This article is contributed by Unmarketd, a curated marketplace for elite performance marketing and data & analytics experts. You can read their growth series on TLD.

As much as I don’t care about politics Bloomberg’s digital campaign stands out as a cautionary tale to all entrepreneurs on How not to run your digital ads so I decided to write about it from a slightly different perspective.

Let’s quickly have a look at their Facebook ads and what went wrong there:

Over the first week of March they spent almost half a million on ads promoting about 270 pieces of content but failing in one simple thing every reasonable Facebook advertiser should know about – building Sales Funnel.

For those who don’t know, Sales Funnel is a process of tailoring your content based on where users stand in their journey.

Simple illustration will look like:

Facebook Ads is extremely powerful if not the best know tool to build your sales funnel. But to use it effectively implementing the pixels correctly is the number one priority.

Let’s look at Bloomberg’s website and see what was wrong there.

Homepage:

Tracking someone who just arrived on your homepage automatically as ViewContent is WRONG!

  • Users may indeed read your content or may just bounce off. Current setting doesn’t differentiate between the former and the later.
  • I’m certain that this website attracted a lot of bot traffic. The current setup doesn’t allow to filter out non-human traffic.
  • Current setting combines low and high intent traffic thus doesn’t allow audiences based on user intent.

The above page is clearly somewhere in the Middle of the Funnel and the homepage is the Top of the Funnel, however the pixel implementation is identical.

Now the lead page:

The implementation is half done.

What’s missing is pulling dynamic parameters such as location (zip code) that is asked on the lead form but for whatever reason missing from the pixel.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to address the voter’s concerns based on where they are? They in fact make tailored content based on geo as well as the proper implementation would allow to target right content to the right audience.

It was just not done…

Enough politics and back to startups.

Unicorn, the electric scooter startup from the co-creator of gadget tracker Tile, is shutting down operations after blowing all its cash on Facebook and Google ads

So don’t be that guy, stop media buying and start building sales funnels 😉

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Thanks for reading The Low Down (TLD), the blog by the team at Momentum Works. Got a different perspective or have a burning opinion to share? Let us know at [email protected].