by Darko Manic, International Digital Marketing Specialist, Truth Tree
Do Facebook Ads work anymore?
That’s a hot debate in the school marketing world, as it is across other industries. So any opportunity to test new and different techniques built into the platform is reviewed, considered, and often used in experiments. These experiments are run to maximize our school clients’ social media marketing success.
Enter Meta (Facebook) Advantage+ creative. Advantage+ Creative eliminates the manual steps of ad creation and simultaneously automates up to 150 creative combinations. This helps advertisers learn what ads are working more quickly while making the most of their advertising budget. Potential enhancements when using this option are:
- Adjusting image contrast and brightness
- Varying image aspect ratio
- Adding templates to a feed image
- Applying artistic filters
- Adding labels
- Displaying relevant Facebook comments
- Different text combinations
Experiment Description
Advantage+ was developed primarily for e-commerce. We wanted to see if it would be advantageous (pun intended) for school marketing.
Our team cloned two ad sets with different goals, four ad sets in all:
- Truth Tree Ad Set 1 (TT1)
- Advantage+ Adset 1 (A1)
- Truth Tree Ad Set 2 (TT2)
- Advantage+ Adset 2 (A2)
Our key indicators of performance were:
- Frequency
- Reach
- Impressions
- Link clicks
- Unique CTR
- CPC
- CPR
Purpose
The purpose of this experiment was to determine how Advantage+ Creative would compare to Truth Tree’s manual creative.
Hypothesis
A1 and A2 ad sets will provide better results through Facebook’s analytics, but Truth Tree’s creative copy will show a higher quality of site visitors based on the following:
- Average engagement time per session
- Conversions
Experiment
For three months, A1 and A2 ran simultaneously with TT1 and TT2.
Throughout the experiment, all variables remained constant. No modifications were necessary to complete the experiment.
Note: These campaigns were highly targeted to specific age groups.
Facebook Analytic Results
Google Analytics Results
Conclusion
Our hypothesis was proven to be correct. The Facebook analytics show a minimal difference. However, the quality of site visitors from Truth Tree’s creative demonstrated more engaged site visitors.
