Since the start of the pandemic the current market conditions couldn’t be more unpredictable. According to an article posted on CNBC’s website in March titled “ Facebook says it’s seeing weakening ads business in countries hit by COVID-19”. It explains that although businesses advertising on Facebook are seeing campaigns and engagement increase.
Most businesses saw a drop in sales in countries that take more aggressive actions in spreading Covid-19.
As a media buyer one would think that since consumers are basically locked in their homes, you would see a big increase in E-commerce overall. For some businesses this was the case, but the majority have seen a decline in performance or accounts behaving volatile, with mixed results.
According to the article on CNBC they mention that Six of the largest 10 advertising countries were “currently Covid-19 hotspots”. This led me to start investigating why you are seeing an increase in engagement and a drop in sales, or atlas high CPA’s.
Why Facebook Sales Might Be Affected
One theory that I started to follow is that it might be due to pixel data getting corrupted. The reason behind this is that customers that don’t usually shop online have been more willing to click on an ad.
They browse and behave like a customer with intent, they might just be bored. But the pixel optimizes for this and includes this behavior in the optimization.
Customers like these might not ever convert since they might not trust E-Commerce website for doing their shopping or just a lack the knowledge to move forward with a purchase.
From December 2019 to July 2020 the unemployment rate increased from 3.5% to 10.2%, luckily on a decline. In April 2020 it reached as high as 14.7%, that’s a rough estimate of 48.2 Million of the total US population without a job.
Why is this important?
If you consider factors such as how many people know someone who lost their job. It wouldn’t be hard to think that at least half of the population would know about someone who lost their job because of Covid-19.
Since most of the E-commerce brands focus on what you would consider the luxury goods market, this is the first place where someone would save some money.
How Can You Manage Campaigns In Order to Survive Through This Period.
Shift your focus back on Marketing first before focusing on the Media Buying. Now is the time where corporate social responsibility could save you and others as well.
It’s always important to have a good CSR plan implemented, even though you might be a small business. This will encourage your customers to support you, because you are supporting others.
The message that you deliver to your customers should relate with them and the conditions that they are in. You wouldn’t necessarily implement this with conversions strategies, only with reach and engagements.
Adjusting your landing page and mentioning for example that “a portion of the profit share is going to a relief foundation” etc, is a good way for customers to support your role in the economy as well.
As for the media buying strategies, I mentioned in a previous article that your seed audiences shouldn’t be from before this large shift in consumer behavior happened. Having shorter seed audiences will make sure that audiences such as your LLA’s can stay up to date with the volatility of consumers during this period.
Making sure to proactively create campaigns rather that reactively will safe you a lot of time and money. Consumers are reactive and the market as well, it’s important to stay ahead of the game to ensure that you can survive or even scale with the current market volatility.
And this only works if you have the right agency partnered with you!
If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand
Book a call below:
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And that’s a wrap!
Quintin
