Compulsive Clickers and how to stop them wasting your ads budget!
Despite Facebook offering encyclopaedic targeting criteria, there is still a lot of mystery involved in how Facebook decides where and who to deliver your ads to. Let’s say you narrow your audience down to 20,000. With a small budget you may only reach half of those, possibly with a frequency of 1.2. Which means one in five of your audience was delivered the ad twice. Now let’s consider what your campaign is optimised for, or what the principal objective is; engagement, clicks or leads etc.
By this point we’re all aware Facebook knows everything about users. Including click rate (how often they click links through FB) and engagement rate (how likely a user is to engage, like/comment). Let’s hypothesise then, that in a campaign optimised for clicks to a defined audience of 20,000, Facebook will likely display the ads to those audience members most likely to click on the link. Here’s the “Compulsive Clicker Theory”. A Compulsive Clicker is a Facebook user who clicks on almost anything.
What makes a compulsive clicker? It could be a user interface issue, maybe the user has a phone that they’re not totally adept in using, so mistakenly click very often. We all know hyperactive social users, that uncle that comments on every post they see. Well if Facebook prioritises these users when delivering ads, what effect will this have on your ads budget? When there’s no correlation to suggest these users are more likely to purchase from you, but they are more likely to click or engage, then it appears an easy way Facebook can boost their campaign figures. If you see that cost per click falling you’re more likely to spend more budget.
SO what can we do about this? Well by incorporating complete tracking of your buyer journey then you can plot their course, and target conversions instead of clicks or engagement. If your campaign is optimised for conversions, then your ad should display to users more likely to convert, perhaps users who regularly buy online, which is a much more promising criteria for the advertiser!
