As marketers, we all strive to target that elusive most profitable customer segments with our ad spend. This is where the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) comes into play. LTV is a crucial metric, providing insights into the total revenue a business can reasonably expect from a single customer account. It considers a customer's revenue value and compares it to the customer's predicted lifespan. By integrating LTV into your Facebook Ad strategy, you can optimize your ad spend and increase ROI. With Able Customer Data Platform (CDP), it's easier than ever to integrate LTV into your Facebook Ad audiences. Here's how:
1. Understanding Your Customer Data and Linking LTV with Customer Profile in Facebook:
The first step in leveraging LTV for Facebook Ads begins with understanding your customer data. Able CDP provides a unified database that consolidates data from online and offline sources, providing a comprehensive view of your customers. By attributing customer's history of interactions, Able CDP enables you to identify and segment high-LTV customers effectively.
Once you have a grasp of your customer data, the next step is linking the LTV to each customer profile. The amalgamation of data from different touchpoints, such as ad clicks, landing page views, and form submissions, will offer a holistic view of the customer journey. By factoring in LTV, you can effectively attribute late funnel events to the right customer and the correct original activity. This more nuanced approach allows you to identify which marketing efforts are generating high LTV customers.
2. Integrating with Facebook Ads:
Able CDP offers seamless integration with marketing platforms like Facebook Ads, allowing for the easy transfer of valuable customer data, including LTV information. When Able CDP sends conversion events to Facebook's Conversions API, it includes LTV data. This data can then be used to create custom audiences and lookalike audiences, which can dramatically improve the efficiency of your ad spend.
Traditionally, two approaches exist to create customer LTV-based audiences in Facebook:
- Audience upload, that relies on external segmentation and Facebook's attempt to find users matching customer emails and other data from the upload file.
- Sending conversion events throughout customer life cycle that are reliably linked with the Facebook Ads identifier.
While the latter approach offers slightly less control, it yields better results as it allows Facebook to use its full event measurement capabilities, utilizing additional parameters such as click ids and browser attributes and identifiers to attribute conversions to its users correctly, allowing to recognize as much as twice more audience members.
Once the data are in the Facebook, a high LTV audience can be created in it natively.
3. Creating High LTV Audiences:
By now, you have successfully integrated LTV data with Facebook Ads. The next step is to use this data to create audiences that comprise high LTV customers. Using data in Events Manager, you can define custom audiences based on LTV, ensuring your ads are seen by the most valuable users. Segmenting your customers by LTV can help you tailor your messages more effectively, improving engagement and conversion rates.
Open "Audiences" in Facebook's Events Manager. Press "Create Audience" – "Custom Audience".
Pick "Website" as the data source. Note: as Able attributes all conversion events to the original website visitors they'll be seen by Events Manager as "website" events even if they happened offline (for example, recurrent payments).
Pick the conversion that has values of which LTV is comprised. It'll be the "Purchase" conversion in most funnels:
Enter the desired retention, which represents a lookback window used to calculate LTV. Press "Refine by" - "Aggregated value":
Enter condition used to define high LTV audience. For example, "Sum of value is greater than $N LTV":
Note: Facebook's default segmentation capabilities don't convert transaction currency to account currency. If you're using Able CDP, consider using the "converted_deal_value" value instead, which would always be converted to your Able CDP funnel's currency (USD by default). If you send conversions to Able from your own back-end, consider including additional non-monetary segments that'd reflect desired audiences in the "custom_data" parameter. It's also common to add a parameter that reflects expected LTV; "expected_ltv" parameter in Subscribe event being a popular convention recommended by Facebook. Additional custom parameters can also be assigned conditionally without coding by using Rules configurable in Able Dashboard.
4. Developing Lookalike Audiences:
Once you have created your high LTV audience, you can further leverage this data to create lookalike audiences. Facebook's Lookalike Audience feature allows you to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they're similar to your best existing customers. When you use high LTV customers as the source for your lookalike audience, you're telling Facebook to find more people who resemble your most profitable customers.
To create a lookalike audiences, press "Create Audience" – "Lookalike Audience" and choose the custom high LTV audience created in the previous step as the source audience:
5. Optimizing Campaigns:
With the high LTV and lookalike audiences in place, it's time to optimize your campaigns. The inclusion of LTV allows for a more sophisticated approach to campaign optimization. Able CDP's integration with Facebook Ads provides real-time feedback on how your campaigns are performing with these audiences, allowing you to tweak and refine your campaigns based on solid data.
Conclusion:
Harnessing the power of Customer Lifetime Value in creating Facebook Ads audiences can significantly enhance your marketing strategy. By identifying and targeting your high LTV customers, you'll not only optimize your ad spend but also drive a higher return on ad spend (ROAS). Able CDP's seamless integration with Facebook Ads, along with its comprehensive customer tracking and data analysis capabilities, makes it the perfect tool for incorporating LTV into your Facebook Ads strategy. Start utilizing the full potential of your customer data and unlock new levels of ad performance with Able CDP.
It's time to move beyond the surface-level metrics and delve deeper into your customer data. With Able CDP, you can go beyond merely tracking events to truly understanding your customers and their lifetime value. So why wait? Start your journey towards smarter, LTV-based marketing today!