Facebook: Blueprint Live

Facebook  Blueprint Live is a day of discovery and teamwork for agencies and advertisers who are already familiar with Facebook and Instagram, and ready to build out real strategies. Working with diverse teams, Blueprint Live is an opportunity to learn more peers and stay ahead of all the latest features and advice from Facebook across its platforms. We sent Lucy Gregg, Junior Display Executive, to cover the event and bring back learnings to 26. Here's Lucy's write up. 

My Facebook experience - by Lucy Gregg

In January, I was offered the opportunity to go down to the Facebook offices in London to attend one of their Blueprint Live events. I was so excited to visit the Facebook offices and to learn more!

As I arrived at Facebook, the office looked incredible, it was set in an enormous glass building and the futuristic office design was inspiring.

Everyone attending the event met in the chill out/ food area where we had avocado on toast and little pots of granola – it was already a great start to the day!

It was so good to meet so many new people and to get to know them.

The Blueprint Live event focused on Performance Marketing. The interactive workshop taught me how to apply the best practices for planning, creating and executing more efficient and successful direct response campaigns across Facebook.

A friendly member of the Facebook team called Amelia took us through the agenda for the day and we got started straight away! We were split up into teams of 4/5 and received a client brief to read through – my team got a luxury travel company. We then had activities throughout the day that involved creating a campaign for the client using the Facebook knowledge we were being introduced too.

So what did we learn?

1. Ad Objectives, Placements and Formats

The main tip for ad objectives was to be as clear as possible, always think of the full funnel and don’t wait for people to find your product.

 In terms of placements, there is automatic placements and manual placements. Facebook advised us to use the automatic placement due to it providing more display opportunities and is likely to deliver a lower cost per outcome.

There are 5 types of formats; Image, Video, Carousel, Collection and Slideshow. They can be used on Facebook, Instagram, FB and IG stories and Messenger.

2. Performance Marketing Toolkit - Facebook offers 3 tools to help

• Facebook Pixel

There are a few steps required in order to implement a Facebook pixel. Firstly, you create a Facebook Pixel in Business Manager, add the pixel to your website, then confirm the Facebook Pixel is working. You can then add Standard Events or Custom Conversions. From there you are ready to start building, optimizing, and measuring.

The tip Facebook gave us was to make sure the pixel is implemented correctly!

From there, you can add ‘Standard Events’ which understand specific actions people take on the website such as ‘Searched’, ‘Purchased’ ‘Added to Cart’ – these are all ways to track the campaign. Make sure you use the standard events that are relevant to the client.

• Facebook SDK

The Facebook SDK is what allows mobile app developers to integrate Facebook within a mobile app.

To set up a Facebook SDK you need to register the app with Facebook, associate your ad account with your app, download and add the SDK to your app, confirm the SDK is working, add app events to your app that are specific to the client and then start building, optimizing and measuring.

• Offline Conversions

Facebook’s offline conversions measurement solution helps to understand which offline events, such as purchases in store/over the phone happened as a result of Facebook ads. By attributing this offline event, you can understand the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and return on ad spend.

There are 3 ways to collect this information – 1. Name 2. Email Address 3. Reward Card. The client will need to upload this information manually using a .CSV file so the offline information can be matched to the Facebook users.

3. Targeting

There are lots of targeting options for Facebook campaigns, such as; location, demographics, interests and behaviours. You can also create custom audiences which allow you to find people who already know your business on Facebook.

Lookalike Audiences is another way of targeting. They are created by Facebook to help advertisers reach people who are similar to/look like the audience you are aiming to reach.

Retargeting is another great way to target by driving existing customers to re-engage with your website/app. It can target people who have visited the client’s website, purchased a product previously or loyal customers.

Tips for targeting are – Avoid extremely narrow targeting. Expand interests to increase conversions and decrease costs. Use dynamic ads to target broad audiences and target mutually exclusive audiences to avoid overlap.

4. Delivery and Optimization

The 3 factors that go into Facebook’s ad delivery include; auction, pacing system and advertiser controls.

The auction happens 24/7 against other advertisers, the pacing system ensures the budget is spent evenly and the advertiser sets the bid. Finally, the advertiser controls are when you can change the targeting, bids, scheduling, budgets and placements.

The campaign budget optimization tool is a feature that allows you to set a budget at the campaign level rather than the ad set level. It then distributes the budget in real time to the best available results across all the ad sets in the campaign. It helps to achieve more conversions at a lower cost.

5. Creative Considerations

Facebook offers a variety of creative formats.

•  Carousel – which is where you can feature different products in the same collection and the user can look through each image of the carousel
• Video – which is an interactive format and with the right targeting and call to action it can be very effective
•  Collection – shows a diverse range of products in the context of a lifestyle video

Facebook’s Creative Hub is a great place to mock up and test Facebook and Instagram ads to ensure you are providing the best formats.

Summary: 

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my day at the Facebook offices, learnt LOADS, met new friends and got to see the world of Facebook!