Meta
- $11.3 billion in ad revenue in 2018
- $17.9 billion in 2019
- $22 billion in 2020
- $32.4 billion in 2021
- This assumes the client already has a Meta Business Manager setup and they can access it (this can be a big assumption). If one doesn’t exist we’ll help create one for/with them.
- We believe that these accounts belong to the client and if they choose to move away from us as an agency, they should easily be able to take the accounts with them. We are working on their behalf, they aren’t renting their advertising from us.
- We set it up so the clients are billed direct by Meta, we don’t charge passthrough markups or CPC fees (see above point).
- Facebook Page
- Instagram account
- Ad Account
- Pixel / Dataset
- Offline limited time promos have the added constraint of physical presence / travel. There may be 3 days left on a sale, but can you get back to this store in the next 3 days? Our brains might even process the sale as being positive ROI on our time investment that got us into that store (unsubstantiated hypothesis).
- Snaps and Stories may have altered the timeline of the internet to 24 hours. Anything longer than one solar day is no longer urgent.
- The internet is an infinite shelf of content, decisions are made in terms of “should I do this now?” 72 hours left in a sale means it doesn’t need to be shopped RIGHT NOW, and is then likely to be forgotten before the expiration date.
- Grounding the promo in something outside the feed or brand’s business goals can stand out as a hook. “25% for 24 hours” doesn’t have a hook (discounts and promos are ubiquitous now, they aren’t hooks in and of themselves). “25% off on your birthday” might trigger “I should treat myself.' “Spring Sale - 25% off” might trigger “I could use some pieces to freshen things up.”
Wild stat from Meta’s creative team (that I heard second hand so grain of salt):
The amount of content the average user scrolls a day is as tall as the Statue of Liberty.
That’s nearly 635 iPhone 15 Pros tall.
So roughly 635 screenshots worth of content.
Meta recommends 30% of your budget be allocated to Advantage+ Shopping campaigns (if applicable).
Meta rep told me they think it’ll hit at least 60% in the not-too-distant future.
Reddit has launched their Meta catalog and Google Shopping ads clone: Dynamic Product Ads.
Very tempted to try these since the forum has taken over Google Search results (part of the licensing deal courtship?).
& there’s this:
Reddit is saying Dynamic Product Ads drove 1.9x greater Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) when compared to conversion objective campaigns, based on the results of testing in Q1.
Reddit is a destination for shopping / product research, why not try to close the loop and turn it into a purchase driver.
Temu is spending like crazy on advertising
“As a result, this increases everyone’s CPA (cost per acquisition) on platforms like Meta and Google because large advertisers like Temu are monopolizing ad inventory and heightening the costs of the advertisers targeting the same audiences.”
over 9,000 active Temu ads are running across platforms.
Be prepared for shifts. These systems (Meta’s auction) are volatile, and businesses should always be prepared to pull back when need be, and have a toolkit of options for where to place their online ad dollars.
2024 gonna be bumpy.
via Adweek
In response to the Search Engine Land piece about Google Ad Strength that I responded to, Google says Ad Strength is not used in the auction.
But!
Ad Strength looks at 4 categories that have been identified to result in better performance through regression analyses.
For example, a low Ad Strength could explain a lack of impressions, but low Ad Strength doesn’t prevent ads from entering into auctions.
It’s a feedback mechanism for creative content and meant to be used as a helpful guide to improve the effectiveness of your ads. Again, it isn’t used directly in the auction.
Meta disclosed Instagram ad revenue as part of the antitrust process.
Instagram earned:
The filing also notes that IG earned $16.5 billion in ad revenue in the first half of 2022, putting it on track to earn more than $33 billion for that year (based on higher holiday spend).
As reported by Bloomberg, the data suggests that Instagram generated around 30% of Meta’s total revenue in 2022. Which, if you were to extrapolate that into last year’s numbers, would suggest that IG brought in around $40 billion in ad revenue in 2023.
Printing money.
Maybe that’s why TikTok wants to clone it.
Facebook will play videos in full-screen vertical by default. Plus some UI updates. Think TikTok meets YouTube.
via Meta
Good reminder: Ads Optimization is Literal
When you select a performance goal in the ad set, the algorithm’s entire focus is getting you as many of that thing as possible.
It’s not trying to get you a certain type of link click or landing page view or ThruPlay. The only goal is to get you that thing and make you happy.
Because Meta is literal, and when you optimize for those things, the assumption is that you are satisfied with that surface-level action.
This is how algorithms work. They don’t make qualitative judgements. It’s a binary “did the action occur?” switch. Yes = success.
🚨 Meta Is Broken
For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps, including WhatsApp, and to some extent, Messenger and Instagram, faced outages and intermittent issues.
Meta’s status page detailed disruptions to key business services, including its Ads Manager, Messenger Platform, WhatsApp Business API and others.
via TechCrunch
&
There has been a lot of talk on Twitter/X about Meta Ads being “broken”. This has happened before, but it’s never lasted longer than a few weeks. This time, many brands have seen soft performance for all of Q1.
there is no obvious cause/effect relationship between poor performance and a specific code push or platform outage on Meta’s side.
only some brands are seeing poor performance.
via No Best Practices (a must read for Meta advertisers)
Something is fundamentally broken at Meta (more than usual). Which means it’s a time to experiment freely, on and off the platform.
Looking forward to playing with this new reporting feature from Meta (because I’m a data nerd).
With the Engaged Customers Audience Segment, you can define your engaged customers using custom audiences, which provides reporting breakdowns specifically for this audience.
Meta now offers a new segment to analyze results in Ads Manager. Just go to the Breakdown menu and choose “Demographics by Audience Segments.” From there, you’ll see separate rows for New Customers, Existing Customers, and Engaged Customers
Cracking open the lid of the black box ever so slightly.
I’m a believer in the AI/algorithm-driven targeting but learning more about what audiences it finds success with can be helpful to fold back into other efforts.
Friday Bits & Bytes | 032924
Why Marketers need to embrace the funny when it comes to podcasting
While there’s no sure-fire formula to being funny, brands that lean into comedic ads find the effort has a good success rate.
A funny ad is a sticky ad
Marketing (and business) doesn’t have to be that serious, have some fun. It may even make your work better.
If only there were a “holiday” coming up that would let you safely try humor for your brand…
How consumers find new brands and products on social media, marketplaces, and brick-and-mortar retail in 5 charts
Here are 2:
Over two-thirds (67%) of US 16-to 24-year-olds say they’ve learned about a product or service through a social media video that organically entered their feed
But
Social media is just one part of the discovery mix. Online marketplaces or search engines are the top places where US consumers start their shopping journey
Outside of impulse purchases, discovery and shopping are two different phases.
Are Lookalikes Still Relevant?
I get that lookalikes are technically a bit more specific, in theory. You could find people similar to your paying customers, for example. I wonder if advertisers simply don’t trust the newer options as much as the tried and true lookalikes.
I’m just not convinced that lookalikes are any better than these other methods. I’ve mostly abandoned them completely as a result.
I am now very interested in this question. Mostly because I’m interested in what’s working on Meta.
And because I just made a bunch of lookalikes earlier today for an upcoming campaign. Wonder if that was time wasted…
What We Can Learn from Bad CEO Quotes
The CEOs of Kellogg and Wendy’s recently caused a bit of public outcry.
From the Kellogg end:
We’ve got to reach the consumer where they are, so we’re advertising about cereal for dinner. If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable.
Meanwhile, at Wendy’s:
Beginning as early as 2025, we will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings
(That’s fancy talk for surge pricing.)
Shockingly, customers (or at least social media users) didn’t love these statements.
But those customers (and social media users) weren’t the target audiences. These were said for Wall Street—intended to juice stock prices, not excite customer bases.
Just like with supply chains a couple years ago, inflation and interest rates and market prices are hot topics right now. Which means a wider audience for statements like these—wider than the CEOs may be used to.
Contrast these statements with this approach from a CEO used to being in the public eye:
You can be sure this was intended to double as a call to investors about the quality and positioning of Meta’s VR product compared to Apple. Just like how “internal” memos at tech giants are written with the understanding that they’ll be leaked and become very much external memos.
So, uh, why am I quoting CEOs?
These statements (and the ensuing backlash) highlight that words and messaging matter.
People feeling the pinch of the highest food prices in 30 years don’t want to hear a CEO making millions of dollars a year say that people should eat his company’s cereal for dinner because it’s affordable.
Thanks to Uber and similar services employing surge pricing, “surge” or “dynamic” pricing feels negative because it usually means more expensive. I’ll quote Tyler Cowen because he covers everything I would have said:
I predict this will fail. For one thing, “we will have discounts for Tuesdays at 3 p.m.” would have been better marketing. Furthermore, many Wendy’s buyers are not wealthy, and they care a good deal about predictable prices.
(They even botched the walk back.)
Once you say something in public, you can’t guarantee which audience(s) receive it. The larger you become (in notoriety, headcount, etc) the fewer private communication channels you have.
Your content matters. And that content is a combination of words and tone.
Respect your customers. Choose your words. Earn trust & don’t burn it.
Monday Marketing Links | 031824
Cookie Deprecation is Coming - Should Advertisers be Worried?
Apple blocked third party cookies for 100% of traffic back in 2020, and most brands see almost half of their traffic from Safari (!!!) So that impact has already been felt for a while now.
…
as long as you’re using ad platforms platforms (Google, Meta, TikTok, Email/SMS) and aren’t super reliant on display networks, there likely won’t be a major impact.
…
building out a CDP, beefing up first-party data capture, etc. Those are considered best practices anyway, and will become even more beneficial with all of the privacy changes on the horizon and beyond.
Cookies crumbled a while ago, Chrome phasing out third-party cookies is just the final nail in the crumb filled coffin.
Survey: Retailers should focus on loyalty, brand awareness
The vast majority of retailers believe that their customer experience is at or better than their peers, but new data says otherwise.
…
The top three strategic outcomes experienced retailers should be focused on, according to IDC and SAP, are improving customer loyalty (59%), improving brand awareness (50%), and empowering employees with the right data and tools (43%) to improve the customer experience.
Everyone thinks they’re above average, but that’s not how average works. And there’s usually room for improvement regardless.
Customer experience is a moat. The better the experience, the bigger the moat.
Big Tech accounts for nearly two-thirds of the US digital ad market
Big Tech (Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft) will attract nearly two-thirds of US digital ad dollars this year
That’s more than double its share since we began tracking it in 2008.
LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform
boost the time people are spending on the platform, the company is breaking into a totally new area: gaming.
…
tapping into the same wave of puzzle-mania that helped simple games like Wordle find viral success
…
one idea LinkedIn appears to be experimenting with involves player scores being organised by places of work, with companies getting “ranked” by those scores.
Taking a page out of the old Facebook playbook and reinventing Solitaire for the browser-first workforce.
Money Stuff: Slorg is Sorry He Burnt Slerf
Basically the way crypto works is that a guy named Slorg makes up a token named Slerf, which is distinguished from other tokens by having a cartoon sloth logo. You send $10 million of Solana crypto tokens to Slorg, and he makes a note to himself that he owes you some Slerfs. Then he accidentally flushes that note down the toilet and, due to the irreversible nature of the blockchain, you get no Slerfs and your money is permanently gone, though Slorg is very sorry.
And now we know how crypto works!
mistake was very good for attention, and attention is the true value of any memecoin. So the obvious thing happened and the new tokens that were released shot up around 5,000%.
It's A Metric!: First Time Impression Ratio
Today’s metric is one I just learned about: First Time Impression Ratio (FTIR)
According to Meta, FTIR is:
The percentage of your daily impressions that comes from people seeing your ad set for the first time.
FTIR = Reach / Impressions
The lower your FTIR, the higher your frequency.
This matters because you can’t survive on “moment of conversion” traffic alone. Such a small sliver of any platform’s user base is in-market for your given offer at any one moment that you should run campaigns to gain brand awareness (this is why you need both brand and performance marketing (and yes, smaller budgets can put these considerations on hold)).
Attention is gold.
A member of the Foxwell Digital community uncovered an interesting FTIR trend:
a dramatic decline from approximately 60-70% to 10-25% over the past 6-12 months [as of March 2024].
This drop suggests a saturation point where the same audiences are being reached repeatedly, leading to what can be termed as ‘audience fatigue,’ rather than just ad fatigue.
The root causes identified include a lack of creative differentiation, reduced influencer marketing budgets, and underinvestment in emerging platforms
A metric on its own isn’t very helpful, but First Time Impression Rate + Frequency could be a useful combo in your budget allocation and performance analysis arsenal when auditing your social accounts.
Friday Marketing Links | 031524
Meta could capture between 22.5% and 27.5% of TikTok’s U.S. ad revenues in the event of a ban.
YouTube stands to gain an additional $1.24 billion to $1.53 billion, with $410 million to $500 million of TikTok’s ad revenues redirected to Google’s display and search businesses
One of the early thought exercises I was given at Blue Ion was: what happens if Meta was shut down tomorrow?
It’s a good question to occasionally ask about any important distribution channels.
DarwinAI has developed AI technology for visually inspecting components during the manufacturing process and serves customers in a range of industries. But one of its core technologies is making artificial intelligence systems smaller and faster. That work that could be helpful to Apple, which is focused on running AI on devices rather than entirely in the cloud.
Apple was launching Vision Pro while the rest of the Valley Giants were pivoting to AI. But the benefit of a massive bank account is the ability to buy whatever you want.
Apple has also been really secretive about their AI plans, claiming “disclosure of strategic plans and initiatives harmful to our competitive position and would be premature in this developing area.”
Apple is at the forefront of ambient computing, and on-device AI will be a key component. Plus, Apple is the only one of the giants that isn’t really a cloud company and is most definitely a hardware company.
Social media apps are gradually becoming more valued as entertainment sources, while actual interaction shifts to smaller, enclosed chats and communities.
Notice how all the platforms focus on “discovery.”
Across all the articles and topics we analyzed, we found no clear connection between social engagement and actual readers of the news.
Understand vanity metrics vs. brand metrics vs. performance metrics.
podcasting is taking over traditional media consumption time, with respondents reporting 28% of them watch less TV and 24% browse social media less often. Gen Z podcast discovery is a mix of methods. 46% of Gen Z respondents rely on social media recommendations, and 33% of younger Gen Z browse top charts and “best of” podcast lists.
Audio! Audio! Audio!
Findings include midrolls outperforming both pre-rolls and post-rolls for placement. A quiet value-add for host-read contracts is hosts tend to go over their contracted ad length. Right Side Up found the sweet spot for “60 second” host-read ad performance was host-read creatives that landed between one to three minutes.
Podcasts foster parasocial relationships which gives host-read ads some extra oomph in the persuasion department.
five types of bad ads, each varying in harm for the marketer: malicious ads, spoofed ads, scam ads, heavy ads and miscategorized ads.
…
The easiest thing is [ad buys] are cheap. [Bad ad creators] don’t wanna spend a ton of money on it. So they proliferate in places with really low CPMs
…
marketers should work on making good ads. Ensuring the proper ads for the right environments is key, along with keeping on top of creative
Higher rates spell trouble for US companies with near-term debt maturities.
Rate changes and inflation measures are the important indicators this year.
How To Connect To Your Clients' Meta Account
One of the most annoying things we have to deal with on a (fairly) regular basis with Blue Ion clients is getting access to various Meta properties and tools so we can manage their advertising.
This isn’t because of the clients, it’s because of Meta. It’s pretty much always a headache and 3x more clicks than you would think necessary.
Before I outline the process we’ve landed on lately (for now?), a few ground rules we play by:
Now, on to the access!
We’ve found the easiest method is having the client add us to their Business Manager as a partner (official documentation here).
We grab our business ID from the main business settings URL for our agency Business Manager. This is the most reliable way I’ve found to get it in an easy copy-paste format.
We then share that with the client along with the documentation link.
They then access their Business Manager settings, navigate to Partners in the left menu, click the blue “Add” button, and “Give a partner access to your assets.”
The assets that need to be shared may change on a case-by-case basis, but we ask for:
The ideal is to get manage access for all assets, but we just request the highest level they’re comfortable granting us.
Then we wait for them to appear in our Partners list and assign out asset access as needed.
Voilà! Happy advertising!
& stay curious
From episode three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs:
Once you give a collection of things a name—the way people’s minds work—they start thinking because those things share a name, they’re the same kind of thing.
Names and genres and labels matter.
The human brain is designed to pattern match and categorize and bucket and metaphor to save on processing power.
(Neural networks are designed to do this for AI models via weights.)
In grocery aisles, “water company” usually means plastic bottles—it’s what shoppers expect. Liquid Death smashes that expectation, so it stands out.
Ambient computing is coming
Apple has explored the idea of developing new wearable devices — including a fitness ring, smart glasses and even AirPods with cameras — to broaden one of its most important business areas.
This is a mix of Apple targeting products from other brands (Oura, Meta Ray-Bans, Snap Spectacles, etc) and building the product ladder that leads to the Vision Pro as the eventual replacement for the Mac line.
via Bloomberg
In The Abstract: Effectives of Limited Time Promos in Online Retail
The paper Examining the Efficacy of Time Scarcity Marketing Promotions in Online Retail from the Journal of Marketing Research has some great research (as covered on the Nudge Podcast).
Even the abstract is informative, if a bit unwieldy in that classically academic way:
Time scarcity promotions (e.g., “40% off for a limited time”) are mainstays of online retail marketing. Although positive effects of time scarcity promotions on consumer interest have been evidenced in the brick-and-mortar world, should retailers expect similarly robust effects online? The present research suggests the answer may be no. First, the authors report meta-analytic and experimental results suggesting that previously identified positive effects of time scarcity promotions observed offline may not emerge in online shopping contexts. Then, consistent with the prediction that online time scarcity promotions activate more persuasion knowledge than identical control promotions, the authors detail findings suggesting that providing retailer-exogeneous justifications for online time scarcity promotions’ time restriction (e.g., consumers’ birthdays, seasonal changes) can increase the potential of observing positive effects on consumer interest online. Further, results suggest that the positive effects of including exogenous time justification may be more likely when less time remains until the online promotion’s expiration. However, results stop short of suggesting that online time scarcity promotions will consistently yield superior outcomes compared with identical online control promotions. Therefore, the authors highlight the continued need for careful managerial use as well as further research examining the optimal translation of offline tactics to online retail.
I will now try to translate this into actual human speak, line by line…
Limited time promos / flash sales are popular with ecommerce.
These types of offers have proven success in brick-and-mortar / offline retail, but does that transfer online?
Spoiler alert: probably not.
This is based on a review of pervious research.
Providing a reason for the promo’s limited run can boost the offer’s performance online (e.g., holidays, celebrations, seasons, etc).
This can be boosted further by shortening the offer’s time frame (e.g. 24 hours only).
But these steps won’t make them super promos when compared to other offer types you might run.
We recommend you use these carefully. And more research is needed on the performance of offline tactics for ecomm.
A few guesses as to why flash sales and limited time promos aren’t as effective online:
Companies have moved focus from growth to revenue since Fed rates rose above 0. Especially those that care about their market cap & stock price.
An easy way to do this is to pass a previously internalized cost to customers. If you can pass the blame, even better.
Thus: Meta is passing on the Apple tax for boosted posts to advertisers
The change stems from a 2022 App Store update where Apple extended its typical 30 percent cut of digital purchases to boosted posts.
You can add prepaid funds to your account via a web browser to get around the App Store tax when boosting in-app.