What My Last Co-op at a Social Media Ad Agency Was Like

This is it folks! After five years, I’ve completed my fourth and final co-op placement and my Marketing Management Co-op degree. This past semester I worked as an account coordinator at AdParlor (external link) . AdParlor works with a variety of different companies across the globe and focuses specifically on social media ads. This includes paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, Google and more!

 This co-op experience has been unlike anything I’ve done before as most marketing positions I’ve had have focused on organic marketing, which is marketing that happens naturally over time without money behind it. For example, organic marketing may be generating content for the company’s social media accounts and paid marketing may include creating an ad for a consumer’s feed. However, paid ads can sometimes be created to look like organic marketing.

The difference between the two types of marketing is huge, and the experience I had at AdParlor gave me a whole new insight into the marketing industry. I thought I would share three things I got to learn how to do in this position:

Creating Social Media Ad Targeting

Have you ever been scrolling on Instagram and seen an ad for something that you’ve been thinking about buying? Did you wonder how they knew you were the right person for that ad? This has always interested me, and I finally got to learn how the back end of this works at AdParlor. This all boils down to targeting certain audiences. Of course, users can be targeted by demographics such as age and gender, but also more specific topics such as mothers of young kids or certain job titles like interior designers for example. You can even target users that have already visited brand websites or have an interest in certain topics. I found it extremely interesting to see the difference in clicks and purchases ads can have when the right people are targeted.

Building Social Media Ads

From my first week on the job, I learned how to build the actual ads that consumers see on their Facebook feeds and Instagram stories. The ads build includes getting copy and images from the creative team to input, but also a link for users to be directed to and a call to action to push consumers to click such as “subscribe” or “sign up.” Something I never knew before working in this  position is that it’s best practice to launch a variety of different images and copy variations at the beginning of a campaign to test how it performs and understand how to maximize performance, which means getting purchases for the lowest cost.

Analyzing Performance

Speaking of maximizing performance, I learned that to reach top performance with social media ads it is important to look at the numbers in the ad account dashboards routinely. When doing so it is important to look and see if adjustments for the budgets are necessary, and if ads need to be paused. This is because most social media platforms, like Facebook, price their ads based on a bidding system. This means that certain audiences and times of day on certain days may be more expensive or cheaper than others.

Overall, after all my learnings I couldn’t get enough, and I’ve decided to stay at AdParlor over the summer. As this caps off my co-op experience, I am extremely grateful to have been a part of the co-op program as the experience has allowed me to hit the ground running and work right after graduation at AdParlor. I will also start a new chapter in the Bell rotational graduate leadership program (external link, opens in new window)  in September.