Meta Roadshow Overview

On Thursday, October 5th, our Paid Social team from Common Thread attended the Meta roadshow in Los Angeles. Our goal was to gather valuable insights to share with our internal team and clients.

The Meta experts covered three key topics:

1. Drive Performance Through Automation
2. Optimizations During Holidays and Competitive Moments
3. Creative Diversification

Plus, they also shared new features making their way to the Facebook ads manager user-interface.

Driving Performance through the Power of Automation

Meta's algorithm uses 1st party and 2nd party data to automate and optimize campaigns using AI. The main focus was on Advantage Plus, with recommended best practices divided into three areas …

Creative:

Utilize the campaign duplication feature for top-performing creatives, including catalog ads, static visuals, and video creatives.

Campaign Set Up:

Organize campaigns by region or business line, tailor KPIs, tap into existing customer lists, enable shops and apps as conversion destinations, and allocate at least 30% of the budget to ASC (Automated Social Campaigns).

New Features:

Use Age/Geo exclusions sparingly, leverage comparison reporting for insights, and adjust budget allocation and creative strategies.

Optimizing for Auction Dynamics During Holidays and Competitive Moments

This session explained how the Meta algorithm maximizes value under various constraints.

For holiday planning, they recommended Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, Reels, broad audience targeting, data quality improvements, and budget increases with bid controls.

Creative Diversification with a Focus on Testing

Among all the sessions, this one stands out as particularly actionable and closely aligned with our recent CTC efforts and ideology.

Meta's algorithm carefully examines creative similarity and shies away from investing in new assets if the original ones performed poorly. To counter this, the importance of diversifying creative concepts was underscored, along with the suggestion to incubate creative work within a CBO campaign before incorporating it into ASC.

Additionally, we learned that creative copy does not significantly impact the auction or algorithm's creative confidence but plays a pivotal role post-auction. Hence, prioritizing diverse ad formats and concepts, including overlays and various ad formats (carousel, collection, poll ads, reels, still, video), is crucial.

Tailoring messages to evoke emotional responses during key calendar moments, such as holiday travel, was encouraged. Craft unique concepts for different user segments and test them within a single campaign for maximum impact. Furthermore, Meta highlighted a remarkable 53% increase in click-through rates for partnership ads, attributing this success to the social proof associated with influencer endorsements.

Lastly, Meta emphasized the importance of not pitting new ads against historical ones in the same campaign. While ads ranking can quickly identify winners, A/B testing may help uncover other hidden gems.

New Features

There are two new features that are coming to the Facebook ads manager UI that will help to simplify Mega sale day planning:

1. Schedule budget increases to met spikes in demand

   Use budget scheduling, a new feature that helps schedule budget changes without resetting the learning phase (only on ASC)

2. Schedule ads to align with promotional periods

   Set individual ad schedules (at the ad level) with start/end times to manage promotional campaigns.

In conclusion, our journey through the Meta roadshow was an enriching experience that will undoubtedly shape our future campaigns and benefit both our internal team and valued clients.