Fail of the Week: Facebook Messenger Ads + Chat Bots

I kicked off last week riding high and practically skipping into the office.

Excited about the awesome new video series we were launching and interested to see how our new client campaign had performed over the weekend, particularly with our test Facebook Messenger Ads.  Then my work day was like, ERRRRRRR. Hold up. We’ve got something fun for you. Yes, you’re correct if you’re realizing that my fail of the week hit me on a Monday. Talk about the Mondayest of Monday things to have happen.

Before you go getting on your high horse thinking to yourself, ‘well then they must just be bad at their job’ let’s pause. I say ‘fail of the week’ mainly as a funny, self-deprecating, even-the-playing-field phrase. I actually don’t believe in ‘fails’ because really all they end up being are learnings. Ok, now you’re thinking I’ve gone from failure to cheesy in about 15 seconds flat. But it’s true! Let me explain what I mean.

The Fail

First piece of this fail comes with the setup of our messenger ads. I had one campaign with 8 audience segments and 2 ad creatives per audience segment. I began crafting all my UTM campaign URLs and placing them within each ad creative and that’s when I began noticing several of my ads were wrong. The ad creative was missing and my copy was missing. Weird! I went to investigate, set my ads up again and then déjà vu, it happened again. So I began digging in more.

I realized that you couldn’t set up different CTAs within a single audience segment. Meaning, one ad couldn’t point leads to a URL while the other sent the lead a messenger bot response. So, I had to go back and rework my strategy. Instead of testing ad creative, I had to test specific audience segments with the messenger bot response. Moral of this story; if you would like to test out a new CTA in your ads, be sure to check out Facebook Blueprint or sites like THIS or THIS to make sure you have a full understanding of how that objective must be used.

We decided to test out the Facebook Messenger bot response ads because personal interaction and quick response time from a ‘human’ is a huge factor for their conversion funnel. Plus, here at Rogue Marketing we have a rule we live by and it’s the 80-15-5 rule. Which is that we plan a client campaign based around 80% of your budget goes toward proven vehicles and channels to yield the results the client wants, 15% of the campaign budget will go towards channels that may have not been utilized in past campaigns or just don’t have the right strategy behind them to show conversions right away but have been proven by a competitor and then 5% will be dedicated to emerging technologies and channels. And this is where the Facebook Messenger ads came to trial.

The Learning: Dōmo arigatō misutārobotto

Translation: Thank you very much, Mr. Robot.

Did you know that Messenger Bots are one of the first mainstream forms of Artificial Intelligence? I think Messenger Bots are amazing when utilized correctly and for this client and my fail, they helped me to create a conversion funnel instead of a dead end lead.

We went with the business messenger bot integration, Chatfuel. We set up a welcome message (which Facebook can do already, but that’s about as far as it goes). The welcome message would guide the lead through a series of prompted menus giving them pre-determined options based on the conversations we’re most likely to have through messenger for this particular client. The great part is that Chatfuel has analytics so we will be able to optimize our responses after 30-60 days based on our conversations, sales team feedback and conversions.

5 Key ‘Fail’ Learnings:

1. Facebook Messenger Ads must be set up at the Audience Segment level
2. Don’t have your Facebook Page’s auto-replay messages on if you set up a chatbot
3. A fail isn’t a fail if you learn from it
4. There are a multitude of chatbots out there that integrate with your Facebook Business page, here are 3 to try today:
   1. Chatfuel
   2. Botsify
   3. OnSequel

*Learn more about each in this post from Social Media Examiner.

5. Setting up a chatbot will take collaboration from all parties involved, from the marketing team to the sales team. You must anticipate your customer behavior and you must also know what your desired behavior is for them to take once you’ve got them.

So, this little ol’ fail maybe wasn’t even a fail after all? It was more of a classic case of, you don’t know what you don’t know, but if you’re willing to be a lifelong learner, then you will always be able to turn it into something of value for your client, business or at least yourself.

What ‘fail’ did you have this week?