Meta
- Search is no longer a platform, it’s a feature.
- Users want answers, not necessarily options.
- Google will not be replaced by a copycat. It will be chipped away at by new, novel alternatives and user dispersion across other channels. (and maybe by antitrust)
- Meta continues to reduce reliance on other companies wherever it can. The true realization of this will be a hardware platform, likely in the XR space.
- For brands / creators, having your content on the web—preferably on a platform you own—where it can be crawled is once again the path to relevance. (see: Gwern)
- Discovery
- Utility
- Conversion Value Rules
- Incremental Conversions Attribution
- Third-party Analytics Integration
- Cross-Channel User Journeys
- Unboxing reaction
- Price / discounts & deals
- Click-to-purchase ratio
- Hold rate (watch length)
- Hook rate
- Spend (aka the algorithm’s love language)
- More prominent promo callouts
- Expanded reminder ad capabilities
- Site links for all (these do get used based on my tests)
- More features to get people taking action at a physical location
My team is probably tired of hearing me talk about this stuff, but context is important. Especially when talking to clients.
For context, in the second half of October, political parties spent well over $2.5 million per day on YouTube. For Meta, it’s closer to $1 million per day.
November 6 will be a pressure release. In more ways than one.
Some of your ads feel more expensive lately?
This might be why:
The Harris campaign has instead focused its digital spending on larger platforms like Google and Meta, where it has spent over $280mn this year. The vast amount of political spending on those platforms — already more than $1.5bn
I’m not sure how they’re defining “this year” since the Harris campaign technically started in July when Biden suspended his campaign.
$280 mil in 3 months?
Either way, a lot of money putting pressure on the auction algorithms.
via Financial Times
Meta is developing its AI search engine (and apparently has the “most-used AI assistant in the world”).
Now OpenAI is fully launching ChatGPT search
ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before. You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more.
Search is now about your preferred interface, experience, and engine.
Meta is developing an AI search engine, to be embedded in its Meta AI chatbot. The company has reportedly been indexing the web for at least eight months.Meta AI currently uses Google and Bing’s search engines when it fetches users answers about current events, financial markets, and sports.
This highlights a few things:
Meta’s plan for growth among younger demos:
Surface content like an entertainment app (social media is basically TV now).
Do the classic “Meta experience upgrade” on things like marketplaces, forums (Groups), and events.
Network effect + massive infrastructure = advantage
Ben Thompson on Meta:
Market = time & attention
Differentiation = horizontal services that capture more time and attention than anyone
This is what makes the Zuck’s Bucks machine run.
It also means whatever captures attention and increases time spent gets rewarded.
Imagine this but in a pair of glasses like Meta’s Orion:
The future of watching football is here 🤯
— ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) December 2, 2022
(via nazwif/TikTok) pic.twitter.com/5tskjSFLFf
Sensors will only proliferate (ambient computing!) creating even richer augmented experiences.
Meta is working on “New Brand [Safety &] Suitability Controls”.
The big one I know some clients will love:
We’re testing the ability for businesses to turn off comments on ads
There is research that suggests ads with comments perform better (social proof?), but some industries and brands attract a lot of negative comments and/or don’t have the bandwidth to actively moderate and engage. Control on this capability would be nice.
B2B advertisers are increasingly turning to social to spread the word.
Unsurprisingly, LinkedIn is #1. Followed by Meta.
YouTube is riding the growing B2B video wave.
via EMARKETER
a VR headset is about withdrawing from interactions, whereas augmented reality is obviously about adding that layer onto existing reality. And so in that way, I think it's a lot more similar to a smartphone. So if you're trying to figure out what does the next platform look like, VR looks very different from that and AR looks much closer to the existing interactions we have while using our smartphones.
Why I’ve been on the AR bandwagon for years.
Meta just casually announced an AI-powered AR glasses prototype.
Ambient computing accelerates.
Meta reportedly rolled out an ad algorithm update in August. It caused a lot of volatility, but includes some nice sounding features.
You can assign certain audience profiles OR conversion types higher values
measure which conversions would not have happened w/o the ad being shown (true impact) AND optimize for these types of conversions
more emphasis on cross-channel journeys to drive incremental conversions.
Social Savannah’s top…
Black Friday strategies / hooks for Meta:
KPI to measure creative performance:
Meta wants your holiday ad dollars, so it’s rolled out:
Posts with a lot of comments look to be more heavily weighted when it comes to what shows up in your Threads feed. That’s over re-shares and Likes, with the experiment seemingly suggesting that the Threads algorithm is geared towards incentivizing discussion over everything else.
This makes sense at first glance because commenting is the highest form of public engagement. And engagement is what Meta’s other apps struggle with.
So Meta wants engagement and the algorithms are primed to reward the actions the platform wants.
But this article raises a great point I hadn’t thought about—about what Meta really wants.
ROBOT FOOD!
What better input to train your social platform’s LLM on than public user conversations?
Snapchat will soon start “experimenting” with placing sponsored messages next to chat threads from friends, according to CEO Evan Spiegel.
These “Sponsored Snaps” from brands will appear as unread messages in Snapchat’s main Chat tab, implying that they’ll sit above messages from a person’s contacts until they’re acted on. This is the first time Snap will show ads in the most used part of its app.
Snap might be another early indicator. Have to imagine Meta is watching closely.
Apparently that “unknown” age range in Google Ads is mostly teenagers and younger users.
Google could use app downloads and online activity to determine “with a high degree of confidence” that the “unknown” group was populated by younger users.
I wonder what the percentage is.
New learnings from The Meta Rep™:
If you pause a campaign / ad set / ad, you have 7 days to turn it back on without losing any of the learnings it’s accrued.
After that 7 days you’re starting over.
said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a call discussing the results with investors. “Over the long term, advertisers will basically just be able to tell us a business objective and a budget, and we’re going to go do the rest for them. We’re going to get there incrementally over time, but I think this is going to be a very big deal.”
Digital marketers have been speculating this as a potential future, now Zuck has said it out loud. Based on Google’s PMax experience, advertisers won’t like it.
This is an excellent guide to Meta’s Audience Segments powering Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASCs) from Foxwell Digital.
Includes audience types to use for each and ways to not try to keep the system from over indexing on existing customers now that the cap feature is gone.