Getting better quality traffic from Facebook

In the middle of 2017 Facebook quietly rolled out an optimisation called ‘Landing Page Views’. This is Facebook’s way of helping advertisers better measure the traffic from a paid advert to the landing page on the client’s site.

We now have almost six months of data on this new optimisation and there are some very interesting results. We need some context first, so let’s take a step back.

How to better report on website traffic from Facebook campaigns:

Users can obviously click on an advert (and this click might be registered as a ‘link click’ in a traffic campaign) but what if the person who clicks the advert doesn’t actually make it to the landing page?

They might abandon the landing page (perhaps they clicked accidentally, or the mobile site didn’t load quickly) and the Facebook or Google pixel doesn’t have the chance to fire. Facebook tell us that as many as 40% of website visitors abandon a site at 3 seconds of delay (Source; Optimal DR: High Quality Traffic Case Study).

In short; a link click is registered when someone clicks on your advert to go to the advertiser’s intended URL. A Landing Page View means that someone has clicked on your advert and actually made it to the destination URL where the Facebook pixel has fired, recording the website visit.

Facebook are combating this problem by allowing advertisers like Nunn Media to optimise to Landing Page Views.

So what does this mean?

This gives us a better indication of the volume of people who actually visit the website and gives us some insight into website (especially mobile) performance. Breaking this down, if we hypothetically saw a large discrepancy with website clicks and landing page views, it suggests that there are issues with website load times. We saw this issue with a retail client in August and were able to address this issue ahead of their 2017 Christmas campaign.

When we use for Landing Page Views, it also means we will get better quality traffic because Facebook’s system will then be able to optimise towards the better quality traffic that actually makes it to your site.

What does Facebook recommend?

Prior to the introduction of Landing Page Views, optimising for link clicks was recommended (and is the best option only when we don’t have a pixel down on the client’s site (see screen shot below).

With the introduction of optimising for Landing Page Views this is now common best practice within Nunn Media.

Optimising for the cheapest Newsfeed clicks doesn’t necessarily mean great quality traffic (measured via time on site, pages viewed, products viewed and purchased). Optimising means that we’re telling Facebook which action is the most important metric for our campaign in order to get the best results.

How are results different?

As expected, we are seeing no change in the volume of ‘website clicks’ and therefore the CPC hasn’t been affected. However, where we are now optimising for Landing Page Views, our clients are seeing a higher ‘cost per Landing Page View’ relative to the CPC.

Nunn’s 2017 average CPC is around 20% lower compared to the average cost per Landing Page View, since July.

Despite the increase (CPC vs Landing Page View), we’re comfortable knowing that this optimisation means more people are actually landing on the destination page, and we are reporting on people who made it there, and not just those clicky users who abandon at the first site of slow load times.

When would we use this as an objective?

When we want people to visit and land on a specific page, we would optimise for Landing Page Views. For example;

  • A multi-site retail client wants people to land on the a Store Locator page;
  • A client wants people to read the details or T&Cs of an offer before signing up
  • A retailer wants to display the opening trading hours of the stores
  • A client has an article that they want customers to read on their site

To learn more about the many factors that can impact mobile site performance, Facebook have this great article here.

Do Nunn Media clients need to do anything?

No. We’re now optimising for Landing Page Views where our campaign objective is website traffic to specific pages (as per the scenarios mentioned earlier). When our objective is conversions or reach & frequency our approach is very different.

If you have not already, you’ll begin seeing our language in our social / digital reports change to include Landing Page Views. In a lot of cases, we’ll continue to report on CPCs too to provide comparable data with other digital channels.

To find out how we can help you find great results across paid social media advertising, or to dig deeper into anything aforementioned, please reach out to James Belias our Brand Engagement Director.