It’s basically a bottomless pit at an all you can eat buffet!
And the more data, the better.
So what has this got to do with carpet bombing?
????
Well – it all comes down to whether or not you have enough data to work with on that pixel of yours.
For example…
…let’s say you give FB a free for all with your targeting, you want link clicks and you have a brand new pixel with zero data.
FB will spend the first 500-8,000 impressions furiously trying to figure out who is going to respond by blasting your ad out. But because there is no data to go off and no targeting parameters, your ad will likely be shown to skews of audiences that are completely irrelevant. As a consequence, your soft stats – such as CTR – will suffer, and your relevance will dwindle.
And we all know what happens when your relevance plummets. You start to lose the auction process against other advertisers.
Now, on the flip side, if you have existing data on that pixel, and give FB an open book to play with – sometimes, magic can happen here.
… the imperative word here is sometimes.
Which means, you’ll still need balls of steel 😉
So does carpet bombing work? Yea and nah… yea if you have a healthy pixel full of data or are only using it for very soft top of funnel activities. But nah if you have zero data and are looking for actual conversion events.
Hope this makes sense team – drop any q’s below!
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