While I was working for the City of Mississauga, I was tasked with promoting weekly webinars for the City’s Older Adult population. These covered a wide range of topics that were typically unrelated. Up until then, City staff had created Facebook events for each session and then boosted them individually with individualized audience criteria. However, when we would report on these events, the numbers were quite low compared to the amount we were spending, most likely due to the cost-per-click being around $1.30-1.40 with an average of 50-70 engagements maximum per event.
We need to find a more efficient and cost-effective way to promote these events. If we truly want to service the Older Adult population in the City, it would be beneficial to reach as many of them as possible.
Our specific objectives should be to improve our cost-per-click and audience targeting to ensure our budget goes farther and we are actually reaching our desired demographic. Creating a standardized, focused audience targeting will help this.
First, we need to look at the targeting we have previously used and see what commonalities existed that we can carry over. Then, we’ll need to brainstorm new criteria that fit our unique demographic. We also can create a Facebook carousel ad that we go in to update weekly promoting the program as a whole and shedding spotlight on the following week’s events. This would allow us to combine the budget as well which would help the ads to go farther. Additionally, since the ad will go through a learning phase each time we update without having an entirely new audience each time, we should see a difference in the cost-per-click.
We created a list of senior-specific interests and targeting criteria that would be beneficial for the entire program instead of the specific niche, weekly topics. We also set up the ad using some stock photos for the weekly topics of note and an end card that pointed to the Older Adults page with all the info that will remain a constant factor.
We have now permanently switched to this method and consistently see 30,000 to 40,000 average impressions, 400-600 average link clicks, and an average cost-per-click of $0.20-0.40. Unfortunately, due to privacy concerns we cannot track actual attendees but there is no doubt that we are making the most out of our budget by optimizing our process and generating more engagement than ever before for this program. It’s not often you see such a massive success with such a small change but it’s a win worth celebrating and remembering!
