Spotlight on Search and Social: Skai’s Proudest Achievements

It is important for all marketers to step back from their day-to-day tasks and assess their efforts to identify high performers to continue to invest in and low performers to pause. We advise all clients to do so and “practice what we preach” by doing this for our own digital marketing campaigns as well. In doing so, we’re able to understand what messages, imagery, and ad types work best for our business and which do not.

We’re proud to share Skai’s biggest wins in search and social below with the hope that you’ll take away some tips and learnings to boost your own campaign performance!

Carousel Ads Shine With Social Testing

Skai’s biggest win in paid social this year thus far is the performance we’ve been able to generate from our carousel ads, a relatively new ad type available on Facebook. Carousel ads provide marketers an opportunity to share multiple images or videos within one ad. When viewing these ads, the audience has the ability to interact by swiping through the different assets and clicking on links unique to each image or video. Marketers are able to provide a full, cohesive story by using this ad type that they may not have been able to get across using a traditional page post ad.

Fully embracing our testing strategy, our team set out to determine the effectiveness of these ads and launched a variety of them, each telling their own story and getting our overall brand message across to our key audiences.

One of our top performing carousel ads thus far (shown below) highlights some recent Skai content and research, feeding our audience with tidbits of information, intriguing imagery, and clear calls-to-action. When swiping through the entirety of the ad, our audience is able to learn more about how to justify marketing plans and engage with us by clicking into the relevant information to dig deeper and understand the role Skai plays.

This ad alone had a 14% lower cost per click and 107% higher click-through rate than the averages across all of our carousel ads. By using the Skai platform to manage these ads, we were able to easily add additional audiences to our targeting to expand reach without going through the entire creation flow again which was a huge win and time saver for us! We look forward to continuing to leverage this ad type to tell our story and continue to test images, videos, messaging, and audiences to increase engagement.

Incremental Growth on Search

Because paid search is a much more mature market than social, the key projects, focus, and overall performance of our search campaigns has remained fairly consistent over time. That being said, we’ve made a recent effort to tweak our messaging to drive more conversions via paid search.

Within Skai, we were able to use Advanced Search to easily update language in ads across multiple ad groups and campaigns in the click of a button. This easy updating allowed for the updated messaging to appear almost immediately and our performance to soar from there.

This effort has proven successful, as we were able to generate a 48% month-over-month increase in conversions from January 2016 to February 2016. Having the ability to drive these conversions helps us to better map our efforts back to our business goals and track a more accurate return on investment.

As we continue to learn from and optimize our own paid search and social programs, we’d like to share a few general tips to make your efforts as successful as possible.

1. Embrace industry changes. Our industry is ever-changing with publishers, partners, and channels continually making updates to their offerings which can, more often than not, affect the entire digital ecosystem. In tandem to this, customer behavior is constantly evolving as well, and as a marketer, you must be agile and have the ability to shift your program at any moment. Utilizing Skai to manage your campaigns makes shifting focus and adjusting to industry changes phenomenally simpler.
2. Be open to testing new things. Publishers and partners are always reiterating and providing new avenues for you to reach your audience and meet your business goals. Be open to these new offerings and test them when you can. By doing so, it can give you a better idea of what types of paid media work best for your business.
3. Continually monitor performance. Coinciding with the first point here, consumer behavior changes constantly. As this happens, campaign performance will change as well. Be sure to have a close eye on your overall performance at all times so that your budget is being used in areas that provide the greatest return on investment.