To convert Facebook users into sellers on OLX we had run ads with the selling message however these ads were not delivering results.

Facebook as a platform has largely been seen to cater to E-Commerce players and drive sales through it. Thereby there was a high skew of behaviour of users to buy products driven through Facebook ads. Thus, the bigger problem lay in transforming the habit of Facebook users from a “buy-only” centric behaviour to a Sell centric behaviour.

That's when we realised that we needed to provide the Facebook audience with a CTA that would help them interact & engage with our banner and finally convert into a seller- posting ads on OLX.

There came the inception of the Sell Now CTA, we passed months convincing Facebook and surpassing engineering hurdles. Facebook finally released this button exclusively to us to beta test.

Execution : For this custom call to action (CTA) from Facebook required rounds of engineering efforts. The Facebook product solutions team went across several iterations to launch this CTA as they also had to abide by the policies of user experience.

Timeline:

The initial stage of discussion began in December 2014. By the end of February 2015, the process got finalized as manual appending of the CTA to OLX's individual accaount from Facebook's backend.

The 1st phase was planned for entire April 1st to 30th, 2015

2nd phase ran from 10th to 29th May.

Scale:

Budget for phase 1 was $12000 and phase 2 ran with 2 different ads for 10 days and the budget allocated was $17000 each.

From phase 1 to phase 2 we had to work with approximately 150 creatives, all being monitored and optimised at the same time.

Results of Phase 1 Test:

• CTR’s improved by 3%

• Cost per conversion reduced by 49%

• Conversion rate improved by 83%

On Higher scale of budgets in Phase 2 results were as follows:

• CTR improved by 24%

• Cost per conversion reduced by 24%

• Conversion rate improved by 56%

Response Rate:

We increased the volume of sellers by 60% on OLX's platform through the addition of this button.

Change in behaviour:

Through this experiment we had marked a new behaviour for Facebook's audience of 'Selling' who were predominantly consuming and engaging with the message of buying and learning more though Facebook. The button was so successful that not only will it be launched for all classifieds player in India, but also it will be launched and readily available globally.