Vans, the iconic skate brand that originated in Southern California,came to Upcast when it wanted to drive engagement and awareness in the social sphere. Consumers gravitate towards social media to share, discuss, and generally talk about the brands they know and love.
This is especially true for Facebook, which dominates all social channels in sharing activity. Vans worked with Upcast on two key Facebook campaigns, with brand engagement being the goal for both. Those campaigns, and their successes, are outlined below.
Driving Engagement with Photo Albums
Vans wanted to find a way to promote its #VansWishList Instagram campaign over the holiday season in 18 different countries. With so many distinct products, Vans wanted to promote entire Facebook albums, rather than individual photos. However, since Facebook photo albums are not an official ad format, there was no straightforward way to promote them. Fortunately, the team at Upcast was able to overcome this obstacle by leveraging the story IDs from the photo albums Vans wanted to promote. Upcast’s product team then promoted these IDs in order to produce more visually compelling promoted posts that included entire albums, rather than individual photos.
As a result of the #VansWishList photo album promotion, Vans saw that this ad type was more successful than the generic photo ad type available on Facebook. Successes include:
• The Promoted Album Post was Vans’ best performing ad type in 18 countries
• These posts saw a 2.4x higher engagement rate than singular photo ad units from Vans in the same timeframe
• The cost per engagement (CPE) was 2.75x lower for promoted photo albums compared to singular photo ad units run concurrently
Boosting Reach of Organic Page Posts
Vans also had the opportunity to leverage Upcast’s proprietary Auto Page Booster feature to increase brand reach across Facebook, while reducing Cost Per Engagement (CPE). With Auto Page Post Booster, Vans was able to automatically promote engaging organic page posts when those posts met a certain engagement threshold. So, if a particular post was exceptionally popular, Auto Page Booster would promote it to a select audience in 18 different countries.
After the Auto Page Post Booster promoted the higher performing organic Facebook posts, the reach of those posts more than tripled. As a result, Vans saw:
• The average CPE was below €0.01 in all 18 targeted countries — including UK and Scandinavia
• The boosted posts achieved an impressive click-through rate (CTR) of 6.35 percent on average, compared to the Facebook benchmark of 2.5 percent
• The engagement rate for the boosted post was 2.5x higher than the original, organic version of the post Are your social campaigns driving meaningful results? Talk to us and learn how you can achieve better engagement at scale
Are your social campaigns driving meaningful results? Talk to us and learn how you can achieve better engagement at scale.