On Wednesday 14th July, our expert marketing panel hosted the latest episode in our digital masterclass series: “Clearing in a cookieless world”. Some of the key takeaways from the session included:

• The crumble of third party cookies and the arrival of iOS 14.5 heralds a new privacy centric world that shakes digital advertising to its core. You will need to get creative with the way you gather data. We showed attendees some tips to do this.
• First party data will thrive in the post third party cookie world. It has unrivalled value and relevance, and offers deep insight and differentiation opportunities for your Clearing campaigns. Think about your my account or my application portals and you can authenticate and re authenticate users.
• Engage your audiences in the platform – think video, instant experiences and make the most of the retargeting capabilities that exist within the apps.

A huge thank you to everyone who attended and submitted a number of thought-provoking questions…we’ve rounded some of them and our panel’s responses up, so you can digest them at your leisure.

If you want to watch an on-demand recording of the masterclass, we’ve embedded the YouTube video below too.

1. How do you set up the Facebook Conversions API?

There are a number of ways to do it. One of the most straightforward methods is to use Zapier. It’s very robust and is by far the easiest way of setting up the Facebook Conversions API, and will save you a heap of time!

2. Who would you target the Clearing web forms to on Facebook / Instagram?

When targeting the Clearing web forms, it can be to your core audience of prospective students, but we would recommend having a separate one for your influencer audience too. We found that targeting parents with lead forms results in a much stronger conversion rate. These audiences are highly invested in getting their children into education.

3. Would you suggest retargeting based on certain web pages and those who have visited in the last 30 days ?

Yes, absolutely. Of course, retargeting people who have visited certain pages on your website will require 3rd party data, but it is something that we do recommend, as well as retargeting people from your Facebook page. Hitting your audience on both sides will ensure that you’re reaching as many high-intent people as possible.

In terms of that 30-day window…30 days is probably the optimum as long as you’ve got the volume there. In a general sense, over the course of the whole recruitment cycle, as we know, this can be a year and a half for some students, so, in some situations, it could be better to extend that to 90 or 180 days.

4. What’s the one thing we should do in the next 4 weeks to really help us hit our targets?

First and foremost, make sure you have the infrastructure in place to collect enquiries and they are super prevalent amongst that Clearing content that you have on your site. It’s also about creating call lists as well on the day of Clearing. You’re in a great position if you’ve got a list of 150 (or more) phone numbers that you know you can call up immediately.

Again, from that data that you’ve collected, use it to build custom audiences within the platforms and get them set up as early as possible so that they can populate before key times. Finally, our last big recommendation is to make sure you get that Facebook API installed, just to make sure, again, that you’re collecting all of the data that you need before you actually need to use it.

5. Will the changes to Facebook effect promoted posts based on the interests of users, e.g. Facebook accounts they’re following?

The short answer is no, because when you’re using interest audiences, you’re using Facebook’s proprietary data, but the potential issue with that is that so many other advertisers are going to be using those data sets as well. This will increase competition and likely drive up CPMs. What we would recommend is utilising your own data to target and make lookalikes of those core audience segments.

That’s a wrap on our Q&A session, if you have any queries in regards to your “Clearing in a cookieless world” campaigns, get in touch to book a free 30 minute ‘cookieless tracking’ consultation with our experts. As promised the full masterclass is below: