The 4% | Edition 013

The busy season is upon us and feels like the most unpredictable Q4 season in a long time.

The last 6 months has been a full renovation across Google & Facebook Ad Platforms, with past structures and strategies considered best practice are now the main culprit of inconsistent and poor performing ad accounts.

On the back of Facebook's Performance Summit and likely campaign changes you're making this week and next for Black Friday, it's worth running through this checklist:

The Performance Five

One: Learning Phase Matters (a lot!)

You know how your agency has been going on about learning phase, and every-time they say it you're thinking this is just a cop out excuse for getting poor results; turns out your agency was telling the truth!

Those hunches on Learning Phase have become explicit warnings from the platform now.

The main reason you end up in learning phase is likely due to creative testing; the main recommendation is to maintain a 'testing' campaign for adding new creative, as it gets results and graduates, then move this to your existing campaigns.

Secondly, pay attention to the number of conversions required. The learning phase hurts low spending accounts a lot more, the goal is 50 conversions; so if your CPA is $50 it'll take about $2500 to get out of this mode. If that's your daily budget, then no problems; if that's closer to 1 week or 2 weeks budget, then you need to adjust your testing schedule to suit.

Two: Test Branded Content

Have you tried using the Branded Content feature; this utilises the influencers handle to promote your products.

It requires a relationship with the influencer to set up, we have seen mixed results; for some it's been our number one ad, on others it makes no impact. Testing is critical here; it's likely that whoever cuts through organically will perform the best with paid ads.

Three: UGC Matters (a lot!)

You know how your agency keeps telling you they need more lo-fi UGC style content, and you're thinking this is a cop out excuse for your hi-fi brand content getting poor results; turns out your agency was telling you the truth!

In some circles it's been estimated that the best performing Meta Ad Accounts have at least 50% of their ads in a UGC style format.

Now it's important to note, that UGC has become the umbrella term for content that appears to be made by creators or customers; the reality is a lot of these are made in studio, with storyboards & scripts.

It's why we're using the lo-fi and hi-fi definitions in speaking with our clients.

This is the most important thing to have in your ad account for November sales success.

Three: Creative Diversity

You know how your agency keeps telling your they need more video content, and you're thinking this is a cop out excuse for getting poor results; turns out most brands listened to this advice!

And so we're now in a swing of performance on video, where it's still imperative to include; however the best performing ad accounts have a diversity of content showing to each audience; Lo-Fi & Hi-Fi video, Static Images of Product vs Testimonial, Carousels; your goal should be to have at least 3 styles for each audience.

If you can maintain 3 creative types with a frequency on a single creative less than 4x you will see improvements gains.

Ps I know I repeated 3, Creative is so important it deserved to be split out!

Four: Conversions API

Ok seriously how do you not have this setup still?!

If you're on Shopify there's no excuse at all. Get it done.

If you're on other platforms please reach out and happy to recommend the tools we've used.

Five: Attribution

It's impressive for an platform presentation to almost exclusively focus on what's best for the advertiser, and so I hand it to Meta on the Performance Summit!

They did make a plea at the end to test the conversion lift of their campaigns with their own tools; Conversion Lift.

Or there's Lifetimely, TripleWhale, Hyros etc..

Our own agency view on all these tools, is that you have to trust somebody. What makes any 3rd party attribution tool more trustworthy than the next?

The reality is we'll continue to have less 'absolute' data points; the focus should be on upskilling and education on the marketing science of balancing long & short term investments.

Focussing on your total revenue, MER if you want to. But the brands that will win in the long term through digital advertising, are those who lean on a long term view.

Tom Roach's modern take on the Binet & Field work is a great starting place.

Plus loved Dan White's illustration to summarise the work of Dr Grace Kite on what percentage of revenue to invest.