Lessons from Aitarget teaming with OMD MD agency and DIY retailer OBI for a huge test of creatives that increased CTR by 44%

What products do you choose to show in your Facebook ads? Which items from a large catalogue are more likely to attract and engage Instagram users? Retailers often follow a particular framework, for example by only showcasing their best-looking, or most popular, or most expensive, or cheapest, or on-sale products (there are many variants).

But does this work best? Or are you missing out on something by thinking this way?

A great thing for modern advertisers is that they can be greatly helped by artificial intelligence and Facebook’s own algorithms, as well as those of the social network’s partners such as Aitarget. Together with the OBI chain, one of the biggest players on the European DIY market, Aitarget and OMD MD agency looked at three effective methods for testing different announcements and choosing the ones with the highest conversion rate.

We could increase the scale of our split testing by several times over, while remaining efficient at the auction and saving money from our budget.

Step 1: Determining the business goal

Our overall goal was to improve business metrics by increasing the Click-through Rate (CTR) and attracting more traffic to the website, with no additional expenses.

As a large retailer, OBI had hundreds of promotional products; not all of them could fit into the advertising campaign. That is why our second task was to understand which products could deliver the highest CTR. We compared many ads to pick those with the highest CTR.

We had a short amount of time, literally a couple of days, to test over 100 announcements and choose the most productive ones CTR-wise, and turn off all the others.

How did we do this?

Step 2: Creating a Testing Base

For testing, we launched five ad campaigns for Facebook and Instagram; about 10 to 20 announcements each. The ads were targeted at people living in cities with OBI stores, those with «Repair» and «Interior Design» in their interests, as well as those who had just moved.

Quickly preparing such a large number of creatives for testing could be a huge challenge. We solved that by utilising Aitarget’s E-commerce Tool.

That tool took 30 minutes to generate all 100 videos (for suitable product categories) from the product catalogue and based on OBI’s branded ad template. These videos were automatically loaded into Ads Manager, saving significant time for the ad agency and retailer.

Step 3: Setting up Rules for Displaying Announcements

We chose a specific strategy to test. If such a large amount of promos all reached the auction at once, the efficiency of the campaigns would sink due to competition between the announcements. To avoid that, we used automation.

We set up rules for the automatic announcements in such a way that the promos would be shown one after another over the course of three to five days. After reaching the set amount of impressions, the ad would stop and be replaced by the next one in the queue.

The criteria for ad efficiency was CTR. During a two week campaign (from 15 August to 4 September 2019), two days were spent on determining the attainable amount of impressions. Afterwards, we determined the minimum number of impressions for creatives.

In three to five days we could select the creatives that got a higher-than-average CTR. Those ads continued to be shown to the audience, and all the others were turned off.

Results

After turning off automation and once only the most effective promos were being shown, CTR rose by 44% compared to results before automation.

At the same time, we could lower CPC by 62%.

Advantages:

• There is no limit to the amount of creatives you can test.
• Announcements don’t get moderated twice.

Limitations:

You can test out creatives, but not audiences.

*DIY is better together.

Better and better each time!

The winning OBI promos based on our test results

All advertisers notice that CPC on social networks is constantly growing, especially during busy seasons, says Anastasia Sumina, Head of Business Development at Aitarget. For DIY retailers like OBI, that season spans spring and summer. “This is why, first of all, companies will have to up the ante in order to attract more clients, due to growing competition at the auction,” says Sumina. “Secondly, companies try to pick products that, to their mind, the audience enjoys the most. As a rule, these are products with the most attractive prices. But can we be 100% sure that your opinion aligns with the interests of your target audience?”

Sumina says businesses can understand what users expect by testing various hypotheses (from colour schemes to product lines, layouts, templates, overlays and more) in a way that prevents competition between the varying ads. “By marketing the winning creatives with the products that definitely work for its audience, the brand will get better results.”

Daniil Shcherbakov, OBI Russia Digital Media Planner, praised the Aitarget Tool for its fast and affordable work with mass creation of video creatives, that allowed businesses to test such varied hypotheses. “It gives you the possibility of launching multiple creatives at once, without them competing against each other,” says Shcherbakov. “As a result, an objectively winning creative is determined for further marketing. Thanks to this testing, we determined the creatives with the products our target audience picked, instead of the subjective opinions of market researchers.”

For Nikita Utkis, Paid Social Group Head in the OMD MD agency, using Aitarget’s Tool meant that they could expand the basic functionality of Facebook Ads Manager. “We displayed a massive base of automatically prepared creatives to our audience, and picked the ones that attracted the most attention in the news feed and only contained information about the products the users really needed,” says Utkis. “The Tool helps to considerably save on resources for launching such a massive campaign and providing relevant information about the products.”

Along with Announcement Rotation, we looked at two other effective methods for testing and choosing creatives with the highest conversion rates.

2. Dynamic creative

This is an example of how you can use the capabilities of the tools Facebook provides. Businesses can upload multiple variants of basic ads components ( title, description, image/video, CTA). Then the Dynamic Creative algorithm combines these elements into multiple creatives, launches announcements, and optimises them.

Advantages:

• You can save time as announcements are created automatically.
• You can see which components of the announcement work better than others.
• The algorithm automatically chooses which creative to show to different users with different placements.

Limitations:

• There are a limited range of campaign goals and combination variants (eg a maximum of 10 images and five variants for each block of text).
• The results of all displayed variants are shown, without separate results.
• You can’t combine it with customising announcements for various placements.
• You can’t control which announcement to show, as the algorithm picks it on its own.

3. Split Testing

Split testing is one of the most effective ways to get more conversions.

With split testing you can see how your audience reacts to various announcements and pick the one with the highest conversion rate to display. In this case, hypotheses aren’t tested by changing the creative, but by splitting the audience into groups.

Advantages:

• You can test your design, optimisation, audience, and placements.
• Audiences don’t overlap.
• Each ad set has an equal chance on the Facebook Ad Auction.

Limitations:

• A maximum of five types of the same parameter can be tested each time.
• Only the price of the results of each audience group is being evaluated.

How Aitarget and iProspect harnessed automatic bid and ad budget rules to reduce CPM by 28% while growing reach by a third for the M.Video consumer electronics retail chain

In the competitive world of the Facebook ad auction, when things get heated up CPM can vary greatly within one ad campaign. Our experience shows that for three quarters of Aitarget customers, the lower and upper CPM limits may differ by 500-700%.

So how can you help control your costs and optimise your bid in such an environment?

The answer is automation. By using a tunnel automation strategy you can set maximum and minimum bids and/or budgets and ensure your campaign stays within these limits.

Switching from manual to automatic allowed Aitarget client M.Video to drive their CPM down to a lower and more stable level throughout an advertising campaign, while also growing their reach by more than a third. How’d we do it? Let’s take a look at their journey.

Making a better impression

When advertising on social media, M.Video – Russia’s largest consumer electronics and home appliance retail chain – wanted to focus on growing sales and maximising ad impressions and branding. Building uniform audience reach and optimising purchases with a certain frequency of ad impressions was important. M.Video’s goals were to show an ad to an audience several times, while maintaining CPM within its KPI; to optimise the cost of purchase by at least 6%; and to get wider reach without having to increase its budget.

For these ad campaigns, there was no fixed cost of purchase: the minimum and maximum CPM values for the KPI differed by 4 times for Instagram and by 1.5 times for Facebook.

The iProspect international agency launched two campaigns with video creatives for M.Video: the first for Facebook (Feed, Instant Articles, In-Stream Video) and Audience Network placements; the other for Instagram Feed and Stories.

Reach was chosen as a target, and several ad sets were launched with audiences selected according to CRM or interest in certain goods or types of sales (cashback, coupons, discounts).

Both campaigns were run for 18 days in July, using Aitarget automations to enhance performance. The automatic bid and budget rules linked changes in CPM and impressions to bid behaviour. For example, if the values set for CPM were exceeded, the bid was automatically reduced, and vice versa. This resulted in more impressions at a price favorable to M.Video, and allowed more control over any CPM growth.

Automation rules for M.Video

With the year-on-year growth of auctions on ad platforms, the issue of minimising the cost of media purchase with effective targeting is high on the agenda,” says Aleksandr Maslin, Targeted Advertising Group Head at iProspect. “The human factor doesn’t always help respond to the situation at the auction quickly. That’s why together with our colleagues from Aitarget, we set up the use of automation tunnel strategy for M.Video and made the purchase more effective.

Course correcting on campaigns

The ability to harness automation thanks to Aitarget delivered significant results for M.Video. Compared to the defined KPIs, automation quickly reduced CPM in Facebook ads by 28%, and in Instagram ads by 26%. Those benefits were retained throughout the campaign.

“The use of automation let us get more sustainable results from campaign to campaign and plan the KPIs of our ad activities more accurately,” says Digital Marketing Manager at M.Video. “For the first test, we took the minimum CPM values of the previous campaigns as a benchmark. Applying tunnel strategy, we managed to reduce the CPM by 26% to 28% and increase the reach by approximately 35%–38%. Moreover, even in high season, when the auction is warmed up to the maximum, we were able to repeat the result achieved, which proved the effectiveness of the tool. We intend to continue working with the Aitarget automation. We’ve got positive results with broad targeting and geo so far. The next step is to do tests with short periods of 2–4 days and limited geo/super geolocations.”

Along with the reduction in CPM, Facebook impressions rose by 38% while CPC fell by 25%, and Instagram impressions went up by 31.5%. Overall, M.Video saved 32% on its budget for Facebook advertising and 25% for its Instagram advertising, and reached far more people.Roman Grishayev, Account Manager at Aitarget, recommends that companies use the tunnel automation strategy if they’re looking to reduce CPM and CPC while scaling their advertising campaigns.

“For example, for M.Video, we managed to buy 38% more impressions with the same budget thanks to automation. “In general, in the context of the constant bid growth on social media, automation – which lets you reduce the cost of purchase – becomes the most effective budget management tool. The tool allows you to set any rules of bid and budget behavior, correlate conditions logically with operators ‘and’ and ‘or’, as well as add marks to create several levels of rules.”

Going higher with more tips for effective real estate ads from Aitarget, Facebook, JagaJam and Donstroy.

Fourth floor: short and sweet

Mobile made the world turn faster, so a simple image of a house will no longer engage users. You need a new type of content that demonstrates advantages in a few moments.

Don’t focus on a long text description in your ads, instead highlight one or two advantages that are important for your target audience (e.g. five minutes from public transport, the historic centre, or schools and playgrounds, or favourable mortgage conditions).

Put this core message on a creative optimised for mobile and don’t forget to brand it. Such advertising will stay in users’ memory and increases conversions, including delayed ones.

We recommend that Video for News Feeds and Stories be less than 15 seconds long. The most effective videos are three to five seconds in length. Use the built-in Facebook tool for creating slideshows to make these kinds of videos from any images and short text. Longer videos may be appropriate in other placements, such as In-Stream Video.

A sample of the video ad created with Video Creation Kit

To catch the attention of users who scroll their news feed swiftly and show longer videos to those who are ready to watch them, Daria Vladimirova of Aitarget recommends using the auto placements along with the creatives adaptation.

“Facebook allows you to cover all available platforms in one ad and at the same time add standalone creatives for each,” said Vladimirova. “Selecting ‘auto’ and uploading, for example, a square three-second video for Instagram, vertical 15-second slideshow for Stories, and a 90-second video for In-Stream, you allow Facebook algorithms to choose where and in which form ads will perform, maximising the conversion possibility. This brings greater coverage, makes budget spend more efficient, and provides optimal cost per result.”

Fifth: interior decoration

“Your posts shouldn’t be true to type,” she said. “Take photos of the building from different angles, non-standard perspectives, so the content will not pass unnoticed in the news feed. Imagine what a person sees when they dream about their future flat and show it. Offering an empty apartment is inefficient. Show an apartment in which they may want to live.”

Alexander Sushchenko, Head of SMM at Donstroy, gave examples of the company’s practices which brought good results. He recommends showing on video a wide panorama of the location, then going into details. If the environment is not attractive, it is still necessary to remain relevant and show ads in real time, working on the shooting angle.

For flats to sell undecorated, the “before/after” format is suitable, where empty walls turn into an attractive interior. For ready-made accommodations give a video tour of the rooms.

“It is important to approach video production for social networks as responsibly as possible and combine a helicopter shooting (air) with infrastructure details of the property on the ground and with interiors, public spaces, and details of future apartments design,” said Sushchenko. “The goal of your video is to answer all (or almost all) customer questions and interest them in the property to prompt further interaction.”

Sixth floor: lead the way

Beware auto-filling lead forms. While lead forms that auto-fill based on a user’s Facebook profile is an option that will save users’ time, it can add half-hearted people to your CRM.

“To improve the quality of your leads, add an extra question to the lead form where answers are entered manually, and/or turn on the ‘Higher Intent’ setting – a window to confirm sending the data while filling out the form in mobile Facebook news feed,” said Daria Vladimirova.

You could ask, for example, whether the user is looking for a decorated or undecorated flat, how many rooms and which district they need, or to sign up for a visit to your sales office.

In addition to the button driving users to your website, a lead form can end by allowing the user to download a file (e.g. a layout, special offer, or other content), or the “Call me” button.

Consent given to have a phone conversation will fade quickly even for interested users, so try to respond quickly and contact potential clients within 20 minutes of them filling in a lead form. Integrate lead generation with any CRM and utilise instant callback services.

The penthouse view

In order to optimise, Facebook has to show your ads to a certain number of people. If your ad budget is too low, your ad will not get enough impressions or audience and Facebook algorithms may consider your ad ineffective and remove it from the auction.

To avoid this, your minimum budget for advertising a new building should be about $125. It is even better to budget for $150–310 per day. At the same time, you can get 2–7 times lower cost per lead compared to other platforms, and 4-5 times higher conversions.

So there you have it: a grand tour of Facebook ads for real estate, taking in every level from Facebook Pixel settings and format choice to testing and optimisations.

So did you find a great new place?

Tips for effective real estate ads from Aitarget, Facebook, JagaJam, and Donstroy.

The article was first published on Medium.

In the middle of the March a trio of social media experts held a closed business breakfast in Moscow for digital advertising professionals from real estate firms. Aitarget teamed up with Facebook and JagaJam, as well as real estate developer Donstroy, to share ideas and exchange best practices in social media advertising.

At the business breakfast we discussed formats, creatives, targeting settings, and gave attendees recommendations on how to drive audience attention with developers’ offers on Facebook and Instagram. Our Aitarget team has collected the highlights from the meeting to help you better deliver conversions and purchases through online real estate ads.

We’re moving up in the world, so get in the lift with us. Stand clear, mind the closing doors!

Ground floor: mobile

Yulia Kolesnichenko, Agency Manager for Central and Eastern Europe at Facebook, reminded everyone that the mobile format is a trendsetter for real estate advertising. People do not use aggregators, and ads in newspapers are not as influential as they used to be. Most often people will search for accommodation using a mobile phone. And this trend will keep growing. Within the ten seconds you spent reading this paragraph, about 70 new users around the world started using a smartphone.

Kolesnichenko pointed out that a mobile is the most effective selling tool for developers today, because the mobile and the audience are united. At Aitarget we noticed that about 98% of real estate advertisers’ budget was spent for mobile devices, and that mobile brings to developers up to 99% of leads.

First floor: warehouse

First things first: install a Facebook Pixel on your website to track user actions and optimise.

Choose those Pixel events that fit real estate the most. For example, Search event is suitable for apartment selection and filtering by parameters, while ViewContent shows which exact page was viewed. Lead or Contact are the core events for the “Leave a request” and “Call back” buttons.

If you plan to launch dynamic ads, you need to set several events on one button. Also, there are some must-have events to make your dynamic ads work. For general catalogue use ViewContent, AddToCart, and Purchase, and for special real estate catalogue – Search, ViewContent, InitiateCheckout, and Purchase.

This scheme may suit most developers, but everything depends on your website structure and the options that are available for users

Second floor: targeting

Across its family of platforms, Facebook’s targeting system enables real estate businesses to find suitable customers by family status, income, location in a specific are, and other characteristics that may determine their interest in properties of a certain type (e.g. two-bedroom apartments close to the underground or penthouses with parking).

Yulia Kolesnichenko highlighted the need to take care of people: find those who are interested and suggest to them the type of housing that suits them. If a person looks at a complex that they cannot afford, show them another one with targeted advertising.

The most effective targeting settings for real estate are:

• narrowing a broad audience by interests, locations, demographics, and behaviour;
• using your already available leads, as your clients may become interested in accommodation again (remember that you can look for long-term clients);
• creating Lookalike audiences from your existing customers.

Third floor: first, be dynamic

Aitarget and Facebook both advised that, first and foremost, the breakfast attendees should pay attention to dynamic ads for real estate.With Dynamic Ads, if a user was searching for a single-room apartment on the 20th floor, the algorithm would select an appropriate choice from your catalogue and show it in the ad.

Yulia Kolesnichenko noted that Facebook’s specific dynamic ads for real estate allow businesses to show the layout, location, and type of apartments based on audience needs, so users will be more inclined to leave their contacts.

To set up the dynamic ads, you need a catalogue of your offers in the data feed format supported by Facebook ads. You should include apartments with different layouts, residential projects of different levels, and with various heights and other parameters.

Source: PIK Group, Facebook Success Stories

Daria Vladimirova, Lead Agency Manager at Aitarget, suggested brands adopt two types of dynamic ads: using a specific real estate catalogue, and a general one.

“A special real estate catalogue maximises the relevance of an ad for the users when they are already interested in your offer and are potentially ready to leave their contacts,” said Vladimirova. “With the regular product catalogue, you can increase conversions at earlier stages of the sales funnel. It enables you to use the Collection and Instant Experience formats, providing the audience with more information about your project.”

In Collection, the main creative (photo or video) aligns, for example, with the apartment layouts and brief descriptions that lead to the corresponding page of a website.

A sample of the Collection ad

Instant Experience is a mini landing page within your ad, where you can add images or videos, text blocks and buttons, and layouts pulled up from the catalogue. Finalise it with a lead form.

How to set up advertising for already interested users: tips from Aitarget and our experienced e-commerce clients

Dynamic Ads automatically highlight products from your Catalogue to the News Feeds of the most relevant audience on Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger. As a result, social media users see ads featuring items they are already interested in.

However, if the retargeting is configured incorrectly, those skis a customer has already purchased may haunt they on Facebook and Instagram for ages, wasting your advertising dollars and possibly giving a negative impression of your business.

So Aitarget is sharing our top tips on how to avoid senseless pursuit of the wrong customers, and what actually works for effective dynamic retargeting. Our tips are fortified by our e-commerce clients’ best practices.

Ready

The three pillars of dynamic advertising are:

• customer statistics;
• a product catalogue;
• an ads template.

First, make sure you have installed the Facebook Pixel for your website and Facebook SDK for mobile apps. These tools collect statistics on visitor behaviour and will assist with determining who should see display items, according to the audience’s actions.

Second, prepare a source of information about your products which Facebook can use when generating your dynamic ads. This means creating a product catalogue, a storehouse of products that you will advertise. To create a catalogue, you need a product feed generated outside of Facebook. This is a summary table that organises product prices, names, descriptions, images, availability, and other characteristics – generated outside Facebook.

Anastasia Volkova, Head of Online Marketing at Aizel, talks about her company’s experience and results when using Dynamic Ads and a product catalogue in their brand advertising:

“We are very pleased with the efficiency of Dynamic Ads on Facebook and Instagram. When we first started working with this format, we launched A/B tests and measured how the handpicked product selections performed compared to dynamic ones built by Facebook algorithms. From the very first tests, automatic Dynamic Ads showed higher performance in terms of clickability, сost per сlick, and much higher conversions.”

You can then either upload your product feed on the Facebook Catalogue Manager in Google Merchant format or add products and their characteristics to the Facebook catalogue manually.

It is essential to link your catalogue with Facebook Pixel and check if it works correctly through the built-in Facebook feed debugger.

Third, you need an ad template to automatically upload products from the catalogue. It can be set in Ads Manager.

So are you ready? Let’s go to the start line.

Get set

Oops! False start!

Let’s first check out some more tips on retargeting optimisation using the product catalogue.

“Dynamic Ads allows Facebook to do all the work for the advertiser,” notes Elvira Deryabina, Client Solutions Manager at Aitarget. “The social network continues to develop this format, giving brands the opportunity to stand out in News Feed with the help of additional add-ons. Discount stickers make users pay attention to the products during sales, and the Dynamic Ads + Instant Experience format stays on the border of brandformance due to a strong creative component and a personalised selection of products within the ad.”

Not random events

Pixel collects and transfers data to Facebook about users’ actions on a website, but only for added events that track specific online interactions with your brand. There must be at least three such interactions in the Facebook Pixel funnel: ViewContent, AddToCart and Purchase. These are the main user stops on the way from viewing the item to purchase.

If you want more detailed statistics, you can use other standard Facebook Pixel events.

Facebook SDK, an analytical tool that must be added to the application to track users’ actions, works in a similar way. Note that to use Facebook SDK for iOS, Android or JavaScript (on the web) you need your Facebook application ID number registered at developers.facebook.com.

To show users your relevant products dynamically, add to the SDK cast in the same way as in the Facebook Pixel events.

Deep connection

Want a user to interact with a product from a smartphone, then receive retargeting ads on a computer or tablet, and vice versa? To achieve this, include Deep Links in your product feed.

Deep Links enable you to lead a user who clicks on a link in an ad to a specific page of your product from the catalogue, not to your general page. If you collect statistics through both Pixel and SDK, you can retarget people with ads for the products they saw on your website, but shift them to your mobile app.

Deep Links for an app will lead the client who already has it installed from the advertisement directly to your product page. If the application has not yet been installed, the link will open the corresponding App Store or Google Play page, and the product will appear along with the first launch of the downloaded application.

Get set a bit more…

To make ads more attractive to the audience and fit your brand, customise their design.

Overlays

Add a virtual price tag which can automatically update to your ads. You can use the price image, the crossed out price, a discount percentage, the “Free delivery” message, a logo or any image you possess.

Feed processing technology created by Aitarget allows many possibilities with overlays: add frames and any text from the feed directly on the product images and change the position of the goods in the picture.

Slideshow

Create a slideshow with different images of the same product shown in the Dynamic Ad. To do this, use the additional_image_link field in the feed so that the customer can better consider what you are offering.

Fixed card

The first card of a Carousel can be fixed and displayed permanently in all ads of this format. Each user will see the preferred image or video and then a personalised set of products.

This is a convenient way to inform users about brand-relevant news along with Dynamic Ads. For example, you can tell everyone that a sale has begun or a new collection or collaboration with a well-known designer has started, and then accompany that announcement with products that the specific user has shown they are interested in.

Offer

Use the Facebook Offer special feature to show general promotions, discounts, and special offers to your audience together with individually selected items.For example, include the offer ad as the first card in the Dynamic Carousel format. It will transfer clicking users to a landing page with a promo code.

Categories

You can use one card sets of products that are collected automatically in Dynamic Ads. Aitarget’s e-commerce advertising specialists build these collages based on brand, product type, and Google product category division.

Dynamic Instant Experience

The Dynamic Ads and Instant Experience tandem allows you to instantly load a landing page with a selection of products.

Dynamic Collections

On Facebook and Instagram it is now possible to combine Dynamic Ads with the Collections format. In this case, the title image will be fixed and a dynamic selection of products from your catalogue will appear after the user starts interacting with the ad on their mobile device.

Go!

Now you’re ready to race to better results. So incorporate our tips and go!

Bonus tip: Dynamic Ads on Facebook is not only available for retargeting. You can also show personalised product advertising to a new audience that has not yet interacted with your brand to attract traffic to your website or grow mobile app installs.