Advertisers need to stay visible and competitive on Meta in the years to come. Meta has released many new tools and features over the last year. Advertisers have more money to scale their campaigns.
New automated campaign types are proven to be incredibly efficient. There are more options for advertisers to control their campaigns.
Advertisers who seek to focus on their brand awareness budgets over direct response have found that the media giant has improved the experience of working with influencers.
Many of the best practices uncovered through testing are vital for any brand's long term Meta advertising strategy.
There are five things to consider when running an advertising campaign on social media.
1. Leverage Advantage+ campaigns
There is a new feature called Advantage+ campaigns. Meta has mastered machine learning so I always advocate for it. App and shopping initiatives can be added to the Advantage+ campaign.
Meta is able to find the right audience and the right creative for advertisers. Across app install and shopping, we succeeded.
To take advantage of Advantage+ campaigns, you need to make sure you have a lot of creativity. Meta suggests the best assets to use, but marketers can choose their own.
If you want to see an improvement in your cost-per-acquisition running with Advantage+ campaigns, you should experiment with a combination of ads known to perform well. You should keep an eye on these for the next ten years.
2. Work with influencers
Meta has recently put out new guides to help advertisers work with influential people.
Meta understands that marketers want to use user-generated content on brand channels with paid media.
There are a few key best practices to make your strategy go as smoothly as possible.
- Connect your influencers as partners under your company page’s “Paid Partnership.” This function allows you to promote their content on your brand channels.
- When promoting on Instagram, ensure influencers include the paid partnership label with your brand – “Paid Partnership with [Brand Name].” This is very important as it ensures you can pull the partner’s content onto your own pages to advertise within the ads manager. Make sure each partner specifically includes your brand name in the partnership label because if they only include the generic label that says “Paid Partnership” you will likely run into trouble getting their content promoted and will have to have them edit the post.
- For Instagram Reels and Stories, verify that there are no stickers or copyrighted music in videos created. Otherwise, Meta will not approve your ads. In addition, you’ll have to work with influencers to re-record their content, which can be a major inconvenience if your campaigns are timely. Typically, the quality of content decreases when we have to go back to influencers and ask for last-minute changes to content that was initially in final approval.
Advertisers can only add links to Reels if you write a dark post. If you don't want a dark post, you can go with the "story" placement.
It is recommended to keep an eye on the "Instagram Explore" placement for the next five years. We have seen the lowest CPMs and CPAs from the new Explore placement, and we are going to increase our spend on future influencer initiatives.
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There are still a lot of issues to be worked out when setting up Meta's ConversionAPI. Various setup methods have been rolled out by Meta.
CAPI is worth keeping an eye on since it is a deeper level of Optimization. Meta is trying to offer more integrations for advertisers to get set up faster without a full development team.
We delivered our lowest cost per acquisition of the year in the fourth quarter. Our CPA went down in the first month and then went up in the second. A deeper data point was fed to Facebook.
There will be more updates regarding CAPI setup. You don't want to miss out on this feature.
4. Use ‘open’ and ‘broad’ targeting
When scaling your campaigns, open or broad targeting will always be the top choice.
The audience most likely to be interested in your ads and to take action can be found by Meta.
- Leaving your targeting open, meaning you don’t add any targeting beyond demographics.
- Leaving your targeting very broad, using minimal interest targeting that keeps audience scale in the millions.
The best way to make machine learning work for advertising is to use open and broad targeting.
5. Make the best of lead gen forms
The theme of "less is more" has been around for a long time. In many cases, this is still true. Adding more questions to qualify the customer is one way to improve the quality of leads.
When we need to drive quality over quantity, we have seen this succeed. Your front-end cost will likely go up. The quality on the back end greatly improves and decreases the efficiency of qualified leads, which in turn increases revenue for businesses.
If you are struggling with the quality, you should try manual fill for first name, last name and email address. If you want to find out what works best for your business, you will want to test a few different variations.
Don't have a lot of manual questions to fill out. The introduction to the form that the consumer gets from filling it out should be sweet. Whatever makes the most sense for your ad, this can be a short piece of information.
Ensure your thank you page is engaging with helpful information and resources. The education provided by this can help build your audience for nurture campaigns.
Keep the form creative for your leads. You have a lot of time to grab someone's attention and make them stop.
Automation will become a core campaign tactic as Meta continues to evolve.
Advertisers are able to test and learn at a faster pace with tools like CAPI and Advantage+.
Don't hesitate to use open and broad targeting to feed audience maximization.
There will be a lot of testing in the years to come to see where advertisers can find more efficiency.
The guest author's opinions are not necessarily those of the search engine. There are staff authors here.
