Joshua Dreller
Sr. Director, Content Marketing @ Skai
What does it mean to fast-forward an industry by 3 years?
For most CPG companies in the midst of a digital transformation, in January it was probably still a 3-year plan.
In March it became a 3-month plan.
Some CPGs are adapting quickly. For example, Heinz launched its Heinz to Home program which ships some of its most popular products directly to customers—including free delivery for front line workers.
Source = https://heinztohome.co.uk/
As CPG continues to move down the funnel, Facebook can be a key driver to getting consumers to wherever their goods are sold on Amazon. Facebook ads can be pointed to an Amazon page—and it wouldn’t be surprising if other retailers offering major commerce advertising programs could be next.
But, in order to truly make this powerful cross-channel connection work, many social advertising teams have a key piece missing.
Flip the switch on the Facebook to Amazon connection
In order to calculate marketing return-on-investment, one needs to know the sales/revenue driven by the cost.
To even attempt optimizing traffic without knowing how each campaign, ad set, and ad performed once Facebook users are pushed to Amazon is by proxy online. And that means, “the next best KPI” which usually is efficient, low-cost/high-volume clicks. But, of course, pausing one ad that has a slightly higher CPM could mean that you just turned off your best traffic lane.
Skai is now testing a new feature that enables Skai Social clients to track Amazon sales from Facebook ads and solve this problem. Marketers will be able to see within their social advertising dashboards how their campaigns are driving Amazon activity and be able to make better data-driven decisions on how to optimize their investment or apply auto-optimization options—not optimizing to clicks or other secondary metrics—but to true Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
What you can do once you have this connection in place?
Once you can see how every element in your Facebook advertising program is performing, you can start doing some pretty interesting things…
Use Custom Metrics
Maybe you want to see video completions to Amazon sales to see how well your new explainer video series is working? Or see the number of impressions on your best performing ads yesterday to see if there’s more inventory available. Having the right off-Facebook/on-Amazon metrics is essential.
Enhances automation
One of the challenges of driving advertising offsite is that you have less visibility into the next location. There can be major spikes in consumer buying behavior on Amazon, that can easily get missed. But automation rules can be set to automatically boost Facebook ads that start driving the most Amazon sales, pause ones that drop below the desired ROI level, and other common tasks.
Leverage advanced AI features
Skai Smart Tags track common issues for social advertisers such as predicting and alerting for ad fatigue. If you know which campaigns are your most valuable Amazon drivers, you may want to keep a much closer eye on how your creative is performing. That’s hard to do for a social advertising team that could be managing well over 100 ad sets, but this is the kind of task that artificial intelligence can easily handle.
TV to Facebook to Amazon
Social advertisers can already trigger Facebook Ads based on real-time TV signals—such as boosting an ad targeted to a market where the brand’s big television ad just aired. Once the Facebook to Amazon connection has been set, now TV signals can drive traffic—via Facebook—to Amazon pages.
Other signals too such as Weather
Weather can also be a trigger for Facebook Ads. For many brands, seasonality and daily weather patterns have an impact on which products they should be boosting and which they may want to pause. Rain vs shine can make a difference to many different Amazon sellers.
Ultimately, just get your Facebook to Amazon connection in place
As Amazon becomes a bigger part of your focus, getting it right with one of the biggest drivers to your product pages is more critical.
To enable data-driven decision making, marketers need the data. Opening up your social advertising team to Amazon success metrics will immediately make a world of difference. Once you have that foundation in place, there will be many new and innovative options for your Facebook to Amazon program.
Social + Ecommerce = CPG success
Are you getting the most out of your Facebook to Amazon connection? Maybe it’s time for a platform upgrade.
With Skai Social, you can engage social customers while achieving branding and performance goals.
With Skai Ecommerce you can create, manage, forecast, and optimize Amazon and Walmart campaigns at scale.
Contact us today or set up a quick and easy demo to learn more.
