Earlier this year, Nextdoor launched the Nextdoor Ad Center (NAC), a self-serve advertising platform. With NAC, businesses can utilize location and interest targeting, demographic segmentation, track campaigns in real-time, and more.
Since this platform is new, you may be trying to figure out the best practices for your ads. Keep reading to get advice.
Creating an ad using Nextdoor Ad Center is simple. There are three ad types you can run: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Once you choose the ad type, you can select the placements for your ad. There are three placement options, and each ad placement has a different average click-through rate (CTR). The placement options are:
You’ll also be able to add location and demographic targeting. With location targeting, you can target your audience based on:
You can bulk upload up to 700 postal codes for your Nextdoor ad targeting as well. You can also choose to exclude areas based on the same categories. With demographic targeting, you can target your audience based on:
For all of the targeting options, you can choose to target all neighbors instead of targeting specific groups as well.
When you’ve finished adding the targeting information, you’ll set the delivery of your ad, including:
Finally, schedule the start and end date of your ad.
The last steps are to add your company’s logo, ad image, copy, and landing page URL.
Your ideal budget may vary based on your audience size, but it is one of the most important aspects of your ad. In NAC, you enter a daily budget. We’ll talk about this more in tip three, but your daily budget needs to be a certain amount more than your bid. If you have a small daily budget, your bid will have to be smaller, and you’ll get fewer impressions and engagement on your ad.
It’s going to be hard to get engagement on your ad if your audience is too small. Include enough locations in your targeting that you can narrow the audience down by demographic targeting and still have enough neighbors to see the ad. Starting with fewer locations will make it harder to narrow down your audience.
As mentioned above, your daily budget needs to be a certain amount higher than your bid. Your bid-to-budget ratio should be 10 times, but if that’s not possible, the minimum is 5 times. If your CPM is $10, which is the recommended minimum bid amount, the minimum daily budget should be $50. If you can’t afford to have a $50-per-day budget, your bid will have to be lower.
Since the recommended ad group bid is $10 and the daily budget should be at least 5 times more than that, the recommended ad group budget is $50 per day. In one ad group, you can run multiple ads and the budget will be split between them.
It may be better for your ad to avoid demographic targeting. Nextdoor users have the option to enter their age, gender, and interests. These are not required for users to have a profile, so not everyone chooses to enter this information. When you use that to target a group, if someone hasn’t put in that info, they will automatically be removed from your targeting. Your audience size will significantly decrease if the users who don’t add this information are automatically removed.
This is an easy and inexpensive way to put your ad ahead of others. Most advertisers bid at a flat rate, whether CPM or CPC. When you add even one penny to your bid and make it $10.01, your ad will be put above the ads that have a bid of $10.
If you have a large overall budget, start your ad group with a $100 to $200 daily budget. Decrease this budget every two days if your daily budget is getting met. Since the recommended bid-to-budget ratio is 5 to 10 times your bid, if you have a bid of $10, you’ll be putting your ad in a great position with a $100 daily budget.
Let’s take a look at two of our clients to compare. One client is an HVAC company in Ohio, and the other is a window company in North Carolina.
Our Ohio client has a budget of $1,000 per month and a small audience reach based on ZIP code, age, income, and homeownership.
You can see the estimated audience for this client is 26,000 to 39,000.
This client targets 177 ZIP codes, people ages 35 to 64, with a household income of $64,000 and up, and includes all homeownership levels.
The ad type was Conversion and ran in the Newsfeed:
This client has a pixel installed to track conversions, so you’ll see there were two conversions tracked. Pixels aren’t always the most accurate way to track your leads because they currently only support forms and not calls, so businesses may miss out on qualified leads.
Our North Carolina client also has a budget of $1,000 per month and a smaller audience reach based on ZIP code, age, income, and homeownership.
You can see the estimated audience for this client is 9,900 to 15,000.
This client targets 14 ZIP codes, people ages 25 and older, with a household income of $96,000 and up, and has a homeownership level of 51% and up.
The ad type was Consideration and also ran in the Newsfeed:
Both of these clients do have “small” audiences, which you can identify by the alert under the audience size in each image.
Even though they have the same budget, you can see that they performed differently. The Ohio client has a larger audience than the North Carolina client but received comparable impressions and the same number of clicks.
The average CTR for an ad in the Newsfeed placement is 0.45% to 0.55%.
Our Ohio client had a CTR at 0.50%, while our North Carolina client had a CTR at 0.47%.
The Nextdoor Ad Center is a great platform to increase awareness of your brand, bring engagement to your product, and turn neighbors into clients. To get a leg up on your competitors when you start running your ads, follow our seven Nextdoor advertising tips or send us a message to learn more about our Nextdoor advertising services.
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