The “Taste Graph” is Payvment‘s secret weapon. Facebook’s top ecommerce platform has spent two years finding out what Facebook users Like and buy, and starting today its 165,000 merchants can use it to auto-target ad campaigns. See many businesses don’t have know how to A/B test, target, or manage Facebook ad bids, but now they just set their total budget, and Payvment pre-populates creative from their store, optimizes bids, and show ads to people interested in similar products.
The result is ad campaigns that get 25% better click through rates than those bought through Facebook’s self-serve platform. By making Facebook ads easier and more effective for the massive long-tail of small businesses, Payvment will boost Facebook’s revenu and take a cut for itself.
Facebook ads are tough for small businesses because they either need huge budgets upwards of $10,000 a month to pay for a enterprise level Ads API tool or service, or they have to go it alone in the manual self-serve tool that makes efficient data-driven testing almost impossible. That’s why a Payvment survey found that 60% of the sellers who use its tools to set up ecommerce stores on their Facebook Pages had never used Facebook ads.
That’s why Payvment spent the last year and part of its $7.5 million in funding from Blue Run Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and 500 Startups to build its “one-click Facebook ad buying service”. It takes all the heavy-lifting out of running serious Facebook ad campaigns so merchants can focus on running their stores while still paying to bring in qualified new customers.
Payvment’s CEO Christian Taylor exclaims “We’re going to be the the one to kick down the door to small businesses using Facebook ads!”
Merchants select a product they want to advertise, and Payvment grabs one of the already-uploaded photos, the product description, and intelligently creates a Facebook ad complete with image, headline, and copy. It analyzes the merchant’s store and who have Liked, bought, browsed that product, finds people who’ve interacted with similar products on its other stores, and shows them the ad.
By leveraging this taste graph, ad viewers are much more likely to make a purchase. Store owners can then track their campaign performance in an analytics dashboard. In exchange for the service, Payvment takes a small percentage of a merchant’s total ad spend.
Facebook should be thankful. Payvment is effectively solving a gaping hole in its ad offering for small businesses. Taylor tells me “If you look at the history of AdSense and AdWords, the majority of spend is by small businesses. Sheryl came from Google. Facebook knows [how important] small business will be to ad spend.”
While hundreds of big brands spend millions on ad campaigns, hundreds of thousands of small businesses buying thousand-dollar campaigns can add up. Facebook needs the sum to grow its revenue and satisfy investors, and Payvment is ready to lay the groundwork.