By Ciara Brady on 4 Dec 2019
Wolfgang Bites - Watch: New Social Channels
Wolfgang Bites - Read: New Social Channels
Al: So Roisin, Facebook advertising is at another really interesting inflection point right now. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Roisin: Yes, so I guess to get to where we are today, I'm going to go back a little bit. 2014 was when organic reach died. It was when Facebook became a pay-to-play channel. You had to advertise. Afew years went by with this being okay. Then around 2017, brands started to notice and there were a lot of rumors about ad space running out. It became more expensive to advertise on Facebook. We noticed this back in 2017, but certainly this year in 2019, we've started to notice our CPCs rising. So It's becoming more expensive to advertise.
Al: Really? around about what proportion increase are we seeing?
Roisin: We're seeing around a 35% increase in CPCs year on year. So it’s actually quite a bit.
Al: What can marketers do to mitigate this problem?
Roisin: What we're doing on the social team here is trying to expand to other channels. For a long time our bread and butter was Facebook. Now we are being pushed to look at other channels. For example, we've started advertising on Reddit, on Pinterest, Snapchat, and we're seeing really, really good results. For example, on Reddit and Pinterest, we're seeing CPC’s that are 60% cheaper than Facebook.
Al: 60% cheaper. That's phenomenal to get the CPCs for so much cheaper. But in Wolfgang, we worship the almighty conversion. How do these other channels compete with Facebook for conversion?
Roisin: This is a really important point to make. These other channels are really good at driving traffic and cost per clicks at upper funnel, but they're not driving conversions. That's really important to know. The tactic we're taking is using these other channels to bring your audiences in for prospecting with cheap traffic at the beginning, upper funnel. Then we are making sure Facebook is still there for remarketing, it's still going to drive your conversion. It's using both at different stages of the funnel. That’s our real main takeaway here.
Al: So today, Facebook is still king of conversion on social. Do you believe that will continue to be the case?
Roisin: I don't think so. If you remember back to when Instagram Story ads were released, they weren't driving conversions. They were just very much upper funnel. That's absolutely not the case anymore. Consumers have gotten really used to buying on this platform. It was the same with Facebook years ago. I'd imagine with the likes of the great new ad formats that these platforms are releasing, Pinterest in particular has loads of great shopping ads coming out. I think customers will also get used to using these platforms for purchasing. I think, slowly, users will start to purchase on these platforms, but at the moment, Facebook is still king. I don't think it'll be that way forever.
Al: Great stuff. Thanks very much, Roisin.
Roisin: Thanks.
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