Holiday Retargeting Ads Lead to Strong ROI and Better Attribution for TisBest
The Challenge
Attribution for marketing can be easy, but we see many businesses that aren’t taking the easy steps to figure out what their marketing dollars are actually doing.
For the 2019 holiday season, we worked with TisBest, a charity gift card company, which had not been able to attribute its marketing dollars in years prior. The company needed our team’s help to track the sources of its sales.
The Solution
Our first step in ensuring TisBest was set up for success was to install pixels on its website. We added tracking pixels for Facebook and LinkedIn, two major platforms that TisBest uses for holiday advertising.
Each pixel allows us to track and retarget website visitors. Facebook also allows event-based tracking, so we can follow people along the sales funnel. The event-based tracking is similar to goal conversions in Google Analytics in that the goal is decided upon by the client and 9 Clouds team. Once these tracking pixels are set up, they will “fire” when someone performs the goal and allow us to see the action.
Once TisBest’s website pixels were in place, we were able to set up online advertising through Facebook and LinkedIn. Within each ad, we added a unique UTM tracking code.
UTM tracking allows us to break down each ad we are running to watch engagement on the website. It’s especially beneficial for A/B testing. If you do not have unique UTM tracking on each ad, you won’t be able to decipher which copy, creative, or targeting is working best (or worst).
TisBest appreciated our A/B testing approach, as the 9 Clouds team was able to pinpoint which ad performed better and then make optimizations to reach the project’s goals.
Tag — You’re It! Create Proper UTM Parameters for Your Dealership’s Marketing Campaigns
Pixels like Facebook and LinkedIn offer easy ways to retarget website viewers, including those who left a shopping cart without purchasing. Combining data from these pixels with Custom Audiences uploaded to Facebook, we were able to retarget TisBest purchasers with ads encouraging them to come back and make a new purchase.
Considering it costs five times as much to attract new customers as it does to retain current customers, why not capitalize on your current customer base?
The Results
During our holiday campaign, our Facebook retargeting campaign produced strong results for TisBest.
Retargeting campaigns are a great way to reach website users who have not made a purchase (or, if you are not an e-commerce site, whatever your final goal is). Our December 2019 retargeting campaign, which had a national reach, yielded excellent results:
- Average cost per click of $3.74
- Average click-through rate (CTR) of 0.54%
- 62 purchases made from clicking an ad*
- A 9x placement ROI due to 9 Clouds’ audience targeting techniques
*We’d like to note that Facebook tracks purchases (or conversions) based on the ability to track last-touch attribution. Last-touch attribution gives all of the credit for a purchase to the last piece of content a user “touched.” So, within Facebook, another ad could have been viewed prior — yet the Facebook retargeting ad (usually seen last) will be given credit. This is typical for any retargeting campaign a business would set up.
The client was very excited about these results. Deepa Garg, marketing director for TisBest, said:
“We’re all very excited internally because this is the first year on record that we know spenders are converting profitably. We’ve had no data evidence of this prior to this season because our marketing wasn’t tracking properly in the past.”
Not only were we able to produce results that offered TisBest insight for future marketing plans, but we were also able to set up its team with the tools (pixels) it already owns and won’t lose, no matter what marketing efforts TisBest chooses in the future.
The TisBest team also valued 9 Clouds’ expertise with current advertising strategies and algorithms, which are difficult to keep up with when you have a small marketing team like TisBest’s.
Adding in the fact that 9 Clouds doesn’t charge a commission on advertising spend was the cherry on top for Deepa Garg:
“The value proposition we buy into versus 9 Clouds’ competitors is the agnostic view on ad spend — which lets us all work together, collaboratively, on what’s best for our business. It fits well with our lean organization and is trust building versus receding.”
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