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Ep 490: Meta’s New Advantage+ Update: What It Means for Advertisers & How to Win | AKNF
00:27:11
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- [00:00]
Eric Dick
What's happening with AdvantagePlus?
- [00:02]
Jacob
Meta's always furthering their automation, giving their algorithm more control. And the next step on this that they just released is are we still.
- [00:10]
Eric Dick
Finding ways to force our own hard lines between different aspects of the customer journey, or are we just loading everything up into Advantage plus and letting Meta take the wheel?
- [00:21]
Taylor
The big thing that I would definitely say for any advertisers, as you start to navigate this is some of the.
- [00:28]
Jacob
Key considerations if you're a brand and you know you're running some Advantage plus on Meta. Basically the first things to do is.
- [00:35]
Taylor
Look at one thing that Meta is trying to do is they're trying to be better equipped to handle more and more creative. So the other big best practice I am a big fan of.
- [00:50]
Eric Dick
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- [02:20]
Jacob
Yeah, yeah, some new announcements coming out in the past couple weeks. You know, Meta's always looking for ways on the, you know, furthering their automation. What's the next step to, you know, basically giving their algorithm more control and taking some of that manual aspect away from the advertisers. And the next step on this that they just released is removing the customer cap option on Advantage plus campaigns. So this has been an option historically where you have your Advantage plus campaign. You know, you load your creative winners in there and what you can do is set a customer cap. You can tell Meta, you know, I want to spend maximum 20% of this budget on existing customers or existing defined audiences. And that's pretty important for a lot of advertisers with the way their ecosystem set up right now. You know, a lot of them use Meta as like cold traffic drivers. And being able to set that cap has been, you know, good for ease of mind, but also benchmarking and all this stuff. But they're actually removing that option and working towards this new simplified campaign flow. You know, it's, it's new technology, it's all these new kind of systems being taken into account. And essentially what it is, is, yeah, basically just the next step where you don't even get to control the customer cap. So you tell Meta, here you are and spend it as you wish, essentially. And lots of nuances and goods and bads that will get into this. But yeah, that's kind of the long and short of it.
- [03:48]
Eric Dick
Interesting because it's again, a theme on the podcast that we're discussing a lot this year is the worry among advertisers that Meta is overspending on the bottom part of the funnel to saturate it. And this customer cap was a really good way to, for it to top of funnel. And it's obviously fighting that because it's seeing, there's no, you know, the more you hammer like, like what's, what's their data on this? Like, what are they. Why, what's what what's some of the data behind this decision?
- [04:14]
Jacob
Yeah, I mean, they've kind of laid out a few reasons. Like they, they list performance improvement. You know, their studies have shown removing budget caps on existing customers just does lead to better performance. A Meta analysis found like the budget cap resulted in a 13% lower cost per purchase, you know, compared to campaigns with a cap. So basically they are trying to prove it out with that data or they have that data. But of course there's some nuances with that data of like, sure, if CPA goes down. But is that because, you know, now the campaign is hitting people that are already aware of the brand and that's, you know, question that advertisers will have to benchmark and we'll get into some of that. But second reason, just encouraging automation, strategic flexibility, and then long term strategy, the removal of caps, you know, it's part of a longer term strategy to optimize their delivery and performance, allowing more freedom in targeting to meta which can direct advertiser spend towards, you know, warmer audiences, potentially improving the cpa. So they do mention that as well, which is important to kind of note. And then feedback is the last one, you know, mentions. This is still an early stage thing, something they've been testing. Now they're starting to basically force it where all new, you know, Advantage plus campaigns moving forward, not all of them, but certain accounts are getting it now aren't going to have this option but they are still open to that, that feedback. So that's kind of their stance on it.
- [05:44]
Eric Dick
Yeah, yeah. So that's their stance on it. Now Taylor, are we, are we thumbs up if we, if we had to be a thumb up or thumb down on this, is this a, is this a thumbs up moment for meta ads or a thumbs down moment?
- [05:53]
Taylor
It's a good question. I've started to get some initial like data back from where it's taken effect and it's, it's tough for me to honestly give you a clear thumbs up or thumbs down.
- [06:05]
Eric Dick
Like this is one of those ones.
- [06:06]
Taylor
Yeah, thumbs sideways. I'd say it's one of those ones where it's a little bit painful early on because as Jacob mentioned there are certain, certain controls we have in place with most of our clients to leverage the benefits of Advantage plus and then ensure that we're the campaigns are following the guidelines. We need to be able to influence the funnel how we want to. But at the same time the idea of business as usual campaigns have been they've had their place as like really great top of funnel down drivers in addition to being great disruptors for pretty quick fire performance. So at the same time, you know, one of my favorite benefits of Advantage plus shopping campaigns has been the social proof building really aggressively, quickly, much quicker when I launch test ads or graduate them into there than in a business as usual campaign. And so the idea of that benefit which I'm seeing from this new campaign type while being able to apply some other audience, some, some of your more business as usual type audience controls, there's a potential benefit there as well. So I think it's something to, to monitor. It could be like iOS 14.5 too, right. Where really painful. But Meadows modeling got a lot stronger afterwards in the years to follow so hopefully over the long tail it'll be, it'll be a good thing for advertisers.
- [07:21]
Eric Dick
How is it generating more social proof? How are ASC campaigns or Advantage plus campaigns generating more social proof?
- [07:27]
Taylor
Yeah, I wish I had the exact answer for it, but like, it's, it's pretty insane. Like when we launch ads in there, we notice the, like, the likes start to build up and the comments start to go too. And it, it's legit. Like, I, I mean, one big component, right, is the fact that there is a lot of advertisers will add them with like a 5, 10, 15% returning customer cap. So that's part of it, the fact that those go in there. But I, like, I'm seeing it happen even in this new campaign format where we have that audience excluded, where you kind of have to pick that exclusion. And so it, to me, there's potentially an algorithmic element at play there that I don't have any extra insight on, but I do enjoy the benefits of.
- [08:07]
Eric Dick
So I'm curious when it. Because I know we talk a lot about, you know, different campaigns for different customers at different stages of the funnel. You know, you might run a founder story top of funnel, but if they're ready to convert, that's like less important. So you don't want there. Are we still finding ways to force our own hard lines between different aspects of the customer journey, or are we just loading everything up into Advantage plus and letting Meta take the wheel?
- [08:31]
Jacob
Yeah, I mean that's, that's kind of where they're at, is in the Advantage Plus. It's the latter. You're just loading everything up and you, you literally now have no control over where the messaging's going. They do also still now give you this, this other option to basically have a new campaign that is more of a manual solution. So almost going backwards in a sense, where you can. You basically have two ad sets now. You set the budget per ad set and it's just one ad set is your customers and one is everything else without your customers. That exclusion is in there. And this is what they've recommended for those brands that, you know, have found exactly what you just said. Like founder stories don't work for our audience that already knows about us. Like, we don't want to have Meta prove this out. Again, we've already found that data. You're going to have this secondary campaign that's not Advantage plus with those two ad sets and you can kind of pick and choose where the ads go. But again, this is not as nuanced or as detailed as it used to be, but that is what they're Sort of recommending as the pivot I guess per se in addition to obviously still running Advantage plus, if that makes sense.
- [09:43]
Eric Dick
So in platform Taylor. Yeah, like that that's what you're echoing as well. This is kind of how we're using these exclusions.
- [09:49]
Taylor
Yeah. So like with this like how this change takes effect to Jacob's point it when you like if you try, if your account has been brought into being affected by this and you try to duplicate one of your existing Advantage plus campaigns, it'll show you that the existing customer budget cap is no longer available. And so what it then does is it gives you those two ad sets, one being for net new customers and then one excluding net new customer or one excluding customers and being for net new customers and one including customers. So that's really a bottom of funnel build. You could already do that in a business as usual campaign. Right. So it's interesting, it's the fact that it kind of defaults over to this to try to replicate that effect is is pretty interesting to me at least. But the big thing is like what I've started testing in that case because in most of our instances, at least in the instances I've tested the for me it's not as much of an objective to do that. So I actually removed the ad set for the returning customers and just launched the new one. And I have seen some components of an Advantage plus campaign. But the big thing that I would definitely say for any advertisers as you start to navigate this is Meta's audience segments. It's a breakdown available in custom reports and directly in Ads Manager under the breakdowns tab. That is probably going to be your best friend trend as you test this because without being able to or if you want to try to replicate the impact but monitor how much is net net new traffic versus your middle of funnel engaged traffic that hasn't bought yet even within this new setting like that's going to be really powerful in understanding truly how top of funnel this effort is. Unless you add more exclusions in long winded way of saying I'm actually cautiously optimistic and excited about about this because of the opportunity that that might be there as we move forward to blend the benefits of both types of campaigns that we've seen today on Meta.
- [11:45]
Eric Dick
And you can still then in reports I think this is what you're saying. But you can still in your reports in these Advantage plus campaigns you can still see the breakdown between new and existing customers. So you can tell where the spend is going after the fact.
- [11:58]
Taylor
Correct yeah. And you can even break it down a level further if you have it defined in your audience settings, which is the engaged segment. So that's your. That's the people that are not like net new to your brand. They've been to your. Usually they've been to your website, but you can see your website visitor breakdown to have three. Three there. So net new website visitor and then purchasers.
- [12:16]
Eric Dick
How long until business. Until we. They don't offer business as usual campaigns.
- [12:20]
Jacob
Yeah. I mean it seemed like they were going that way, but with this new update and like telling people to kind of go back to that as well as run Advantage plus is interesting, like Taylor said.
- [12:30]
Eric Dick
Yeah. What was your, what's your hypothesis with that, Taylor, as to why they did this?
- [12:35]
Taylor
When you think about Advantage plus being launched two, three years ago now that it was. It was such an interesting. Like it performs. It performs and builds momentum very differently than a business as usual campaign. Based on what I've seen with pretty much every brand, I've tested it and so it felt like it was almost segmented within Meta's process. And this is just me finger in the wind, like applying some. Some thinking, like backtracked kind of thinking to this. It's almost like a contrasting test for them to launch like a new direction algorithmically with certain different benefits compared to running your standard business as usual campaign or traditional campaign. Social proof being one of them. Now it feels like they're merging them together. Like there's this realization that brand, a lot of brands use both still or there are still debates happening. You see it on dtc, Twitter kind of everywhere about like what you're using and why you're using it. And so this feels like a simplification to blend them together now that there's maybe some more confidence behind the adoption rate of that and how advertisers feel about that campaign type. That's what I'm hoping at least. But you know, again, I don't have any evidence to prove this. This is just a hypothesis that may or may not be true.
- [13:44]
Eric Dick
So practically for advertisers out there, what are we changing and what are we, you know, staying the course, slash, doubling down on in terms of our approach with Meta ads?
- [13:53]
Jacob
Yeah. I could kind of take like some of the key considerations. If you're a brand and you're hearing this and you know you're running some Advantage plus on Meta, basically the first things to do is look at what is your campaign set up, how much budget currently is running through Advantage plus, what's the breakdown there then break down that Advantage plus traffic, basically with the customer breakdowns that we just talked about. Benchmark, exactly how much of it last six months has been cold traffic, how much has been warm traffic? Get those benchmarks, benchmark your return on ad spend across those. And essentially what you do is just start to test it as, you know, as it makes sense and you can compare and contrast. Of course, the short term effect which Meta is saying, you know, should, should look better with this new Advantage plus campaign set up. That's really the reason to go with it, right? As performance. And that's kind of what they're saying. But also the longer term effect, like, sure, Meta's CPA looks great. Does that mean that a year from now, like the LTV is going to be as high as it was now? The subscription uptake is going to be as high as it was now? All these other things that Meta doesn't necessarily care about if people are going to throw money at them because the CPA looks great. Right. So there's like a lot to kind of gauge and just benchmark. And you know, I do think their Meta, you know, does have the best interest of advertisers and increasing their performance, but at the same time they also want to get advertisers spending more. So it's just making sure you're kind of aware of those considerations that I just went through and definitely testing it as it, you know, comes out because you want to be. Yeah, firing on all cylinders, essentially.
- [15:33]
Eric Dick
Any other best practices Taylor, that you recommend on Meta these days?
- [15:37]
Taylor
Yeah, I mentioned the audience segments breakdown. So that is it. You know, it may not like a lot of people at this point have third party attribution tools that they use to verify as well. I always encourage people to look at those, but this is helpful through the lens of getting a sense of like, how it, how it stacks up comparatively and ultimately especially as you're testing new campaign types and you're trying to evaluate, you know, how does this new campaign structure perform against my traditional business as Usual or Advantage Plus? It's helpful to see where that traffic's going in the more simplified audience structure. One thing that's cool about this too is it looks like you can save your Advantage plus audiences within this, this built structure. So you can like, this is a way to combine Advantage plus some of the benefits of Advantage plus potentially with things like lookalikes and interest groups, some different things that you can try and see kind of where that goes. But ultimately I'd say like biggest Best practice at this stage on Meta is continue to prioritize your creative and and, and what's going to fuel your most important KPIs often being creative Offer post click One thing that Meta's trying to do is they're trying to be better equipped to handle more and more creative. So a lot of the tests, like a lot of, a lot of the beta tests we saw last year were Meta increasing the number of creatives in one of the test groups in your ASC campaigns. So it's really interesting to see where that continues to go. And then I think the other big best practice, I am a big fan of segmenting by product when I'm using cost caps mainly if There are differing AOVs and different, different targets kind of baking in your own profitability targets within your campaign structure. So I would still encourage people like it is it's becoming a more and more simplified ad ecosystem, but it's still definitely worth applying a level of critical thinking about how you want a structure to align to your overall business objectives when you have multiple products in play that might reach different audience segments and have different profitability metrics behind them.
- [17:41]
Eric Dick
I just, I wanted to ask because I know we haven't probably talked about the pilot method in a while, which was the way that we've sort of, you know, really built out our ability to test different angles, different avatars, see which aspects of the ads are working well and build on them. Is are we doing these pilot test style things with a, with Advantage plus now or are they still being done on business as usual campaigns all stepped out or does ASC kind of do this on its own now?
- [18:06]
Taylor
Okay, sure. So one, one thing that's like one thing to watch with ASC is your, your breadth of spend between ads within the campaign. Even in this new campaign I was, I was comparing the results and I saw VAR variance between different campaigns I've had under this new style of campaign Meta's launch. So sometimes you'll see all spend go to one ad and that's a challenge, right? Because on the one hand the algorithm is favoring it. That might be what you want because it's going to perform, but on the other hand you might not be giving a shot to. We've adapted our testing systems. A lot of our brands use a graduating system where they float between business as usual and ASC so that they can take the benefits of ASC and scale but still get clarity from the business as usual and then on a case by case test direct into ASC so that we can just scale quickly. But I think it's going to be interesting to see where that goes in this because if anything, this might help more with some of the clarity and some of the challenges that there have been in testing in ASC and being limited by one ad set.
- [19:07]
Eric Dick
Nice. Anything to add there, Jacob?
- [19:08]
Jacob
Exactly what Taylor said. Like, it's, it's not like we're just abandoning all business as usual, especially even on the audience side. Like, you know, sure, Meta is going to find an audience, but there's always going to be opportunities there. Let's just say March Madness is coming up and you're a brand that's, you know, related somehow. Basketballs or something, or not even basketballs, like beer or something like that. You're going to want to have an audience matrix test, you know, running where you can hit those specific people. You know, you're getting your brand in front of them and it's guaranteed data. And guaranteed data is something that's going to kind of go away with Advantage plus because that data is hidden within their algorithm. It's not like they're giving you some data but you don't know like, hey, how much of it came from this exact buyer Persona. And like all these little things that you can do on the manual side. So but we find is use those manual businesses usual solutions and you know, if it works, it works. But also take those insights and then apply them to Advantage plus, feed them in. Yeah, and you might even have another Advantage plus campaign that's only basketball related because you've found that that's worked and that own Advantage plus will sort of dial into its own customer segment versus your other Advantage plus that's running Evergreen.
- [20:26]
Eric Dick
So you could essentially do a pilot test just with each angle avatar combo being its own asexual Advantage plus campaign.
- [20:34]
Jacob
You could. Yeah, theoretically. But with the way the Advantage plus works, you're not going to get equal spend to every ad and all these, you know, things that you.
- [20:43]
Eric Dick
But it would find ideally what is the, the gold coin or whatever that, that actually works there. And I'm like, when it comes, we're testing, you know, you throw in 10 to 30 different creatives in one of these. That's crazy. And then when it comes to landing pages, like, you know, say we're talking running founder story angles and then we have a founder's landing page. Like you don't want to run a founders story creative to a PDP because they're not, that's really not what they're after. In that case, do we run many different landing pages in ASCs as well. Or do we still run campaigns that we have specific landing pages for in business as usual?
- [21:15]
Jacob
Yeah. So like on the landing page side, it's a good question. We're usually using tools in the back end like our tool Warp drive where basically we're, you know, routing the traffic and you can use the rules like if they've come through, you know, this campaign or this campaign, send them to this page or this page. You can do different links by like campaign. But yeah, you can't really have bunch of ads in the advantage plus going to different spots on the front end. Like so it is something you kind of have to think about. And that again is. Might be a reason to test some business as usual. If you need to, you know, test a certain promo or running a giveaway and you need to get traffic to a giveaway page. There's. There's considerations there. But yeah. Taylor, I'm curious how you're kind of managing that.
- [21:59]
Taylor
Pretty aligned with your thinking. I. That is something that we think about. Like we do look at how impactful is congruency between an ad angle and the landing page angle and then like using that. It's powerful to use that data.
- [22:13]
Jacob
Right.
- [22:14]
Taylor
Like Eric. Because if we, if we run an A B test using the tools that Jacob mentioned and we see like, hey, broad ad to founders page works better than broad ad to pdp. That's really interesting. That'll probably spur some founders content coming up next and make those data, data informed decisions. But yeah, like to Jacob's point, it's challenging in asu if you have that issue where one ad is going to get the majority of the spend or you're seeing that and you're feeling limited in your ability to, to test and actually get meaningful data. That's where I'd say like, don't worry too much. Like creative in this modern meta environment is, is typically more impactful than like a really rigid structure that you're following. And usually that's where we'd look to, to break away from that a little bit and be flexible.
- [22:58]
Eric Dick
Super cool. I don't know. I didn't. We didn't prep for this, but we're. I know we're launching Warp Drive. Kyle's hard at work on the marketing front for that. It was just DX3 promoting that. And I know we have a number of our clients that are integrated with Warp Drive and others that aren't. From the ad buyer's perspective, how are you guys liking what's being developed at Warp Drive.
- [23:17]
Jacob
It's been great. I haven't been like super looped in on the client side facing stuff, but how we've been using it, like just the tools, the routing. Yeah, it's saved us millions. It's been great. And like I said with ASC and things like that, these tools are going to become even more meaningful and important and impactful because running these things behind one link allows you to also have that consolidated approach on meta where yeah, let's just throw everything in Advantage plus all the winners, they're all on one link. But we can still change where that journey goes, you know, because we have this tool. So yeah, some of the new stuff they're coming out with has been awesome. Some of the features, yeah, game.
- [24:00]
Taylor
Game changer for me as well. And I'm, I'm bullish bullish on AI when it comes to, to media as a, as a whole. So potentially another topic for another time.
- [24:08]
Eric Dick
Oh, I'm interested now. Yeah, I guess we'll have to dive into that. I guess let's leave it. I just. We just launched our, our podcast this week with Taylor Holiday, the cost Cost Cap King, who stated in that podcast that cost caps have never been more important because they're one of the main levers that remains for advertisers not in ASC campaigns, but in business as usual style campaigns. Do you guys agree with Taylor's bombastic statements about cost caps? Taylor v Taylor, do we have a, can we, can we set up a debate series or do you agree that.
- [24:37]
Taylor
Would be a fun debate series? I would say, I'd say I generally agree. I think there's a place for each bid type. I can't speak for Taylor, but I bet that he would be aligned in that as well. Generally speaking, cost caps, they're really powerful. But I'm even noticing some potential limitations within this new campaign structure compared to what we've seen with asc. So ASC has had the ability to add cost caps just standard Advantage plus shopping campaigns for a while and those have been quite effective, but they're kind of a loose cost cap. Business as usual has always been a little bit tighter and then when you get to Big cap, you're really, you're really starting to constrain it and be pretty tight to your goal as a whole. But I'm finding in this new version of campaign that it is a little bit tighter than the Advantage plus Shopping campaign, but there is still a great place for it, especially if you know you're, you're looking to to anchor against some intended outcomes that you have. And I know Jacob, we were talking earlier and you made the really good point that really one of the big things you're you're only going to have at this point on Meta is your ability to to tell it what your outcome is and feed it the creative as things keep getting simpler and simpler, so it does become more and more prominent. But I think there's also a flip side to it where if you become too reliant on cost caps, it can also be damaging or limiting and you might miss opportunity that's that's in front of you as well. So that's where having an overall system that you're confident in and a team around it that you're confident in is really important.
- [26:08]
Eric Dick
Hear that Taylor Holiday. We somewhat agree we'll have to do an actual episode with Taylor v. Taylor Holiday v. Kane and see what we come up with. But nice guys. Thanks so much for the meta updates we've got. This is coming out next week. The one previous to this will be an episode from Aves going deep on the founders story angle for both creative and landing page, which is a huge lever that not enough brands are probably using out there. So hopefully people will listen to these and get a lot of value. Thanks again.
- [26:39]
Jacob
Yeah, thanks Eric.
- [26:46]
Eric Dick
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer. Co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all killer no filler services, take off to Pilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.