The Page Post Engagement Experiment

Using post engagements as a top-of-funnel optimization as part of a traffic generation strategy.

As you may remember, I recently looked at optimizing (much) further up-funnel to generate larger retargetable audiences in prospecting. If you missed it, you can take a look at it here. The TLDR version is that I decided to run a Page Post Engagement prospecting campaign to build a large audience that can be retargeted at a far cheaper cost than optimizing for conversion. Of course, this took place alongside my conversion-optimized campaigns, not as a replacement.

The end result was pretty amazing. I was able to add ~1,000,000 new people to my funnel at a cost that was at fractions of a cent each. Now, that’s great, but what good is that if these people don’t actually convert? Welcome to the second phase of the test.

Below, you will see the results from the last seven days across both stages of the funnel I’ve built. It’s important to look at both combined because if the goal of the top-of-funnel campaign isn’t conversion, we need to make up that cost in retargeting. So, we will look at the spend across both stages, revenue and ROAS. Needless to say, these results are also looking really good.

First, a note: I had to redact the names of the ad sets for privacy reasons but replaced them with the general structure. The targeting on these is intentionally quite simple for the initial stages of this test, but I will expand upon these on future tests to see if I can optimize it even further. Targeting looked like this:

Top Of Funnel (TOF)

• Purchase Lookalike - 10%

• Active Subscribers (integrated through Klaviyo) - 10%

Middle Of Funnel (MOF)

• 50% Video Viewers (of the posts used in TOF)

• Facebook Engagers - Last 30 Days

• Instagram Engagers - Last 30 Days

The outcome here is obvious, but to summarize: it was a great success. Total spend across both prospecting and retargeting was $4,365.57, and total revenue (tracked, and therefore is likely to be higher) was $17,023.42, with a holistic ROAS of 4x on the dot.

For me, the next stage of this test would be to segment the retargeting out. I’m interested to see how 3-second, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 95% video viewers convert when split out.

With BFCM quickly approaching, I can definitely recommend the tactic of optimizing much further up-funnel to fill those retargeting audiences up. Come November, you can/should hit these audiences hard with your holiday promotion and watch the revenue flow.