Staying Social with Sophie

After you install a Theme, Sophie processes large amounts of data so you can reap maximum returns from every dollar spent. Based on the Theme that you install, your offerings and products reach, via advertising channels, to potential customers for your business on the web.

A lot of web users spend significant amount of time on social networking platforms. On Facebook alone, there are 900 million users of which 50% log in every day, making it a ripe ground you can use to reach out to your customers. Managing advertising on Facebook can be quite a task; one that requires continual effort to constantly monitor and tune your campaigns. Picking up the right form of advertisingis also important for the success of your social marketing plan. At Lexity, we realized after careful experiments that Facebook can be  a great channel for display ads, only if certain aspects are taken care of.

The performance of Facebook ads decays in 2-3 days after they are published. There are various reasons this could happen - ad bids are not enough, demographic targeting (age group and gender of people who see your ad) is not precise, the ad body is not appealing to viewers, etc. What does this mean for you if you’re managing your own campaign? A few different things.

1. You have to constantly monitor your ads and analyze statistics by sifting through graphs & campaign reports
2. Shortlist parameters you think can positively impact your campaigns
3. Make changes
4. Repeat steps 1, 2 & 3 for every ad
5. Repeat step 4 every day

It's possible that despite the changes you make to an existing ad, it still doesn’t perform. Your best bet then is to design a new ad, and swap out the old one. This is indeed why advertisers who can afford large teams of people, have large teams that manage the chores mentioned above.

If you have a small business and are busy managing the plethora of things you have to, Sophie can manage all of this for you. Sophie, our intelligent ad planner, takes care of everything for you to make your Facebook ad campaign successful. Below, we show some results on how she does that, in a progressive timeline from the start of the campaign.

1. Routine ad tuning

The curve below shows the performance of an ad over a period of time. When the ad was published, it did not perform at all. At point 1, a bid change change was made that resulted in the ad performing in the beginning and then plateauing. At point 2, the ad performance started to decline, and achieved a minima at point 3, where another change was made to take it up to point 4 and beyond.

2. Tuning with insignificant data

In this case, Sophie did not have enough quality data yet about your ads. An exploratory approach was taken, and small changes were made to bring the campaign up to speed. Performance did come eventually, albeit after a tad bit of a haul. 

3. Tuning with enough data

 After the ads are up to speed and are getting enough traffic, Sophie maintains a good performance factor throughout the lifetime of the ad, making changes when appropriate, and leaving enough dwell time in between for changes to take effect.

4. Ad rotation

Owing to her genius combined with her uncharitable behavior towards non-performing ads, Sophie even swaps out running ads with new ones. This is usually done after an ad has performed for its life and there isn’t anymore meaningful tuning possible. The graph above shows the performance of a campaign for which ads were swapped out by Sophie. The deep troughs make it evident why Sophie decided against these ads. At point 1, the running ad was swapped out and was tuned to reach performance point 2, from where over a period of a couple of days it dropped down to an all time low at point 3 and got  swapped out in favor of a steadfast performance.

 

We have learnt a lot on what works and what doesn’t with Facebook advertising when it comes to small businesses. And we are so excited to building a great product that could help you reach your audience on the social web. Stay tuned!

 

-Gursharan