Neighborhood Ad Center Demo

This is a demo of the Nextdoor Ad Center. To get started, visit this site, signup for an onboarding call and mention FOXWELL during onboarding for $300 in ad credits for any account you want to test on!

This content was produced in partnership with Nextdoor.

Andrew Foxwell: Hello, everybody, this is Andrew Foxwell and I have my buddy, Anthony here from Nextdoor, and he's going to walk us through the Nextdoor ad campaign platform. We're really excited about it; there's a lot of opportunity happening on Nextdoor right now, too, in terms of qualified people and qualified users. So before we even get into the creation of it, Anthony, do you want to talk about what kind of numbers we have on Nextdoor, and how qualified those people would be for direct response buyers?

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for having me, very excited to be here, very excited to introduce you to the Nextdoor Ad Center. In terms of just Nextdoor members, kind of what we're all about here. For those of you who aren't aware, Nextdoor is the platform to tap into neighborhoods that matter to you. From a member standpoint, we're in one in four households across the United States. We're in 11 global markets at this time, but this product is really focused in on U.S. targeting. But we are as a company in 11 global markets, but it's a great platform to reach that household decision maker in your target markets.

Andrew Foxwell: Fantastic. I mean, there's a lot of people there, I think the thing that's nice is that you can do city-specific, but you can also do national campaigns and target them that way, too. So there's incremental and a lot of different ways. But let's go ahead and just talk about it. So it's built similar to a lot of other ad platforms we see certainly. So a lot of the people that we're talking to are, you know, conversion, advertisers or direct response advertisers. So you have three different options on a campaign, why don't we go ahead and just get started there and then see what this campaign flow looks like?

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, absolutely. So this is our first iteration of a self serve campaign management platform. So historically, at Nextdoor, you either had to buy through manage services, or we had a local business suite of products. So this is really exciting time for us. And we're super excited to introduce you to this. So the very first thing that you see here is your campaign creation screen, really where you're diving in, first and foremost, your overall objective. Just like you mentioned, Andrew, this is going to look a lot of very similar to other platforms that you're seeing in the market. That's intentional, we want to make this an easy to use platform. So no, it doesn't make sense to completely reinvent the wheel here. But right where you're seeing right here, like I said, is where you're choosing your initial objective. So if you're looking at primarily drive, you know, brand awareness, or in your case with your partners, primarily conversion focus, so you want conversion focus, you can click on this and generate your conversion pixel to run the UI.

Andrew Foxwell: And I think it's important to mention too, that the pixel, as it stands now, is also going through a lot of changes, right that other things are going through with iOS14 updates. And so that'll change probably eventually over time of what we can report on, but we will still be able to obviously track with a conversion pixel in the pixels there for building pools and stuff like that, too. So that's there. So we have it now. And that's pretty easy thing to install.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Absolutely. And right from the UI itself, you'll be able to generate your unique pixel. And you'll also have implementation instructions. Now what you mentioned around this being kind of new for us here at Nextdoor, the overall platform has been live since June of last year, we launched this conversion pixel right before the holidays, back in December, is our kind of v1 of this pixel. So throughout this year, in addition to numerous just updates with the product, in general, this conversion pixel will also be getting additional features layered on as well as we continue to grow it.

Andrew Foxwell: Love it. Love it. So you go ahead and choose conversion, you get the pixel installed, and then what happens after that?

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, so from a pure functionality standpoint, this objection choosing really just populates the bid more commonly associated with that campaign objective. If you're seeing as I click on it, click on here, what you're noticing at the very bottom is the bid type that it's going to pre-populate. So if I were to click on awareness, it would pre-populate a CPM bid in the ad group section, or consideration or conversion will pre-populate a cost per click bid. Now, those are the two bid types available today, and we will most likely be expanding that as we get throughout the year. But now those are the two bid types that you could select at the ad group stage. So if I were to drill down here, we kind of already got, we don't have to go through the whole pixel generation, just know that that is right on where you see your pixel right here, you'll be able to create a unique one. Today, this pixel is single event tracking, and just click through attribution. Like I said, it will be going through numerous changes as we go through 2021, so we'll be really expanding upon that from a functionality standpoint as well.

Andrew Foxwell: Okay, cool, cool. Cool.

Anthony from Nextdoor: So let me give this campaign a name here. And then next we'll drop us into our ad group stage. So this is really where you're going to be focused in on your targeting. You didn't see moments ago that you can target the United States, or you can get as granular at the state city DMA or postal code level.

Andrew Foxwell: Nice. Yeah, I mean, that's super helpful in terms of different different cities within a certain geo, or whatever. Have you seen success on doing targeted versus more national campaigns or results in the conversion side been been similar?

Anthony from Nextdoor: I think when it comes to geo targeting, I wouldn't say there's a direct comparison between more broad or more targeted really, then the advertiser, when that comes into play more is the layering on of different audience segments. So if you are more targeting, say just a couple cities, my recommendation is to go more broad, from an audience perspective, knowing that at Nextdoor, you really have that ability to reach the household decision maker. That's what makes us a little bit different from other platforms, in terms of our audience, is that we tend to have that more mature audience. And really, like I said before, that household position.

Andrew Foxwell: We have some tests running now. One is the more specific and then once national, so we're kind of we're kind of testing it as well, to see which one which one works. We have a food delivery service, basically, that's city specific. So that one's running there and doing pretty good. So yeah, so you basically go and put in the ad group, put in a name on this, you choose a location, and then you can go age, gender. And then obviously a lot more options. Let's talk about some of those.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, absolutely. So the audience segments, you'll see a mix of first and third party data layered in here. So starting from the audience right at the top there, gender, age, household income, you'll see different layers. Here at Nextdoor, just from a pure overall national average standpoint, about $90,000 is our median household income, we tend to skew higher in household income, because we tend to skew higher in homeownership. So our national average from homeownership is 74%.

Andrew Foxwell: And is this first party or third party data on the household income?

Anthony from Nextdoor: Household income is third party. And then the next one, which is very unique to Nextdoor is homeownership. So one thing to keep in mind, this is another key differentiator from Nextdoor in the market is that we have address verified members. So everybody that comes onto the platform is verified to live where they say they live. So we're always targeting based on the individual's home location, not where their device is. And because we can back into where they live, we can also layer on census data to get an understanding of neighborhood homeownership. So what you're seeing in this section, and why you're seeing it broken out into four separate ranges, a good way to describe this is to put it into an example. So if you were targeting call it the state of California, wanted to target majority homeowners. This section right here is basically saying in the state of California, what neighborhoods you want to target based on the density of homeowners. So I want to target neighborhoods with the highest homeowners, I'm most likely going to out of the gate hit 51% to 75%, as well as 76 to 100%. And what this will mean is we're going to target neighborhoods within the state of California that has a density of homeowners within those ranges.

Andrew Foxwell: Got it. So just not a lot of renters?

Anthony from Nextdoor: Exactly. Now out of the gate, I most likely would include this 26 to 50% as well, because I wouldn't want to exclude neighborhoods where one and two members own their home. So this is a good place, you could always start with this, you could kind of remove it as you're seeing different, you know, leads coming into your funnel, the one I would look at if you're looking to exclude the communities that are primarily encompassed of renters is this zero to 25%?

Andrew Foxwell: Okay, cool. So it's just a way to differentiate, that's huge. I mean, it's a qualifier, and it's a quality assurance thing, almost to some degree of making sure that those are actually people that are going to spend some dough potentially, I think that's an interesting differentiator.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Absolutely. The other thing that you can let later on, in addition to audience targeting, you'll have device and you'll also have a wide range of interest categories that you can select from. So these will range from things like barbecue and grilling to, in this case, pet owners. So the example I'm kind of walking through right now is a pet brand. This is really where you could focus in on members that have raised their hand and said, "Hi, I own my I own a pet." Now, that's different. And the reason why I like to specify that is because not all members are raising their hand and telling us that they have a dog or they have a pet. A lot of these selections are made during the onboarding process, during you know, once they initially sign up. So as a best practice, I always recommend leveraging multiple ad groups for every one campaign, one that's focused more broadly. So this example, if you were targeting looking to target pet owners, maybe have a small budget in there for just pure geo targeting without layering in this interest segments, knowing that some of those members just didn't go into the next door platform and identify themselves as pet owners, and have that next ad group that's really focused in on those that have specifically raised their hand.

Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, I mean, I think it's similar to what we would do and other best practices with another platform, like, you know, we go through and do some broad some more specific targeting. But go ahead and hit that drop down again, if you would, so these are, these are things that are this is a mix of first and third party data, is that correct?

Anthony from Nextdoor: Correct. So it is a mix of first and third party. And one other thing that is we just layered this on just a few weeks ago, is these high affinity segments. So these segments are based off click model testing that we did. So in these industry buckets, these are encompassing of members that have been historically more likely to click on ads in those specific industries. So a great way for your performance advertisers to really get focused in on our member base in those industries that have been, you know, communicating a lot with ads in that specific industry.

Andrew Foxwell: Well, that's, that's also very good. And great data to have. Some good numbers as well. So it's a nice way to layer in some interests and some other demographics in there. And give it a shot for sure. So if you can click back on some of the high affinity stuff to scroll through some of that it gets really interesting. Finance, food, retail, there's a lot of people in direct response that have, you know, retail, so that's an interesting one, that's cool. It's good to see, good to know, good for people to play around with.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Absolutely, and I think those that are looking maybe in some Home Services space, we have a lot of advertisers that are in that industry. And it doesn't have to be the exact one if it's not home security, if it's just something to do with your home leverage all three of these these is going to give you the highest probability to breach those that already have expressed interest with other advertisers in these markets. Like I said, we did a little bit of the legwork for you guys and selected those members that have had based on click model testing that have been engaging with similar ads.

Andrew Foxwell: Cool. All right, well, let's, let's keep on rockin here, other things that we could, we could target. So so once we get to the interest when it comes to delivery and the budget. And let's talk about that a little bit.

Anthony from Nextdoor: So what I mentioned at the very beginning is that we have two bid types that you can select from cost per impression model and the second being and cost per click. Regardless of the objective that you selected. The very beginning, you could always change. This is definitely something I recommend testing with as someone that's new to the platform, maybe you want to start if you're very conversion focus, maybe you want to start with the CPC bid. However, if you're leveraging some of these high affinity segments, it might be worth testing a cost per impression model as well, as we've really done that quick model testing. So to get your most exposure, this is just a nice way to leverage both and test both to see what really is driving the most conversions for you. In addition to bid, you'll have your budget. Today, you can only you can put a daily budget in there, where you don't have the option to select a lifetime. So what you'll do is put say, $200 a day, and then you'll select your flight dates at the bottom.

Andrew Foxwell: Okay, so that would be $200. But that's per the ad group. So it's what it's like an ad set, basically. Yeah, and you can set set different budgets per ad group,

Anthony from Nextdoor: Correct. So every campaign will create two ad groups, one for the newsfeed placement and the second for that for sale and free placement of your overall daily budget, you can decide what percent you want allocated to each placement. So I always say maybe you want to start with the bulk of your ads in the newsfeed that newsfeed is the very first thing that you see when you log on to the platform. And the for sale and free section is our online marketplace. Now you can select any distribution or allocation of budget across these two, leverage this and you can kind of already do that for you. So say you want maybe all in the for sale and free for sale and free is a high conversion focused placement. Like I said, it is a marketplace. So based on your industry, it could be a really great placement where you'll potentially also see a little bit of cheaper cost from a bid perspective and overall delivery performance.

Andrew Foxwell: Can we talk a little bit about the for sale and free section so that's a segment on Nextdoor I mean, I've clicked on it on my own Nextdoor, that basically stuff is for sale and free. It's like, kind of like, it's obviously just a marketplace. And I mean, I think that ads would do pretty well there. So it's probably good to obviously test both. But, you know, starting in the news feed makes sense. But the for sale and free people might be more inclined, it's already looking to buy. Preliminarily, we're doing a split on ours right now. So we I don't have any data. But I know in the discussions you and I've had that the for sale and free and other tests you guys have done, too, with advertisers, it's done pretty well.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, it's definitely one recommendation that that I have, and that advertisers have seen success doing is leverage the newsfeed for kind of more of an awareness, focus, creative and copy where your personal inquiry could potentially be just very, very conversion focused. So it's a nice way to have one kind of campaign with two different objectives all within kind of the same group. Now in that for sale and resection, like you mentioned, it is an online marketplace, it's a place where members are going with buying intent. You'll see a wide range of products from home appliances, to cars for sale, there's there's just a wide range of different products. But what's great about it, and why it has such a high engagement, it is compared to you know, Facebook marketplace, or Craigslist, it's all localized. So everything that you're seeing in that for sale and free section, those items are all within a short radius of your actual physical home address. So a great way to kind of interact with your neighbors, get some new goods all within your backyard. So it definitely is one of our most engaged places on the platform.

Andrew Foxwell: Cool. And I neglected to mention earlier on the on the targeting thing, just to jump back on that. Currently there's no custom audiences are exclusions. But that's something that's on the roadmap, and it's coming. So that's something that I know, we'll probably get questions about. So I wanted to just mention that. That's something that's on the way.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Absolutely. So yeah, like I mentioned at the beginning, we've been live since June, our 2021 roadmap is quite something to see here. So we have a lot on our plate in this calendar year. We're super excited about everything we have coming. But exactly like you said, exclusion list, leveraging your own first party data, is something that you will soon have the ability to do. If we were to have this conversation about, you know, six months from now, and then most likely, it'll be in the product.

Andrew Foxwell: Cool. So jumping back to this, when I first came in here, we talked about the frequency cap, and a default was 20 impressions a week, which felt like a lot. But then because we look at things in a daily sometimes and (the frequency) is like two times a day, which might be a lot, so tell me why you guys set the default to 20, and what you recommend there?

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, so it is a drop down, you can customize this equal to 20 based on Facebook's three times per day, right? Yeah, we're just aligning very similar to what our customers are most used to across on their platform. So yeah, that's we're just quoting it in a in a weekly basis versus daily, so it looks high, but really it aligns with Facebook's as well.

Andrew Foxwell: Cool. And then you can set the schedule and and then get into the ad creation. Let's go ahead and do that.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, so the schedule, you can select, obviously, your your start and end date. And this is also where you could do some day parting. So say, you only want your ads to run on certain days of the week, or certain times within those days. This is where you can customize that. So say you only want your ads to run from 7PM to 8PM, this is something that you could layer on. So it's only delivering during the day and not kind of at night based on whatever market or industry that you're in.

Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, day parting isn't something people do a lot. They might eliminate, you know, middle of the night or something here and there. But we aren't doing that now, just trying to get some raw numbers on it. But it's nice to know that it's there for sure.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, definitely something you could you can leave out entirely or leverage if you already have some data from from previous campaigns and other platforms where you've seen the most success.

Andrew Foxwell: So definitely leverage. Let's go ahead and try to start creating an ad and see what that looks like.

Anthony from Nextdoor: So the very first thing that you'll notice is that today we only have one format. That being said, in about six to eight weeks. I hate to give a hard deadline when it comes to engineers' timelines, but we will be layering on video formats as well as carousel ads, which are the next two that are scheduled to go live. If I kind of go in here and I give my creative a name here, I'll select this display image. You will see that we provide you with some creative best practices directly in the UI. As I scroll down here, I'll be able to add my logo, add my creative.

Andrew Foxwell: And so this is like the icon associated with the name.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Exactly. So this is the logo image. And I'll show you exactly where this is going to be seen on the creative itself. I'm just kind of scrolling down here, just so you know, all creatives are saved in creative assets library. So any item that you use, you can always go back and leverage again, this import from Facebook's feature today is based off native posts. So if you're having some of your posting from your business page, on your on Facebook, you could leverage and import some of those assets directly. It will be as simple as copying the Ad link and importing that in. But today, it's just for native posts,

Andrew Foxwell: We we did some of it that way, when we got it going. And then other stuff, we just use the same creative, basically, that we've been using on Facebook, because it was, you know, Link post created, basically. So the only thing is we had to as you had to do there, some of the stuff we had was square and this stuff is cropped, to sort of the 1200 by 628. The older one, so other than that, it was fine, basically easy to go through.

Anthony from Nextdoor: This whole flow will will guide you throughout each part. And if you're missing, anything, it will notify you. So we'll make sure all those are all in there. Now I'm going in here. And what I want to touch on in this section is the use of dynamic fields. I did mention at the very beginning of this call that Nextdoor has address verified members because that we have that kind of information about where they live. So if you're doing a large-scale national campaign to really increase that ad relevancy to members, you could leverage dynamic fields.

Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, I love this, we're using it. So go ahead and show it show this is a great part about it.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Now let's go to the body text here. And this is where you could leverage now you can do this in the headline or the body text, it's completely up to you. It's as simple as adding these two curly brackets importing city, you could also do this at the neighborhood level. So where I've included city, you just typed a neighborhood that will instead of dynamically populating the city name, it will dynamically populate the neighborhood name. We recommend first testing the city name, because the city name remains consistent, whereas the neighborhood name may not (if it's newer). So depending on the time when that Nextdoor neighborhood was created, you know new developments they change names that kind of go through a rebrand themselves. So it could not resonate maybe to new members as it does for old members. It definitely is one I recommend testing first. But that that neighborhood one is a great way to really increase that ad relevancy as well.

Andrew Foxwell: Awesome, very cool. Easy to see easy to customize, easy to write, I like that. I like the headline to is nice and bold. So it gives you two CTAs basically above the image, which is nice.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, and one thing to note, and I'm going to throw out an offer here too. This is definitely something I recommend leveraging if you're doing any promotions for any of your campaigns, this is definitely something I would recommend. Now one thing I want you to note here is anywhere that you click as a member, so say I remember seeing this Lincoln Paws ad, if I were to click on the business name, the creative itself, or the call to action, you would be redirected to the business URL. So today, there is no redirecting to an internal Nextdoor business page. It'll all be redirecting to whatever you input into this business URL right here.

Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, it's a good amount of real estate, you're taking over for a pretty low price relative to other platforms. And, you know, the whole thing clicks through so it's nice

Anthony from Nextdoor: In terms of If you want to leverage UTM parameters, you would hard code those in directly into the business URLs section. Now one thing I want to note here is you're gonna see these two tabs. So right now what we just built was the newsfeed placement. Now, if you did say, a 50/50 split from your overall daily budget: newsfeed, and for sale and free, one thing that you're gonna have to do is click on this for sale and free section, and just make sure that the image looks okay. We're basically taking what you imported in the newsfeed placement and cropping it to meet the for sale and free spec. That being said, based on the creative, we may, you know, cut off a portion. So just to prevent your ads from being rejected and having to be researched and resubmitted. Just use these toggles right here, make sure everything is to your liking. This price or discount field, if you have a certain order or percent off, you could do the same thing that you put in the offer text here. Definitely something if you're running any promotions in this for sale and free section, we do see high engagement when there's a kind of a promotion or discount entered into this field.

Andrew Foxwell: Love it. Very, very cool. So once so then you continue and launch right from here, and that we can head into reporting after this. Right.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Exactly. Yeah. So what you're gonna see here a quick review and submit. We're moving really quickly right now, from a creative approval standpoint. During the week, we're looking at about four to six hours. And as of right now, like I said, we are still new, we don't yet have weekend support. So one thing just to just to note when you're putting in your campaigns, we are checking periodically over the weekend. But for the most part Monday through Friday, we're we're getting those approved within a four to six hour window.

Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, that was one thing that was a little different because it wasn't automated, but I liked it because it was sort of like a quality assurance test from a real person. So anyway, that felt good. And we were okay with that. And as long as we were prepared for it, and once we knew about it, so yeah, that was fine. You know, and launching stuff on the weekends is never a good idea. Anyway, really doing it during the week, it's better.

Anthony from Nextdoor: You don't need to stress ourselves out launching a new campaigns over the weekend. We got enough, right? This is supposed to be to relax. Awesome. So yeah, once you hit that Submit button here, this is where it will prompt for payment. Right now you'll just see credit card payment and directly in the UI. Now, once that is submitted, once we've started seeing delivery, this is what your dashboard will look like. So here is where you'll see all your data at the campaign ad groups and ads level. Now, one thing I want to note in the ad group section, so say you start running your campaign, you're seeing amazing delivery in the for sale and free section. Maybe it's outperforming for some reason, maybe it's just fits really well in that placement. And it's something that's really resonating and fitting naturally in there as well. Maybe you want to pause your newsfeed placement. This is where you could do that. So you could pause placements at any time using this live Status column. And then kind of go into this, the live ad group reallocate more budget in there. All of this can be done at any time throughout the life of your campaign. But just know that just how, however you built it during the initial campaign creation, you can always go in and edit that. The only things you cannot edit once you click Submit, is the bid type. So if you wanted to test, let's say you started in the cost per click model, but now you wanted to maybe test a week in with a cost per impression model, you just have to go back and create a new ad group, not necessarily starting from the beginning, just creating a new ad group. So it'd be as simple as just making sure that campaign is checked toggling to the ad group section and clicking Create new ad group.

Andrew Foxwell: Very cool. So within the reporting, you can customize different columns and things like that, kind of pull out whenever you want. And from we were looking at a lot of the default reporting, but you know, any other things to mention about the reporting side, in terms of customizing columns and things like that and reporting?

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yeah, so all we'll be layering on as we add more formats, will always be adding on the corresponding data points video will have completion rate. But for right now, this is the the data points that will live within the dashboard. We are totaling all this for you once your campaigns are live. We will,like I said, be layering on additional reporting throughout the year. Right now, if you wanted to turn off one of the columns you could do so. But for the most part this what you're seeing in the UI right now is the reporting that you're getting from the neighborhood ad center

Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, really good. Well, any other things to mention for the good of the order? I mean, this is a great little walkthrough for people. And I feel like it's, it's really helpful and, you know, great for them to see. To get them excited in terms of testing it on their own.

Anthony from Nextdoor: What I would end with is just because it's self serve does not mean that you're not without support. You have myself and my team from a sales and onboarding standpoint. We have account strategy teams to help you from an optimization standpoint. So we're super excited. We're getting a lot of great feedback in the market. So yeah, excited to have some new folks join us in this in this product.

Andrew Foxwell: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Anthony from Nextdoor: Yes. Thank you.