Best Practices

The New Automated Prospecting



The Release of Broad Audience Targeting Provides New Opportunity for Advertisers to Utilize Facebook’s Data to Convert New Customers

The introduction of dynamic product ads changed the game for most e-tailers, allowing them to reengage with noncommittal shoppers. Facebook unveiled their first version of dynamic product ads nearly two years ago, allowing advertisers to serve relevant products ads to Facebook users, based on the actions they’d taken in the online shop or app.

While this provided optimization of ad spend, recapturing previously lost business, many advertisers wanted the ability to dynamically serve relevant product offerings to new audiences, that haven’t engaged previously with the brand, but might be interested in their products.

Enter Facebook’s new dynamic product ads with broad targeting. Read: automated, targeted ads for prospecting. In early 2017, Facebook started slowly rolling out the ability to target broad audiences with dynamic ads, allowing advertisers to target users that might be interested in their product based on Facebook’s expansive user data.

The big difference: Reach & Relevancy.

Dynamic product ads for retargeting are based on the customers that already know you, and have taken valuable actions recently. While this delivers high results, it can sometimes produce smaller audiences that don’t give your brand it’s due visibility.

And while automated prospecting is not new, Facebook has taken ad relevancy to the next level with this update. StitcherAds has long offered automated prospecting campaigns for our clients, using dynamic ads with lookalike audiences and interest-based targeting to reach new users. However, broad audience targeting gave advertisers greater access to Facebook's big-brother-style, always-watching data, providing both better user and product matches for your ads. Their recommendation engine takes all the data it has about a user and your products to make a match. Then we're able to show that user a specific ad with products just for them. And once your relevant, personalized ads are served, the engine will track how users interact with your products to further refine these matches. It’s an engine that learns the more you feed it. Needless to say, we were immediately on board. The new automated prospecting.

As one of Facebook’s Marketing Partners, we were able to begin offering the new targeting option before its full market release. With our added technology, clients like JD Sports, The Children's Place, and Finish Line were able to automate more of their workflow, optimize using multi-source, real-time data, and scale.

“We’ve experimented with various prospecting methods, but StitcherAds helped us run a dynamic ads campaign with broad audience targeting. Since they’re automated, it was less work for our team. And the results both performed better than other targeting methods and exceeded our goals for the campaign.”

- Evan Whipkey, Integrated Marketing Strategist at The Finish Line, Inc.

Finish Line ad

 

Compared to prospecting with static ad formats, Finish Line saw 49x more sales using dynamic ads to broad audiences, achieving 9.5x ROAS. Read the full case study here.

Our clients are seeing big results with this release, with success metrics similar to those of retargeting campaigns (i.e. people that were already interested). Most advertisers would see this as the holy grail in their long and strenuous customer acquisition journey—and it is! To get started, here's our top 5 tips to get your best results with broad audience targeting:

 

top5

Want more? We wrote a playbook!

To get a deep dive into how automated prospecting works, how to best utilize the new targeting option, and how StitcherAds can help you achieve your highest ROAS, download our 2017 Automated Prospecting Playbook.