Case Study: Facebook Messenger Ads

Hey everybody, this Adam with ParaCore, and in today’s video we’re gonna talk a little bit about Messenger ads. The reason we’re talking about it is because I’ve been hearing concern about Facebook not performing and changes that Facebook makes to their algorithm, the cost per click, the number of people on the Marketplace now, on the ad Marketplace. So I wanted to talk about just one example of using an alternate method that has improved the performance of a campaign quite a bit. And in this case, it’s Facebook Messenger ads.

So if you’re not familiar with Facebook Messenger ads, basically what happens in someone sees an ad in their newsfeed and when they click the learn more button, instead of going to a website or opening up a lead form, it actually opens up the Messenger interface. And the Messenger interface opens up, they can type in something like, Hey I’m interested in learning more. You can set up autoresponders or if you’re using a platform like ManyChat, you can set up sequences. So they hit that link, it opens up a conversation in Messenger, and then there’s real time communication.

One of the reasons I like this approach is because people using Facebook in the millennial generation typically are not that interested in making a phone call to an organization or getting called back and listening to voicemails and going through like the traditional means of communication that most people, especially those that are owning businesses and want the communication channels to look like are used to in the past 10 or 20 years. So with Messenger, it provides a completely different way for people to communicate with you. And so what we’re looking at here on my screen is basically some of the results from this campaign.

Now on the left hand side here you see program and then, Program 1, I think there’s six programs. The spend and this is just for a short period of time but the spend, the number of messages, the total leads, the percentage of leads, and the cost per lead, so 106 dollars. And this is kind of a total. And there’s actually more columns, sorry, I was just playing one call. This is an aggregate of previous months. Sorry that was the month of June. And then so it has the spend for the month, the number messages, leads, and so on and so forth. And that we have all aggregate over here on the right and there’s six different programs.

On the right hand side here, we basically have the number of leads prior to using Messenger and then the number of leads after using Messenger. Now in this particular instance, we actually put the leads into HubSpot and before Messenger they would automatically feed in and then after using Messenger, the team that’s handling the inbound messages actually has to manually put them in HubSpot.

But we typically look at HubSpot for our final lead counts because that’s like the definitive source of data. And we’ve seen errors in Facebook reporting, things like that. So just to go through these for example, this first program, you know the spend was $700 in the time frame that we had before and then after $1,400. 10 leads, $71 per lead and $49 per lead. Decent little decrease. Program 2, $1,500 in spend when we were running traditional ads, $2,248 when we’re running Messenger ads, 11 to 64 so we did spend more but the cost per lead dropped dramatically, 74%, that’s massive.

This is the best performing one, the biggest change. That’s a really big change in cost per lead just because we’re using Messenger ads. The third program, we weren’t running with traditional ads and then we just ran Messenger, $16 cost per lead. That’s really low for this company. March to October 118 down to 37, still a large decrease. One of the best, 69%. And then $16 and $29. And as we go down to the bottom here, it’s aggregated. So we basically have this number 9625 is the total spend. We did increase the spend quite a bit for the time period. The number of leads is 268, 575 and then the cost per lead dropped 25% across all campaigns. I’m actually going to just confirm one thing here. Yeah $36, so cost $36 per lead, and so it dropped 25%. So over all the different campaigns, we had a 25% drop in cost per lead just by changing the format of the ad. So we actually didn’t change the ads in this scenario. We didn’t change targeting, we just changed the ad format. And it was easier for people to communicate. There was less friction, and people seemed to like it more. Here are the number of appointments scheduled. Sorry this is kind of behind my window. Number of appointments scheduled, you can see has also increased and appointments scheduled is really, getting a lead or getting communication what’s in the platform is not that big of a deal. But by having, but by scheduling appointments, that’s when we know that it’s actually working.

So not only are they communicating with more people, the lower cost per lead, they’re getting more appointments scheduled. So here you can see November, December, and January, February, March, June so the quantity has increased quite dramatically. And then here just as kind of further proof in the pudding, I’m gonna minimize my window. This is the ad manager right. And so what we have here is we have the different ad sets. And here are the Messenger conversations. So this is actually for the month of July. I just got a random set of data. It’s August 2nd right now. So here you can see the cost per result is $17, $12, 38, seven dollars with 42 leads. Six dollars with 48 leads. $12 dollars, $10 with 29. 51 with six and 4.7, $4.70 with 33. And so over $2,272, it doesn’t actually, it doesn’t aggregate them all for you unfortunately, I’m not able to see that right now. But the average is probably somewhere around 20 to 25 which is what we saw before right. So that’s a really great, a really great performance metric.

So I wanted to show you this primarily because, you know when there’s concern about how Facebook is performing in that environment, there are different things we’re doing to combat that and basically keep experimenting in bringing the cost per lead down. We’ve been working with this client for a couple years now. We’ve been running a lot of traditional ads, we run ads to their website, the landing pages. We’ve done lead formats which have done really well. And then we started doing Messenger ads. And you can continually try and experiment with different things. Not all of our experiments turn out this way. Some of them don’t work. You know, Messenger, sometimes, especially if don’t have, like for example, if you don’t have someone sitting there and responding to all the messages and setting up appointments and being really, really active, as people are active on their phones and communicating with you, it’s not gonna work that well.

So this works very well because they have a team of people handling that. It’s a large group that gets a lot of inbound activity. And then they can set the appointments and then move them into HubSpot manually. So if you have any questions, please let me know. Messenger ads are awesome, and we’re also starting to work with platforms like ManyChat which allow you to set up responder sequences and kind of, it’s not really artificial intelligence, but it’s like, it’s conversation threads based on answers and questions that are happening in a Messenger platform so you can actually take someone a few steps down the funnel before they even, before you even talk to them personally, before you can even actually talk to them.

So again, my name’s Adam, I’m with ParaCore. We’re a pay-per-click lead generation agency. If you have questions or comments, please leave that below and always like or subscribe to the video if you enjoyed it if you got this far. And thanks for watching.