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Ep 567: Ecom CMOs: How Pilothouse Used Meta’s Update to Drive 30% Higher CTR with Fewer Campaigns
00:29:34
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- [00:00]
A
There has been the shift away from testing in separate ad sets and gradually over time continuing to just feed high confidence concepts into existing campaigns organized by the alignment to the Persona or the topic.
- [00:17]
B
What's your take on how impactful the changes that Meta has made to their ecosystem actually are?
- [00:22]
A
I'm a huge fan of what Meta has done with partnership ads this last year. It felt like they really listened to advertisers and that they've made it really dynamic.
- [00:39]
B
Before we dive in, let's take a minute to talk about what happened this bfcm because the numbers were massive and they reveal a lot about the state of E commerce performance right now. Across the Triple Whale platform, brands process more than 26 million orders and over $2.9 billion in revenue in just one weekend. Brands also spent more than $600 million across the major ad platforms and Triple Whale brands alone represented nearly 20% Shopify sales during BFCM, which is pretty incredible when you consider the scale. But here's the part that actually matters. The brands that performed best weren't reacting blindly. They had a clear understanding of what was driving results, which channels were truly profitable, how roas was trending throughout the weekend, how AOV shifted as promotions rolled out, and where they had the strongest opportunities to keep momentum high. That level of clarity only comes from having all your data in one place, updating in real time. Triple Whale is the agent powered intelligence platform trusted by more than 50,000 brands. Like true, Classic Way and Olipop, it unifies data across every channel and tool, giving you a single source of truth and actionable AI insights so you can make confident decisions faster. If you want that level of visibility heading into 2026, you can create a free account and see the platform for yourself. Visit triplewhale.com dtc that's T R-I-P L E W H A L E.com dtc dtc it's all killer, no filler. I'm a little subdued today because we just had the pilot house Christmas party last night. Taylor, you left early to get back up to Shimanus. I raged. It felt like a I was just saying the last couple years it felt a little bit stuffy that the Christmas parties. This one was a true re, you know, return to form for the pilothouse team having an epic throwdown. Did you have a good time?
- [02:26]
A
Oh, it was awesome. Yeah. Lots of. Lots of familiar faces, lots of new faces. It was. It was a great time, really enjoyed it and was stoked for the the grand prize winners too of the the company draws there.
- [02:36]
B
Yeah, a couple great prizes, some AirPod Pros and some phones. It was. It was great. It's just when you work remote, it's just so amazing when you can get together. Like we've been a remote team kind of since we started, and I think a lot of us are here, local on the island, but still just bringing everyone in, getting everyone together, mixing it up, drinking some shafts. If you don't know what chefs are, it's a Victoria Special drink. You should Google it because it's amazing. But let's kick it off here. I wanted to talk about Andromeda. We've talked about Andromeda quite a bit and the first question I wanted to ask you was because I had someone on the podcast the other day say that so much of the discourse around Andromeda was blown up and overblown and it's really not that different. I'm wondering, I know Andromeda's been around for over a year now, but this was our first Black Friday Cyber Monday, kind of with it in full effect. What's your take on how impactful the changes that meta has made to their ecosystem actually are?
- [03:25]
A
Yeah, I think quite impactful, honestly, as we were kind of deep in a lot of the postmortem now and chatting with various PoCs and looking into things, and one of the biggest things that I saw across the portfolio. It's tricky when you're trying to understand all the variables at play, but a really big incline in outbound CTR that translated to high quality traffic for a lot of brands on the Meta side this year. So one thing that we're seeing is it's continuing to get smarter and smarter. CPMs were up, as everybody would kind of expect during this period. They climb every year. But when you think about it too, when you have potentially finite inventory, depending on kind of how you look at that, a CTR increase to offset the cost is really, really powerful. So we did generally see that. I think the number that was floated around and this isn't official yet or anything like that, but potentially as much as a 30% improvement in CTR year on year for a lot of brands is kind of a benchmark, some exceeding that, some maybe being a little bit lower, but basically the system handled a real range of creative effectively from what we threw at it. And we had some really interesting trends though. I think one of the big things to call out is that we still saw scrappy statics perform in a lot of places. But a little bit more, to me, it goes hand in hand with the overall trend, where it feels like we're seeing more and more of what you would expect as a marketer. Like when you have good video content, the system can handle it, it can deliver it really effectively towards the targets that you have and then you can reinforce it with offer messaging or static style content down funnel to keep it really oversimplified. But yeah, it was an interesting year for sure.
- [05:19]
B
That is interesting. Did you find. I know in the past it's, you know, 80, 20 or even 90, 90, 10 in terms of the creatives that actually drive the results. And in theory, because you've got this gem lattice, you know, in Andromeda actually matching people up on a creative per profile basis. Did you actually see more creatives maybe get served than you would have in previous years?
- [05:41]
A
I think so, yeah. Because I'd say like there was still a tendency to see majority of spend go to top performer. But what I would notice within campaigns is that the ads underneath would kind of go up and down in the like spend and ranking order as you continue to filter in more ads. So super interesting because in past years, if you launch new ads in the same campaign, you'd probably just see things keep going as they were going and those don't get any spend this time. We did see more delivery to ads within the grouping and basically a really helpful system from my perspective around being able to just keep feeding that top performing campaign and just keep going up and up and up. My accounts, I always try to focus on consolidation, but they were even more consolidated. They were probably the most consolidated they've ever been this year based on the delivery patterns that we saw and the ability to just keep investing into what was working and see that delivery move how we wanted it to.
- [06:38]
B
Very cool. I've heard a lot of talk about sort of foregoing traditional testing campaigns and just having them all kind of rolled up into one consolidated campaign. Is that kind of what you mean? Or were you still operating, you know, testing and retargeting campaigns, things like that?
- [06:51]
A
I believe there's still a place for it. It's a little bit more. The account structure has kind of changed in terms of we might have a certain topic or core concept. So it might be product drop, it might be promo, it might be evergreen angle, or like a seasonally relevant message. We're still generally segmenting some of that type of content campaign to campaign, depending on how we're rotating creative in. So there is an element of segmentation happening. There's still breakouts for very specific audience Segments that we want to try pushing harder with like your email segment alignment and stuff like that over Black Friday. But generally speaking there has been this shift away from testing in separate ad sets and gradually over time continuing to just feed high confidence concepts into existing campaigns organized by the alignment to the Persona or the topic. So like it still happens, we still use those testing campaigns. A lot of it is still that diversification of risk, you know, is it like based on what's happening in the account, are we taking a big risk by moving a test ad into like our top spending campaign? You know, if it's your first time doing that, like my philosophy is always tried in like a secondary or third campaign, not your top one, like those kinds of things. So we still use that kind of logic. But generally speaking, yeah, it's continuing to change and shift and it's interesting for me to reflect on because it felt like, it feels kind of like it's accelerated a bit in the last few months. But like this has been a long time coming like compared to where we were five, six, seven years ago. So yeah, I think it's interesting, it's going to be interesting to see what 2026 holds as well.
- [08:36]
B
I was reading a message from friend and rival David Herman the other day. He was talking about the Andromeda system, talking about the gym, but he also mentioned something that I wasn't as familiar with, which was this idea of event, event based features or EBFs, which are basically what Meta uses to sequence a user's journey. So I think traditionally you'd want to have all these stepped out campaigns for different parts of the funnel. In this Andromeda world. It seems like Meta is using these event based features in order to really understand where people are in the funnel and be able to serve them accordingly. Because it can look at your creative, it can look at where someone is and find the right ad to meet them. Is that something you found where you weren't having to break things out as explicitly into different campaigns, but you were using these event or that you were allowing them the algorithm to use these EBFs?
- [09:24]
A
Yeah, yeah, definitely to an extent. And I think we, we tend to view that differently depending on the moment and the type of content and what the overall objectives are. Because there is still an element of if you lean too heavily into that. We see the risks as being you're, you're delivering potentially depending on the brand, their audience, their existing audience size, their warm traffic, what other channels they have coming in, you run the risk of staying in kind of a warm zone of traffic, which isn't always bad, especially at this time of the year when you're trying to convert revenue. But then with some of the like we are still running max exclusion like very tight top of funnel campaigns and monitoring how many new visits were driving over a period compared to previous periods for growth and thinking about things through that lens too. So there's, I would say, yes, with the asterisk, that there is still an element of applied kind of marketing foundations to help guide the growth pattern that we want to see in addition to what the machine is doing for us. But it's super cool to see how a lot of the time a lot of marketers operate with a certain idea about what frequency should be. And I'm seeing that kind of get rewritten in real time where your CTR might go way up within a segment of your audience because you've driven the frequency up and it's doing it cost effectively. And it's. It's kind of interesting to see those types of patterns happen. And that is in my eyes, meta getting smarter and managing this, this kind of delivery. Based on that.
- [10:51]
B
Now we've done on the DTC side, done a bunch of podcasts with Metta this year, which has been awesome, and I think the most recent one, which is out maybe next week, is all about partnership ads and how much of an emphasis they're putting on partnership ads in their ecosystem, which I guess are formally what we would have hacked together as whitelisted ads. Or is that something. Did we see that trend as well with some of our accounts, that people were really getting a lot of value out of those partnership ads?
- [11:16]
A
Totally. And I'm a huge fan of what meta has done with partnership ads this last year. It felt like they really listened to advertisers and that they've made it really dynamic. So when I go into meta to build a partnership ad back in the day, I used to have to either choose between dark posting or use the old partnership version, which was brand name in partnership with creator. Now they've got a dynamic system with it where you can set it up. You can basically do either of those by setting it up through the same system, officially using the partnership feature. And you can either choose to show one profile dynamically show both, allow the system to optimize to whoever it should show first based on what meta thinks will perform better, likely related to people's user behavior with influencers and things like that. So we saw really, really good results with partnership ads. It's been a Pretty common area of investment for a lot of brands who maybe had stepped away from it for a little bit depending, or for brands who wanted to kind of jump in and take advantage of that. And it really paid off for a lot of our big brands, both from a retargeting perspective and also from a top down investment perspective to reach new audiences. Because I think a huge part of where Meta has gone has been delivery to Personas based on where they most deeply engaged with content and are likely to act. So if you have a certain Persona they're on, maybe they're on reels rather than feed. You work with a creator that can reach that audience well even beyond kind of what your brand typically delivers to. That's a big opportunity in the modern Meta ecosystem.
- [12:50]
B
Did you find that those partnership ads had higher, like incrementality or higher, I guess, new audience? I think that's probably the big idea with them is that they come with their own audience, but they also come with who they are in a way that appeals to maybe new audiences in the way that your brand might not be doing.
- [13:05]
A
Yeah, again, a little bit of both. Like there are moments where they overlap with existing ones and that sometimes drives an exceptionally high conversion rate because there's a high amount of interest there within a slightly warm or maybe you know, slightly lower new visit percent. But totally there were pockets where we saw it looked from the incremental kind of modeling tools we use. Typically those partnership ads were maybe not the strongest on the direct click compared to like branded promo ads and things like that. But they were up there in terms of the top down impact and how they were reaching people that were getting warmed up and then converting downstream. So super, super cool and big opportunity I think for anybody who doesn't have that in their, their growth mix coming into next year.
- [13:51]
B
And it's just worth noting how much of a focus these kinds of ads are for Meta themselves. I was just chatting on the podcast and they were talking about, I don't think they've ruled them very close to rolling out catalog ad supported partnership ads where you basically will have, you know, a partnership ad like a UGC from someone's handle and then they'll have the catalog of products directly under them where they'll be able to speak to specific products. It'll almost feel like that creator's like personal store which is kind of is giving like TikTok shop vibes, right.
- [14:20]
A
Oh, that's super cool. Yeah. Because we already leverage the catalog AI feature that pops it underneath those partnership ads which so we're seeing that happen, but really relative to the brand's side, not necessarily like a curated creators kind of collection, which I think is a super cool opportunity as well.
- [14:38]
B
You mentioned it's funny, I was really enjoying going and seeing the ads that were being pumped out in the real time updates in the general channels over, over Black Friday Cyber Monday from the team. I'm thinking specifically about some of Abe's creatives that she was just hammering in all these funny stick figure prime millennial, just like 35 year old prime Millennial ads tickling people's funny bones. And I'm curious how much of like we have always known that that like scrappy standout attention kind of style of ad is really good bottom of funnel, especially in these heavy sales periods. Do you think there was like how much of what we went into Black Friday was like plan versus how much was like quick pivots in order to create clever, you know, engaging moments on the fly?
- [15:24]
A
Yeah, it's a good question. I think if I had to give you like a percent breakdown, it's probably something like 75, 25 planned versus kind of in the moment. And like basically I think what we did really well this year across the board was every brand had a really clear creative range based on their core audience and Persona for their offer creative coming into it. So that's kind of where the 75% comes in. Most of our brands had some sort of meme style variant, product focused, UGC focused, more organic feeling stuff, lo fi type stuff. Just a real range of things happening that we, we went live with and that paid off. And then in real time when you started to see things shift and you know you're navigating the reality of real time retail, we were able to move pretty quickly and lean in and take advantage. And because of the delivery system prioritizing things that would hit that way, it worked out really well. I will say like one huge thing to consider in the creative side with that from my POV is alignment to Persona. Like you hit it on the head like the Millennial in that case, like that was a huge pillar in the success of that. And another big one is the, the offer alignment behind it. Because I think when it comes to the types of ads that hit, like if we're, if it's like a stick figure type ad and you need to back that out with either a really good offer or like all the info someone needs on the landing page behind them. So that because there's always the risk that you're going to end up driving lower quality click throughs for people who aren't warm. And if they don't get the right message about what kind of value this product can bring to their life, at some point in that key part of the journey, you may see a really high ctr, but not quite the same conversion rate as others. And you might give up on a concept like that. So it took a lot of work to get everything dialed in together and huge credit to Aves because she was going in and doing all that heavy lifting to make sure everything was organized that way. And we had all that behind it. But I think we saw like a real mix. Like if I gave you the two kind of key performers for everywhere, it was like the funny attention grabbing style backed out by that. And then the other was like the very much the evergreen that has momentum coming in. Tons of value. Tons. Like a strong hook. More like your CGC video that explains it because it makes people want the product or the solution so much that they end up buying it. When it's that peak buying moment and it's, and it's on sale, it just elevates that to a, to another level.
- [17:52]
B
If I'm thinking right. Aves, the offer that we're talking about here too was like a bogo offer of a pretty high value AOV thing. So it was like buy one, get one of this pretty expensive, high quality product, you get another whole one. So it's like her if it, you know, if she was doing all those funny ads and it was like, oh, you get 20% off off. Like it might not be as cool, but this idea that you can buy something for self and get a gift for your family member kind of free of charge probably helped that as well because it's kind of a really standout offer.
- [18:19]
A
Yeah, it created like the perfect storm because there was also a lot to play off of in the offer itself and like, you know, kind of play on like jokes related to it. So it worked out really, really well.
- [18:28]
B
Did you? Because I think you sit, you're not just on Meta, right? You sort of sit astride a lot of the different platforms that we operate with.
- [18:35]
A
That's correct. Yeah.
- [18:36]
B
Were there any, any trends you saw there? And I think I had, I think I had heard one of my podcasters mention that they saw a bit of a shift. Some spend shifted from Metta toward Google. In their case, I forget the exact reason why. But like when it, when it came to other plan other channels or Omni channel presentation, like were there any trends you saw there this year.
- [18:57]
A
Yeah, I think like this year especially with everything that happened and with what a lot of brands faced throughout 2025, a pretty tumultuous year with the tariffs, various things happening. So like I'd say like the general trend was a harder kind of shift from a lot of awareness effort in the build up to Black Friday lean into what's converting those, those clickouts like how you're, how you're driving your email list, all that kind of stuff and then shifting even a little bit more aggressively towards some of those more like bottom of funnel or intent based kind of areas. So generally speaking still like just to give you the kind of quick channel run through Applovin, still very strong for us in general year on year Meta we saw what felt like pretty strong improvements compared to last year, which was really great to see. We saw a ton of growth. I know within our email side of things. Google looked really strong as well for sure. Some emerging channels too like Pinterest and Snap looked better than they have in the past for me. And TikTok showed some really strong signs too. So I know for most brands and again this is a pretty broad generalization or for a lot of brands you've kind of got the big, the big two in Meta and Google and then TikTok's kind of that third and there are these other channels. But I definitely feel that Pinterest and Snap are two to watch on top of Applovin, which kind of emerged into that category as well as they're all competing and continuing to try to drive more incremental settings for advertisers. Whether it's Applovin's new customer only campaign type or it's Snap really focusing on TCPA plus a click optimization. There's some really cool, cool opportunity out there on these, these channels as they all compete. And I think it's good for advertisers because it, it just diversifies and continues to hold innovation to a very high standard.
- [20:45]
B
That's cool. And I know this year we've, you've been on the attribution front lines for Pilot House for a long time and I know you guys made some decisions this year we're going to announce on the podcast we're not going steady with Triple Whale which, which is awesome. Talk about maybe that decision and maybe how Triple Whale played in this year in the heat of the moment.
- [21:05]
A
Yeah. So like huge shout out to the, the MTA tools out there because at really like being able there were moments where I'm sure a Lot of people listening to the podcast saw Shopify go down at one point and you couldn't see your analytics and so like you're kind of flying blind, I believe it was on Cyber Monday. It's all a little bit of a blur to me at this point, but having access to real time data was super, super helpful there. I think again, being able to model it down and see when you're looking at real time Black Friday and Cyber Monday and you're starting to think about what can we do next year to take it further. Having access to understanding what everything did in the build up so that you're not just looking at last click data, you're looking at first click, you're looking at some of the modeled views and really trying to get a complete picture of what's going on. That has been incredibly powerful for us because even in real time we could see where that investment was paying dividends for brands and we were able to lean into iterations. So like if we saw for example, investing up funnel in a certain product line was working really, really well and converting downstream through email, we were able to kind of shift and quickly make ad iterations to focus on the offer plus that product line and focus on like one day click type stuff to capture a lot of revenue effectively as well. So excited to get it going. There's a triple Whale has been doing a lot of cool stuff with AI and various things and yeah, I think it's going to be cool to see all our brands benefit.
- [22:31]
B
Moby, I guess is their sort of AI clippy tool. Were you, is were you using like, because I know that you use these hardcore mta, you know, aspects of the tool, but were you finding value in the, not in the natural language, like chat modal as well?
- [22:45]
A
Oh, totally. I would quickly prompt it and be like, hey, I have a thought about where we could go strategically and it would tell me, here's the breakdown of what's happening there. And I would get it way faster than if I'm trying to figure out how to compile all the different data from different naming conventions and things like that. I was able to just run it using a SQL query and basically give it to me in real time. And then you spot check it, you verify it as with anything, make sure it's accurate. It typically looked pretty good. So super helpful for saving time in real time. When time is of the essence, I.
- [23:19]
B
Feel to bring it back to hockey. I feel like every time, every time there's a Stanley cup, there's a theme that Happens. So it's like, oh, the defensemen were really big guys. And then everyone the next year says oh, we need to get big guys on D or we've got to need a number one, we need a goalie. So I'm just curious, in this hockey metaphor, what, what are some of the things that happened in the heat of battle, this Q4 that you really think will be impactful next year for any CMOs out there listening?
- [23:44]
A
Yeah. So I think one thing that we saw was the importance of email, like the email list connection to paid. So like one of the biggest connecting points from my POV is that with like if you have a really good pop up situation, a great like optimized website for email flow and you're running a lot of paid, you're likely getting a lot of people who are signing up. Like when you think about like email revenue and where that comes from, it has to come from somewhere because it's either going to be like past purchaser, people who abandoned but they entered their info at checkout or like people who signed up and are interested, they're you know, maybe interested in your brand but they're not buying right now. We saw loading up that email list and having a lot of clarity around what those targets should be where, where we had that, that paid off a lot. So it takes the pressure off the paid. It ensures you can be efficient in the moment. That's a big, big takeaway. I think a lot of brands pulled, did something to kind of keep things fresh and exciting over Black Friday weekend because there's the classic trend where you know, early access deals, they keep going live earlier and earlier. They're more common. I think the consumer really valued a feeling like there was a really great offer where it wasn't just your standard up to something percent off and it's all the clearance things and the consumer's kind of like, and that's not really a real deal for me. Kind of feels like a corporate move. Those kinds of like being able to connect with the consumer at that level helped a ton. So that was another way that a lot of, a lot of brands won and basically like, you know, as we, as we see it kind of every year, the work you do in the months leading up, that is critical. So highly, highly recommend doing postmortems now when things are fresh, being able to get ready and set those notes aside for apply them to your Q1 strategy of course, but like also have them ready to pull in next year in August, July, September, like whenever you're Doing your deep planning for it.
- [25:40]
B
Very cool. And don't be afraid to go Omnichannel, it sounds like too. Right. Especially if you've got a good MTA solution. You're tracking the Halo effects and all these things. It seems like there are these other platforms that are kind of out there that are giving people more incremental new customers. Like Applovin and Snap, as you're saying.
- [25:58]
A
Absolutely.
- [25:58]
B
Yeah.
- [25:59]
A
It's. It's cool to see how it's developing and I'm excited to see. See where it goes because I think that's like another way to really think about it is where. Where are your Personas and your core audiences engaging with content? Where can you reach them the best? In combination with all the algorithmic benefits, we know that there are tools like meta and whatnot.
- [26:17]
B
What about TikTok? That was another one I'd heard, actually was on the Triple Whale podcast I did. They said TikTok made a lot of gains this year. TikTok shop is really settling and like, to me it's only a matter of time. With the amount of attention that TikTok is getting versus all the other platforms, it's the fastest growing one. Like it's gonna figure it out eventually. Did we see rumblings of that?
- [26:36]
A
Yeah, we definitely did. It's. And it's kind of had its, its own ups and downs as far as like, quality, efficiency, things like that, generally speaking, across the board. But it's, it's starting to settle in nicely. And I, I kind of have this. Have the same POV because you think of the audience that's coming through there and it's just going to continue to be a mature audience that gets more settled in their careers. And as they figure out more with the algorithm, at the end of the day, they have so much content delivery power in that algorithm that like, it's always kind of been a matter of time until it starts to really catch and take. So I'm excited to see where that goes too. We saw signs of some upticks there as well.
- [27:15]
B
And I know you're going to say it depends, but we watched, I think it was probably four weeks ago now. There was that fun online debate between Charlie and my friend Jordan Menard about the amount of creative that it really takes in today's day and age. I think Charlie was arguing that you really, you know, this idea of like spamming lots of creatives doesn't really work. You really just need winner creatives actually don't even know the exact outline of the debate. But it was between a lot of creatives and a little creatives. It sounds like a lot of creatives that are all neatly, like, not just variations on creatives, but actual net. New concepts, new partnership ads, new angles. But you still need a lot of volume. Is that correct?
- [27:57]
A
Yeah, I like your hockey analogy because my perspective is like, shots on goal. Like, if you take, yeah, 100 shots and they're all off target, like, it's not going to be helpful. But if you, like, if you have a goal and your goal is like your Persona and you know, you have a theory or a strong understanding what connects with them, you're more likely to find those winners by getting the shots on the net. So if you take a hundred shots on net, you've got a better shot than taking two shots on net at. At like, scoring more goals. But you do deploy more.
- [28:23]
B
If you take them from all the same spot on the ice in the same kind of shot, Matt will just dismiss them because they've seen enough. You gotta. You gotta.
- [28:30]
A
The keepers move all around. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think that's the way that we're looking at it too. Like, I would if I was given the scenario of, hey, we'll make. We'll make a ton of creative. It'll all be kind of man, like, the same. Then I'm like, no, I'd rather just have. I'd rather shoot my shot with two really good ones. And so I'm aligned with that kind of that. That stance on that you miss 100%.
- [28:52]
B
Of the shots you don't take. Wayne Gretzky, Michael Scott, Eric Dick, we all. Thanks so much for coming on the pod today, Taylor. This is a great one.
- [29:00]
A
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Eric. It was a. It was a lot of fun.
- [29:09]
B
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.