In part one of social media transit marketing we talked about developing the parameters of your campaign, in part two we got into nitty gritty of designing a social media transit marketing campaign on Facebook. In the conclusion we’ll look at how well our campaign worked within the metrics that we defined. It’ll be hard to measure specifically how many people saw one of our ads and considered using Amtrak, but we can get a good measure of how many people we impacted.
Just to recap, our goal when designing this campaign was to spend only a small amount of money to reach a specific group that would be inclined to take Amtrak home for the holidays within Illinois. In this case, we determined that college students represented both a group that would likely commute over the winter break and a group ideally reached through social media.
Using Facebook’s great interactive platform, we found approximately 13,200 people that were college students in the right age and demographic pattern for using Amtrak service to get home for the holidays. We then decided we wanted to spend no more than $500 overall and no more than $50 a day. Here’s what happened:
Below you can see what our last week looked like (we cut out on the 22nd, assuming most people will have gone home by then). We started out strong, but our bid-per-click was pretty low so Facebook stopped showing our ad as frequently. To give Facebook the incentive to keep running our ad we upped our bid to an average of $5.00 per click.
We were able to do this because our big goal was to get people to think about service, not necessarily buy a ticket right then and there. If you’re looking to get clicks or care only about views you can adjust your bid differently (see part one). You can see below that our plan worked with a sudden increase in page views (and clicks).
Overall, the campaign was a great success, with an average of only $1.99 per click spent and a total of $45.76 for 23 clicks and 43,398 views. If you do the math that’s 948 views for each $0.01 spent. And unlike newspaper ads where you have no control over who views it, we know for certain that each view was to someone that we wanted to hit.
Here is the overall summary:
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