Meta Performance 5: Proven techniques to help businesses succeed

Earlier this month, we held our inaugural Performance Marketing Summit to provide marketing leaders with actionable goals and considerations for driving performance on Meta technologies and share what we as Meta are doing in the near future that’s important for businesses. While there were over 650 in-person attendees and over 1,000 in the virtual session, we are happy to share our key tips with all of you.

We understand the challenges you as a performance marketer are facing as you adjust to the new digital advertising ecosystem, and how it has become more difficult to achieve and measure your results. To help advertisers make the most of machine learning in this new environment, we have developed the Performance 5—a simple, strategic framework that can help you increase the effectiveness of your media dollars on our platforms right now.

Here is a deeper look at what the Performance 5 is and how your business can benefit.

The Performance 5 pillars

• Account simplification: Reduce the complexity of your ad account structure to help improve performance. Simply put, this means spending the right amount of time in the period known as the “learning phase.” Your account enters 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. As a best practice, you shouldn’t spend more than 20% of your budget in the learning phase, as doing so can result in weaker performance and higher costs. To help automate the campaign process, last month we launched Advantage+ shopping campaigns—a new tool under Meta Advantage that automates the delivery, creation and management of ad campaigns with the power of AI.
• Creators for direct response: Today, creators are more than influencers, they’re architects of culture and community who help drive business outcomes for brands. This strategy encourages brands to leverage the trust, authenticity and originality of creators to launch Branded Content ads on Meta technologies. These ads empower creators and brands to work together to create tailored, authentic, original content that helps build connections with existing and new customers. An internal study across 12 ecommerce advertisers shows that adding Branded Content Ads to advertisers’ media mix has driven an average sales lift of 39% and a 19% lower median vs. the target CPA.¹
• Creative diversification: Across the board, advertisers are seeing success with creative diversification. In 2021, advertisers who deployed this strategy saw 2 main benefits: 32% more efficient DR outcomes and 9% incremental reach.² Consumers become tired of seeing the same ads over and over again, which leads to creative fatigue. There are 2 main categories of creatives to combat this:
  • Creative format: This is about incorporating new, engaging ad formats and placements. For example, you might consider testing video if that’s something you haven’t tried or testing into one of our newer creative formats, like Reels. We’ve seen advertisers lean into UGC-style ads, or ads that appear to have been created by a customer or creator, to connect with their customers and drive performance.
  • Creative concept: This is about incorporating new messaging and tones into your creative mix. If you’re trying to reach a specific audience, work to ensure the concept of your creative will resonate with that audience.

The women’s intimates ecommerce brand Adore Me worked closely with Meta’s Creative Shop, an internal team of creative strategists, to develop and test a variety of creative messaging that aligned with what they know about their 5 different customer cohorts. By customizing their messaging for each of these cohorts, Adore Me was able to achieve a 17% lower CPA and 21% more new customers.³

• Conversions API quality check: The Conversions API (CAPI) creates a direct and reliable connection between Meta and your marketing data. Conversions API helps optimize ad targeting and personalization, decreases cost per action and more accurately measures campaign outcomes. There are 2 important technical areas that your marketing engineering teams should pay close attention to, since they can significantly influence the quality of a your Conversions API set up and, ultimately, your Meta media performance:
  • Redundant event set ups:This involves using both Conversions API and the Meta Pixel. When you use the Conversions API alongside the pixel, it creates a more reliable connection that helps the delivery system decrease your cost per action.
  • Improving the Event Match Quality score : This involves using EMQ score, which you can see in the Event matching tab in your server event details. A higher EMQ score means events are more likely to match to a Meta account, which can help you see more of your conversions and lower your cost per result.
• Business results validation: We know that last-click cookie-based attribution models don’t measure the full value of advertising, as they fail to account for the power of the impression or cross-device consumer behavior. In fact, an internal meta-analysis of 32 businesses that showed on average, last click attribution undervalues Facebook and Instagram by 47%. ⁴ This is why we recommend Conversion Lift, which helps you understand the true, causal impact of your investment on Meta. Conversion Lift uses a gold-standard methodology to capture the causal impact that Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network ads have on business performance that addresses measurement challenges marketers face such as over-reliance on clicks and shift to mobile browsing.

We look forward to seeing our clients adopt the strategies outlined in our Performance 5 framework, along with our new automation tools like Advantage+ shopping campaigns, to drive success for their businesses in 2022 and beyond.

Check out the replay of the Performance Marketing Summit here.