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Proprietary Bidding System: Petron Bids

The strength of unique know-how and its application to our partner businesses forms one of the fundamental pillars of our operations. One successful example of where we have applied this know-how is in the area of bidding on social media. Together with our colleagues from Petron Group, we developed our own bidding system that integrates data from Facebook and Google Analytics and uses the Facebook API to manage bidding and budgeting in our partners' campaigns.

THE FIRST STEP TO SUCCESS - PROPER SYSTEM SETUP

Before launching any tool, it is crucial to ensure that we have done everything to secure the full functionality of the system.

Important points include:

  • Check Facebook Pixel and Conversions API: For proper measurement, it is essential to correctly set up events such as page load, product view, add to cart, initiate checkout, enter payment info, and purchase.
  • Check the product catalog: If products are automatically loaded from the website into the catalog using an XML or CSV feed (which is the most common case), it is important to verify that all products are correctly uploaded. It is also necessary to check the match of product identifiers in the feed with the product identifiers in the pixel.
  • Check website functionality: It may seem obvious, but often it is not. It is necessary to ensure that the order process is simple and that customers have various payment methods and delivery options available. Essentially, do everything necessary for a user-friendly e-shop.

PROPER LOGIC AND SETUP OF THE FACEBOOK API

From the very beginning, we spent dozens of hours per month searching for the right logic for the rules within the Facebook Ads platform. However, the problem was that if we wanted to track campaign performance in Google Analytics, we couldn't use only data from Facebook Ads.

Other challenges we had to address included:

  • Working with the learning phase, which means we could only make significant changes once every 4 days.
  • Limiting changes in bids and budgets to a maximum of 20% to avoid triggering the learning phase again.
  • Working with results from Facebook and Google Analytics based on different time windows (3, 7, and 14 days).

Once we had the right logic set up, we needed to devise a system to apply it. Thanks to the Facebook API, we could connect external systems to Facebook Ads and manage social campaigns in real time based on analysis results. We later named this system PETRON BIDS.

RESULTS

Let the numbers speak for the success of Petron Bids:

Segment: Furniture in Slovakia

Year-on-year comparison:

  • Increase in traffic from Facebook: +291%
  • Increase in the number of transactions from Facebook: +165%
  • Year-on-year revenue growth from Facebook: +231%
  • Decrease in PNO (number of new orders) in Google Analytics: only -0.51%

Segment: Fashion in Slovakia

Year-on-year comparison:

  • Increase in traffic from Facebook: +35%
  • Increase in the number of transactions from Facebook: +165%
  • Year-on-year revenue growth from Facebook: +188%
  • Decrease in PNO in Google Analytics: from 38.42% to 23.26%

Segment: Gifts in the Czech Republic

Year-on-year comparison:

  • Increase in traffic from Facebook: +29%
  • Increase in the number of transactions from Facebook: +99%
  • Year-on-year revenue growth from Facebook: +78%
  • Decrease in PNO in Google Analytics: from 17.43% to 18.65%

Segment: Furniture in the Czech Republic

Year-on-year comparison:

  • Increase in traffic from Facebook: +11%
  • Increase in the number of transactions from Facebook: +68%
  • Year-on-year revenue growth from Facebook: +93%
  • Increase in PNO in Google Analytics: only +0.78%

I hope this case study helped you expand your business with new ideas. If you have any additional questions, feel free to contact me. If you want to learn more about the world of online marketing, don't forget to follow me on Facebook and subscribe to YouTube.