So you’ve heard about Fluent’s SOI Owned and Operated Rewards Offers and want to start running them on Facebook? In this step-by-step guide, our expert team of media buyers provides tips to help you set up your campaign for long-term success.
Why Social Works for Fluent Sweeps
Before we tell you how to set up your campaign, here’s why you should:
Huge spend potential – Facebook offers huge spend potential with no real ceiling – you can continue to increase spend (we see from 10 to 30k/day) as long as the quality remains stable.
Creative liberty – You can test different combinations of copy and creative and continuously work to iterate and optimize based on your findings.
Higher payouts – When you run Fluent’s offers on Facebook, you are spending into a platform that has highly engaged users with an active interest in earning rewards. As a result, Facebook helps to drive high-quality traffic that ultimately yields higher payouts for our affiliates.
Setting Up Your Campaign for Success
In order to measure success once your campaign is up and running, it is important to lay the groundwork for proper tracking and reporting.
URL structures –Subaff parameters are appended to ad URLS to tie Facebook front-end metrics with back-end performance metrics. These tracking mechanisms provide insights into the full picture – everything from what ads are converting to which ad accounts are driving the most value.
Reporting – As part of your reporting, set up a pivot table to help determine what levers you can pull to drive more conversions at a higher quality. To inform optimizations and enable scale, make sure to include key datapoints like creative IDs, ad copy, targeting, and custom audiences.
Gift Card Values – How Do I Know What to Run?
The value of the gift card ultimately dictates the actions a user must complete in order to claim their reward. At Fluent, we break down different rewards values into separate tiers. For example, to earn a $100 gift card, a user must claim 4 deals, to earn a $1,000 gift card, a user must claim 10 deals.
From a front-end perspective, as well as a monetization and progression standpoint, we typically see higher engagement with lower value amounts on social (i.e. $75, $100). Higher value amounts can often create skepticism and deter the user from pursuing the reward.
We have also found success attaching a brand or product to a gift card value, rather than promoting a generic $1,000 Visa gift card. Users are motivated to engage with the ad and sign up for the process if they see a tangible item or brand that excites them.
In order to engage users and entice them to sign up, it’s important to test different reward values and make sure your front-end creative is as relevant as possible. For example, to remain relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic, we pivoted our messaging and shifted budgets toward gift cards for food delivery, gaming, and home improvements.
Best Practices for Compelling and Compliant Creatives
Quick Copy Tips That Work
- Have a personality: Use a fun tone and emojis when appropriate
- Break down the process: “Sign up, claim x deals, earn gift card”
- Call out the value awarded so far: “We’ve rewarded over $4,000,000 in gift cards”
- Never mislead the user: don’t use deceptive words like “free”
Facebook Stories Best Practices
There are two main points to keep in mind when creating UGC-style videos for Facebook:
Blend in – Try to make the content feel as organic and authentic as possible. For example, a video that features someone using their gift card makes the process seem more credible and attainable, ultimately enticing the user to sign up for the process.
Tell a story – Explain what the user needs to do in order to claim the gift card. For example, include text overlays that explain the process and use language that makes it very clear what is expected of the user in order to claim the gift card.
Testing Best Practices
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) is a Facebook tools that allows you to upload and test different variations of images, video, copy, landing pages, and headlines against your pixel conversion objectives (for example, an email submit). With DCO, you are giving Facebook free reign to determine which combination of these elements will ultimately yield the lowest cost per action and drive the most value.
Pro Tip: Once Facebook identifies a winning combination, plan a creative refresh at least once per week and create new versions of top performers. From there, reiterate and test on what’s been working well to get as much longevity out of your creative as possible. For example:
- Test best images with new copy
- Test best copy with new images
- Test best styles and apply them to new landing pages
Optimizing and Scaling
After you launch your creative, the next step is monitoring performance to ensure your campaign is on the right track. Here is Fluent ‘s winning recipe for scale, according to our benchmarks:
- CPR < $.70 (cost per email submit)
- CPC < $.30
- CTR > 3%
(Note: creatives at lower spend should be 20%-50% lower/higher than these benchmarks)
Pro Tip: When starting out with a new pixel and creative, allow your data to mature. Give Facebook time to find the target audience you’re looking for, waiting at least 2 days before turning off a low-performing ad.
Community Management
There’s plenty of room for people to get confused with an offer like rewards. In order to prevent a snowball effect of negative comments that can bring down ad quality rankings and ultimately cause costs to increase, make sure to be on top of your community management.
As a best practice, revisit top spending ads on a regular basis and provide detailed responses to any questions. Keeping your community management under control will not only build trust among your consumers but also extend the longevity of your campaigns, help you avoid policy issues, and ultimately get more conversions.
Now that you have all the information you need to launch your campaign, connect with us to get started!
