Smartly.io Connect London: How to Tackle the High Sales Season

Smartly.io Connect events are exclusive events around the world that bring together the brightest minds in digital advertising. In October, we invited advertisers in London to join us for talks, panels, workshops, and networking. For those of you that missed the event, don’t worry! We’ve compiled the top highlights and insights below. And, we will have a Smartly.io Connect in London in March among many other Connects that you can attend in 2018!

The third edition of Smartly.io Connect London was a success with close to 100 performance marketers and advertisers attending.

The main takeaways from the Facebook optimization track:

• Facebook targeting has significantly improved over the past few years, and it keeps on getting better, use it
• Facebook metrics may only show the partial truth. Do not use it to drive your business. Use 3rd party data and tracking to challenge Facebook metrics
• Use 3rd party data as much as possible to optimize your Facebook campaign towards your business objectives

Here are some of the tips and ideas that we overheard during the roundtable conversations:

• Try using a slideshow image in the first card of a carousel ad - this has worked well for some advertisers
• Make the Canvas look like a website - it loads faster and gives a more pleasant user experience
• Launch 360-degree ads first with organic targeting (with a dummy post) and then use that in combination with automatic post boosting
• App event-based campaigns are extremely competitive in December - this applies to apps in December. Try to identify seasonal peaks in your industry/market, optimize accordingly, and watch out for rising app install CPAs
• Consider optimizing for conversion and not reach when it comes to videos, some advertisers report better performance with this optimization goal
• Lift from different ad campaigns (metro, tv, Facebook) can be measured with lift studies and promo codes - but they are far from perfect.

While our keynote speaker Jorrit Bouma from Wonderbly delivered eye-opening insights on how to smash the peak season, our panel discussed how seasonality affects businesses of different verticals and how well automation can support the busiest sales seasons. We had some of the major players in the UK represented in the panel: Anna Derezinska from Skyscanner, Jake Mayell from Net-A-Porter, and Stefano Pantaleoni from eBay.

In one of the two Lightning Tracks, we took a look at the implementation of scientific methods to testing, at statistical significance, and at lift studies and why and how to do them.

Here are the main takeaways from the Lightning Sessions

On A/B testing in Facebook:

• Plan and document tests carefully and test only one thing at a time
• Always use a statistical significance calculator, so you don’t make decisions affected by random noise
• Tests need to collect enough conversions (based on confidence interval)  and run for long enough (based on your sales cycle)
• Only run a maximum of 3 ad studies at the same not to lose track of what you are trying to achieve

We at Smartly.io are looking forward to hearing your ideas and thoughts around attribution, lift results, and 3rd party data. Also, In case you missed: here’s what Busuu learned at our March edition of Smartly.io Connect, and the results from the applied knowledge.