CheezeDMG Blog

You can probably wrangle down the price on just about anything right now. But getting stuff for free is still difficult. And getting good stuff for free is really tough.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to find that we can get free impressions on Facebook engagement ads. And those free impressions work as hard if not harder than the ones you pay for.

Here is how it works on a typical ‘get fan’ campaign.

Firstly you buy impressions on a Facebook engagement ad. The engagement bit is very important.

So lets say you buy 1m impressions on a CPM basis.

The way engagement ads work is that the ad is served up to those people who you have targeted. Engagement ads include underneath them the names of friends who have already ‘become a fan’. That is the engagement bit - you are more likely to click through if a friend has done the same.

Facebook records these clicks in the normal way.

But the really good part is that if I become a fan then that comes through into ALL my friends news feeds. These are the free impressions.

What is really great is that for the campaigns we have run for Canterbury and for PDSA - we have found that these free impressions generate the same level of fan sign as the paid for impressions. In fact, for PDSA, for every fan we generated through the paid for ad we got 2 from their news feed. So for the PDSA campaign we generate c15k new fans of which 10k signed up through friends news feeds.

This is what social is all about, peer to peer recommendation working better than any other form of advertising.

With click through rates of around 2.2% this is an extremely effective form of advertising. With careful targeting, good creative and a decent incentive we managed to get two of our Facebook campaigns into the European top 5.

For example our current Canterbury campaign is targeting males aged 18 plus and using rugby keywords, the engagement ads aim to drive sign-ups to the Canterbury of New Zealand fan page initially through a 20%

merchandise discount offer. Newly signed up fans will then be asked to vote for where they think the Rugby World Cup 2015 should take place. And they’ll also be notified of the results of a previous competition asking fans to upload photos of themselves in their Canterbury of New Zealand gear via the brand’s Facebook fan page and email, followed by an invite to take part in the next competition themselves.

The idea is that with careful planning of post sign up activity like that I’ve mentioned above we can keep fans engaged in the page for longer.

In summary, there is good free stuff out there but you need a decent plan to make good use of it.

Sphere: Related Content