Intro
Are you, just like us using Facebook to bring traffic to your website? The low cost and high volumes certainly make it very attractive. Unfortunately, we see in Google Analytics that the quality of that traffic is not always good. Bounce rates tend to be high and people spend almost no time on your site. You can bring your Facebook traffic campaigns to the next level by choosing to optimize towards a micro conversion. Using a simple action on your website to optimise towards, still allows the Facebook algorithm enough room to bring new traffic at a low cost while simultaneously bringing you people that show actual interest in your offer.
Is your Facebook traffic qualitative?
In your well thought off holistic Facebook strategy you most likely have a campaign that is dedicated to bringing traffic to your website. Facebook is awesome for that. You can easily bring many people to your website at very low CPC’s using the “Landing page views” optimisation that Facebook offers. If your goal is to do just that, driving traffic to your website, and nothing else, perfect, no need to read the rest of this article. But, if you are like us, also interested in the quality of traffic, you might want to reconsider the way you optimise.
Because optimising for “Landing page views” does just that, it brings people to your website and that is the end of the story. Whether they bounce immediately or browse your entire website, is not taken into in the optimization. This can result in seeing some very low traffic quality in Google Analytics.
Optimise for a micro conversion
With a few small tweaks, you can have a traffic campaign that brings you quality traffic while keeping a good CPC. You do so by optimizing towards an appropriate “micro conversion”. Instead of optimizing toward “Landing page views” you chose “Conversions”. For your conversion event you don’t go for your normal conversion that you use in the conversion campaign. Instead, optimise towards a micro conversion.
A micro conversion is a simple action on your website. It is something a user does on your website that shows a genuine interest in your offer. Some examples are: spending 5 seconds on your website, clicking on a button or scrolling through a certain part of the page.
Now, you are not simply bringing people to your page, you are bringing people that have truly the intentions of discovering what you have to offer. Choosing the micro conversion with care is important in the success of your campaign. Don’t choose a conversion that is unrealistic if your goal is to bring new people into your website flow.
Quick-Step Floor Explorer case
Together with Unilin we put this theory to the test for their brand Quick-Step. Before our traffic campaign optimised towards “Landing page views” and had a lookalike audience of website visitors. Although we had a lot of inexpensive traffic, almost all of them bounced immediately. They did not spend time on the site and hardly visited any pages.
To change this we started optimising for a micro conversion of people going through the Floor Explorer tool. This tool helps people easily discover what floors they might like in a playful way. We believe this to be a conversion that is “light” enough that new users will complete it while still indicating a strong interest in the brand. We also opened up our audience by adding an ad set with limited targeting (open audience) next to our lookalike audience.
This was very successful as we managed in bringing very high quality traffic at a low cost to the website. Of course CPC’s increased but the increase was limited and in return we had many qualitative sessions coming from new users. People discovered the Floor Explorer tool, spent longer on the website and went through multiple pages. Using the open audience was really effective as it allowed the Facebook algorithm a lot of room to find our quality audience. The open audience was our best performing audience.
Conclusion
This campaign shows that optimizing for conversions is the way to go when you want to bring quality traffic to your website. This approach, combined with broad targeting, gave the Facebook algorithm a lot of room to find quality people at a low cost, making the campaign very successful. You can find more information on this case on the Facebook for Business website.
Jennifer Nollet
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