At ACT360, we often analyze why a particular ad was shown on our staff’s news feed. This blog is a part of a series that we are doing to let you in on why we think the ads were shown to us.
In this blog, Amod looks at why this particular ad from Harpal Rich Rice got served to him.
The Facebook ads platform has a few features that can be a great tool for someone who is trying to learn targeting in digital channels, and we will use these tools today to analyze why Harpal Rich Rice ads were shown to me.
Why am I seeing this ad?
The first feature called “why am I seeing this ad?” allows you to see why Facebook showing you these ads. You will know what the targeting criteria was.
For example, this ad from Harpal Rice was shown to me the other day, and when I checked to see why was it shown to me, I found that they wanted to show it to people aged 26 – 40 and who live in Kathmandu. This information about me is conveniently available to the FB platform through my profile.
Ad Library
Another way of learning more about the ads and their strategy is to look at the Ad library from the Page Transparency tab in the brand’s Facebook page. This helps you understand what other ads (other than the one that was served to you) are being served by the page. Although this feature was (kind of) forced upon Facebook after the US election in 2016 to let people know if brands are promising different things (contrary) to different people, it is a great tool to analyse the brand’s marketing strategy as well.
In Harpal’s case, there are no other ads running apart from the one that was shown to me. This is a common practice in Nepal, where people do not understand the concept or the need to split test ads.
Does the targeting option make sense?
The brand seems to have used only demographic factors for running their ads. By targeting 26 – 40 year old people, they could be looking to target people who run households and have a say in purchasing decisions of staples like rice.
The brand owners may have also been advised that the majority of audience in Facebook are from Kathmandu. This may be the reason for them to target Kathmandu only. Another reason to target only Kathmandu could be to boost sales (as most of their distribution could be in this one location) in Kathmandu only.
Buyer’s journey consideration
The content of the advertisement is fairly salesy and asks people to take action. This may be because the brand considers their target audience (in this case, me) is already aware, and is considering buying rice. This is a sound logic as rice is something that has to be bought every month or so.
It is therefore okay for them to be salesy most of the time, although it would be nice to run ads that would make people aware about the quality of the product keeping in mind the AIDA or the ACD framework of inbound marketing.
Could there be a better way?
Although the overall strategy does make sense, a more gender neutral copy would do a lot better. Also, with Facebook’s capability to segregate gender properly, it would have been more effective if separate copies were written for different genders.
An ad talking to a “grihini” would connect with me way less than a message talking to me (a responsible husband). A better way still would be to run two ads (split testing); one targeting females and married customers (as the ad says grihani) and another one targeting males with slight plays in the copy (for eg. the rice your wife would love, etc).
Regardless, in my case, I would say the ad did manage to reach its ideal customer as I am the one who often purchases rice in my household. This I feel is more down to luck than to the plan.
That’s all for this week. We will be back next week analysing another ad and why was it shown to us. Do keep visiting our blogs!
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