The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Messenger Ads

Here at AdStage we’re indeed excited to experiment with Facebook Messenger ads. Chatbots have taken off big time and two thousand seventeen has been tipped to be the year they budge into mass adoption. There are now over 100,00 of them on Facebook Messenger. This growth is reflected in the enhancing popularity of messaging apps, which are growing swifter than social networks and fueling the rise of chatbots in the process.

Marketing is all about (a) finding your target audience and (b) communicating how your product or service can solve their problem. Which is why companies need to market through these messaging apps.

Why? People LOVE using Messaging apps and they choose to use it to communicate with people we love. We iMessage our significant other. Facebook Messenger with our friends. Slack with our team. So let’s market to people where they presently are.

We’ve put together this guide to walk you through the ins and outs of how to set up them up and get the best spectacle.

How to Navigate This Facebook Messenger Ads Guide

This guide to messenger ads is violated down into four main parts. Feel free to skip to the section that is most relevant to your needs.

Part four – AdStage Case Probe & Results (coming in June)

Want to get an alert when Part four comes out? Give us your address and we’ll shoot you an email as soon as it’s ready!

Part 1:

Let’s face it most people use their smartphones as their primary PC. This reliance on mobile phones grows in lockstep with our desire for constant and instant communication with family members, friends, and even work colleagues.

Come in messaging apps. Mobile messaging apps are exploding and are one of the greatest marketing trends in 2017. According to Business Insider, “the combined user base of the top four talk apps is larger than the combined user base of the top four social networks.”

Their exponential growth is largely due to their rich services and features, from free text messaging, to voice and movie calling, group talks, stickers to convey moods, and even photo and file sharing. Now add falling data package prices and cheaper smartphones and it’s effortless to track the boom from traditional calling to SMS to social messaging apps.

The Popularity of Messaging Apps

There are several networks in the messaging app ecosystem. As for the most popular network, it truly depends on what you’re measuring and geographic location.

In the battle of the messaging services, Facebook Messenger (65%) has a lead over WhatsApp (56%) for membership, but WhatsApp is virtually level for visitors/users. WeChat is absolutely superior in China; over 90% have an account.

According to a explore of global internet users from GlobalWebIndex in 2015, Facebook Messenger was the most used messaging app with 37% of those surveyed using it, followed by WhatsApp (33%), Skype (21%), Line (10%), and Google Hangouts (9%). Almost half (49.3%) of mobile users in North America and 43.4% of those in Western Europe will use messaging apps this year.

The MEF Mobile Messaging Survey 2016 indexes the messaging habits of almost six thousand respondents across nine countries worldwide as shown below.

eMarketer’s latest report predicted Messenger will reach 105.Two million active daily users in the U.S by the end of 2016. That figure represents 40% of mobile users, making Facebook Messenger the leading over-the-top (OTT) mobile messaging app in the U.S. OTT messaging apps work over an Internet connection and not the SMS network like iMessage, which has boosted their popularity with international users.

SimilarWeb conducted a examine using Android data from one hundred eighty seven countries and were able to determine the most popular messaging app all over the world (minus iPhone users).

While they’re consolidating under a few key players, in almost every country in the world, a messaging app is the most used app overall.

Messaging App Demographics

In general, messaging apps are especially popular among junior smartphone owners. In the US, 42% of smartphone users inbetween the ages of 18-29 use messaging apps. And three in ten online smartphone users utilize general messaging apps, like Whatsapp, Viber, or Kik.

As the customer journey evolves and becomes more fragmented across networks and devices, there’s a real chance for marketers to reach junior audiences on the device of their choice, and on the network of their choice.

Which is exactly what Facebook is banking on with Messenger ads.

Part Two:

What is Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger is a free mobile messaging and talk app for smartphones that lets people send text messages, hold group talks, send and receive money, share photos or movies, and even make voice calls to their Facebook friends. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in February that WhatsApp serves as a replacement for SMS services, whereas Messenger aims to be a more “expressive and rich environment” with a broad range of content.

For businesses, Messenger is harshly two years old. At the two thousand fifteen F8 conference, Facebook unveiled a fresh Messenger feature to bring businesses on the platform with the objective of enhancing how people and businesses communicate. Since then there are now more than one billion messages sent each month inbetween customers and businesses.

Plus, Messenger gives Facebook another way to own users’ time. The average user spends over fifty minutes a day scrolling and interacting on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot of time. However, there are only twenty four hours in a day, and the average person sleeps for 8.8 of them. That means more than 1/16 of the average user’s waking time is spent on a Facebook possessed platform.

What was once just a feature within Facebook is now one of the world’s most popular mobile messaging app services.

Messenger Stats & Growth

The undeterred rise in usage of Facebook Messenger proceeds from over 1.Two billion active users that’s ⅙ of the global population. 88% of online adults are a member of at least one of Facebook’s four main services: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram.

Picture Credit: Facebook

And according to Facebook’s two thousand sixteen Q4 report, there are four hundred million Facebook Messenger users using voice and movie talk on the app each month.

Here are a few more staggering stats Facebook hasn’t been bashful about sharing.

• • • • 10% of all Voice over IP (VoIP) calls made globally take place within Messenger
      • 17 billion photos are distributed by Messenger each month
      • 22 million GIFs collective every day, the equivalent of two hundred fifty four GIFs per 2nd

Pic Credit: Facebook

This graph from Statista presents the number of Facebook Messenger users in the United States from two thousand fourteen to 2020. In 2015, 90.Four million U.S. mobile phone users accessed the messaging app to communicate. This figure is projected to grow to 139.Two million users in 2020.

Over the last year, we’ve seen Facebook look for ways to keep customers and shareholders glad and engaged. They continuously roll out fresh features, many copied from Snapchat, keeping the platform fresh and users actively engaged. They introduced Messenger Ads in Q4 two thousand sixteen hinting at their ambition to carve out another revenue stream similar to Instagram.

Facebook Messenger Ads

Messenger ads provide marketers another avenue to embark a conversation. And there’s a real business case to be made here as customers become more interested in using Facebook Messenger to make online purchases. Statista reports eighty four percent of millennial respondents are willing to connect their PayPal account to Facebook Messenger in order to use conversational commerce.

Two Types of Messenger Ads + one Closed Beta

Presently, there are two types of Messenger ads available to advertisers with another one in closed beta.

1. Send People to Messenger (Direction) – use Messenger ads to have your leads initiate the conversation with your business.
2. Send Ads to People on Messenger (Placement)
3. BETA: Testing Home Screen Ads (see example below)

Messenger BETA: Home Screen Ads

How to Create Facebook Messenger Ads

There are presently two types of Messenger Ads available. Let’s walk through how to set up each type of ad.

Send People to Messenger (Direction)

Send People to Messenger ads show up in the News Feed with a call-to-action button that opens a Messenger conversation. It’s a a unique way to embark a conversation and provide a personalized practice for your customers or potential customers.

Send People to Messenger News Feed Ads

Here’s how to get commenced.

1) Choose the Traffic objective (Note: This may emerge as “Send people to your website” for some advertisers).

Two) Choose your campaign name and click Proceed.

Trio) Choose your audience, budget and News Feed placements (Note: You cannot use Instagram as a placement option when selecting Messenger as a destination).

Four) At the ad level, choose your format. You can choose Carousel, Single Pic, Single Movie or Slideshow format.

Five) Choose the Page you want to connect.

6) Choose Messenger as your destination.

7) Type a welcome message. When people click on your ad, they will automatically be directed to Messenger and receive a copy of your ad and the welcome message.

8) Select your call to act. I’d recommend Send Message so the user understands.

9) After you’ve reviewed your ad, click Place Order.

Keep in mind: Your Send People to Messenger ad won’t emerge to people who don’t have the Messenger app.

Send Sponsored Messages to People on Messenger (Placement)

Now let’s set up the other type of Message Ad available to advertisers.

Send Sponsored Messages to People on Messenger

1) Choose the Traffic objective (Note: This may show up as Send people to your website for some advertisers).

Two) Type in your campaign name and click Proceed.

Trio) Choose your budget.

Four) Choose your audience. Keep in mind that you can reach people who’ve messaged your page.

Five) For placement choose Messenger. Note: selecting Messenger will turn off all the other placements.

6) At the ad level, choose your format. The option presently available is the Single Photo format

7) Choose a website destination URL.

8) Write your headline, text and link description.

9) Once you’re blessed with the ad, click Place Order.

Messenger Ads Campaign Ideas

There are some indeed interesting use cases from companies that have experimented with Messenger ads and chatbots. For example, Digital Marketer ran a very successful campaign that generated 500% ROI in three days.

Or Nordstrom’s Messenger chatbot that asked a series of questions about user preferences, which users could reaction right in the app. Depending on the input, the chatbot would then suggest them some bounty ideas, specifically picked for them. Rather than relying on customers to interact with your website, these examples display innovative ways to stay engaged with customers on a preferred platform and device.

Another way you could employ Messenger ads is to send out coupons or discounts. Below ranks the types of advertising and promotions that consumers in the United States are willing to receive via Facebook Messenger as of 2016, sorted by age group.

A total of fifty two percent of Generation X survey respondents stated they were open to receive notifications of store sales upon coming in a store via Facebook Messenger.

There are very outstanding stats and ad placements. Right now, there’s a hefty chance for early adopters to take advantage of Messenger before it gets ruined by spammy advertisers or before your audience gets fully turned off Messenger ads. Now’s the time to experiment!

Part Three:

Messenger Ads + Talk Bots = Automated Gold

Chatbots have taken off big time and two thousand seventeen has been tipped to be the year they stir into mass adoption. There are now more than 100k of them on Facebook Messenger. This growth is reflected in the enhancing popularity of messaging apps, which are growing swifter than social networks and fueling the rise of chatbots in the process.

According to Chatbots Magazine, there are several global trends working together to make two thousand seventeen the year of chatbots.

• Mobile messenger supremacy
• App exhaustion
• Support for chatbots by Facebook, Microsoft and other leaders
• Dramatic reduction in chatbot development costs

A chatbot (brief for talk robot) is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with a human user in natural language, understands the intent of the user, and sends a response based on business rules and data of the organization.

I’m not talking about AI or Machine Learning. Think of talk bots like email marketing, but through messaging apps. People’s behaviors are switching and marketers will need to adapt to stay relevant. It’s like beginning an email list when email became a thing. Or embarking a podcast ten years ago. Those that are very first to the game

Beerud Sheth, founder and CEO of cloud messaging platform Gupshup, wrote an article on VentureBeat and said,

“We’re in the midst of a once-in-a-decade paradigm shift. Messaging is the fresh platform, and bots are the fresh apps. The shift radically switches end-user practices and developer frameworks and inevitably will switch business models, how we monetize, and how we advertise.”

Petite businesses without budgets for developers can experiment with codeless talk bot builders. These instruments turn a company’s frequently asked questions, like hours and location, into automatic replies on Messenger.

Here is a List of a Few Free Talk Bots to Get You Began

• ManyChat – Visual bot builder for Facebook Messenger with broadcasts, analytics, scheduled posting and many other features
• Chatfuel – A bot platform for creating an AI chatbot on Facebook. Learn how to create a Facebook message bot quickly and lightly, no coding required.
• Botsify – Create an AI chatbot without code
• OnSequel – Create media and entertainment bots without writing code to engage the 3B+ users on messaging apps.

We personally love ManyChat because it is (a) free (b) doesn’t require any coding, and (c) super user friendly.

You might be wondering how you could employ a bot for your business. Below are a few ways businesses are presently implementing to engage with their audiences.

Examples of when you could use them

• Payments
• Customer Support
• Product Search
• Personalize yet automated responses
• Content
• Coupons
• Demos

You might also be thinking that this would never work for my company. You may be right! Below are a few industries that will benefit the most from chatbots.

Sync Messenger Ads with Your Chatbot

Once you get your chatbot created it’s time to integrate it with your Messenger Ads campaign. We suggest taking some time to map out the messaging flow from our audience all the way to the desired outcome.

The key here to figure out what activity you want the user to take once they click Send Message. Within the ad set up, Facebook provides the option to include an automated welcome which is flawless for kick beginning a conversation and controlling where you want to take your audience.

We’re testing a few options with our integration into Manychat. Very first one is getting access to CRO eBook. Once someone clicks through from the ad they’ll see a welcome message that says, “Hi there! Looking to get your free CRO eBook? Just type “ebook” below and we’ll send it right over!”

If they type in “ebook” after the welcome message then will see this message.

Pretty awesome! The user was able to get an eBook without leaving a platform they’re comfy with.

How to Set Up Keyword Sequences

Keyword sequences work off of a “if this then that” type of logic. Example, if this “keyword” then “perform this act.”

For our eBook Messenger Ads, we input if the user types “ebook” then message them the eBook.

When someone typed in this keyword is automatically kicked off the eBook delivery sequence as seen in the example above. All of this was done using Facebook Messenger Ads plus a chatbot keyword sequence to supply our CRO eBook.

This is only scraping the surface of what you can accomplish with chatbots. You can create advanced customer journeys by varying the act and prize. Here all the options Manychat offers based on a specific keyword. From here you can automate the journey with “if this then that” logic into the desired response.

You can see that you could send an photo, file, movie, or a list with more options. The possibilities of this powerful automation are a lot like email nurture campaigns. It’s like a choose your own venture for the user as they go after the map you created.

PART four AdStage Case Explore (coming soon)

We’re diving into Messenger Ads and chatbots over the next six weeks. We’ll share our learnings and results at some point in June.

Looking For a Better Way to Examine Your PPC Data?

With AdStage Report it’s effortless to stay on top of results and share them with your team.

Cut hours of manual reporting time and produce the flawless, branded report.

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Messenger Ads – The AdStage Blog

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Messenger Ads

Here at AdStage we’re indeed excited to experiment with Facebook Messenger ads. Chatbots have taken off big time and two thousand seventeen has been tipped to be the year they budge into mass adoption. There are now over 100,00 of them on Facebook Messenger. This growth is reflected in the enhancing popularity of messaging apps, which are growing swifter than social networks and fueling the rise of chatbots in the process.

Marketing is all about (a) finding your target audience and (b) communicating how your product or service can solve their problem. Which is why companies need to market through these messaging apps.

Why? People LOVE using Messaging apps and they choose to use it to communicate with people we love. We iMessage our significant other. Facebook Messenger with our friends. Slack with our team. So let’s market to people where they presently are.

We’ve put together this guide to walk you through the ins and outs of how to set up them up and get the best spectacle.

How to Navigate This Facebook Messenger Ads Guide

This guide to messenger ads is violated down into four main parts. Feel free to skip to the section that is most relevant to your needs.

Part four – AdStage Case Examine & Results (coming in June)

Want to get an alert when Part four comes out? Give us your address and we’ll shoot you an email as soon as it’s ready!

Part 1:

Let’s face it most people use their smartphones as their primary PC. This reliance on mobile phones grows in lockstep with our desire for constant and instant communication with family members, friends, and even work colleagues.

Come in messaging apps. Mobile messaging apps are exploding and are one of the greatest marketing trends in 2017. According to Business Insider, “the combined user base of the top four talk apps is larger than the combined user base of the top four social networks.”

Their exponential growth is largely due to their rich services and features, from free text messaging, to voice and movie calling, group talks, stickers to convey moods, and even photo and file sharing. Now add falling data package prices and cheaper smartphones and it’s effortless to track the boom from traditional calling to SMS to social messaging apps.

The Popularity of Messaging Apps

There are several networks in the messaging app ecosystem. As for the most popular network, it indeed depends on what you’re measuring and geographic location.

In the battle of the messaging services, Facebook Messenger (65%) has a lead over WhatsApp (56%) for membership, but WhatsApp is virtually level for visitors/users. WeChat is absolutely superior in China; over 90% have an account.

According to a explore of global internet users from GlobalWebIndex in 2015, Facebook Messenger was the most used messaging app with 37% of those surveyed using it, followed by WhatsApp (33%), Skype (21%), Line (10%), and Google Hangouts (9%). Almost half (49.3%) of mobile users in North America and 43.4% of those in Western Europe will use messaging apps this year.

The MEF Mobile Messaging Survey 2016 indexes the messaging habits of almost six thousand respondents across nine countries worldwide as shown below.

eMarketer’s latest report predicted Messenger will reach 105.Two million active daily users in the U.S by the end of 2016. That figure represents 40% of mobile users, making Facebook Messenger the leading over-the-top (OTT) mobile messaging app in the U.S. OTT messaging apps work over an Internet connection and not the SMS network like iMessage, which has boosted their popularity with international users.

SimilarWeb conducted a examine using Android data from one hundred eighty seven countries and were able to determine the most popular messaging app all over the world (minus iPhone users).

While they’re consolidating under a few key players, in almost every country in the world, a messaging app is the most used app overall.

Messaging App Demographics

In general, messaging apps are especially popular among junior smartphone owners. In the US, 42% of smartphone users inbetween the ages of 18-29 use messaging apps. And three in ten online smartphone users utilize general messaging apps, like Whatsapp, Viber, or Kik.

As the customer journey evolves and becomes more fragmented across networks and devices, there’s a real chance for marketers to reach junior audiences on the device of their choice, and on the network of their choice.

Which is exactly what Facebook is banking on with Messenger ads.

Part Two:

What is Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger is a free mobile messaging and talk app for smartphones that lets people send text messages, hold group talks, send and receive money, share photos or movies, and even make voice calls to their Facebook friends. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in February that WhatsApp serves as a replacement for SMS services, whereas Messenger aims to be a more “expressive and rich environment” with a broad range of content.

For businesses, Messenger is harshly two years old. At the two thousand fifteen F8 conference, Facebook unveiled a fresh Messenger feature to bring businesses on the platform with the objective of enhancing how people and businesses communicate. Since then there are now more than one billion messages sent each month inbetween customers and businesses.

Plus, Messenger gives Facebook another way to own users’ time. The average user spends over fifty minutes a day scrolling and interacting on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot of time. However, there are only twenty four hours in a day, and the average person sleeps for 8.8 of them. That means more than 1/16 of the average user’s waking time is spent on a Facebook possessed platform.

What was once just a feature within Facebook is now one of the world’s most popular mobile messaging app services.

Messenger Stats & Growth

The undeterred rise in usage of Facebook Messenger resumes from over 1.Two billion active users that’s ⅙ of the global population. 88% of online adults are a member of at least one of Facebook’s four main services: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram.

Pic Credit: Facebook

And according to Facebook’s two thousand sixteen Q4 report, there are four hundred million Facebook Messenger users using voice and movie talk on the app each month.

Here are a few more staggering stats Facebook hasn’t been bashful about sharing.

• • • • 10% of all Voice over IP (VoIP) calls made globally take place within Messenger
      • 17 billion photos are distributed by Messenger each month
      • 22 million GIFs collective every day, the equivalent of two hundred fifty four GIFs per 2nd

Picture Credit: Facebook

This graph from Statista presents the number of Facebook Messenger users in the United States from two thousand fourteen to 2020. In 2015, 90.Four million U.S. mobile phone users accessed the messaging app to communicate. This figure is projected to grow to 139.Two million users in 2020.

Over the last year, we’ve seen Facebook look for ways to keep customers and shareholders glad and engaged. They continuously roll out fresh features, many copied from Snapchat, keeping the platform fresh and users actively engaged. They introduced Messenger Ads in Q4 two thousand sixteen hinting at their ambition to carve out another revenue stream similar to Instagram.

Facebook Messenger Ads

Messenger ads provide marketers another avenue to commence a conversation. And there’s a real business case to be made here as customers become more interested in using Facebook Messenger to make online purchases. Statista reports eighty four percent of millennial respondents are willing to connect their PayPal account to Facebook Messenger in order to use conversational commerce.

Two Types of Messenger Ads + one Closed Beta

Presently, there are two types of Messenger ads available to advertisers with another one in closed beta.

1. Send People to Messenger (Direction) – use Messenger ads to have your leads initiate the conversation with your business.
2. Send Ads to People on Messenger (Placement)
3. BETA: Testing Home Screen Ads (see example below)

Messenger BETA: Home Screen Ads

How to Create Facebook Messenger Ads

There are presently two types of Messenger Ads available. Let’s walk through how to set up each type of ad.

Send People to Messenger (Direction)

Send People to Messenger ads emerge in the News Feed with a call-to-action button that opens a Messenger conversation. It’s a a unique way to commence a conversation and provide a personalized practice for your customers or potential customers.

Send People to Messenger News Feed Ads

Here’s how to get embarked.

1) Choose the Traffic objective (Note: This may emerge as “Send people to your website” for some advertisers).

Two) Choose your campaign name and click Proceed.

Trio) Choose your audience, budget and News Feed placements (Note: You cannot use Instagram as a placement option when selecting Messenger as a destination).

Four) At the ad level, choose your format. You can choose Carousel, Single Picture, Single Movie or Slideshow format.

Five) Choose the Page you want to connect.

6) Choose Messenger as your destination.

7) Type a welcome message. When people click on your ad, they will automatically be directed to Messenger and receive a copy of your ad and the welcome message.

8) Select your call to act. I’d recommend Send Message so the user understands.

9) After you’ve reviewed your ad, click Place Order.

Keep in mind: Your Send People to Messenger ad won’t show up to people who don’t have the Messenger app.

Send Sponsored Messages to People on Messenger (Placement)

Now let’s set up the other type of Message Ad available to advertisers.

Send Sponsored Messages to People on Messenger

1) Choose the Traffic objective (Note: This may show up as Send people to your website for some advertisers).

Two) Type in your campaign name and click Proceed.

Trio) Choose your budget.

Four) Choose your audience. Keep in mind that you can reach people who’ve messaged your page.

Five) For placement choose Messenger. Note: selecting Messenger will turn off all the other placements.

6) At the ad level, choose your format. The option presently available is the Single Picture format

7) Choose a website destination URL.

8) Write your headline, text and link description.

9) Once you’re glad with the ad, click Place Order.

Messenger Ads Campaign Ideas

There are some indeed interesting use cases from companies that have experimented with Messenger ads and chatbots. For example, Digital Marketer ran a very successful campaign that generated 500% ROI in three days.

Or Nordstrom’s Messenger chatbot that asked a series of questions about user preferences, which users could reaction right in the app. Depending on the input, the chatbot would then suggest them some bounty ideas, specifically picked for them. Rather than relying on customers to interact with your website, these examples showcase innovative ways to stay engaged with customers on a preferred platform and device.

Another way you could employ Messenger ads is to send out coupons or discounts. Below ranks the types of advertising and promotions that consumers in the United States are willing to receive via Facebook Messenger as of 2016, sorted by age group.

A total of fifty two percent of Generation X survey respondents stated they were open to receive notifications of store sales upon injecting a store via Facebook Messenger.

There are very extraordinaire stats and ad placements. Right now, there’s a thick chance for early adopters to take advantage of Messenger before it gets ruined by spammy advertisers or before your audience gets fully turned off Messenger ads. Now’s the time to experiment!

Part Trio:

Messenger Ads + Talk Bots = Automated Gold

Chatbots have taken off big time and two thousand seventeen has been tipped to be the year they budge into mass adoption. There are now more than 100k of them on Facebook Messenger. This growth is reflected in the enhancing popularity of messaging apps, which are growing swifter than social networks and fueling the rise of chatbots in the process.

According to Chatbots Magazine, there are several global trends working together to make two thousand seventeen the year of chatbots.

• Mobile messenger dominance
• App tiredness
• Support for chatbots by Facebook, Microsoft and other leaders
• Dramatic reduction in chatbot development costs

A chatbot (brief for talk robot) is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with a human user in natural language, understands the intent of the user, and sends a response based on business rules and data of the organization.

I’m not talking about AI or Machine Learning. Think of talk bots like email marketing, but through messaging apps. People’s behaviors are switching and marketers will need to adapt to stay relevant. It’s like embarking an email list when email became a thing. Or kicking off a podcast ten years ago. Those that are very first to the game

Beerud Sheth, founder and CEO of cloud messaging platform Gupshup, wrote an article on VentureBeat and said,

“We’re in the midst of a once-in-a-decade paradigm shift. Messaging is the fresh platform, and bots are the fresh apps. The shift radically switches end-user practices and developer frameworks and inevitably will switch business models, how we monetize, and how we advertise.”

Petite businesses without budgets for developers can experiment with codeless talk bot builders. These contraptions turn a company’s frequently asked questions, like hours and location, into automatic replies on Messenger.

Here is a List of a Few Free Talk Bots to Get You Commenced

• ManyChat – Visual bot builder for Facebook Messenger with broadcasts, analytics, scheduled posting and many other features
• Chatfuel – A bot platform for creating an AI chatbot on Facebook. Learn how to create a Facebook message bot quickly and lightly, no coding required.
• Botsify – Create an AI chatbot without code
• OnSequel – Create media and entertainment bots without writing code to engage the 3B+ users on messaging apps.

We personally love ManyChat because it is (a) free (b) doesn’t require any coding, and (c) super user friendly.

You might be wondering how you could employ a bot for your business. Below are a few ways businesses are presently implementing to engage with their audiences.

Examples of when you could use them

• Payments
• Customer Support
• Product Search
• Personalize yet automated responses
• Content
• Coupons
• Demos

You might also be thinking that this would never work for my company. You may be right! Below are a few industries that will benefit the most from chatbots.

Sync Messenger Ads with Your Chatbot

Once you get your chatbot created it’s time to integrate it with your Messenger Ads campaign. We suggest taking some time to map out the messaging flow from our audience all the way to the desired outcome.

The key here to figure out what act you want the user to take once they click Send Message. Within the ad set up, Facebook provides the option to include an automated welcome which is ideal for kick embarking a conversation and controlling where you want to take your audience.

We’re testing a few options with our integration into Manychat. Very first one is getting access to CRO eBook. Once someone clicks through from the ad they’ll see a welcome message that says, “Hi there! Looking to get your free CRO eBook? Just type “ebook” below and we’ll send it right over!”

If they type in “ebook” after the welcome message then will see this message.

Pretty awesome! The user was able to get an eBook without leaving a platform they’re convenient with.

How to Set Up Keyword Sequences

Keyword sequences work off of a “if this then that” type of logic. Example, if this “keyword” then “perform this act.”

For our eBook Messenger Ads, we input if the user types “ebook” then message them the eBook.

When someone typed in this keyword is automatically kicked off the eBook delivery sequence as seen in the example above. All of this was done using Facebook Messenger Ads plus a chatbot keyword sequence to supply our CRO eBook.

This is only scraping the surface of what you can accomplish with chatbots. You can create advanced customer journeys by varying the act and prize. Here all the options Manychat offers based on a specific keyword. From here you can automate the journey with “if this then that” logic into the desired response.

You can see that you could send an picture, file, movie, or a list with more options. The possibilities of this powerful automation are a lot like email nurture campaigns. It’s like a choose your own escapade for the user as they go after the map you created.

PART four AdStage Case Explore (coming soon)

We’re diving into Messenger Ads and chatbots over the next six weeks. We’ll share our learnings and results at some point in June.

Looking For a Better Way to Examine Your PPC Data?

With AdStage Report it’s effortless to stay on top of results and share them with your team.

Cut hours of manual reporting time and produce the flawless, branded report.

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Messenger Ads – The AdStage Blog

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Messenger Ads

Here at AdStage we’re indeed excited to experiment with Facebook Messenger ads. Chatbots have taken off big time and two thousand seventeen has been tipped to be the year they budge into mass adoption. There are now over 100,00 of them on Facebook Messenger. This growth is reflected in the enhancing popularity of messaging apps, which are growing swifter than social networks and fueling the rise of chatbots in the process.

Marketing is all about (a) finding your target audience and (b) communicating how your product or service can solve their problem. Which is why companies need to market through these messaging apps.

Why? People LOVE using Messaging apps and they choose to use it to communicate with people we love. We iMessage our significant other. Facebook Messenger with our friends. Slack with our team. So let’s market to people where they presently are.

We’ve put together this guide to walk you through the ins and outs of how to set up them up and get the best spectacle.

How to Navigate This Facebook Messenger Ads Guide

This guide to messenger ads is violated down into four main parts. Feel free to skip to the section that is most relevant to your needs.

Part four – AdStage Case Examine & Results (coming in June)

Want to get an alert when Part four comes out? Give us your address and we’ll shoot you an email as soon as it’s ready!

Part 1:

Let’s face it most people use their smartphones as their primary PC. This reliance on mobile phones grows in lockstep with our desire for constant and instant communication with family members, friends, and even work colleagues.

Inject messaging apps. Mobile messaging apps are exploding and are one of the greatest marketing trends in 2017. According to Business Insider, “the combined user base of the top four talk apps is larger than the combined user base of the top four social networks.”

Their exponential growth is largely due to their rich services and features, from free text messaging, to voice and movie calling, group talks, stickers to convey moods, and even photo and file sharing. Now add falling data package prices and cheaper smartphones and it’s effortless to track the boom from traditional calling to SMS to social messaging apps.

The Popularity of Messaging Apps

There are several networks in the messaging app ecosystem. As for the most popular network, it truly depends on what you’re measuring and geographic location.

In the battle of the messaging services, Facebook Messenger (65%) has a lead over WhatsApp (56%) for membership, but WhatsApp is virtually level for visitors/users. WeChat is absolutely superior in China; over 90% have an account.

According to a examine of global internet users from GlobalWebIndex in 2015, Facebook Messenger was the most used messaging app with 37% of those surveyed using it, followed by WhatsApp (33%), Skype (21%), Line (10%), and Google Hangouts (9%). Almost half (49.3%) of mobile users in North America and 43.4% of those in Western Europe will use messaging apps this year.

The MEF Mobile Messaging Survey 2016 indexes the messaging habits of almost six thousand respondents across nine countries worldwide as shown below.

eMarketer’s latest report predicted Messenger will reach 105.Two million active daily users in the U.S by the end of 2016. That figure represents 40% of mobile users, making Facebook Messenger the leading over-the-top (OTT) mobile messaging app in the U.S. OTT messaging apps work over an Internet connection and not the SMS network like iMessage, which has boosted their popularity with international users.

SimilarWeb conducted a probe using Android data from one hundred eighty seven countries and were able to determine the most popular messaging app all over the world (minus iPhone users).

While they’re consolidating under a few key players, in almost every country in the world, a messaging app is the most used app overall.

Messaging App Demographics

In general, messaging apps are especially popular among junior smartphone owners. In the US, 42% of smartphone users inbetween the ages of 18-29 use messaging apps. And three in ten online smartphone users utilize general messaging apps, like Whatsapp, Viber, or Kik.

As the customer journey evolves and becomes more fragmented across networks and devices, there’s a real chance for marketers to reach junior audiences on the device of their choice, and on the network of their choice.

Which is exactly what Facebook is banking on with Messenger ads.

Part Two:

What is Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger is a free mobile messaging and talk app for smartphones that lets people send text messages, hold group talks, send and receive money, share photos or movies, and even make voice calls to their Facebook friends. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in February that WhatsApp serves as a replacement for SMS services, whereas Messenger aims to be a more “expressive and rich environment” with a broad range of content.

For businesses, Messenger is harshly two years old. At the two thousand fifteen F8 conference, Facebook unveiled a fresh Messenger feature to bring businesses on the platform with the aim of enhancing how people and businesses communicate. Since then there are now more than one billion messages sent each month inbetween customers and businesses.

Plus, Messenger gives Facebook another way to own users’ time. The average user spends over fifty minutes a day scrolling and interacting on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot of time. However, there are only twenty four hours in a day, and the average person sleeps for 8.8 of them. That means more than 1/16 of the average user’s waking time is spent on a Facebook possessed platform.

What was once just a feature within Facebook is now one of the world’s most popular mobile messaging app services.

Messenger Stats & Growth

The undeterred rise in usage of Facebook Messenger proceeds from over 1.Two billion active users that’s ⅙ of the global population. 88% of online adults are a member of at least one of Facebook’s four main services: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram.

Pic Credit: Facebook

And according to Facebook’s two thousand sixteen Q4 report, there are four hundred million Facebook Messenger users using voice and movie talk on the app each month.

Here are a few more staggering stats Facebook hasn’t been bashful about sharing.

• • • • 10% of all Voice over IP (VoIP) calls made globally take place within Messenger
      • 17 billion photos are distributed by Messenger each month
      • 22 million GIFs collective every day, the equivalent of two hundred fifty four GIFs per 2nd

Picture Credit: Facebook

This graph from Statista presents the number of Facebook Messenger users in the United States from two thousand fourteen to 2020. In 2015, 90.Four million U.S. mobile phone users accessed the messaging app to communicate. This figure is projected to grow to 139.Two million users in 2020.

Over the last year, we’ve seen Facebook look for ways to keep customers and shareholders glad and engaged. They continuously roll out fresh features, many copied from Snapchat, keeping the platform fresh and users actively engaged. They introduced Messenger Ads in Q4 two thousand sixteen hinting at their ambition to carve out another revenue stream similar to Instagram.

Facebook Messenger Ads

Messenger ads provide marketers another avenue to begin a conversation. And there’s a real business case to be made here as customers become more interested in using Facebook Messenger to make online purchases. Statista reports eighty four percent of millennial respondents are willing to connect their PayPal account to Facebook Messenger in order to use conversational commerce.

Two Types of Messenger Ads + one Closed Beta

Presently, there are two types of Messenger ads available to advertisers with another one in closed beta.

1. Send People to Messenger (Direction) – use Messenger ads to have your leads initiate the conversation with your business.
2. Send Ads to People on Messenger (Placement)
3. BETA: Testing Home Screen Ads (see example below)

Messenger BETA: Home Screen Ads

How to Create Facebook Messenger Ads

There are presently two types of Messenger Ads available. Let’s walk through how to set up each type of ad.

Send People to Messenger (Direction)

Send People to Messenger ads show up in the News Feed with a call-to-action button that opens a Messenger conversation. It’s a a unique way to begin a conversation and provide a personalized practice for your customers or potential customers.

Send People to Messenger News Feed Ads

Here’s how to get embarked.

1) Choose the Traffic objective (Note: This may show up as “Send people to your website” for some advertisers).

Two) Choose your campaign name and click Proceed.

Three) Choose your audience, budget and News Feed placements (Note: You cannot use Instagram as a placement option when selecting Messenger as a destination).

Four) At the ad level, choose your format. You can choose Carousel, Single Pic, Single Movie or Slideshow format.

Five) Choose the Page you want to connect.

6) Choose Messenger as your destination.

7) Type a welcome message. When people click on your ad, they will automatically be directed to Messenger and receive a copy of your ad and the welcome message.

8) Select your call to act. I’d recommend Send Message so the user understands.

9) After you’ve reviewed your ad, click Place Order.

Keep in mind: Your Send People to Messenger ad won’t emerge to people who don’t have the Messenger app.

Send Sponsored Messages to People on Messenger (Placement)

Now let’s set up the other type of Message Ad available to advertisers.

Send Sponsored Messages to People on Messenger

1) Choose the Traffic objective (Note: This may emerge as Send people to your website for some advertisers).

Two) Type in your campaign name and click Proceed.

Three) Choose your budget.

Four) Choose your audience. Keep in mind that you can reach people who’ve messaged your page.

Five) For placement choose Messenger. Note: selecting Messenger will turn off all the other placements.

6) At the ad level, choose your format. The option presently available is the Single Pic format

7) Choose a website destination URL.

8) Write your headline, text and link description.

9) Once you’re blessed with the ad, click Place Order.

Messenger Ads Campaign Ideas

There are some indeed interesting use cases from companies that have experimented with Messenger ads and chatbots. For example, Digital Marketer ran a very successful campaign that generated 500% ROI in three days.

Or Nordstrom’s Messenger chatbot that asked a series of questions about user preferences, which users could response right in the app. Depending on the input, the chatbot would then suggest them some bounty ideas, specifically picked for them. Rather than relying on customers to interact with your website, these examples showcase innovative ways to stay engaged with customers on a preferred platform and device.

Another way you could employ Messenger ads is to send out coupons or discounts. Below ranks the types of advertising and promotions that consumers in the United States are willing to receive via Facebook Messenger as of 2016, sorted by age group.

A total of fifty two percent of Generation X survey respondents stated they were open to receive notifications of store sales upon injecting a store via Facebook Messenger.

There are very awesome stats and ad placements. Right now, there’s a big chance for early adopters to take advantage of Messenger before it gets ruined by spammy advertisers or before your audience gets entirely turned off Messenger ads. Now’s the time to experiment!

Part Three:

Messenger Ads + Talk Bots = Automated Gold

Chatbots have taken off big time and two thousand seventeen has been tipped to be the year they budge into mass adoption. There are now more than 100k of them on Facebook Messenger. This growth is reflected in the enhancing popularity of messaging apps, which are growing swifter than social networks and fueling the rise of chatbots in the process.

According to Chatbots Magazine, there are several global trends working together to make two thousand seventeen the year of chatbots.

• Mobile messenger supremacy
• App exhaustion
• Support for chatbots by Facebook, Microsoft and other leaders
• Dramatic reduction in chatbot development costs

A chatbot (brief for talk robot) is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with a human user in natural language, understands the intent of the user, and sends a response based on business rules and data of the organization.

I’m not talking about AI or Machine Learning. Think of talk bots like email marketing, but through messaging apps. People’s behaviors are switching and marketers will need to adapt to stay relevant. It’s like kicking off an email list when email became a thing. Or beginning a podcast ten years ago. Those that are very first to the game

Beerud Sheth, founder and CEO of cloud messaging platform Gupshup, wrote an article on VentureBeat and said,

“We’re in the midst of a once-in-a-decade paradigm shift. Messaging is the fresh platform, and bots are the fresh apps. The shift radically switches end-user practices and developer frameworks and inevitably will switch business models, how we monetize, and how we advertise.”

Puny businesses without budgets for developers can experiment with codeless talk bot builders. These instruments turn a company’s frequently asked questions, like hours and location, into automatic replies on Messenger.

Here is a List of a Few Free Talk Bots to Get You Commenced

• ManyChat – Visual bot builder for Facebook Messenger with broadcasts, analytics, scheduled posting and many other features
• Chatfuel – A bot platform for creating an AI chatbot on Facebook. Learn how to create a Facebook message bot quickly and lightly, no coding required.
• Botsify – Create an AI chatbot without code
• OnSequel – Create media and entertainment bots without writing code to engage the 3B+ users on messaging apps.

We personally love ManyChat because it is (a) free (b) doesn’t require any coding, and (c) super user friendly.

You might be wondering how you could employ a bot for your business. Below are a few ways businesses are presently implementing to engage with their audiences.

Examples of when you could use them

• Payments
• Customer Support
• Product Search
• Personalize yet automated responses
• Content
• Coupons
• Demos

You might also be thinking that this would never work for my company. You may be right! Below are a few industries that will benefit the most from chatbots.

Sync Messenger Ads with Your Chatbot

Once you get your chatbot created it’s time to integrate it with your Messenger Ads campaign. We suggest taking some time to map out the messaging flow from our audience all the way to the desired outcome.

The key here to figure out what act you want the user to take once they click Send Message. Within the ad set up, Facebook provides the option to include an automated welcome which is flawless for kick beginning a conversation and controlling where you want to take your audience.

We’re testing a few options with our integration into Manychat. Very first one is getting access to CRO eBook. Once someone clicks through from the ad they’ll see a welcome message that says, “Hi there! Looking to get your free CRO eBook? Just type “ebook” below and we’ll send it right over!”

If they type in “ebook” after the welcome message then will see this message.

Pretty awesome! The user was able to get an eBook without leaving a platform they’re comfy with.

How to Set Up Keyword Sequences

Keyword sequences work off of a “if this then that” type of logic. Example, if this “keyword” then “perform this act.”

For our eBook Messenger Ads, we input if the user types “ebook” then message them the eBook.

When someone typed in this keyword is automatically kicked off the eBook delivery sequence as seen in the example above. All of this was done using Facebook Messenger Ads plus a chatbot keyword sequence to produce our CRO eBook.

This is only scraping the surface of what you can accomplish with chatbots. You can create advanced customer journeys by varying the act and prize. Here all the options Manychat offers based on a specific keyword. From here you can automate the journey with “if this then that” logic into the desired response.

You can see that you could send an pic, file, movie, or a list with more options. The possibilities of this powerful automation are a lot like email nurture campaigns. It’s like a choose your own venture for the user as they go after the map you created.

PART four AdStage Case Investigate (coming soon)

We’re diving into Messenger Ads and chatbots over the next six weeks. We’ll share our learnings and results at some point in June.

Looking For a Better Way to Examine Your PPC Data?

With AdStage Report it’s effortless to stay on top of results and share them with your team.

Cut hours of manual reporting time and produce the flawless, branded report.

Related video: