Chris "Coz" Costello
Senior Director of Marketing Research @ Skai
Sweet spot marketing. Search does not exist in a vacuum. People don’t just spontaneously search for things. They react to stimuli in their lives that prompt them to search. These stimuli can be anything from a leaking roof to hunger pangs to timely advertisements.
Facebook, as it turns out, is particularly well-suited to deliver those timely ads. The combination of massive reach and precise targeting allows marketers to generate demand from their most valuable customers. That demand often results in search activity and marketers can capture the full opportunity by having paid search campaigns running for relevant keywords.
At Skai, we continue to explore the vast opportunities of sweet spot marketing for brands to profit at the intersection of search and social. Last week, we unveiled Intent-Driven Audiences to enable advertisers and agencies to leverage consumer search activity for retargeting on Facebook.
We’re also conducting research for leading marketers to quantify the impact of Facebook ads on paid search performance. Last year, we published our first study on this topic and found that running Facebook ads can improve paid search ROAS by 30%.
Today, we published the second installment in our series under the title: “Finding the Sweet Spot Marketing for Search and Social Investment.” In this study, we looked at paid social and paid search data from Experian to further investigate the synergistic relationship between these two channels.
Also, Luke learns that Vader is his father.
No, wait, that’s a different sequel.
Anyway, we continue to understand much more about just how the cross-channel interplay works through this research—what is it about Facebook Ads that makes them work so well in conjunction with paid search, and how can you maximize the effects?
The combination of massive reach and precise targeting allows marketers to generate demand from their most valuable customers.
In this case, we specifically investigated different Facebook spending levels to identify that there is a “sweet spot” where those favorable effects came into play.
Looking at this chart, for example, we plot conversions and conversion rate against various Facebook ad spending levels and articulate a curve that starts to level off around the middle level of spending, which was 1.81x higher than the baseline Facebook investment.
As with the first study, we encourage marketers to test and measure their own programs to find their sweet spots. Think of this as a road map to help plot out your own cross-channel measurement plan.
This type of data-driven approach is empowered by advances in measurement technology that take us further and further from the classic John Wanamaker quote about not knowing which half of his ad budget was wasted. We can track every dollar spent and give proper credit to each ad for its overall contribution to an end goal. We have another research study, for example, showing that Facebook ads are valued 30% higher when using multi-touch attribution compared to last click models.
With paid search accounting for 50%+ of online marketing budgets, if Wanamaker were still alive, he’d perhaps say that he knows half his money goes to paid search but would still question how to leverage it any better. With the research and technology made available by Skai, we are starting to find the answers.
