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The secret of Sadiq Khan’s super effective Facebook ads

London Mayor Sadiq Khan faced a tough re-election fight in 2020 and in the few months leading up to election day, his team pulled out all the stops to connect with voters.

Lockdown cancelled any visits, hustings and in person events -- so social media emerged as the primary battleground in Sadiq Khan’s campaign to retain the mayoralty.

The campaign team’s priority was to drive home the impact that Sadiq’s policies had had over  his first term. They looked at the facts and figures and found some impressive city-wide stats. But the team wondered whether people’s attention would be captured more easily by talking about wins at the local level.

It’s a bit like unleashing the power of local, but rapidly and at scale. With a few clicks, Pinpoint can create hundreds of different versions of the same fantastic ad, customised to specific constituencies, regions, cities, local candidates -- or on any other custom data you can think of.


KEY STATISTICS

  • 44% increase in Click Through Rate

  • Cost Per Click halved: 74p down to just 38p


That’s why they decided to experiment with Pinpoint. It’s a bit like mail merge for ads -- you can create a template ad, then merge in local names, facts, figures or faces.

Pinpoint helped us share personalised and relevant content with our target voters, enabling us to show them exactly what Sadiq has delivered for their local area - such as record numbers of new council homes.

Sarah Brown, Sadiq for London 2021

Pinpoint generates ads for every local area you’ve selected and sets them up for you in Facebook Ad Manager, with audiences targeted and ready to go.

You can create hundreds of local ads in a few minutes. Sadiq’s team only needed to create 32 ads at a time, one for each London borough. They set up tests to see whether campaign ads that referenced local names, places and statistics within London outperformed ads that were pitched at a London-wide level.

The results were dramatic. Over the three month test period, January to March 2021, standard London-wide versions of campaign ads relating to council homes had a cost per click of 74p.

They garnered 125,417 impressions with a click through rate of 0.9%. Pinpoint’s localised versions of the same ads had a cost per click of 38p with 200,098 impressions and a click through rate of 1.3%

Even an ad that simply used the name of the local area saw greater engagement.

It’s a bit like unleashing the power of local, but rapidly and at scale. With a few clicks, Pinpoint can create hundreds of different versions of the same fantastic ad, customised to specific constituencies, regions, cities, local candidates -- or on any other custom data you can think of.

So why not take a leaf out of the Sadiq campaign’s social media playbook and go local with Pinpoint?