The pace of innovation in the online advertising space has not let up. In particular, Facebook’s relentless drive to hone their offerings has created many new tools for online advertisers.
We put two of those to the test in KS-04’s special election in partnership with the NRCC: In-Stream advertising and Offline Conversion Tracking.
In-Stream
For the first time in a Congressional IE, we deployed Facebook’s new in-stream video advertising unit and the results were compelling. Overall, In-Stream delivered a 68% completion rate, 3.7 times higher than that of traditional newsfeed targeted ads.
The only downside was that we were met with limited inventory and were only able to place 1% of the ad buy through In-Stream.
Offline Conversion Tracking
The singular goal of our effort was turnout. To that end, we integrated offline AB/EV conversion data back into Facebook, enabling us to attribute every early vote cast to an Ad, Adset and Campaign.
For example, if we served an ad to John Doe, and he then went and voted early, that information was tracked back into Facebook, allowing us to see not only the cost of that conversion, but to optimize our messaging based on the offline metric.
Overall, we generated 3,745 offline conversions at a cost of $2.93 per conversion. In other words, we generated 3,745 votes at a cost of $2.93 a vote – and this was just the early voting. It does not account for the majority of the votes that were cast on Election Day. When added to that, the cost per vote based on our reach will likely drop below $1 per vote.
Combined, these capabilities provide compelling new ways to influence voters and measure the impact of your effort for further optimization. Candidates not keeping up with these capabilities are sure to find their opponents reaching voters in a smarter, cheaper manner than they are and are likely to face the consequences at the polling booth.