– Facebook incentivizes eCommerce businesses to spend money on ads without ensuring the quality of the traffic being driven.
– Businesses often rely on Facebook to find Lookalike audiences based on previous purchases, but there is still no check on the quality of the ad spend.
– To improve the quality of traffic and customer conversion, businesses should focus on understanding the buyer journey, using clean data, and being efficient in their marketing strategies.Build a process that allows for understanding the quality of traffic and the buyer journey in order to maximize the benefit of both Facebook advertising and email marketing.Facebook has conditioned eCommerce businesses to have their credit cards automatically debited massive sums of money, trusting that they are targeting the right people who are looking to make a purchase. There is no check on the quality of the traffic being driven, beyond whether or not someone makes a purchase. Most people don’t make a purchase. If something doesn’t go well, it’s something YOU did wrong.
Think about this for a second, from a business perspective, Facebook is incentivized to cap the return you get so you continue to spend money. It’s much like a casino, where you bet money hoping for a return, slowly being lulled into not thinking twice about having your credit card charged multiple times throughout the month. You change campaigns, audiences, and ad creative, all striving to increase your engagement and sales. Sometimes you win big, sometimes you don’t. At the top of the funnel, most people are looking to break even. And your spend is broken down by Cost Per Click, sometimes more than $1 PER CLICK! This is crazy to me.
Then we put our trust back into Facebook to find Lookalike audiences based on people who have purchased from us, again trusting that Facebook is creating quality audiences. This is absolutely batshit crazy. Yet, this is what everyone is telling people to do because it’s slightly better than blind guessing. At least you have a purchase to anchor. There is STILL no check on the quality of the ad spend past the standard metrics that don’t tell us anything about our customers.
STOP THE INSANITY.
We set out to better understand the quality of the traffic. What we needed to do was to build a process that allowed us to tell a story of where customers are in the buyer journey, use clean data to build models, and find the relationship between those data points and conversion. If you’re not doing this, it’s time to start. And strive to be ruthlessly efficient at it.
For all those who say that’s why you do email – 99.9% of brands only collect an email address at signup, and no one can say they average over a 50% open rate throughout the duration of the welcome series.
FACT – Low-quality audiences drive low-quality signups.
It’s not one or the other, it’s figuring out how to maximize the benefit on both fronts. #marketing #ecommerce #customerjourneyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco