SEO
Tips For Top-Performing Brand Awareness Campaigns On Facebook Ads
One of the most underrated aspects of social media marketing is our channel’s ability to make a difference in any part of the funnel.
As a whole, social media is a lot like a marketing multi-tool.
Think about it. We may not be the sharpest conversion “knife” in the drawer, especially compared to brand search.
But what we might lack in performance superiority, we more than make up for in our versatility.
We can offer various tools to get the marketing job done, regardless of the objective.
Now, I’ve spent the better part of my career as a social media performance marketer, and I’ll admit it’s still my default way of operating.
But there is an entire world outside of lead generation and traditional “CPC,” and it’s a world that can significantly impact the bottom funnel and the bottom line.
I’m talking about the top of the funnel.
“Brand awareness” campaigns, where the impression numbers are big, but measurable attribution can be small.
And it’s a world where performance marketers may feel a little uncomfortable due to the lack of tangible results.
But just because top-funnel campaigns don’t always drive leads and sales as efficiently or directly doesn’t mean they aren’t a vital part of any balanced digital marketing strategy.
In this article, we will go “up-funnel” and talk about how brand awareness campaigns work on Facebook, and how you can set them up for optimal results.
The Strategic Role Of Brand Awareness
Before we get into campaign details, it’s essential to understand the role of awareness in an overall marketing strategy.
For “full-funnel” marketers, this might be a bit of review, but it’s critical to understand how to make the most of these campaign types.
First, let’s nail the nomenclature.
These campaigns have different names and terms that I may use interchangeably in this article.
Brand awareness, brand, awareness, top-funnel, upper-funnel, and TOFU are just a few ways marketers refer to these campaigns.
In the easiest strategic terms, brand awareness campaigns aim to introduce your target audience to your brand.
This is accomplished by running introductory and memorable creative to a broad audience.
Think of the funnel stages the way you would dating.
You can run conversion campaigns exclusively.
But it’s the marketing equivalent of walking up to someone and asking them to go out with you – no introduction, no discussion, just right in for the sale.
Sure, that can work if you have “high-intent” customers/singles.
But your chances of successfully closing the deal are higher if you introduce yourself and break down some of those initial barriers.
Where conversion or lead generation campaigns at the bottom of the funnel aim to get people to take action, brand awareness campaigns are meant to introduce you, familiarize you, and get you to stick in the minds of your customers.
Seems pretty straightforward, right?
It is, but the measurement is less definitive than campaigns at the bottom of the funnel.
Measuring Brand Awareness Campaigns The Right Way
Measuring a sale or lead in digital marketing is pretty straightforward.
Brand awareness success lies in more “squishy” and less concrete KPIs.
Here are a few that you should keep an eye on as you’re evaluating success:
Impressions and Reach
This one is simple. We want to serve as many impressions and reach as many people as possible.
Frequency (Impressions/Reach)
We can’t always expect our audience to see or absorb our ad’s content on the first impression.
Sometimes it takes two, three, or 10.
Frequency refers to the average number of times a person in your audience has seen an ad over a given period. The higher, the better.
However, high frequencies could signal over-delivery and potential wear out.
CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions)
If the goal of brand awareness is to get in front of your audience and stay there, we’d like to do this for the most efficient cost possible.
A low CPM is vital to maintain efficiency and maximize your ad’s “staying power.”
Video Engagement
If the creative you’re running in your upper-funnel campaign is video, you’ll have access to a host of specialty metrics that will help you better understand how your message is consumed.
We’ll cover these specifically for Facebook below.
Facebook & Upper Funnel Campaigns: Which Objective To Choose?
Facebook gives advertisers several options when executing awareness or upper-funnel campaigns on the platform. In fact, it can be a little confusing.
Not only are there a few campaign types that apply to what we’re trying to accomplish, but they might appear in a different “Consideration” section.
Without getting into a marketing philosophical debate, there is often some grey between awareness and consideration.
For our purposes, “Video Views” are included as an upper-funnel objective.
Generally speaking, you can’t go wrong with selecting either Brand Awareness, Reach, or Video Views as an objective for an upper-funnel campaign.
But there will be subtle differences between the three regarding which KPIs are prioritized.
As Facebook marketers know, the platform is very good at optimizing campaigns to get desired results.
Here are the differences:
| Objective | Description/Optimization | KPI |
| Reach | Shown to as many people within the audience as possible | CPM / Reach Volume |
| Brand Awareness | Shown to people within the audience most likely to recall the ad | Ad Recall Lift |
| Video Views | Shown to people most likely to watch/complete the video | Cost per View |
Reach
- Run this to show your ads to the widest audience, as cheaply as possible, as often as possible.
- Measure this by CPM and Impression, Reach Volume.
- Superpower: Unlike the other two upper-funnel objectives, you can set the average frequency goal for Reach campaigns
- Watch out for poor engagement and click metrics. These campaigns are designed to be cheap and broad, and you will not see the same amount of clicks or video views/completes as you would if you chose another objective.
Brand Awareness
- Run this to show your ads efficiently to people who are more likely to recall them.
- Measure this by CPM and Ad Recall Lift.
- Superpower: Brand Awareness is the only campaign objective that gives advertisers access to a unique metric called “Estimated ad recall lift (people).” It shows how many people Facebook estimates would remember your ad if asked within two days.
- Watch out for the Estimated ad recall lift metric and its translatability to other brand awareness metrics across different channels. This is a Facebook-specific metric and may not mean much outside the platform.
In addition to the specialized “Estimated ad recall lift (people)” metric, any Facebook campaign spending at least $30,000 or more over its duration is eligible for a Brand Survey Test.
This Brand Survey Test is available in the “Experiments” section of your ad account’s ads manager and allows you to ask up to two preset questions to help determine the brand lift of your ad campaign.
- Standard Ad Recall (Required) – Do you recall seeing an ad for [page] online or on a mobile device in the last two days?
- A Second, Optional Questions
Video Views
- Run this to maximize video engagement and drive the lowest cost per 3-second video view.
- Measure this by CPM and CPV.
- Superpower: Video View campaigns will optimize to video performance metrics, showing the ads to people more likely to watch them longer and more often.
- Watch out for CPMs. Video views tend to be more expensive to run (comparatively) than Reach or Brand Awareness. And if video completion or view counts are not as important to you as Impressions or Reach, you may want to opt for another option.
Facebook Video Performance Metrics
Regardless of whether you’ve chosen a Video View optimization, all campaigns with video have access to special video metrics. Facebook has a lot of them, but here are a few you should focus on.
ThruPlays
The number of times your video plays to completion, or for at least 15 seconds.
This is also the closest comparable metric to those used by other ad platforms like Google.
Cost Per ThruPlay
The average cost for each ThruPlay.
This metric is calculated as the total amount spent divided by the number of ThruPlays.
Video Plays at 100% (Completions)
The number of times your video played at 100% of its length, including plays that skipped to this point.
Video Average Play Time
The average amount of time a video was played, including any time spent replaying the video for a single impression.
Retargeting: Adding Value To Brand Awareness Campaigns
By raising your target audience’s awareness of your brand, you should improve their likelihood of converting further down the funnel.
That’s why identification of people within your audience influenced by your brand awareness campaign is important.
These potential hand raisers can be retargeted campaigns to move further down the conversion funnel.
Thankfully, Facebook’s wealth of behavioral retargeting options gives you plenty of ways to segment potential would-be customers.
You can learn more about these retargeting options in this article by Tim Jensen, but here are a few you should focus on.
Video Views
Create an audience of people who have watched a percentage of your campaign’s video. The longer they’ve viewed, the higher their intent could be.
Ad/Post Engagers
Create an audience of people who have interacted with your ads or posts within a given period. This engagement could signal their interest in learning more and moving down the funnel.
Website Visitors (With a Twist)
Create an audience of people who have visited your website within a given period.
More specifically, use the exact landing page URL with UTMs to make sure you’re matching 1:1 with the audience you targeted with your brand awareness campaign.
Conclusion
Brand awareness campaigns are critical to familiarizing your brand to your target audience.
Facebook offers many options for executing upper-funnel goals and providing value for full-funnel marketing campaigns.
Reach, brand awareness, and video views are the main campaign objectives you’ll want to use, but they optimize to different things.
Always remember:
- If you want cheap impressions and the ability to control frequency, go for reach.
- If you want to deliver to audiences Facebook believes more likely to remember you, choose brand awareness.
- If you want to maximize the amount and quality of your video engagement, pick video views.
More resources:
Featured Image: kenary820/Shutterstock
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SEO
Google’s Search Engine Market Share Drops As Competitors’ Grows
According to data from GS Statcounter, Google’s search engine market share has fallen to 86.99%, the lowest point since the firm began tracking search engine share in 2009.
The drop represents a more than 4% decrease from the previous month, marking the largest single-month decline on record.
U.S. Market Impact
The decline is most significant in Google’s key market, the United States, where its share of searches across all devices fell by nearly 10%, reaching 77.52%.
Screenshot from: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/, May 2024.Concurrently, competitors Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search have seen gains. Bing reached a 13% market share in the U.S. and 5.8% globally, its highest since launching in 2009.
Yahoo Search’s worldwide share nearly tripled to 3.06%, a level not seen since July 2015.
Screenshot from: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/, May 2024.Search Quality Concerns
Many industry experts have recently expressed concerns about the declining quality of Google’s search results.
A portion of the SEO community believes that the search giant’s results have worsened following the latest update.
These concerns have begun to extend to average internet users, who are increasingly voicing complaints about the state of their search results.
Alternative Perspectives
Web analytics platform SimilarWeb provided additional context on X (formerly Twitter), stating that its data for the US for March 2024 suggests Google’s decline may not be as severe as initially reported.
From our data (Search Engine website category, US, March 2024) it doesn’t look like we’re there yet: pic.twitter.com/RBUJp4ZLeb
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 1, 2024
SimilarWeb also highlighted Yahoo’s strong performance, categorizing it as a News and Media platform rather than a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category.
Don’t underestimate Yahoo. They’re doing great. On our platform they’re categorized as News and Media, and hence not a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category. But they rank #10 worldwide, #6 in the US, and #1 in their category. Much higher than Bing and OpenAI. pic.twitter.com/O4yJu5QEK6
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024
At the same time, Google is slightly declining 👀 pic.twitter.com/9i7paeU1QG
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024
Why It Matters
The shifting search engine market trends can impact businesses, marketers, and regular users.
Google has been on top for a long time, shaping how we find things online and how users behave.
However, as its market share drops and other search engines gain popularity, publishers may need to rethink their online strategies and optimize for multiple search platforms besides Google.
Users are becoming vocal about Google’s declining search quality over time. As people start trying alternate search engines, the various platforms must prioritize keeping users satisfied if they want to maintain or grow their market position.
It will be interesting to see how they respond to this boost in market share.
What It Means for SEO Pros
As Google’s competitors gain ground, SEO strategies may need to adapt by accounting for how each search engine’s algorithms and ranking factors work.
This could involve diversifying SEO efforts across multiple platforms and staying up-to-date on best practices for each one.
The increased focus on high-quality search results emphasizes the need to create valuable, user-focused content that meets the needs of the target audience.
SEO pros must prioritize informative, engaging, trustworthy content that meets search engine algorithms and user expectations.
Remain flexible, adaptable, and proactive to navigate these shifts. Keeping a pulse on industry trends, user behaviors, and competing search engine strategies will be key for successful SEO campaigns.
Featured Image: Tada Images/Shutterstock
SEO
How To Drive Pipeline With A Silo-Free Strategy
When it comes to B2B strategy, a holistic approach is the only approach.
Revenue organizations usually operate with siloed teams, and often expect a one-size-fits-all solution (usually buying clicks with paid media).
However, without cohesive brand, infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts, they’re pretty much doomed to fail.
It’s just like rowing crew, where each member of the team must synchronize their movements to propel the boat forward – successful B2B marketing requires an integrated strategy.
So if you’re ready to ditch your disjointed marketing efforts and try a holistic approach, we’ve got you covered.
Join us on May 15, for an insightful live session with Digital Reach Agency on how to craft a compelling brand and PMF.
We’ll walk through the critical infrastructure you need, and the reliances and dependences of the core digital marketing disciplines.
Key takeaways from this webinar:
- Thinking Beyond Traditional Silos: Learn why traditional marketing silos are no longer viable and how they spell doom for modern revenue organizations.
- How To Identify and Fix Silos: Discover actionable strategies for pinpointing and sealing the gaps in your marketing silos.
- The Power of Integration: Uncover the secrets to successfully integrating brand strategy, digital infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts.
Ben Childs, President and Founder of Digital Reach Agency, and Jordan Gibson, Head of Growth at Digital Reach Agency, will show you how to seamlessly integrate various elements of your marketing strategy for optimal results.
Don’t make the common mistake of using traditional marketing silos – sign up now and learn what it takes to transform your B2B go-to-market.
You’ll also get the opportunity to ask Ben and Jordan your most pressing questions, following the presentation.
And if you can’t make it to the live event, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording shortly after the webinar.
SEO
Why Big Companies Make Bad Content
It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes.
HubSpot teaching you how to type the shrug emoji or buy bitcoin stock. Salesforce sharing inspiring business quotes. GoDaddy helping you use Bing AI, or Zendesk sharing catchy sales slogans.
Judged by content marketing best practice, these articles are bad.
They won’t resonate with decision-makers. Nobody will buy a HubSpot license after Googling “how to buy bitcoin stock.” It’s the very definition of vanity traffic: tons of visits with no obvious impact on the business.
So why does this happen?
There’s an obvious (but flawed) answer to this question: big companies are inefficient.
As companies grow, they become more complicated, and writing good, relevant content becomes harder. I’ve experienced this firsthand:
- extra rounds of legal review and stakeholder approval creeping into processes.
- content watered down to serve an ever-more generic “brand voice”.
- growing misalignment between search and content teams.
- a lack of content leadership within the company as early employees leave.
Similarly, funded companies have to grow, even when they’re already huge. Content has to feed the machine, continually increasing traffic… even if that traffic never contributes to the bottom line.
There’s an element of truth here, but I’ve come to think that both these arguments are naive, and certainly not the whole story.
It is wrong to assume that the same people that grew the company suddenly forgot everything they once knew about content, and wrong to assume that companies willfully target useless keywords just to game their OKRs.
Instead, let’s assume that this strategy is deliberate, and not oversight. I think bad content—and the vanity traffic it generates—is actually good for business.
There are benefits to driving tons of traffic, even if that traffic never directly converts. Or put in meme format:
Programmatic SEO is a good example. Why does Dialpad create landing pages for local phone numbers?
Why does Wise target exchange rate keywords?
Why do we have a list of most popular websites pages?
As this Twitter user points out, these articles will never convert…
…but they don’t need to.
Every published URL and targeted keyword is a new doorway from the backwaters of the internet into your website. It’s a chance to acquire backlinks that wouldn’t otherwise exist, and an opportunity to get your brand in front of thousands of new, otherwise unfamiliar people.
These benefits might not directly translate into revenue, but over time, in aggregate, they can have a huge indirect impact on revenue. They can:
- Strengthen domain authority and the search performance of every other page on the website.
- Boost brand awareness, and encourage serendipitous interactions that land your brand in front of the right person at the right time.
- Deny your competitors traffic and dilute their share of voice.
These small benefits become more worthwhile when multiplied across many hundreds or thousands of pages. If you can minimize the cost of the content, there is relatively little downside.
What about topical authority?
“But what about topical authority?!” I hear you cry. “If you stray too far from your area of expertise, won’t rankings suffer for it?”
I reply simply with this screenshot of Forbes’ “health” subfolder, generating almost 4 million estimated monthly organic pageviews:
And big companies can minimize cost. For large, established brands, the marginal cost of content creation is relatively low.
Many companies scale their output through networks of freelancer writers, avoiding the cost of fully loaded employees. They have established, efficient processes for research, briefing, editorial review, publication and maintenance. The cost of an additional “unit” of content—or ten, or a hundred—is not that great, especially relative to other marketing channels.
There is also relatively little opportunity cost to consider: the fact that energy spent on “vanity” traffic could be better spent elsewhere, on more business-relevant topics.
In reality, many of the companies engaging in this strategy have already plucked the low-hanging fruit and written almost every product-relevant topic. There are a finite number of high traffic, high relevance topics; blog consistently for a decade and you too will reach these limits.
On top of that, the HubSpots and Salesforces of the world have very established, very efficient sales processes. Content gating, lead capture and scoring, and retargeting allow them to put very small conversion rates to relatively good use.
Even HubSpot’s article on Bitcoin stock has its own relevant call-to-action—and for HubSpot, building a database of aspiring investors is more valuable than it sounds, because…
The bigger a company grows, the bigger its audience needs to be to continue sustaining that growth rate.
Companies generally expand their total addressable market (TAM) as they grow, like HubSpot broadening from marketing to sales and customer success, launching new product lines for new—much bigger—audiences. This means the target audience for their content marketing grows alongside.
As Peep Laja put its:
But for the biggest companies, this principle is taken to an extreme. When a company gears up to IPO, its target audience expands to… pretty much everyone.
This was something Janessa Lantz (ex-HubSpot and dbt Labs) helped me understand: the target audience for a post-IPO company is not just end users, but institutional investors, market analysts, journalists, even regular Jane investors.
These are people who can influence the company’s worth in ways beyond simply buying a subscription: they can invest or encourage others to invest and dramatically influence the share price. These people are influenced by billboards, OOH advertising and, you guessed it, seemingly “bad” content showing up whenever they Google something.
You can think of this as a second, additional marketing funnel for post-IPO companies:
These visitors might not purchase a software subscription when they see your article in the SERP, but they will notice your brand, and maybe listen more attentively the next time your stock ticker appears on the news.
They won’t become power users, but they might download your eBook and add an extra unit to the email subscribers reported in your S1.
They might not contribute revenue now, but they will in the future: in the form of stock appreciation, or becoming the target audience for a future product line.
Vanity traffic does create value, but in a form most content marketers are not used to measuring.
If any of these benefits apply, then it makes sense to acquire them for your company—but also to deny them to your competitors.
SEO is an arms race: there are a finite number of keywords and topics, and leaving a rival to claim hundreds, even thousands of SERPs uncontested could very quickly create a headache for your company.
SEO can quickly create a moat of backlinks and brand awareness that can be virtually impossible to challenge; left unchecked, the gap between your company and your rival can accelerate at an accelerating pace.
Pumping out “bad” content and chasing vanity traffic is a chance to deny your rivals unchallenged share of voice, and make sure your brand always has a seat at the table.
Final thoughts
These types of articles are miscategorized—instead of thinking of them as bad content, it’s better to think of them as cheap digital billboards with surprisingly great attribution.
Big companies chasing “vanity traffic” isn’t an accident or oversight—there are good reasons to invest energy into content that will never convert. There is benefit, just not in the format most content marketers are used to.
This is not an argument to suggest that every company should invest in hyper-broad, high-traffic keywords. But if you’ve been blogging for a decade, or you’re gearing up for an IPO, then “bad content” and the vanity traffic it creates might not be so bad.
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