Ampush Lowers LivingSocial's CPA Costs on Facebook by 60% With Domain Sponsored Stories and Custom Audiences

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, February 15, 2013 (Press-News.org) With the help of Ampush's marketing solutions LivingSocial was able to achieve a 58% ROI through Domain Sponsored Stories and Custom Audiences and 60% lower CPC than their previous Facebook efforts.

In the hyper-competitive world of daily deal sites, brands work hard to stretch their marketing dollars in order to attract and retain the right user base. An efficiently executed social media campaign is paramount to success as this enables brands to connect and engage consumers far more effectively than other channels. Specifically, Facebook provides the scale and personalization to enable what Ampush calls "referred intent"-- the potential for viral growth driven by the actions and endorsements of influencers within a user's network.

LivingSocial sought to launch a Facebook marketing campaign in order to drive new users and repeat purchases. Ampush worked with the team at LivingSocial to design and execute a strategy that combined Domain Sponsored Stories (DSS) and Custom Audience targeting while meeting LivingSocial's high-volume spend requirements. The challenge at hand was to properly manage budget so that high daily spend levels could be achieved, while also delivering efficient CTRs and high quality conversions. The campaign produced a 20 times better CTR than domain ads on the right-hand side as well as 60% lower CPA costs versus other solution providers.

OBJECTIVES

Three major goals were established to align with LivingSocial's marketing objectives:

• Drive new sales to LivingSocial's daily deals through earned media
• Obtain new users cost-effectively
• Obtain the most net value per ad spend dollar on Facebook

To meet these objectives, Ampush designed and implemented a multi-product solution customized around LivingSocial's goals.

STRATEGY

The launch plan for LivingSocial centered largely around DSS within the News Feed to drive specific deal purchases as well as new user sign-ups. DSS works by sharing a visitor's engagement from your site (e.g., a visitor 'Likes' or 'Read' an article) on Facebook which can then be amplified and published to their friend's Facebook News Feed. Campaign success was measured by purchases, rather than impressions or CTR, in order to achieve the highest net value per ad spend dollar. Ampush also used Custom Audience targeting—leveraging LivingSocial's existing CRM data to target current subscribers, as well as users that made purchases in specific deal categories in the past. For new user acquisition, Custom Audiences was used to exclude certain creatives from being shown to current subscribers.

RESULTS

DSS capitalizes on the native Facebook experience and the social context this ad type provides helped to achieve CTRs 20 times better in News Feed than domain ads on the right-hand side. The use of Custom Audiences for targeting and the team's expertise helped to maintain CPAs 60% lower than campaigns run by other Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers (PMDs) that ran concurrently.

With a 58% ROI LivingSocial decided to expand its Facebook marketing initiatives in order to include Open Graph Sponsored Stories within the News Feed. This will effectively multiply LivingSocial's successes by increasing their reach on Facebook and continuing to drive higher purchase rates and margins.

Ampush is a social technology company helping enterprises leverage the social graph for marketing success. An early member of Facebook's Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program, Ampush drives billions of social ad impressions per month for large-scale brand marketers and agency partners across a range of verticals including technology, financial services, gaming, retail, travel, and consumer packaged goods.