Chapter 14
Advertising Studio
IN THIS CHAPTER
Supplementing subscriber data with social network data
Finding potential customers who are similar to existing customers
Showing online ads to the people who want to see them
The growth of social media networks and other online ad networks has given rise to a new marketing channel. As existing and potential customers began spending more and more time online to socialize, relax, and shop, online marketers quickly recognized the new opportunity that these online arenas presented for placing advertising messages.
The depth of information available about people online makes targeting ads with online advertising easier than it ever could be with older channels. When you can target your message to exactly the right people, you can spend less money on placing ads and get a more positive response from the people who do see them.
The Advertising Studio app is the online marketing tool in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It helps you take advantage of the contact information that you already have about your subscribers, such as email addresses and phone numbers, to find those same subscribers on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and other ad networks. Advertising Studio users have had impressive success using online ads to reengage audiences who have become unengaged with email marketing campaigns.
Advertising Studio also helps you find new customers by way of lookalike audiences, a group of social media users similar to existing customers. Because social media networks collect information about all their users — including your subscribers — and make that data available to you as a marketer, you can find other social media users who have key characteristics in common with your subscribers. Members of a lookalike audience may be more inclined to become your customer because they're similar to the customers you already have.
Advertising Studio Editions
Advertising Studio offers three different editions. The lowest edition comes free with your Marketing Cloud account. You can choose to license more functionality for an additional fee:
- Lead Capture: This edition of Advertising Studio is included automatically with your Marketing Cloud account. It lets you pull data from Facebook into data extensions. (See Chapter 6 for more information about data extensions.) You can use this data to augment the data you already have about your subscribers and identify new potential customers.
- Professional: For a fee, you can access the Professional edition. You should spring for the Professional edition if you want to place targeted ads in front of your existing subscribers while they're using websites or social networks.
- Enterprise: For a higher fee, you can sign up for the top-tier Enterprise edition. You can use this edition to connect Salesforce CRM data to social and ad networks for lead generation campaigns. This edition requires substantial implementation and a thorough knowledge of your Salesforce CRM system, so its functionality is outside the scope of this book.
Lead Capture Edition
The lowest-level edition of Advertising Studio is the Lead Capture edition, which is the one that comes automatically with your Marketing Cloud account. To access Lead Capture, you select Lead Capture from the Advertising Studio category on the app switcher, as shown in Figure 14-1.
FIGURE 14-1: Lead Capture appears in the Advertising Studio category even if you haven't paid to license anything related to Advertising Studio.
You use Lead Capture with the lead capture forms in Facebook specifically. When you open the Lead Capture app, you create lead capture tasks and specify a corresponding Facebook lead capture form that you want to use to capture data into a data extension in your Marketing Cloud account.
The result of using Lead Capture is a data extension of contact information for Facebook users who are interested in your offer. The app does not currently provide any analytics.
You can also use Lead Capture to create Facebook lookalike audiences. Currently, Lead Capture can create lookalike audiences of Facebook users only.
Other social media platforms, such as Google and Twitter, let you generate lookalike audiences using their own proprietary tools.
When you open the Lead Capture app, an overview of your Facebook lead capture tasks appears, as shown in Figure 14-2. The overview lets you quickly see the status of each lead capture task in your account. From this overview, you can also create a new lead capture task.
FIGURE 14-2: The Lead Capture dashboard offers a quick summary of your lead capture tasks.
Before you can create the lead capture task, though, you need to create the lead capture form in Facebook that will generate the user information.
Facebook lead capture forms
You use a Facebook lead capture form to let Facebook users tell you they want to receive information from you. Usually you offer something, such as a discount or a newsletter, to entice users to sign up. Interested users go to the form and fill in their contact information so that you can send them whatever you offered. Figure 14-3 shows a sample Facebook lead capture form.
FIGURE 14-3: Fields on the Facebook lead capture form will eventually contribute subscriber data to your Marketing Cloud account.
The Facebook lead capture form depends on you also placing an ad on Facebook to make users aware of your offer and drive them to your form. Figure 14-4 is a sample Facebook ad that drives use to the lead generation form.
FIGURE 14-4: Sample Facebook ad that would lead subscribers to the capture form.
Knowing that its users are likely to be accessing the site via a smartphone, Facebook designed the forms to work well on mobile devices and require as little typing as possible. The form fields automatically prepopulate with whatever information the user has provided to Facebook in the past. Fewer empty fields are faster and easier for Facebook users, which makes it that much more likely that the user will complete your form.
You can find instructions on how to create a lead capture form at www.facebook.com/business/a/lead-ads.
Creating a lead capture task
After you set up your Facebook lead capture form (including the Facebook ad to drive users to the form), you can create the lead capture task.
At this time, you cannot delete a lead capture task from Advertising Studio once you set one up. You can stop capturing leads through it by discontinuing the lead capture form on Facebook.
Use the following steps to create a lead capture task in Advertising Studio:
- From the app switcher, select Lead Capture from the Advertising Studio category.
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Click the Create Lead Capture Task button that appears near the top right of the screen.
The Create a New Lead Capture Task Wizard appears on the first step: Select Facebook Page.
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Log in to the Facebook account that contains the lead capture form that you want to use.
You might need to grant the app permission to access information in your Facebook account as part of this step.
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Select the correct Facebook page, and then click View Lead Forms.
The wizard moves to the Choose Lead Forms step.
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Select the lead form you want to use, and then click Confirm Selection & Continue.
The wizard moves to the Define Data Extensions step.
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Review the configuration of the data extension to contain the lead information, click OK, and then click Continue.
The Define Data Extensions step in the wizard defaults to naming the data extension with the same name as the lead capture form. The data extension contains a field to correspond to each field in your lead capture form.
- Review the alert telling you that the system will create the data extension, and then click Submit Lead Capture Task.
When Facebook users complete the lead capture form, Advertising Studio pulls the data into the data extension. Use the information in the data extension to deliver on the offer you made in your ad. Then you can also add the contact information that you gathered to your other marketing efforts.
Sample lead data extension
Figure 14-5 shows a sample data extension definition that Advertising Studio might create as the result of a lead capture task.
FIGURE 14-5: You define the fields in the data extension when you define it.
This data extension contains the following fields:
- Lead ID: A unique identifier for the Facebook user. This field is meaningful only within this table.
- Lead Gen Form ID: A unique identifier of the Facebook lead generation form that collected the data. You might use this information to evaluate the success of one form against another, or just to find out how a particular Facebook user got in to your system.
- Facebook Page ID: A unique identifier of the Facebook page that contains the lead generation form. Again, you might use this information to evaluate how successful your Facebook pages are relative to each other.
- Facebook Ad ID: A unique identifier of the Facebook ad that drives users to the lead generation form.
- Date Collected: The date when the Facebook user completed the lead generation form.
- company_name: The company name of the Facebook user who completed the form. This could be useful for identifying corporate users who may have a need for your service or would fit in your target demographics.
- email: The email address of the Facebook user who completed the form. This field appears in the data extension because there was a field for an email address on the lead generation form. You could add this kind of contact information to you email-marketing efforts.
- full_name: The first and last name of the Facebook user who completed the form. Even if you already had the email address for this subscriber, you could add the subscriber's full name to your records for use in your email-marketing and other online-marketing efforts.
Creating a lookalike audience
Using Advertising Studio, you can create lookalike audiences only in Facebook. However, other social networks, such as Google and Twitter, also allow you to target lookalike audiences in their own, native tools.
Your first step in creating a Facebook lookalike audience is to create a data extension of your best customers. See Chapter 6 for more information about data extensions. You can use the Email app (see Chapter 11) or the Contact Builder app (see Chapter 8) to get the subscriber information into the data extension.
You'll use the information in this data extension to tell Facebook about the kinds of users who are your ideal customers. The current customers that you include in your data extension are the ones that you want your new prospects from Facebook to “look like.”
Of course, you'll also need to have a Facebook account for your company and have it mapped in your Marketing Cloud account to complete this process. After the data extension and the Facebook account are ready, use the following steps to create a Facebook lookalike audience:
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In Advertising Studio, click the Create Audience button.
The Create New Audience window appears.
- Enter the name of the lookalike audience and, optionally, the description.
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Choose Facebook as the destination and then choose the Facebook account that you want to use. Click the Configure button.
The Configuration tab appears for your new audience, as shown in Figure 14-6.
- In the column of options on the left, select List or Data Extension, and then select the Data Extension radio button on the right.
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Select the data extension that you previously created with your top customers.
When you select the data extension, the screen updates with new fields on the tab, as shown in Figure 14-7.
- Click the Add a Lookalike Audience hyperlink.
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Select whether you want to optimize the list for reach or for similarity.
If you choose reach, you'll receive the 5 percent of Facebook users in the country you choose in the next drop-down list who are the most similar to the subscribers in your data extension. If you choose similarity, the lookalike audience will include only the 1 percent of Facebook users who are the most similar.
It's a best practice to make both a reach audience and a similarity audience, send to both, and see what works better for your particular situation. Just remember to suppress the similarity group from the reach group when you do your sends so that top 1 percent doesn't get the same message twice and mess up the veracity of the test. - In the Select a country drop-down list, select the country where you want to find new customers.
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Click Activate.
The Activate Audience window appears, where you can set up the lookalike audience to refresh at a time interval of your choosing.
FIGURE 14-6: The Configuration tab with its initial set of fields.
FIGURE 14-7: The Configuration tab with different fields.
If you choose to refresh your lookalike audience, Marketing Cloud will automatically resend the data extension to Facebook at the time interval you selected. It will bring back the resulting lookalike audience anew. You can change the subscribers in the data extension before it refreshes, but you don't have to. The audience you receive from Facebook will contain many new prospects either way because of how frequently Facebook users join or change their preferences.
Professional Edition
The mid-level edition of Advertising Studio is the Professional edition. Advertising Studio Professional requires a license at an additional fee above and beyond your Marketing Cloud account.
This edition lets you upload a list of your subscribers' email addresses or phone numbers to a social or ad network. The network then tries to find those people from that information and present your ads to them.
This edition lets you target online ads to particular audiences. For example, if you wanted to test whether subscribers who have become unengaged with your email marketing campaigns respond better to seeing your advertising messages in their social networks, you could create a list of your unengaged email subscribers and target those people as Facebook users.
It is possible to accomplish this same functionality manually without using Advertising Studio. However, Advertising Studio makes the process a lot easier and a lot more secure. You don't have to worry about having your subscribers' information stolen with this process like you might have to if you were to download the contact information from your CRM and upload it to the social or ad network site.
If you've purchased Advertising Studio Professional, you can access it by selecting Advertising Audiences from the Advertising Studio category on the app switcher, as shown in Figure 14-8.
FIGURE 14-8: If you've licensed the Professional edition, it appears in the Advertising Studio category alongside Lead Capture.
The Professional edition is an app more for connecting data than creating it: You create your audiences in other Marketing Cloud apps and use Professional to connect them with social or ad networks. The social or ad networks show your ads to those users.
Advertising Studio Professional does not include performance reporting, but the social or ad studio that you use probably does. Advertising Studio Professional does show you how many subscribers from your audience the social or ad network was able to find among its own users, which correlates to the size of the audience who may see your ad.
When you choose the Professional app from the app switcher, an overview screen appears showing all your audiences. After you create an audience, statistics from the social or ad network start to appear in the audience overview screen.
Figure 14-9 shows an example of the overview screen.
FIGURE 14-9: The Professional dashboard offers an overview of the performance of the audiences you've created.
Before you can begin using Professional, you need to set up some prerequisites:
- License the professional edition of Advertising Studio.
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Create a data extension or list that contains the audience you want to target. See Chapter 6 for more information about data extensions and lists.
You can use the Email app (see Chapter 11) or the Contact Builder app (see Chapter 8) to do the technical work of creating the data extension or list, but the hard work of this step comes before that. You need to be thoughtful about which subscribers to include in your targeted audience so you can achieve your business goals. Don't skimp on the planning step when deciding whom to include on your list. - Create accounts with whatever social or ad networks you want to use to place ads, and have your credentials near at hand when you begin using Advertising Studio Professional.
When you log in to your social or ad network in one browser tab and then open Advertising Studio in another tab of the same browser window, Advertising Studio will notice the account and ask for permission to interact with it.
When someone else owns the ad network accounts
In many companies, the person in charge of using Advertising Studio in Marketing Cloud is the same person who sets up the company's social account and purchases the company's online ads. However, as the online marketing team grows larger, you might find yourself needing to coordinate with someone else who takes responsibility for the company's social or online advertising presence.
Even if you don’t have access to the account credentials, though, you do have some other options for getting Advertising Studio connected with the social and ad networks that you need:
- Use screen-sharing technology to let the person who owns the ad accounts log in remotely. Make sure the account owner stays in the screen share long enough to approve Marketing Cloud's permission to communicate with the ad network.
- Create a Marketing Cloud login for the ad account owner and have that person associate the accounts to your Advertising Studio Professional account.
- Have the ad account owner grant you admin rights so you can access the ad account from Marketing Cloud.
Supported social and ad networks
Advertising Studio uses the attributes of your subscribers to look up profiles on social networks. The social networks that Advertising Studio works with follow:
- Facebook and Instagram can accept email address and phone number of your subscribers to find matches.
- Twitter can also accept the Twitter user ID in addition to email address and phone number.
- Google and YouTube can accept only email.
Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and joined their destinies. Similarly, Google acquired YouTube in 2006 and brought it under the Google umbrella.
Neither Google nor YouTube is exactly a social network; nevertheless, Google works with Advertising Studio as well. For example, you can target the ads that appear when a subscriber uses Gmail (or YouTube, of course). You can also target the ads that appear alongside Google search results.
If you've ever sold advertising space on a website, you know that you rarely negotiate with the sponsor directly. Instead, you offer a space on your website to an advertising network. The advertising network acts as a go-between, negotiating with the sponsors and choosing the perfect ads to insert into the space you provided.
The advertising networks have a surprisingly large amount of data about each person viewing the page. As the ad buyer, you can use the advertising networks' knowledge to target subscribers even when they access websites other than social networks.
The following ad networks work with Advertising Studio. This list also includes the attributes that each accepts for looking up users:
- Krux: Email address and phone number
- LiveRamp: Email address only
- LiveIntent: Email address only
- Neustar: Email address and phone number
- Viant: Email address only
This is not an exhaustive list, nor is it a limit on what you can do to target your online ads. As new social and advertising networks gain prominence, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is likely to expand the functionality of Advertising Studio to support them.
Creating an audience
After your ad network accounts are set up, you can use the following steps to create an audience:
- From the app switcher, select Professional from the Advertising Studio category.
- Click the Create Audience button that appears near the top right of the screen.
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Enter a name for the audience and choose the social or ad network for which you are creating the audience.
A list of accounts for that network appears.
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Select the correct account and click Configure.
A new screen appears.
- Choose a source type that applies to your audience, and then click Select:
- Template: A template is a predefined definition of an audience based on common use cases. For example, all subscribers who clicked in the last 30 days might be a template.
- List or Data Extension: You can use this option for subscribers in Marketing Cloud or for audiences you built from systems outside Marketing Cloud. For example, if you created an audience of recent purchasers in your POS system, you could include them in a data extension.
- Contacts: Audiences from Contact Builder.
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Select the attributes that you want the system to use to find profiles that match the subscriber data in your audience.
Select more than one attribute to increase the chance of finding a match.
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Indicate whether you want to receive an alert when an audience is ready for use, and then click Activate.
We recommend that you receive the alert; this step can take a while and, without an alert, you'll just have to keep checking whether your audience is there to know for sure.
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Indicate whether you want to refresh the audience manually or on a scheduled basis.
It's more common to schedule audience refreshes because data sources change regularly as part of other schedules. Scheduling the refreshes makes sure that you are always targeting the audience you intend without having to remember to update it manually.
An audience refresh takes quite a while, depending on factors such as the size of the audience and especially which network you're using. The following list gives a general range of how long you can expect each network to take to refresh the audience:
- Facebook: 2 hours
- Google: 7 hours
- Twitter: 24 hours
- Krux: 2-7 days
- LiveIntent: 24 hours
- LiveRamp: 5-7 days
- Neustar: 3-5 days
- Viant: 1 hour