FieldTest 101: How to use the FieldTest platform
With the holidays around the corner and digital marketing growing faster than ever before, more and more people are signing up for the FieldTest platform to scale their marketing and grow their business. We’ve worked hard to ensure that advertising with us is as easy as possible but we understand that the world of digital advertising is a new world for many, and sometimes our clients need a hand in setting up their first ad campaigns. This week on the blog we wanted to cover the steps in this process, provide a step by step guide to building your first ad campaign, and help make sure it’s one that will be effective from the get-go. Let’s start at the top!
STEP ONE - PIXELS
Your FieldTest Pixels are an important part of what makes our campaigns work. These small snippets of code allow us to accurately track the traffic to your site and get a “fingerprint” of every page visit, conversion or sale. This data collection allows us to build effective custom lookalike audiences to help your campaign scale in its later stages. These strategies all hinge on your pixel being placed properly, luckily it’s pretty simple on most of the top website and e-commerce platforms. Simply copy the line of code provided either by email or when you signed up for the platform and drop it into the custom header/footer code section of your site builder. This is generally in the “Header and Footer” section on platforms such as wordpress (which requires this free plugin), or in the “Scripts” section on platforms such as Shopify or Squarespace. Once this is done, FieldTest will run some tests to ensure they are working properly and you’re good to go!
It’s important to note, however that we will often ask our clients to set these pixels up ahead of their campaigns, particularly if they are just launching their website and don't have a lot of traffic from the jump. This is because we need to take a number of “fingerprints” before we can accurately use your pixel data to build lookalike audiences and sometimes it’s best to give this a long runway in order to gather up the necessary data. This runway may cause some frustration if you are eager to get your campaigns up and running, but in the long run it will maximize your spend efficiency and ensure that you are able to scale your campaigns effectively and affordably with the full power of FieldTest technology.
STEP TWO - UNDERSTANDING FT ADS
It’s important to understand the capabilities of the FieldTest platform so you will be able to use it effectively in building your campaigns. There are two ways to load ads into our platform when building your new campaigns.
1: "Build Ads" - This creates a 300x250 "Content-Style" ad unit, where you provide a website link, and our builder will grab a title and image from the link and build the ad for you. Sometimes the image and title are not perfect, so we recommend "Editing" the ad in this interface, updating/changing the titles, and uploading/swapping out the images. These ads are great for all stages of the funnel.
2: "Upload Ad" - Design your ads in Photoshop, save as JPG, GIF, or animated GIF, and upload directly into our system by dragging and dropping them into the upload tool. We support several ad sizes, but the most popular are:
300x250: Commonly used in Awareness, Consideration, Retargeting, and Mobile
300x600: Commonly used in Awareness, Consideration and Retargeting
728x90: Commonly used in Awareness, Consideration and Retargeting
160x600: Commonly used in Awareness, Consideration and Retargeting
970x250: Commonly used in Awareness
320x50: Commonly used in Retargeting and Mobile
These ads all play an important role in a full funnel ad campaign, but we’ve designed our platform to make swapping them out fast and easy so don't be afraid to experiment with new types of creative. You never know, it might just be the thing you need to unlock your campaign’s best possible performance. How exactly do you use these creatives? Let’s cover that in depth...
STEP THREE - BUILD YOUR FIRST CAMPAIGNS
We believe in the power of digital marketing to scale your business and drive new sales, but that doesn’t mean a single ad or even single campaign will act as a silver bullet and achieve it all. We have long pushed our clients to take a step back from their campaign pages and view their marketing through what is called the ‘sales funnel’, a multi-tiered strategy that understands that your customers are human beings with particular wants and needs, who won’t be convinced to become customers with a single ad experience. This is backed up not only by our professional experience but by science, with the sales funnel quickly becoming the marketing standard for the cutting edge of the industry.
It was with this in mind that we designed the FieldTest platform to be able to handle multiple campaigns at once, all stages of the sales funnel running simultaneously. This gives you the ability to run a full marketing campaign from one easy to use dashboard. This is the first factor many of our new clients miss, and it’s an important one to remember - Your individual ‘campaigns’ are parts of your marketing funnel whole. Each step in the sales funnel should be covered in your initial campaign setup in order to ensure that you are giving your new customers every ad experience they need in order to convert to repeat customers.
We’ve covered the individual stages of the sales funnel before but broadly speaking they can be summarized like this:
Awareness: Making new customers aware of your brand and piquing their interest about your products.
Results: Reach, frequency, awareness and organic growth.
Consideration: Having given your customers reason to be interested in your product, showing them exactly what sets you apart from your competitors and showcasing why you are the best of the bunch.
Results: Traffic and site engagement. Better intender data for LAL audiences, intenders primed for purchase
Action: Giving your intenders a final push to convert through specialized retargeting ads with custom headlines and discount offers
Results: All upper-to-mid funnel data leveraged to drive bulk of purchases/conversions
These three steps outline the general guidelines for your first three campaigns, the three notes you need to hit in order to drive a full funnel marketing effort and scale your business. Each one can be set up individually in order to focus your spend on boosting the specific results to be expected from each stage, but ultimately we recommend that all three be running at once in order to fully take advantage of the tools FieldTest provides.
So how do you set up a campaign at each stage, and what makes each stage setup unique? Let’s go through each individually.
Awareness:
Starting at the top of the funnel, you’ll build an awareness campaign to reach a wide audience and gather data on who responds positively. Target your ads to broader interests and demographics in order to find new interested intenders in each segment (Health and Fitness, Anxiety Relief, Yoga, Hiking, Crossfit, Technology Interest, Business, Coachella/Music Festivals, etc). Some clients create several Awareness campaigns to target different personas or geos. Casting a wide net can help you find new audiences you never expected so don’t be afraid to experiment with targeting!
Your ads should be informational and descriptive. (Who you are, what your product is.) Imagine at this stage your ads are billboards on a highway. They should say everything about your product without the user having to click to figure it out.
The goal here is traffic, buzz, reach, awareness, frequency, organic traffic.
Usually ~50-60% of total marketing budget
Headline example: "The New 2020 Honda Civic. An Affordable Compact Car You'll Love To Drive"
Consideration:
With your traffic-driving Awareness ads in place it’s time to move down the funnel. Here we use your data gathered in the awareness stage (remember that pixel you placed?) to deliver ads to highly qualified intenders, those proven to be the most likely to love your products. Using the “Lookalike Audience” under the Custom Audiences dropdown in the campaign builder, these ads will be used to prospect for new users that "look like" your existing customers. This strategy targets users that are in market for products similar to yours and are considering brands to buy from.
In this stage your ads should be conversational, informative, with a strong call to action to LEARN MORE. They should click through to landing pages and earned media (favorable articles about your brand). Product pages should be informative with videos, testimonials and descriptions to give your intenders all the information they need to decide that your product is the right choice for them
The goal here is site visits and site engagement.
Usually ~30-40% of budget
Headline Example: "See How the New 2020 Honda Civic Stacks Up Against the Toyota Camry" or "The 2020 Honda Civic, Named Best in Class by Car & Driver, 0% Down"
Action:
With your Upper and Mid-Funnel campaigns in place you have created a flow of traffic to your site and an informative mid-funnel campaign to showcase your products unique benefits and/or features, it is time to drive home the deal and earn your conversions. In the action stage we use a strategy called “Retargeting” to deliver ads exclusively to intenders who have been to your site, engaged with your content, or left items in the shopping cart. This is where 90% of your sales will occur, so don’t neglect to set up a campaign at this stage.
When building your ads, select Retargeting in custom audiences dropdown. Your creatives should be product-specific and offer a strong incentive to convert. This can be a unique one-time offer (free shipping on all orders before Thanksgiving) it can be a coupon (10% off with coupon code SAVE10) or it can be a unique winback message (Aren’t you forgetting something? You left your product in the basket). We find that offering even a 10% discount can increase total sales up to 3x so don’t be squeamish with offering a little off the top to push your customers to convert. It can be a huge help in boosting total performance. Ads here should be direct, playful, with a strong call to action to BUY.
The goal here is sales/conversions.
Usually ~10-20% of budget
Headline Example: "The 2020 Honda Civic. Come in For a Test Drive Today and $500 Cash Back"
STEP 4 - KEEP GOING!
With these three funnel stages set up and accounted for you have your first campaign all set up and ready to go! From here you should be in a good position to sit back and watch your performance data come rolling in, but that’s not where this story ends. In our next platform guide we’ll discuss ways to take the data that your initial campaigns provide and use them to inform your future campaigns, driving better and better performance and allowing you to dive deep into your audiences in order to unlock new and exciting segments to continue scaling your business.