The 5 Must-Dos for Performance on FB and IG

INTRO

As a Disruptors Industry Manager, I lead Sales efforts for a team supporting the most interesting and innovative DTC brands in the world. This group is ALWAYS looking to test new strategies and improve on best practices, and our clients are constantly asking “What can I do today to drive better performance with my ads?”?

To answer that question, we launched the Performance 5 framework - a set of five tactics every performance marketer should be using today. A short overview of each of these keys to growth is below, along with fresh examples of how our top Disruptor clients are leveraging each to drive results. To go even deeper on these pillars of performance, read our State of Disruption Annual Report. And look out this summer for an updated version of the Performance 5 framework, sharing the latest case studies, best practices, and tactics you need to drive growth that are built on the foundation of what we share below.

The Performance 5?

• Account simplification
• Creators for direct response?
• Creative diversification
• Signals Quality Check
• Business results validation

Account simplification

Learn faster and better so you can spend more on ads that work best

Get your ads on the fast track to learning

Account simplification involves reducing the complexity of your ad account structure to help improve performance. Simply put, that means spending the right amount of time in the period known as the learning phase.

Your account enters the learning phase any? time you create a new ad set or make a significant edit to an existing ad or ad set. During the learning phase, the Meta ads delivery system learns more about the best people to reach, times of day to show the ad and which placements and creatives to select. This is also a time when performance has not yet stabilized and ad sets usually have higher CPAs.

So while the learning phase is necessary to help our delivery system best optimize ads, spending a large percentage of your overall budget in the learning phase means that you’re spending more of your budget on ads with weaker performance and higher costs. So as a best practice you don’t want to spend more than 20% of your budget in learning phase.?

Account simplification is crucial to help you streamline the learning phase: you get in and get out quickly, ensuring that your dollars go farther for the remainder of your campaign.?

PRO TIP: A new solution called Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns can help you automate simplifying your accounts using AI and new machine learning models. Until now, you might have run many campaigns with different objectives, targeting, and creatives. But this solution will automate campaign creation and allow you to set up a single Advantage+ Shopping Campaign to achieve your performance objectives. The benefits are many:

• Better?performance: ASC uses machine-learning to deliver the highest-performing ads - it’s been shown to drive 17% improvement in CPA and 32% increase in ROAS.
• More efficiency: ASC optimizes for fresh, high-performing creative with minimal manual input
• Greater scale: ASC connects you to more people with intent, while respecting people’s privacy choices

CASE STUDY: When women’s fashion ecommerce Disruptor Lulus identified ASC as a way to drive new customer growth through machine learning, they set up a test to compare the performance of a Meta Advantage+ shopping campaign with Advantage+ Catalog ads versus their usual ad campaign setup.

At the conclusion of the test, they saw a 29% decrease in cost per purchase using an Advantage+ shopping campaign plus Advantage+ catalog ads and a 47% increase in return on ad spend versus usual campaign setup.

Creators for direct response?

Utilize Creator authenticity and personal connections to reach new audiences and drive sales through Branded Content Ads

Advances in technology, increased access to digital tools and inspiration, users’ desire for authenticity and platforms that allow for mass global content distribution power the democratization of creativity and have led to a Golden Age for Creators as evidenced by:

• 133 billion minutes were spent with creator content in 2021 across Meta (That’s 13x what people spent with brand videos)*
• 58% of consumers surveyed said that they bought a new product in the past six months because of a creator’s recommendation*

Creators bring inventive creative and dedicated audiences to brands’ campaigns through Branded Content Ads (BCAs). This combination of tailored content, authenticity and originality can be highly effective in building connections with customers old and new.

Internal Meta research shows that using BCAs and regular ads together drove much stronger outcomes compared to using regular ads by themselves. In fact, we saw 3.9% lower cost per purchase on Instagram BCAs compared to ads run from creator handles without the paid partnership label.*

Getting started with creator marketing

1. Find the right creators. Think of a creator advocating for your brand as an extension of your team. You’ll want to find a creator who’s a good fit for your brand across key dimensions, like voice, creative expression, expertise and more.
2. Craft strategies that reflect creators’ unique voices and styles. Empower your creators by setting them up for success to express their unique perspectives and styles. Use storytelling to entertain and engage your audiences all along the customer journey. And craft for impact, adopting proven best practices for performance marketing.
3. Test out ideas. Experiment to find the optimal mix of branded content and standard ad creatives. For example, you can test and learn to see whether you should use “macro” creators with large followings, “micro” creators with more niche audiences or use a mix of both.?

CASE STUDY: Vuori could lead a masterclass in creator marketing. In a recent campaign in partnership with their agency WPromote, they tested running creator content from their own brand handle, the creator’s handle, and a Branded Content Ad, and saw a 25% decrease in cost per purchase with branded content ad, compared to other influencer marketing tactics.

Creative diversification

Combat ad saturation and fatigue with diverse and differentiated creative

In a digital advertising ecosystem with lower signal about customers’ preferences, creative is THE ultimate performance lever. When advertising platforms have less signal for which to make informed ad delivery decisions, creative IS targeting —?the driving force to unlock incremental reach and drive performance at scale.?

Creative diversification prioritizes product adoption (new formats, placements and mediums) and production of diverse creative concepts (visual messaging, content and style) to drive and scale strong performance marketing results.?

While creative overall is vital to performance, mixing up your creative approach is at the heart of how your creative drives impact. Customers can become tired of seeing the same ad creatives over time, resulting in creative fatigue which can make the messaging less effective. Creative Diversification is an important way to keep your messaging impactful and relatable by decreasing audience saturation and creative fatigue.

Creative Diversification falls into two main categories:

• Creative Format: Try new, engaging ad formats, placements and mediums into your creative mix to inspire action. You could test video ads or develop new or edit existing creative to take advantage of the vertical format.
• Creative Concept: Incorporate new creative concepts, personalities, tones and assets into your creative mix with the aim of keeping your messaging fresh as well as attracting new audiences. Remember that your creative should be a reflection of the audience that you want to reach. If you’re trying to reach a specific segment, think about how your concept will resonate with that audience to drive maximum performance impact.?

For performance marketing campaigns in 2021 with product and concept differentiation:

• 32% more efficient DR outcomes*?
• 9% incremental reach?compared to non-differentiated advertisers*

CASE STUDY: IPSY is one of our most leaned-in partners when it comes to creative differentiation. In the words of Jennifer Bennett, Senior Growth Creative Manager at IPSY:?

“We strongly believe that creative diversification is a key lever to scaling our business and reaching new audiences across Meta in 2023. To diversify creatives at scale, our world-class in-house production studio now supports creative development through our partnerships with Creators and the Meta Creative Shop. Through our internal production and partnerships with creative agencies, we’ve been able to have a constant flow of new creative breakthroughs and sustain minimal levels of creative fatigue. This has led to 85% of total investment to be on low/medium fatigue creatives to unlock performance and growth.”

Signal Quality Check

Connect your data with Meta to optimize performance

Since its launch in 2019, the Conversions API (CAPI) was designed to create a direct and reliable connection between Meta and our clients’ businesses while respecting user privacy. Setting up CAPI enables you to share marketing data, including website events and offline conversions from your server, website platform or CRM.?

There are a couple of key concepts to keep in mind when thinking about CAPI quality:?

Redundancy: Event set ups which involve using both Conversions API and the Meta Pixel are useful because the Conversions API allows you to share website events that the Meta Pixel may lose.

Event Match Quality (EMQ) score: Focus on EMQ score because a higher EMQ score means events are more likely to match to a Meta account, which can help you see more conversions and lower your cost per result. (Note: EMQ is available in the Event Matching Tab in your server event details.)

Business Results Validation (Lift)

Discover the impact of your marketing while respecting customer privacy

Business results validation (Lift measurement) is a privacy-safe measurement solution to understand the causal impact of your Meta advertising investment on your business’ growth.?

We’ve done a lot of work to understand Meta’s true value to our clients and we know Last-click cookie-based attribution models don’t measure the full value of Meta advertising, because they fail to account for the power of the impression or cross device consumer behavior. So if you’re using last-click as your source of truth, you may be making decisions based on incomplete information, which can result in slower growth and lower profitability

In the last year, we have transitioned from a Pixel-based tool to CAPI-Lift, enabling us to maintain our Lift testing capabilities while also supporting businesses’ efforts to respect people’s privacy choices. The solution is designed to limit the amount of individual data we process, for example, by aggregating events from people who have opted out of having their data shared.

Conversion events shared with Meta using Conversion API for Conversion Lift tests will be processed in the following ways:

1. We check each Facebook user’s consent choice.
2. We assign the conversions of people who have opted out to Lift buckets.
3. The Lift solution computes the Lift results using a combination of aggregated (opted-out) conversions and log-line (opted-in) conversions.

Once you have implemented your lift test, begin testing account-wide studies on at least a quarterly basis to gain a true understanding of how Meta is driving growth.?

CONCLUSION

The Performance 5 framework is driving huge results for brands looking to up level their growth strategies, and here are some recommendations on how you can start to embrace them today:

1. Test an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign ASAP!?
2. Review your Creative Diversification and increase the breadth of formats & concepts.
3. Tap into the power of Creators with BCA and our suite of Creator offerings!?
4. Check your EMQ Score
5. Set up Always-On or Quarterly Lift Studies.

Finally,? keep an eye out for our upcoming Performance Summit (June 2023) where we’ll share the continuing evolution of the P5 Framework!

*Sources:

1. Tubular Labs, US only (study of unique viewers of top 10 influencer and broadcast accounts in March 2021 and minutes watched across the top 1,000 influencer, media and brand accounts from March 2020-March 2021 on YouTube and Facebook), April 2021.
2. “Discovery-Led Shopping Study” by GFK (Facebook-commissioned online survey of 12,063 people ages 18+ across AU, BR, CA, DE, FR, ID, IN, JP, MX, SK, UK, US), Jul–Aug 2020
3. Analysis of a scaled, controlled lift study with over 300 brands on Instagram, comparing Instagram Branded Content ads to creator handle ads on Instagram without the paid partnership label, across verticals & regions, 2021.
4. We found that the more visually distinct the creatives, the higher the performance lift of diverse creatives over identical creatives. We saw that the lift in performance (in test vs control) was 32% when the creatives in the diverse cell were most visually distinct, compared to 2% when the creatives in the diverse cell were most visually similar. These results were derived from a scaled backend test comparing the performance of two identical vs two non-identical (creatively diverse) creatives in 2703 ad sets across verticals from 04-04-2021 to 04-26-2021. This analysis was limited to static ads only.**Visual similarity as defined by distance in a vector-based, ML-derived mapping of image contents.