Welcome

Last week, our team joined Meta in New York City for a day of uncovering actionable tools and strategies to unleash efficiency across all aspects of our strategy. If one thing is certain in 2023, maximizing efficiency should be a top priority in your strategy to reach your consumers within a field of competition and over-saturation of platforms. In 2023, Meta has done exactly this – focusing on exploring innovative strategies and tactics for maximizing efficiencies in marketing campaigns through performance innovations in the platform, prioritizing AI and how it can help further your efficiency and connection with your consumer, and lastly, enabling the next generation of technological advances and where our products and features are headed. So, without further ado, let’s dive into this year’s Meta Agency Summit recap:

Performance Innovations and What’s Working Now

Back in June, Meta introduced their performance best 5 practices to help marketers leverage new products on the platform. Below is a quick summary of the performance 5 framework to increase performance and what’s working now:

1. Simplify your account structure and put ad creative in one central campaign – by leveraging account simplification by consolidating ad creatives into one central campaign, you can enhance the learning phase and leverage AI for improved ad performance. An example from Lele Sadoughi demonstrates a 41% increase in purchases and a 1.2x higher return on ad spend through account simplification.
2. Use automation tools to optimize campaigns –  the framework promotes the use of automation tools from Meta’s Advantage suite to streamline campaign setup, citing Ogee’s success with a 28% increase in ROAS and a 25% decrease in customer acquisition costs using Advantage+ shopping campaigns.
3. Differentiate your creative by audience – Marketers are shifting from mass messaging to delivering tailored and relevant messages to specific audiences, recognizing the value in resonance with customer needs. Going beyond messaging, creative can be diversified in other ways such as creative type (video, static, etc.), look and feel (product photo, graphic, etc.), and more. Different people respond differently to creatives and Meta can expand it’s reach in your audience pool by serving creative that converts more with a different subset of your target audience. By diversifying ad creative, as exemplified by Wild Alaskan’s health-conscious approach targeting a younger demographic, marketers can significantly reduce costs per acquisition (CPA) and drive increased purchases, as evidenced by a 43% CPA reduction and 1.8x more purchases.
4. Utilize the Conversion API to improve campaign performance and measurement – Businesses can enhance campaign performance and measurement by establishing a direct connection between their marketing data and Meta through the Conversions API, emphasizing the importance of maintaining high-quality event matching. Ridge, an example cited, integrated the Conversions API and Meta Pixel, achieving an impressive event match quality (EMQ) score of 8.5, ultimately resulting in more conversions and reduced costs per result, showcasing the value of this approach.
5. Measure your campaign with Conversion Lift, A/B testing and marketing mix modeling – Businesses are advised to employ various measurement techniques, including Conversion Lift, marketing mix modeling, and A/B testing, to gain a comprehensive understanding of their campaign performance and effectiveness. The case of BrüMate illustrates the potential misattribution and undercrediting of conversions in the context of Meta ads, emphasizing the importance of robust measurement practices, and the framework “Performance 5” aims to guide clients toward achieving success in 2023 and beyond through these strategies.

Here are some extra tips we learned last week about the Performance 5 framework:

• Use measurement to your advantage and look at multiple sources of measurement to tell a more holistic story. The clearer the measurement framework, the more nimble and efficient you can be with your strategy.
• Test budgets and don’t have a performance goal tied to it. By breaking this out from the overall budget, you can increase the test efficiency by letting machine learning do its things. You’ll want to back off performance to let testing do its magic and overall judge performance after eight weeks to see true impact.

Maximize Client Performance with First-Party Data

In the realm of digital advertising, understanding a client’s current standing with first-party data is crucial. This begins by evaluating their permissions and legal basis for data sharing, followed by a thorough assessment of their tech stack to ensure seamless data-sharing capabilities. The key is to leverage this data effectively, capitalizing on tools like CAPI (Conversion API) and platform pixels, which have shown a remarkable 13% decrease in cost per acquisition (CPA). Moreover, CAPI’s role as a gateway for multiple accounts offers flexibility, allowing agencies to configure it for advertisers. Additionally, to fuel AI-driven campaigns effectively, marketers should shift their focus to Event Match Quality scores, redundancy in setups, deduplication, and real-time data freshness. The goal is to empower Meta’s AI with robust first-party data, unleashing its potential for enhanced ad targeting, personalization, and measurement.

To maximize client performance with first-party data, Meta focused on three areas: ad targeting, personalization and measurement.

• Crucial ad targeting for first-party data includes leveraging offline conversion data for retargeting, understanding lifetime value, and automating audience targeting are vital strategies. Embracing Advantage + enables advertisers to use their input data for suggestions while granting Facebook the freedom to employ data signals for optimal targeting.
• Personalization will enhance first-party data through creative optimization, automation of placements and destinations, and budget management.
• Measurement will be the key to maximizing first-party data with Conversion Lift, brand lift assessments, and A/B testing serving as valuable tools. Conversion Lift, in particular, unveils the incremental halo effect of various marketing efforts, providing deeper insights into campaign performance. By aligning with these strategic areas, advertisers can harness the full potential of their first-party data and Meta’s AI capabilities to drive more effective and efficient advertising campaigns.

Voice of Products

The biggest and MOST IMPORTANT takeaway we should all take away from this summit surfaced during this product section that focused on AI creative and reels. The reason for the importance is simple – in today’s world instead of focusing on audience, placement, person etc., as marketers we should be focusing on outcome and let machine learning find the former. That being said, Creative is the new targeting as 56% of auction outcomes come back to creative. The reasoning behind this is based on the over saturation of ads and platforms consumers are experiencing based on their time spent on digital channels. Therefore to make an impact and reach your consumer, your creative must be as efficient and effective as possible.
We could talk about how reels can make a huge difference and impact on your campaigns, but instead we’ll save our breath and let Meta do the talking here.

Insights Driven Creative

Leaning into how crucial creative is to your strategy – Meta covered the most important levers within your creative and how you should be using your insights to optimize them. The significance of creative fatigue in marketing is becoming a larger issue and cannot be overstated, with action rate being the primary indicator of its impact. Approaching creative with a keen eye on mitigating anti-fatigue is essential. Advertisers must ensure that their content remains fresh, differentiated, and non-repetitive to avoid creative fatigue, which can lead to a significant 60% drop in conversions after just four repeated exposures. Understanding fatigue in terms of how frequently an audience encounters an ad throughout their lifetime is critical, and Meta representatives can assist in tracking this over time. (Shameless plug – but for more information on our POV on creative fatigue, check out our blog here)

Additionally, diverse creative strategies are encouraged to maximize performance, as too-similar creatives risk being lumped together by Facebook’s algorithms, limiting reach and efficiency. The adoption of differentiated creative can yield a remarkable 9% incremental reach and a 32% increase in efficiency, allowing advertisers to expand their audience without significantly increasing spending. Additionally, the power of native Reels in driving higher conversion rates by 29% highlights the importance of resonant and engaging content. Testing creative variations continuously is emphasized since predicting what will work can be unpredictable, sometimes requiring a willingness to allocate spend to different creatives to assess their effectiveness. Finally, reaching out to Meta representatives for reports on creative fatigue, lifetime frequency, and the current differentiation level of creatives can provide valuable insights for optimizing advertising campaigns.

Summit Wrap Up

We’re grateful to maintain our premier partnership status with Meta and to participate in the Meta 2023 Agency Summit. We eagerly anticipate testing Meta’s new product releases and implementing their strategic recommendations to enhance our partners’ performance and remain current in our AI-driven media collaborations. But for now, stay tuned for more updates on the platform, and remember (we didn’t say it first) but CREATIVE is the new king in performance marketing and will be the difference maker in groundbreaking industry advancements and marketing success stories in the future.

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