The following is a rough transcript of Ben Harper’s presentation at Biddable World on 21st January 2014 on “How & Why To Become A Power Editor Power User”.
You can follow the slides when reading the transcript by viewing below:
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Transcript
Hi, my names Ben Harper and I’m from Datify, a data driven digital marketing agency based in Peterborough just outside of London. We work with a number of clients, both big and small, across the whole digital marketing arena, although my specialism is in paid and social. We believe in being data led and transparent in everything we do, with one of our key mantras being to always target any advertising with as much intelligence behind it as possible to reduce wasted impressions - and in the social media context, that’s where Power Editor comes in.
So before we dive in, lets just find out a few things. How many of you use Facebook advertising by a show of hands? And how many of you use Power Editor when creating those adverts?
For anyone in the room who doesn’t know, Power Editor is Facebook’s own bulk editing tool for adverts. It’s a download/upload, browser based system that used to be pretty ugly, but has been improved a lot over the last 6 months or so in terms of usability. Power Editor users get many of the new Facebook advertising rollouts first before it hits the main Ads Manager system, and there are a number of benefits to using Power Editor which can help you maximise your campaigns, which we will discuss shortly. What’s more, it’s free to use.
Let’s start with a quick case study to show the power of Power Editor. On a campaign we ran recently for a client, we achieved a 312% decrease in fan acquisition costs month on month and reduced the cost of their paid content impressions by 125% on the same basis whilst improving relevancy of audience and increasing conversion rate. How? We set up the campaigns using Power Editor and used the advanced functions I’m going to talk you through to maximise every impression and every pound spent.
We’ve broken it down to 5 top tips for getting the most of your campaigns by using Power Editor. First, is bidding strategy. Power Editor allows you to set customised maximum bids when in optimised CPM (OCPM) bidding mode. This allows you to optimise for your goals such as clicks, reach, social impressions or actions - but also allows you to create custom strings, allowing you to optimise your impressions for specific actions such as video plays on your content for instance. When using OCPM normally, Facebook will optimise for generic engagement, but this way allows you to focus on your specific goals to maximise your return.
Bulk editing is another Power Editor feature that allows you to get the best out of your ads. Creating multiple advert sets in order to test different copy and image combinations, targeting sets, placements and more is crucial in optimising your campaign for the best results. Being able to bulk edit allows you to do this quickly and efficiently, meaning there’s no excuse for not drawing up sensible tests to improve your campaigns.
Advanced audience allow you create more advanced targeting sets to reduce your impression wastage, and understanding what each means and how to use them in Power Editor is key. There are three main types of advanced audiences at present:
- Custom Audiences
- Lookalike Audiences
- Partner Categories
Most will be familiar with custom audiences by now. They allow you to include or exclude based on email address, phone number or Facebook User ID as part of your targeting criteria, allowing you to bring in your CRM data for targeting or exclusion as appropriate.
Lookalike audiences are great for finding a relevant new audience. In essence what Facebook does is find users who are similar to those in your custom audiences in terms of profile and target them. This is a powerful feature that can find you new fans and customers quickly, with Facebook doing the back end work.
Partner categories are only available in the States at present, but these are the extra targeting sets available based on user purchase history and intent from Facebook’s data partnerships with Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon. These allow you to target to a really finite level, such as showing adverts to people who buy a higher than average amount of children’s cereal for instance, or those who have recently test driven a certain type of car. As you can imagine, these create great conversion rates - however, they’re unfortunately only available across the pond at present.
You need to be using Power Editor to test out the different targeting options as part of your ongoing optimisation. Power Editor is a must in order to constantly look for the best audience to target that will drive the best results.
Another handy element of Power Editor that changes how you view your campaigns is the advanced placement options. In Power Editor you can choose to show your adverts only to certain types of phone, or just on the News Feed on mobile for instance. Do you know which placements are driving your conversions already on Facebook? Possibly not, so find out by testing using these functions to potentially reduce impression share in non-converting Facebook slots and up your spend in the higher converting areas.
My final point on Power Editor is a slightly more complicated one, and something that I’ll discuss on the Datify blog in more detail soon. The power of data extraction from Power Editor to better target your campaigns is huge. Querying Power Editor on the ‘potential audience’ field allows you to gain competitive insight in terms of a variety of factors, and overlaying the potential audience size data on multiple queries allows you to become much smarter with your media buying. Companies such as Kred and Optimal Social pull this data out effectively, and are worth a look.
Convinced of the need to use Power Editor to get the most out of your Facebook campaigns? So how do you get started? Well, the best way is to access Power Editor from the Ads Manager section of Facebook (there’s a link down the left hand side), and then to start testing & learning. The great thing about Power Editor is you can fully set up campaigns, but as long as you don’t click ‘Upload’ they never make it to the live system so you can play at will.
Keen to find out more? Download our free eBook on Facebook community management being a science not an art here to find out about our data led approach to community management, with some great tips in there on Power Editor data extraction for audience profiling purposes.
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