Here are the results of our November 22nd test.

This week, we’ll be covering an incredibly simple optimization strategy: UGC or User Generated Content.

As of late, we’ve started using UGC for virtually all of our clients, and particularly for one client who is restructuring their account due to decreasing results.

We decided to select 8 campaigns for this test, all of which have a Conversion - Purchase objective (for both acquisition and retargeting) and audience targeting covering several countries.

This client has a ton of customer videos in their repertoire, and they also film some themselves with a smartphone. So, we decided to test a number of UGC-style ads against standard ads. Here are some examples:

We let these ads run for the entire month of October, and then exported our results in the table below. It was impossible for us to get an overall view of our results directly from our account, as attribution was different for every campaign.

• The first thing we noticed was that the cost per purchase was TOTALLY different: a disparity of €5 despite a difference of more than €11 000 in budget.
• Secondly, a significant amount of the budget went to our UGC campaigns: a total of 75% on all 8 campaigns.
• Out of curiosity, we also decided to take a look at the engagement on the ads, namely reactions, comments, saves, and shares. Keep in mind that UGC always receives way more engagement on Facebook, and that we paid a total of €5,48 per result for our UGC campaigns versus €7,73 for our other formats.

While ad engagement doesn’t always translate into sales, comments from customers serve as social proof for buyers (because the comments are positive). Plus, it drastically helps us develop our organic content strategy (especially when our ads are shared). Remember that Facebook does not attribute sales to an ad that has been shared, which means that it’s very probable that we generated many more sales that are not accounted for in our result report!

We’ve now started generating great results with UGC! Here are the elements that seem to work every time:

• Videos of max 45 seconds, with no speech or text, that simply show the product.
• Videos of less than one minute that feature a customer testimonial and the product (vlog style).
• A split-screen image or video, especially to show different situations or products.
• Close-ups of the product, especially if we want to demonstrate something specific.

Here are the results of our latest test as of November 29th,2021.

In one of our recent episodes of Social Selling, we discussed how to bring value to your content, especially if you create educational content for a Lead Magnet.

If you do Lead Generation, this email is for you.

In March 2021, we took on a new infopreneur client that tasked us with acquiring new leads using their Lead Magnet: an e-book of several pages that helps entrepreneurs progress in their field.

When we acquired the account in March 2021, here are the sort of ads our client was running.

As you can see, there are 2 primary types of visuals: ads that show our client in action, and ads that show his free downloadable guide.

Here were the results for all active ads in March 2021.

Way, way too expensive for Lead Gen – especially for an audience as large as entrepreneurs. We think that his ads may have run their course (because they worked in the past) and decided to adapt the same concepts into new creatives.

This strategy proves to be a failure, and we can no longer make ad adaptations. We decide it’s time to go back to the drawing board. But this time, we don’t make the same mistake, and we begin by taking a closer look at our client’s guide.

Inside, we find a ton of valuable content for our target audience, and we even discover this passage.

Knowing we’ve found something meaningful, we borrow this concept and decide to stick it into our ads.

Here are our global results for the first week of April.

We radically changed our account’s expenses, and our CPL decreased by almost 3x! From then on, we continued to adapt this format.

Below are our results for March, April, and May.

And the best part? These ads are still running right now!

Now, what should you take away from this optimization strategy?

If you offer educational content to your leads, try to be as hands-on and as visual as possible.

As the famous expression says, “Show, don’t tell."

In the next iOS 14 Squad email, you'll get another concrete example of this method. Stay tuned!

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