Briefing

What is it?

Promotional periods are a chance for businesses to acquire new customers and generate additional revenue from existing customers.

Meta’s advertising products allow you to showcase promotions by combining relevant audience segments with eye-catching visuals. It’s therefore a no-brainer that businesses turn to advertising on Facebook and Instagram to promote offers.

However, there has been an influx of changes occurring within the platform which directly impact how we’re able to advertise to audiences on Meta.

Why is it important?

iOS 14.5 ATT framework has meant Apple device users can easily opt out of in-app tracking. Although tracking is a bigger challenge, and not limited to Meta, they still lead the way for social reach.

This change does now mean there are smaller, less refined audience pools to target. Further policy changes have also impacted targeting ability across the platform.

It’s not news that there are inflated CPMs across the board, from sustained advertiser competition over the past 18 months.

The tracking changes have led to under-reported and modelled conversion events. This gives the algorithm less data to optimise towards and advertisers less conversions to report against, so your promotional strategy on Meta needs to be well thought out.

What to do next?

• First party data is crucial. Use lead generation campaigns to collect email addresses for remarketing and lookalikes. 
• Campaign setup will vary depending on length of offer and available budget. Exit the learning phase as quickly as possible. 
• Experiment with alternative campaign objectives that have naturally lower CPMs. Top of funnel objectives combined with warmer audiences work well here.
• Creative must stand out. Creative assets need to work 10x harder to make the impressions count. Consider text overlays on images/videos during promos to grab the attention of scrollers. 
• Custom borders help the product ads stand out within the Facebook in-feed placements.
• Consider budget splits in the run up to promotions. Upweight prospecting in the build up, then switch for launch to ensure your core audience has full visibility of the offer.
• Curate product sets of sale items that you can use across prospecting and remarketing to drive users to specific products.
• Implement the Facebook Conversion API to collate server and in-platform events for better reporting and optimisation.
• Finally – Channel diversification. This goes without saying – be everywhere your core audience is.
• If you need help supercharging your social ecommerce strategy for an up-coming promotion then reach out to our media team.