Saturday, July 15, 2017

I, for one, would like to welcome our new Facebook Overlords

Last week I brought you an article about how SnapChat *might* be able to make money to somewhat justify its insane valuation. That was by no means a sure thing. This week I'd like to present a case study of a company which used Facebook's new dynamic ad targeting with a ridiculous level of success. You can read the summary at Marketing Dive or the official case study from StitcherAds themselves.

The main takeaway is that Facebook partner StitcherAds ran a campaign for Athletic apparel retailer Finish Line using Facebook's new broad audience targeting with dynamic ads. The idea is that by mining Facebook's wealth of behavioral data, they are able to identify people who have not yet engaged with Finish Line but have a high propensity to buy its goods. Up until now, the really high return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) and sales increase statistics were the results of targeting people who have already engaged with a brand instead of totally new customers.

The results of this ad campaign? A 49x sales increase and a 9.5x return-on-ad-spend (ROAS)! Let that sink in for a second. Using Facebook's behavioral data, these companies were able to see a response from brand new customers that is on the level of those who were known fans of the brand. The future belongs to those companies who have the data and are able to utilize it and this is just a taste of what is to come. Barring any anti-trust actions, its hard to see how the likes of Facebook and Google don't continue to gain more and more power as the value of the data they hold becomes more and more valuable.

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