Happy Sunday! Let's talk about everybody's favorite topic today, Meta ads. This has been an uh... interesting year for advertisers on the platform. Last year was pretty amazing, with the introduction of ASC and a few other changes advertisers were feeling really bullish on the platform after a very challenging post iOS period. Meta somehow rebuilt attribution with modeling post iOS, and they don't get nearly enough credit for it. Meta stock was back ripping and all was well in our worlds.
This year has been a little different though. In late Q1 there were some confirmed bugs, and then there has been a lot of unconfirmed wonkyness this tear. Now I truly do think a lot of the poor performance advertisers are seeing is consumer confidence and macro, but not 100% of it. We've seen more bugs and weird things happening this year. I've heard some rumors that there is a lot of model testing going on that is hitting accounts, which hopefully means this is a necessary tough period until we "get out of learning" and wind up with a more robust outcome. I can only hope.
All in all, I truly believe Meta is the best channel for the majority of advertisers. It's the majority of our spend and it's usually the most efficient channel. They also have by far the best support for us advertisers of all the channels. So i'm net long Meta, but no channel is without challenges.
To me, the biggest issue with Meta is that the platform is not very good at finding new users anymore, and is instead doing way more retargeting than it should be. Exclusions and identity resolution, especially across devices, are pretty terrible post iOS. No matter how hard yo try to exclude customers and site visitors, a good portion of your "prospecting" spend is going to leak to existing site visitors and customers. This is even worse in ASC; but it's not exclusive to it.
This is why so many brands have dropped dedicated retargeting campaigns. I often see them having a lower click based attribution, with little to no incrementality. Despite this, Meta can still be an incredibly effective channel and is still the best one to focus on for the majority of brands. Here are some things we've done to try to work around this challenge.
Compare % of new visitors and a true new customer ROAS in Northbeam.
This is where having a first-party data source like Northbeam can be really helpful. In Meta you can only see total purchases. But if you see a great ROAS in Meta you don't know the breakdown of new versus returning, especially in ASC. Being able to break that down can be super helpful. We make sure to not over-index on ASC and use the new customer roas as north star when optimizing, as well as % of new sessions.
Optimze For A New Customer Custom Event
This has actually made a huge impact for us. We use Blotout as our CAPI/server-side tracking. No idea why we can't do this natively in Meta, but with CAPI you can create a custom event just for new customers and optimize towards that. There are pros and cons of this; but overall this has increase our % of new visits from Meta and overall efficnecy. So I'd reccomend trying it.
Run Top Of Funnel On Meta
I think this depends on what spend level you're at, but at a certain point it makes a lot of sense to run non-conversion optimized spend on Meta. I think a lot of people try to test lower and mid funnel events when branching out from purchase events because they think it is the most similar and closest to being in market. But I've seen way more success with going all the way up funnel. If you're losing that purchase intent, you might as well go after the cheapest CPMs and reach as many people as possible. We optimize for Reach. You need specific creatives for this and need to hit enough frequency, but overtime this can relly work. Note you won't see any click based attribution, so you need other ways to measure the effectiveness. I am partial to geo-lift experiments with Haus.
Gun to my head, I'd say after $50m in annual revenue is when brands should begin investing in Meta reach campaigns. We're gonna try out some video view objectives as well, and some mid funnel but I'd reccomend starting out with Reach.
Run Top Of Funnel Off Meta
A proper media mix is more important than ever to keep bringing new people into your funnel. If meta isn't great at bringing in new people, you need other ways to bring people in. Because Meta is still great at converting them or finding in-marker buyers, but you just need a different way of bringing them in. Each brand is going to have their own top of funnel. Influencer, PR, Affiliate, TV, Youtube, and OOH are all very good options. In a perfect world you can use Media Mix Modeling or Haus to find which TOF source and at what % of your media mix. If it doesn't make sense for you yet, use post purchase surveys and just throw 5-10% of your media mix into these channels. Shoot to break even at best because there will be lots of "immesaurable" benefits from them.
Product Launches And New Offers
Despite any challenges, we're still growing insanely fast and spending much more on Meta year over year. The times when we are able to spend the most and have the best returns are when we have newness flowing through our ad account. Marketers talk about ad creatives and landing pages a lot, but offers reign supreme. If you can have et new product launches or categories, those will have the biggest impact. If not, you can great creative with bundles, goft with purchases, and the like and still see success.
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Now don't get me wrong. I am the biggest fan of Meta there is. It is by far and away the best channel for driving growth, and it's actually amazing how much better it is than every other channel. But it is not without it's issues as of late, which I want you to be aware of so you can work around them.
I hope you have a great week and 4th of July!
-Cody