Meta ‘Best Practices’ this Black Friday: are they all worth using?

Advancements in AI, advancements in automatic copy, advantage+ shopping campaigns – is optimising campaigns even needed any more? In short, absolutely. If content is king, creativity is queen, and this is one thing that cannot be replaced in Paid Media.

Just how good are some of Meta’s ‘enhancements’ anyway?

Why should it recommend we put on audience expansion if we are just aiming to retarget? Are advantage+ audiences not ridiculously broad?

We’ll dive into the dos and don’ts in this vital Q4 period.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

Scepticism surrounded Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC+) when they were first introduced, as they seemingly stripped all manual control from the advertiser, generating audience sizes bigger than the actual country’s population - with a, ‘trust us, this will work’ approach.

However, across most of our accounts, this has become the cornerstone of conversion activity, allowing a plethora of creative and copy to be utilised, as well as a mix of both prospecting and retargeting (which we love). The result is a tonne of actionable data to help pave future decisions.

The significance of simultaneously running a manual campaign alongside ASC+ is imperative, especially when it comes to retargeting. Do not expand those audiences if you’re looking to pick up on people adding to cart & initiating checkouts – EVER!

Even at a prospecting level, having control over the people you are targeting – whether it be a lookalike audience you’ve tested for months that’s gathered a tonne of data, or a detailed targeting audience you’ve spent a lifetime refining to get the audience size just perfect (must be those engaged shoppers, right?)

Always keep the little tweaks that make a campaign your own, your copy, your CTA tactics, your results.

Advantage+ simply sits alongside this activity, with all the creative variety you can squeeze in, letting you know what placements are working the best & what creative to use more of in your other campaigns. 

The best part is, it does all this whilst converting effectively. Our UK-based ASC has an audience size of 68,000,000. Unless they’re now allowing us to target babies with candy ads (how easy would that be), we highly doubt the entire population are active on Meta – but boy does it convert well. 

Utilising a wealth of data points gathered on users, Meta uses a combination of prospecting the most in-market users for your product, as well as using your custom audiences to help find similar users and then automatically retargeting web visitors.

This is where ASC+ gets interesting – it is a conversion based campaign that is a traffic monster. With its broad but nurtured audience, we saw traffic increase 44% for one client without spending a penny more once we initiated it – this will do absolute wonders for feeding your retargeting pools before key periods!

Not only does these campaigns bring in a solid return of revenue, they bolster all other campaigns and audiences around them, making them a must have as we approach Black Friday and Christmas sales.

Our advice? If you don’t have one activated, do it now with your current ads (you can automatically import best performing ads, too) – and get it activated. You still have time to get it out of the learning phase before your sales ads go live.

Creative optimisations – which should you be using?

Meta will automatically turn on up to 8 optimisations within your ad, but does it really have an advertisers best interests at heart? We’ve dived into them for you:

Relevant comments

YES – helps negate any negative comments if you miss them by optimising towards the most positive comments received.

Music

Subjective – there’s a banger or two on this unlicensed playlist, but just make sure you listen through them and check it suits your brand and tone of voice. Sometimes it can make creative come alive, sometimes it can cheapen it.

Image template

NO – this generates an incredibly ugly version of the ad where the headline overlays the creative, making it look tacky. By all means try it on your ads, it will show you what the template looks like, but this isn’t for us.

Visual touch-ups

YES – no harm in this one. Get the best version of your creative possible, easy.

Text improvements

NO – keep control of your copy. The description for this is ‘Any text that you provide may appear as primary text, headline or description.’ This means your headline could appear as your main body of text. Your ad copy could contain just 2 words – who thought this was a good idea? We’ve seen this happen on ads before, and it’s not a good look. Choose multiple variations of your own copy, and switch this off.

Image Filter

YES – again, no harm in turning this one on and making your creative more appealing. However, we would recommend turning it off if the colours in your ad are particularly important, such as a product image or branding, as the filter may alter the tone slightly.

3D animation

YES – Meta will automatically tell you if your image can be shown in 3D. If it can’t, it’s really not worth worrying about, but if it can, who wouldn’t prefer to see a 3D image over a 2D one? Always worth doing some testing to quality check these, though.

What do you think of the latest additions to Meta, do you agree with our optimsation use? 

Whichever strategy you deploy for the sales season – do it soon! Winter is coming…

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