How to Drive Incremental Revenue on Facebook – The Smartly.io Guide

Measurement is one of the biggest challenges when you’re advertising across platforms. What to attribute to which channel at what time? In a mobile-first world, it’s getting difficult to understand which channel is providing incremental value to your business. Luckily, Facebook offers a way to test and determine the business impact of your advertising.

In other words, If you were to pause your campaigns today, how many customers would convert anyway? How many would not have converted without having seen your ad? Facebook has developed a solution called Conversion Lift Studies that can help in answering the question.

Conversion Lift Studies splits your test audience into two groups: a control group that does not see any ads and an exposed group that will be targeted with your ads. Examining the difference between these two groups is the key to determining if your ads are driving incremental lift.

The Smartly.io Approach in Three Steps

"The Smartly.io Lift Study tool is very flexible and really helps us understand precisely the incrementality of our online marketing efforts on Facebook and Instagram. I wish I had the same tool for programmatic and display!" – Anna Akerman, Programmatic and Display Manager, Uber

Setting up and running a lift study is simple as long as you follow best practices and pay attention to each step of the process.

1. Run a conversion lift study
• Set up the campaign you want to test as well as the percentage holdout group
• Our statistical significance calculator will predict the number of conversions needed to achieve statistical significance
2. Generate statistically significant learnings
• Make sure to run the campaign until the results are significant enough for your to draw conclusions
• Document the results
3. Optimize your campaigns to drive true business impact
• Leverage learnings widely to optimize your current and future campaigns to drive incremental revenue

Tips For Setting Up A Successful Test

Use a mathematical approach to determine lift–- we help our clients calculate lift by offering a statistical significance calculator in the platform. The tool informs when the results are statistically significant. 

Avoid targeting the same audience in other campaigns to ensure that the control group is not being shown any ad from your campaigns during the lift study

Aim to get a reach of over 70% – if you only reach a small fraction of the treatment group, the conversions from the unreached audience makes it challenging to achieve statistically significant results. 

Avoid making the control group too small – in an ideal world, we would recommend splitting an audience 50-50 to reduce the duration of the study.