Mise en Place in performance marketing

You often hear that always-on campaigns make more sense and work better for companies. But what is actually behind it?

Markus Siuda

You probably know the term Mise enPlace from gastronomy. In properly run restaurants, this is an absolute matter of course and an integral part of the daily work.

Before I tell you why this is also important for your online performance, let’s take a quick look at the definition of the term (according to Wikipedia):

"The Mise en Place (french, "putting in place") is, for example, in gastronomy the preparation of a workplace, be it in the kitchen, in the restaurant, on the floor or at the reception.

Perfect mise- en place work in the various rooms and areas is an essential prerequisite for a smooth serving process and thus increases the productivity of the service staff while reducing stress. The mise en-place works essentially depend on the meal or event. In order to facilitate the Mise en Place, checklists are used in many houses. (...)"

In short, it’s all about preparing everything perfectly before the rush starts. This is the only way to work quickly, cleanly and efficiently at a high quality level. The goal is therefore to look after the guests optimally, so that they also like to come back.

Doesn’t it just sound obvious that this approach also makes great sense for your campaigns? So prepare everything cleanly before interactions, website visits, inquiries and purchases really start?

Absolutely! In my opinion, this is even essential and not only prevents potential dangers (and there are some of them), but also increases performance at the same time. And that’s what it’s supposed to be about right?

Let’s take a closer look. To make the idea a little more understandable, I will show you a small checklist of important things that you should definitely consider in the campaign preparation. As far as we are concerned, no campaign starts until my team has worked on these points exactly.

1. The analysis of permissions

To start with, it is important to check whether all permissions are assigned correctly. In concrete terms, this means that the owner of the respective Instagram and Facebook page and the respective Business Manager is exclusively the client.

"It is not uncommon for us to see that customers are put under pressure with the release of the authorizations because they have not secured all rights from the beginning."

Your respective performance agency should only be granted authorizations that are required for the implementation of their work. It is important that the agency is only invited toyour Business Manager as a “partner”. This is the only way you can easily separate the two business managers again if the collaboration ends.

In this context, it is also important to understand that a classic social media agency usually requires different rights than a performance specialist. A performance agency runs campaigns with the aim of achieving maximum results – i.e. measurable performance indicators. A social media agency is usually more concerned with the “playback” of your social media presence, i.e. the publication of creative postings and community management. We call this the “Top of Funnel”. Strictly speaking, the work of a performance specialist usually begins where the work of a social media agency ends. Neither specialty is more important than the other. Both are relevant to success and are not mutually exclusive.

2. Checking the pixel setup

In the next step, you should check whether the Facebook pixel has been installed technically correctly on your website. Here it is important to understand that the integration of the standard pixel code does not open up nearly all the possibilities that exist in tracking.

For example, additional standard conversions can be programmed for specific “events” or, in the case of online shops, many additional values can also be transferred.

It is particularly important for online shops to have clean value tracking for purchases and a Facebook product catalogue. This enables you or your performance agency to perform dynamic re-targeting – i.e. customers are only shown content that really interests them.

3. Control of target groups

It is particularly important to prepare the target groups meticulously. They will determine the later campaign success and this is where most mistakes are made.

These include, on the one hand, the custom audiences :

Check here exactly which audiences could make sense for your campaign. It’s not always just about who I want to address. The biggest mistakes are made in who not to approach. In order to have a good basis for a proper campaign structure, Custom Audiences must be created very precisely.

A small example of a “mini funnel”

Promotion of organic (= newsfeed) postings on Facebook
Retargeting via product video for everyone who interacted with the postings
Video retargeting with a link click product ad for everyone who has seen the video at least to 20%
Retargeting to everyone who visited the site but didn’t add the product to their cart
Retargeting to everyone who added the product to their cart but didn’t start the checkout process
Retargeting to everyone who started the checkout process but didn’t complete the purchase (Abandoned Cart Recovery)
Re-targeting to everyone who bought – Advertising suitable products (cross-sell)

In order for such ” full funnel strategies ” to work, the target groups must be carefully planned, programmed, named and excluded from one another. It’s not a matter of a few minutes. This is exact planning, preparation and the topic that is mostly ignored, although by far the greatest potential lies dormant here.

In addition, the target groups must be prepared in the targeting for the start:

It is important to understand that this setup may change on an ongoing basis. Target groups are always tested and optimized against each other. For the start, however, one question is of central importance:

"Who is my target group and with what message can I reach these people in order to be perceived as valuable?"

It is particularly important here not to fire into the market “too sharply”, but to select larger target groups so that the algorithm can access enough data to make optimizations. I will certainly share details on this in a separate post in the future.

4. Definition of the campaign structure

I always recommend building campaigns according to the full funnel principle. This way you always have an overview and can say exactly which campaigns are performing best.

It could look like this:

001 Top of Funnel – XXXXXX
002 Middle of Funnel – XXXXX
003 Bottom of Funnel – XXXXX

This designation could be the basis. In addition, it makes sense to include the name of the performance specialist, the campaign period and the goal.

For example, this could look like this:

001 – COR – Top of Funnel – Reach (Q1/20)
002 – COR – Middle of Funnel – Traffic (Q1/20)
003 – COR – Bottom of Funnel – Purchase (Q1/20)

At the target group level, it is essential that it is clear at first glance which target group has been programmed. It saves a lot of time to get a clear idea of which target group is behind it already in the naming. Information on GEO, gender, age, interests or, alternatively, whether it is a custom audience is particularly important.

At the ad level, the following naming parameters can make a lot of sense:

Targeting or retargeting
Placement
Advertising media (video, carousel, image…)
Static or dynamic
Version (#number) for different mutations (clear assignment)

5. Excluded Audiences

As I mentioned before, it is particularly important to also exclude target groups. What does it mean exactly?

For example, if I want to generate registrations for a VIP program, I should never address existing VIP members.
If I want to sell a product, I should never address people who have only recently bought this product.
If I want to generate leads, I shouldn’t continue using the same campaign for contacts I’ve made.

Surely you have already experienced the case that you have bought a product online and then been followed by this supplier for weeks. This is simply due to a bad campaign setup. You just weren’t excluded from the target audience after your purchase. How did you feel about that? I suspect you weren’t exactly happy about it, if not annoyed. You have probably even considered whether you would like to shop there again in the future.

6. Checking the pixel events for optimization

You should look at how many events already exist in the pixel. With this information you can then decide when it makes sense to optimize for this event. Basically, Facebook recommends that you should optimize campaigns for this result from 50 weekly conversion events.

If you haven’t already been running campaigns for a long time, that means you should climb the conversion ladder first. That means from website visits, to product page visits, to shopping carts, to started purchase processes up to purchases.. The Facebook pixel can only carry out reliable optimizations if it has enough data.

7. Conclusion

For a seasoned performance marketer, these are absolute basics. Nonetheless, we see that in practice these basics are very seldom made complete. Time is often saved during setup. Saving at this point will inevitably cost you a lot of money afterwards.

"The cost of optimal campaign preparation is disproportionate to the additional revenue opportunities it creates. Be it real costs or time investment."

If you only pay attention to these few points in campaign planning – but all the more precisely – this will drastically increase the chance of a profitable campaign. In addition, you can also use this overview to better assess whether your agency or your specialist knows what he or she is doing.

With this in mind, I wish you good sales and a profitable business!

Markus Siuda

Markus Siuda founded his first association at the age of 15, with which he independently gained his first experience in online marketing. At that time, it was to promote his own events and his band. Over the years, he was able to gain a lot of experience in agencies and in marketing in startups and large companies. In 2014, he finally founded the agency Corvis with his brother Martin H. Siuda with the goal of using his knowledge for the measurable success of his clients. Markus Siuda combines advertising expertise with marketing know-how and online marketing skills to create a unique performance concept.

Mise en Place in performance marketing

You often hear that always-on campaigns make more sense and work better for companies. But what is actually behind it?

Markus Siuda

Table of contents

1. The analysis of permissions

2. Checking the pixel setup

3. Control of target groups

These include, on the one hand, the custom audiences :

A small example of a “mini funnel”

In addition, the target groups must be prepared in the targeting for the start:

4. Definition of the campaign structure

It could look like this:

For example, this could look like this:

At the ad level, the following naming parameters can make a lot of sense:

5. Excluded Audiences

6. Checking the pixel events for optimization

7. Conclusion

For a seasoned performance marketer, these are absolute basics. Nonetheless, we see that in practice these basics are very seldom made complete. Time is often saved during setup. Saving at this point will inevitably cost you a lot of money afterwards.

With this in mind, I wish you good sales and a profitable business!

Markus Siuda

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