Expiring Lease Targeting vs. Standard Targeting in Facebook Canvas Ads
OVERVIEW
Creating an effective targeting strategy to accompany your digital marketing efforts is the best way to make sure the right ads are delivered to the right people on the right platforms — the platforms where your potential customers will actually see and interact with them. However, since Facebook rolled out Fair Housing Updates last summer, targeting is now a lot more difficult for apartment marketers on The Social Network.
With restrictions to targeting for age and gender, plus the removal of zip code and look-a-like audiences, the search for the best new Facebook targeting strategy is underway.
CHALLENGE
The massive changes to Facebook’s ad targeting capabilities necessitated an equally large shift in social strategy. Clearly, audience targeting is one of the key determinants for ad performance. With over a billion active daily users, it is critical to target only those users who might actually be interested in your property — running hyper-focused campaigns is key.
So, the removal of over 5,000 specific targeting options makes for a hefty challenge. With Facebook’s stricter regulations now in place, finding more creative ways to capture the right audience is more important than ever.
STRATEGY
Using our custom research product, Expiring Lease Ninety (EL90), we decided to target a new demographic of potential users — renters whose leases are expiring within the next 90 days. Since this marketing audience is likely to be…well, in the market…in the near future, we believe they are a population more likely to be influenced by our canvas ads.
In running this case study, we wanted to see if EL90 audience targeting for canvas ads could help us reach a more qualified group of Facebook users while still abiding by Facebook’s stricter guidelines. The following findings compare EL90 audience targeting vs. our standard targeting over a six week period.
RESULTS
KEY FINDINGS
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EL90 audience targeting increased average Click-Through Rate (CTR) by 11%
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EL90 audience targeting increased average View Time by 6%
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EL90 audience targeting increased average Site Visit Rate by 22%
CONCLUSION
With a much larger audience pool, it makes sense that standard targeting would result in higher Average Impressions and Average Clicks. However, when we focus on action-based metrics like CTR and Site Visit Rate, EL90 targeting clearly demonstrates increased engagement with 11% and 22% increases on these key metrics, respectively. These findings prove that EL90 is a useful mid-funnel strategy for canvas ads on Facebook — a great way to increase the number of quality leads your property generates.
With EL90, you can reach a more qualified audience while still adhering to the guidelines established by Facebook’s Fair Housing updates. Problem solved.
So, what’s the next step, you ask? Well, now that we’ve proven that EL90 targeting can help us reach a focused and engaged audience, we want to see if this strategy can hold up on its own as a full campaign — in other words, will the restricted audience of an EL90 campaign be enough to spend a full budget? Stay tuned for the results in Part II of our blog.
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Hit us up…we’d love to chat.
