Just when we were looking forward to being able to compare year on year stats again, on the 25th of April, Meta released an update to the ad control setting across their platforms. This change will match a user’s ad setting across all Meta apps/sites. For example, if a user has linked their Facebook and Instagram account and they have opted out of the ‘data about your activity from partners’ setting within one of the apps, this setting will be applied to their account across all the Meta apps they use.
What will this mean for advertisers on the platform? This change may impact the size of your target audiences as users that were previously opted in on one of the platforms will no longer fall into your targeted audiences. This in turn will mean that the cost metrics for advertising on with Meta will see a further increase over the coming weeks as competition for these audiences increases.
The unknown is how significant the impact will be, although it shouldn’t be anywhere near the scale of the initial update. We may see that people who opt out of one platform naturally opt out of the other meaning the impact will be minimal; however, the opposite may also be true, and we may see audience sizes shrink significantly.
The good news is, to reduce the impact of these changes there are 2 major factors to investigate and implement that will have a really positive impact on performance.
- Meta’s Advantage Suite
- Conversions API
Advantage+
The newly released Advantage and Advantage+ suite of optimisation tools helps automate campaigns set-ups and empowers the algorithms to help drive enhanced performance, personalisation, and efficiency with the campaigns.
Some of these tools are just previously available iterations which have been rebranded e.g. Lookalike expansion and detailed targeting expansion now Advantage Lookalikes and Advantage Detailed Targeting; whereas some are completely new e.g. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, which more closely resembles Google’s Pmax.
The aim of these tools is to take away the heavy lifting and restrictions required with a granular and segmented campaign set-up, and to empower the algorithms to deliver the right ad to the right person, at the right time through consolidated audiences, dynamic creative and automatic placements.
We have already started to reap the performance rewards from this approach, and are seeing a 24% decrease in the CPA using Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) -multiple images and copy lines within one rather than static creative.
The Advantage Suite is newly launched and Meta has made it clear that this is just the start, with more Advantage+ products being released later this year.
Conversions API (CAPI)
Conversions API, which is direct server-to-server tracking that bypasses the reliance on the pixel, takes time to implement but will immediately give back approximately 15% of conversions lost during the IOS ATT update. This means that the number of conversions recorded will increase and therefore CPAs will drop and ROAS will increase. However, as richer data is fed back to Facebook, it also has the added benefit of increasing the power of lookalikes and retargeting again to further benefit KPIs.
There are 3 main ways to implement Conversions API, all of which need data or dev resource. Plug-ins or extensions, Facebook’s AWS Gateway and direct server-to-server integration. The implementation time can differ between 1-90 days depending on the option chosen, as can the data robustness.
If you are questioning whether or not to invest the time in CAPI, there are 2 major reasons why you should.
- Through the direct server to server route we have seen almost overnight 17% reduction in CPM and an incredible 26% decrease in CPAs.
- Some future Facebook products are only available for those with CAPI installed.
So, whilst this update isn’t what we wanted to hear, there are strong tactics to deploy that will help campaigns make big positive steps forward again.
If you have any further questions on the above, and how this could impact your advertising strategy, then please contact us to speak to our team, we’d be happy to help.
