← Social Media Marketing Podcast
Social Media Marketing Podcast
Facebook and Instagram Ads Updates for 2025: What Marketers Need to Know
00:42:35
Loading summary
Transcript105 lines
- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Thinking of attending Social Media Marketing World, but you need to persuade your boss. I have really good news for you. We've crafted the ultimate resource to get a yes from your boss. It includes talking points and a scripted email that really works. Imagine yourself in sunny San Diego this spring as you join thousands of marketers at our upcoming Social Media marketing world. Simply visit socialmediaexaminer.com boss to get all the amazing resources resources so you can get a yes from your boss. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing podcast helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, Hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the social media marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever changing marketing jungle. Today I'm going to be joined by Tara Zuercher and we're going to explore Facebook and Instagram ad updates and really the whole AI side of things with ads and where it's going with Facebook and Instagram, and I think you're going to find it really intriguing. Also, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Tara Zerkar, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Tara Zuercher. If you don't know who Tara is, she's a Facebook ads expert and the founder of the Successful Ads Club, a membership site designed to help marketers improve their Facebook and Instagram ads. She's also got the Successful Ads Accelerator, a Done with you program designed to help marketers rapidly launch and scale their ads. Tara, welcome back to the show. How you doing today?
- [02:02]
Tara Zuercher
Good. Thanks for inviting me back. It's so good to be here.
- [02:05]
Michael Stelzner
It's awesome to have you. Today, Tara and I are going to explore Facebook and Instagram ad updates that marketers need to know. But before we go there, Tara, there's probably some people listening to this show. As a matter of fact, I know there are that are focused exclusively on organic and they're not really taking a look at what maybe the opportunities are on the ad side of things. What do you want to say to marketers who maybe have not recently embraced advertising advertising on Facebook and Instagram?
- [02:33]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, and I know a lot of people got scared from the iOS updates. A couple of Years ago, probably left the platform and have been wondering if they should get back on it. And they, you know, in a lot of cases, focused more on organic, which is wonderful. I would just say, just remember that ads can enhance your organic effort. You know, look at the reach that you're getting with your organic and by applying some advertising dollars to your warm audiences, you could be getting much stronger reach, much stronger conversions. So that's what I would say to folks who are really focused on organ organic and those who are focused on, you know, maybe they're not as focused on organic, but they're feeling like they just wish they had more channels for lead generations for sales. Ads are, in my opinion, one of the best shortcuts for any business owner or marketer looking to add more channels and more streams of traffic into your business. So, and also, you just want to consider like, Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users. Instagram has 2 point something, 9 billion, something like that, monthly active users. I mean, the numbers are, they're enormous. And you want to be taking advantage of where your audience likely lives. And I'll finally just kind of say as well, just remember that in my opinion, I would say most, you know, media buyers would share similar opinions that that Facebook is, it's probably the best bang for your buck in terms of reaching leads and converting those leads into sales. And you look at, you know, Facebook's own data, it tells us that, you know, $20 cost per action overall on the platform, $8 cost per lead overall on the platform. These are targeting US markets, right? Less than $1 per click on the platform. I mean, when you compare that against other platforms, it's still an incredible bargain.
- [04:15]
Michael Stelzner
Very cool. I really like the idea. I know that at my company we are pretty much almost exclusively organic. You know, occasionally we'll spend money on like Google search for social media marketing world and stuff like that. So I relate to everyone who feels like they shouldn't have to pay, you know, to get their content out there. But at the same time, I think we as organic marketers need to acknowledge that reach is just plummeted. Right. And if you want to reach that audience who probably initially followed you, right, and your brand for a reason, you've got to pay. And if you want to reach a new audience, right, because for whatever reason, maybe your existing audience is tapped out, I feel like that's a big opportunity for the right business. And what we're going to talk about today is all sorts of things that you may not be aware of that Facebook and Instagram either have rolled out or plan to roll out. So let's start, Tara, with a feature that a lot of marketers likely have never even heard of before.
- [05:17]
Tara Zuercher
Well, I would say you and I, you know, kind of discussed a little bit of this, but I think AI has taken over the ad platforms as well as everything else about marketing. And so I know we're going to dive to a lot of those specific AI features. But just know that AI machine learning, it is kind of the name of the game when it comes to advertising right now. And something I think is that's cool that Facebook has rolled out and has continued to emphasize is advantage plus shopping. So this is a feature that is relatively new and it's Facebook's fully automated machine learning backed solution specifically developed for E commerce. And so it's a really cool feature. It has its own algorithm and it allows you to upload your creative and pretty much that's it. Mike, it's crazy. Like you're not selecting audiences, you're not. It's everything is preset for you and it allows the machine to essentially go out and find customers for you.
- [06:17]
Michael Stelzner
So this is for business to consumer, physical products predominantly, Is that right or is it?
- [06:21]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, it was built for income. Absolutely.
- [06:23]
Michael Stelzner
Not necessarily local businesses or anything like that. Right.
- [06:26]
Tara Zuercher
If you have a product catalog, you could certainly use it. So if you've got SKUs and things like that, I think it would definitely be applicable. But primarily, primarily this was their E Comm solution. And you know, E Comm being the bread and butter basically of Facebook's advertisers. And so I think what's cool about this though is whether or not you're E Comm or, or otherwise, I mean, you kind of see the trend of where Facebook wants to go with its features. Right. So they want fully automated AI supported advertisers inputting as little as possible and then going out and finding customers and clients. Right now this is the E Comm solution. And again, what I think is so cool, it's a brand new product built completely on its own algorithm. We're seeing that there's a lot of success among our E Comm clients who are using this. And I would say it's getting better as we go along, but we're seeing some really great success with this feature.
- [07:21]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, just, just so we're clear, I think I heard you say you just upload your product shots. You don't even have to give a title or description or anything. How in the world does that work?
- [07:30]
Tara Zuercher
Okay, you upload your creative so and you're going to select your catalog and then there's a few different ways that you can build these campaigns. You can select website only or website plus your shop or website plus your app. And you do feed into it the creative. So you get Facebook the creative. It might even suggest some ads that it wants you to use from your previous top performing ads and then from there it's going to go out and find your customers. So it's pretty cool. And I think what again, I think the through line here that I'm seeing with Facebook is just that the trend, the trajectory that it's taking us down as advertisers is less manual inputs and more machine learning.
- [08:11]
Michael Stelzner
This is intriguing. So do you base your students or clients? I mean this is mostly inexpensive e commerce products that, that work for something like this.
- [08:20]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, I'm seeing it work across, I mean, quite a variety of price points, even up to a couple hundred dollars which gets into, especially for E comm, kind of the upper echelon of E Comm pricing.
- [08:32]
Michael Stelzner
Right.
- [08:33]
Tara Zuercher
So yeah, I think it's working pretty well across.
- [08:36]
Michael Stelzner
Very cool. Now what's your take on it? Do you think people should not do this? I mean, what's your professional take on this?
- [08:41]
Tara Zuercher
I definitely think you want to test it. So I would say start with anywhere from 10 to 30% of your budget. You definitely want to give it time. So whenever you have a lot of machine learning behind any of these ad products, what I've noticed is it can often take more time than, let's say the older manual way that a lot of us media buyers and advertisers used to do our testing. So it can take more time because the algorithm has to find your customers and your clients and it has a much wider data pool to do that. So I would say give it a little bit more time. Minimum 7 to 10 days. Don't throw all of your budget at it. Like I said, 10 to 30% of your budget to kind of start and test it over a seven to 10 day period and look at the signals. If you're starting to see, oh wow, starting to work. You know, maybe the CPA is a little bit more expensive than some of your other campaigns, but you're seeing that it's working. Then give it a little bit more time and see if it can outperform your other campaigns.
- [09:39]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so just so I'm clear, when we were prepping for this, we, we had something called Advantage Shopping and, and Advantage Plus. Is this the same or is this different? Because I might Be confused here.
- [09:49]
Tara Zuercher
There's so many Advantage plus things now, Mike, and I'm sure anyone who's in the platform is like, oh my goodness, they're rolling out. Everything is Advantage plus. And then you have to figure out, is this actually just marketing old feature calling it Advantage plus, or is this actually something that's new and enhanced? Okay, so there's a lot of Advantage plus things. There's Advantage plus Placements, Advantage plus Creative, Advantage plus Shopping, which we kind of just talked about. Advantage plus audiences, I could go through one by one what I think about each of those. But I will say the overall is you always want to test it and see. And again, like I just said, always give it a little bit more of a Runway when you're testing these features just to see how they actually do. Because they do need a little bit more time than some of the older manual features. But if you give them the time, then often they will outperform.
- [10:41]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so we were talking about Advantage plus Shopping in the beginning then. And then Advantage plus is the master category under which these other features live. Briefly go over those other Advantage plus options and do you have the choice to turn those on and off or are they default on? Help people understand that a little bit.
- [10:58]
Tara Zuercher
Right now, a lot of them are still optional. You can toggle them on and off. However, you can see that Facebook is wanting to go in the direction of taking them away from us. So just know for anybody out there that's advertising, I mean, going into the next few months, the next several quarters, we're probably going to see a lot of this default to just being the way it is. Advantage plus Placements, this is where used to be able to. Well, you still can. You can still choose if you want to place your ads on reels or stories or some people will deselect audience network or if you just want to advertise on Instagram or Facebook. And I would say that's probably a mistake at this point that I see a lot of advertisers making is selecting their placements. Because what you'll notice is that Advantage plus Placements actually does a phenomenal job and usually you will get a better cost per result. Now what people get a little bit nervous about is, well, all of my audience is on Instagram. I only want to target Instagram. The algorithm will figure that out for you. So you really don't need to mess around with it or try to be smarter than the algorithm. It's very, very difficult, if not impossible to do at this point. And so Advantage plus Placements is a great thing. Just leave it to default. Leave it right there and don't mess around with it. If you want to do an AB test, absolutely, go for it. But just know advantage plus placements, I would say 99% of the cases is outperforming everything else. The other thing to note is as we go through our accounts and we have access to a ton of accounts just because of our membership. When we're looking at accounts and we're breaking it down by placement, still about 60, sometimes up to 80% of your advertising budget is often spent on Instagram. So I know a lot of folks get really concerned about making sure, you know, everything is Instagram. But I think that people are still surprised by how valuable, sometimes even a little bit more valuable, the Facebook audiences can be for many businesses.
- [12:54]
Michael Stelzner
Got it. Okay, so we talked about plus placements. What other. The other ones.
- [12:59]
Tara Zuercher
Okay. Advantage plus Audiences. I know we're going to talk a little bit about audiences in a moment, so I'll hold that one. I'll hold that one. I'll just say a B test that and then we're going to get into that in just a sec. Advantage plus Creative. I know we're going to talk a little bit more there, but I'm seeing great things with Advantage plus Creative plus. It makes your job easier, so it's a good thing.
- [13:19]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, perfect. So I'm tracking with where we're going now. Okay, so let's talk about audiences because obviously and targeting and all that fun stuff, right? Because I don't know, maybe what I call targeting is placements and audiences. And I don't even know what the right language is. But go ahead and talk to us about Advantage plus audiences versus regular audiences and kind of what your take is on all that.
- [13:40]
Tara Zuercher
Okay, I wish that I had, like a diagram. So I'm just going to put try to describe this in a visual way for everyone. Imagine three buckets and there's a little bit of a competition between these three. So you have Advantage plus audiences. This is where you can suggest to Meta what you generally would like them to focus on in terms of age, gender, things like that, and perhaps interests. Then you have broad audiences. Okay, so this was Meta's best practice a couple of years ago. Give us more data and stop controlling the audiences so much advertisers and let us let the algorithm do the work. And then you have what I will call kind of that old manual audience of testing your audience's interest by interest, behavior by behavior, things like that. And so just imagine these three buckets and they're all kind of competing with each other. And I wish that I had a very clear recommendation beyond just you got to test it for your account because I know that, that everyone, you know, probably just wants me to say this is what's working for every single, you know, account type and whatnot. But it's, it's simply not the case. I think that Meta wants Advantage plus audiences where we give them the majority of control. We may make a couple of suggestions, but we really just let them run with it. I know that's what they want to be the most successful. So they want to eventually limit the inputs that we get to add into our settings and they want to control the audiences and go find us buyers and leads. Right. I would say that what we're seeing is that Advantage plus audiences often performs better when it's getting a lead in the door, but doesn't as often perform as well on the conversion on the back end. So if we're talking to local businesses, service based providers, online businesses, we're still recommending that they keep a really close eye on, on their Advantage plus audiences and see how it converts on the back end. Because it's not always as advantageous. Might do really well at the lead level, not as good at the purchase level.
- [15:44]
Michael Stelzner
So that's really important. So what I'm hearing you say is like they might be optimized to get people that are interested, but they might not be qualified is really what I'm hearing you say. Is that correct?
- [15:55]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, not as much conversion value on the back end.
- [15:58]
Michael Stelzner
So if you're using it for leads, that's maybe not recommended. You use the Advantage plus audience. But if you're using it to direct sell a product, is that a different.
- [16:07]
Tara Zuercher
I'm going to give it right now a rating of about. Well, I'll give it a ratio of about 50, 50 is what I see. And on some accounts it's just crushing it. It's absolutely crushing it. And what I notice is on those accounts, generally speaking, those accounts have a ton more data points. Right. They've spent a lot more money on Facebook. They have a very, you know, specific target that they're going for and there's just more data that they've been able to give Facebook over time. So I think it's a little bit more effective. But I see that it's like 50, 50 sometimes. It is absolutely crushing it. And it's like, you know, these business owners or marketers are saying, I will never do Anything but Advantage plus ever again. Because it is just working that well for me and other times it will work better at like the lead level, but then they see it's not as good on the conversion and so it's just something to test.
- [16:54]
Michael Stelzner
Just so we're clear on the lead level versus conversion, are you talking about these leads turn out to be bad leads or are you talking about for those generating leads this works, but for those directly selling it does not work. I just want to get the distinction on that.
- [17:07]
Tara Zuercher
Great clarific. So I would say leads collecting the email or phone number conversion, the transaction. Right. So this is the purchase.
- [17:14]
Michael Stelzner
I see. Got it. So if you use Advantage Audience to generate qualified leads, you'll probably find better success is what I'm hearing you say. But if you're using it to direct sell, it may not be as successful. Am I hearing you correctly?
- [17:26]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, that's a pretty good way of saying it. I would again just say test it and see. Keep a close eye on it.
- [17:31]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [17:31]
Tara Zuercher
Some people get so excited because they're like, wow, it is really if, let's just say you're collecting leads into that then will turn into a sales conversation and go or go through a sales funnel. They get so excited because they're like, wow, these really are working, you know, great. But then when it comes to like back end transactions, they see that maybe it doesn't work as well. So test it. 50 50. That's kind of what I see.
- [17:52]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, okay. Well then I am hearing you correctly that those leads aren't necessarily converting into sales.
- [17:57]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, you are correct.
- [17:58]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, good. I'm glad, I'm glad we clarified that because I don't want to confuse anybody. All right, so Advantage plus audiences is you give control, just to clarify, to Facebook, Instagram, whatever meta platform and they're going to go out and find you an audience. You're saying some people love it, some people don't. So what are the, the broad audiences? Let's talk about that. I mean, I know they've been around for a while, but what's your take on that? Now?
- [18:22]
Tara Zuercher
Broad audiences are still fantastic and we're a great example of that. I mean, we're targeting for a very niche B2B audience. Business owners and marketers, generally speaking, who are spending less than $5,000 per month on their ads. We'll use broad audience targeting very effectively and people will be shocked by that. Like how can meta find that specific of a niche? Well, they have a ton of data from us at this point because we've been advertising for a long time and they find our lead and our buyer very, very well from that. So broad audience targeting is you are simply saying to Facebook, I want. Maybe you're identifying gender and maybe you're selecting ages. You almost don't have to. I usually do the ages at least because I feel like that's, you know, we're always looking for pretty specific age range there and most of our clients are as well. Gender, you know, I feel very neutral on. And then you're not putting in anything else, any interests or anything. I mean, I've seen this for yoga studios, for accountants, for lawyers, all the way up to very specific niche e comm categories. And people will say there's no way, there's no way. You've got to like define this. And they do. They work very, very well. So that would be broad targeting. Still very much a fan of, I would say 70 to 80% of time. They work fantastic.
- [19:42]
Michael Stelzner
If you're feeling lost in a changing world, come to a place where everyone knows your pain. Navigating disruption is easier when you're surrounded by peers facing similar challenges. That's why we designed Social Media Marketing World to help you make meaningful connections with themed networking spaces, interactive workshops, and tons of attendee led meetups. Mattie Young says, this was my very first time at Social Media Marketing World. It exceeded every expectation I had. The value of the sessions and networking experiences cannot be overstated. Don't go it alone. Join marketers just like you. Navigating a rapidly changing world. Grab your tickets today@social mediamarketingworld.info okay, so some people might be wondering, well, why did they have to create Advantage plus audiences if they already had broad audiences and they seem to be working really well and their machine learning going on and they already already know a lot about all the users of the platform. What the heck are they thinking with Advantage plus audiences? What's the difference?
- [20:47]
Tara Zuercher
I think that Advantage plus audiences is. It's hard to explain this. I think it's an advanced version. I think it's broad audiences taken to the next level. So I think it's what they want everything to become. Like I said, I think broad audiences right now still work incredibly well, oftentimes even better than Advantage plus audiences, which are also broad. But I think that Facebook ultimately is going in the direction Advantage plus audiences. These broad audiences they control, that's where it's going.
- [21:17]
Michael Stelzner
They're probably training up this new model and eventually it's going to get better. Because I would imagine in the beginning broad audiences didn't work as well as it does now. Is that fair to say?
- [21:25]
Tara Zuercher
Oh yeah. I mean, in the beginning there was absolutely not. There's no way you could do that. You really had to depend on. And I would say, you know, this was the value of a lot of media buyers was, was targeting, was finding the audiences. And so, and also remember you guys, the audience library has diminished significantly year over year. Especially last year. They cut out so many audiences. So it's clear that they want us to be targeting more broadly. They've removed just hundreds of thousands of audiences, you know, at those smaller levels. And so a lot of things you used to be able to target interest wise, you can't find it there anymore.
- [22:01]
Michael Stelzner
So am I hearing you say this manual audience thing is, is a thing of the past and you shouldn't even waste any time on it or what's your thoughts on it?
- [22:08]
Tara Zuercher
No, you gotta test it. Okay, so manual audiences, this is the old, the OG switch to manual audiences. This is how we used to build audiences by default. And now it's more of a thing you have to kind of, you know, you have to search for the button to be able to even do it. But we're still seeing also great success with interest based targeting. I would say that I'm going to give that a ratio like probably still like 60, 40, 60% of the time. Interest based targeting is fantastic for most advertisers that we see.
- [22:44]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so what I'm hearing you say, if I had to rank order these is the number one highest likely of success that you've seen is broad audiences, followed by manual audiences and then by advantage plus audiences. Because you said 70, 60, 50, 70, 60, 50.
- [22:59]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, I would say that's right.
- [23:01]
Michael Stelzner
Now talk about testing and all that stuff. How do you do all that with all these different things here? What's your thoughts on that?
- [23:06]
Tara Zuercher
How do we do testing? Well, I mean, I would say testing those three categories is very important. On every single account you can do it either by ad set or you can do it campaign by campaign. But that's one of the first things we go in and test because, and you know, this is kind of a bummer to say and I really wish that we had like just a clear top performer. And on certain accounts we do, you know, on certain accounts you'll test the advantage plus audiences and you'll see it perform so well that you think, wow, that must be the only thing that's working out there. And then other really small, you know, certain niche accounts for example, do best with interest based targeting. I mean, they do a lot better than with the other two categories. So first thing that we do when we get a hold of an account is we test those three kind of buckets or those three categories of, you know, different ways of thinking about the audiences now and we see what the account is most sensitive to and what positively impacts conversions the most. And then from there, you always want to be experimenting with this stuff. So if Advantage plus audiences are not working right now, guess what, in three months from now, they could be your top performer. I mean, we've seen that switch so many times. So you just have to keep testing this stuff. I would say just know everything is going to move towards Advantage plus audiences. So we're having this conversation now. In six months, the majority of accounts might be seeing the most success with Advantage plus audiences. And Facebook. We might see start sunsetting some of the older audience features. So this is very dynamic. It's always moving. It's so specific, account by account, what your account is sensitive to, what negatively impacts it, positively impacts it. So just keep in the mindset of testing every three months and you'll stay ahead of the curve.
- [24:50]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, I want to talk about this thing we talked about in prep called lookalike mashups.
- [24:54]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah.
- [24:54]
Michael Stelzner
But before we do that, I do have a question on cost. Have you found that certain audiences are more economical than others as far as or is this a testing thing as well? Do they charge a premium, for example, for interest based targeting over like the broader targeting and the audience plus, or are you finding that it has no bearing on cost?
- [25:14]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, I don't think that there's any CPM difference. CPM being cost per thousand impressions, how Facebook charges you. I definitely don't see any meaningful CPM difference across the three.
- [25:25]
Michael Stelzner
Cool. Let's talk about this mashup thing.
- [25:28]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah. Okay, so this is one of our, we always, you know, we have protocols and formulas and recipes just to keep things super simple. And one of the problems a couple of years ago was people were complaining about their look alikes not functioning as well. So a look like is you can use a source list. Like let's just say you upload your email list to Facebook or even better, an email list of buyers to Facebook and you say, go find me people that look like these people. So you're going to upload this list. They're going to make what's called a lookalike of it to combat, you know, we're just trying to figure out are lookalikes Dead. Why are so many people struggling with them? And our team was experimenting heavily and found a great recipe for lookalikes that we call lookalike mashups. So basically, let's just say you upload your buyer list and ideally you're going to do this with your like, highest value list. So a buyer list, a lead list, those are great ones to start with. And you're going to upload that. You're going to create your lookalikes this way. So you're going to create a 1% lookalike, a 3% lookalike, 5%, 7% and a 10%. And so if you upload your buyer list, you're going to create a buyer list that's 1%. Like I just said, you can create all those lookalikes and then you're going to mash them all together. So you're just going to put them all into the same ad set. And that will often, I don't know what it is, but it just triggers the algorithm to get to work. And we're seeing that, that really helps kind of revive lookalikes. If your lookalikes have been dead, you feel like they're just not performing as well anymore. You're wondering, why do they even have lookalikes? That's been a great formula or recipe to revive your look alike lists.
- [27:08]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, let's talk about creative. When we say creative, I think we're mostly talking about images here. Is that right?
- [27:14]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, totally. And you know, creative, creative is so important. Right. If Facebook is going to make it so that we have far less things that we have to input. Right. Where is the most value that we can create Inside of the ad account? It's 1000% creative. In fact, I was just advising another agency owner recently and I said 80% of your time needs to be on creative, like 80% of your time, because that is where your edge is going to be. That's your competitive advantage. That's where you're going to gain all of that advantage for your clients. Right. So getting really good with creative is important. One thing I think is important to note and what we're seeing kind of at least among the accounts that we are looking at and have access to, still about 60%, sometimes even up to 70% of conversions are driven by static ads. I know everybody thinks it's video, video, video. But I will tell you that static ads are. I mean, they're there, they're not going anywhere. I don't see those going anywhere anytime soon. So video is very Important, I feel. And you should definitely not be advertising on statics alone. I mean some accounts do, but I would say if you can get some video in there, that's best. But static ads are still performing super well.
- [28:30]
Michael Stelzner
So what's the Advantage plus Creative?
- [28:32]
Tara Zuercher
All right, Advantage plus Creative. So you've got a lot of features there. These are when you're uploading your creative, oftentimes you'll notice some options to turn on the enhancements. And so these are how Facebook's going to help you with making your creative that much better. So these includes image brightness, animation, adding music, image expansion. So it will take, let's say you have a square image and ad is going to go to like a stories placement. Then it's going to expand the image and you know, it's going to basically extrapolate what it thinks should be there and make the image look really cool and size it right for that placement. Visual touch ups. And there's some other really cool AI features that Facebook's rolling out with creatives. But when you're talking about just like what Facebook is doing to help us as advertisers make our creative better for all of the various placements, those are the main features, those are the enhancements.
- [29:25]
Michael Stelzner
I gotta ask about this because this sounds really interesting. So animation. So if I have a still image, help me understand what exactly they can do with animation because that sounds really intriguing to me.
- [29:38]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, sometimes what they can do is they'll put a bunch of images that you have together and turn it into a little video. Oh yeah. So that's pretty cool. Or I've seen like where it will like shoot in the headline or if there's words on it. So it'll take the image and then it will make it animate it, it'll make the headline kind of come in from the side or whatever. So.
- [29:56]
Michael Stelzner
Oh wait, wait. So hold on. It actually is smart enough to strip the headline out, fill in what was behind the headline and then have it be brought in. Is that what I'm hearing you say?
- [30:05]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah.
- [30:05]
Michael Stelzner
Wow. And that, that's really cool. I mean, and like there's no upcharge for that or anything like that.
- [30:10]
Tara Zuercher
No, this is just what it's doing.
- [30:12]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, we gotta pause for a second on this because some of this stuff is very big deal for a lot of people. Right? Because maybe you don't have access to a graphic designer in house. Right. Or maybe you hired someone to do a set number of ads and you're, you don't have any budget to Go back to them and make variations right now. Because I have a show, as you know, called AI Explored. The only way to really do this is sometimes within Adobe because Adobe has this cool feature called Generative Fill. So, for example, I'll give you guys an example that are listening. We had a thumbnail of an image of a woman in a cave with a sword looking at a treasure chest. And the problem was that the AI image of the woman with the sword, there wasn't enough room above her head for us to put a headline on there. So I told my graphic designer, just go into Photoshop and Generative Fill above her head. And it just knew that she was in a cave and it drew the rest of the cave so we could put the headline in there. This is stuff that's pretty advanced that don't most marketers aren't even aware of. And it sounds to me as if this is what Facebook is doing with their AI. They're taking like a 16 by 9 image, for example, and they're cropping it in to create a 9 by 16 image and they're filling in the rest of the stuff where in the past they used to fill with color bars. Right. They're actually filling it with actual. So it looks real. Is that really what I'm hearing you say?
- [31:34]
Tara Zuercher
Okay, so from what we see, this is where it's going. Absolutely. The Generative Fill is exactly where it wants to be. I think right now it still does a lot of color bars. Right. But it, it's moving in that direction very, very quickly. And so if you look on in their newsroom, for example, that's exactly where it's going.
- [31:52]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so right now the animation stuff is that adding a headline then over the top of it where there wasn't a headline, like, help me understand because like, I'm curious from a creative perspective and I'm sure everybody else is what exactly it is capable of doing today.
- [32:07]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah. So some things you'll see, like when you turn on the enhancements, it will show you examples. Right.
- [32:13]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [32:13]
Tara Zuercher
The hard thing is you don't actually know what they're going to do, what it's doing to your ads on an individual level. Like, you kind of see some general ideas from the enhancements, but there's no like breakdown for you to see exactly what it did and how that particular thing converted. But some things that I've seen in accounts, for example, and also in the newsroom and other places is like, exactly that. So let's just say you put in an image and it through the AI enhancements, it might add a headline onto your image. Now, it's not just going to add like random headline, it's going to pull from your ad copy and it could also, and you're not necessarily seeing the exact headline it's going to pull. It's going to be based on every single user what they think that person will respond best to. So it could pull from your headline, it could pull from your ad copy, but if there's like a blank space, it can absolutely add that headline on there. So the crummy thing is you don't exactly know what it's doing to your ads and there's no breakdown or on the reporting to see what it did and how that's performing, but you do get some general ideas from what it shows you.
- [33:21]
Michael Stelzner
So do you have any general recommendations? If you use Advantage plus Creative, should we generally provide square images with no text in it? So it has creator freedom and the subject is a certain size? I mean, I don't know. What's your, what's your thoughts on best practices if we're going to do this? Because obviously if we do this wrong, they're going to end up cropping an important part of the image out, potentially, right?
- [33:46]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah. From what I've seen, they're very good about not cropping. So for example, if you've got like words or a little badge or something, they're, they're very good about cropping, like not over words and things like that. So I would say that's pretty, that's done pretty well with them. And then when it comes to square images, the 9 by 16 ratio is good. But square images I would say are the most standard and still common best practice.
- [34:10]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so what I think I hear you say is that the Advantage plus Creative right now is not as advanced as what I thought when I said, hey, it's actually creating stuff that's not in the image. Right. It's not there yet. Or is it there actually right now? Like for example, if we had a picture of you standing outside holding, I don't know, something in your hand, there is sky above you. Is it smart enough to know that extend more sky above you or is it not quite there yet?
- [34:37]
Tara Zuercher
What I've seen on platform right now is probably more color bars and things like that. What it shows us it's going to, is, is definitely the extended image.
- [34:46]
Michael Stelzner
Got it.
- [34:47]
Tara Zuercher
And so, yeah, if you look in their newsroom, if you look on, you know, where it's explaining what these features are, it's Definitely showcasing that. It's going to expand the image. It's going to be generative image creation for you.
- [34:59]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, let's say that you already have really good variety of images and all the different sizes, square, horizontal, vertical. Do you recommend not using this Advantage plus Creative? If you really care about your creative? I mean, what's your thoughts on this?
- [35:14]
Tara Zuercher
No, no, you absolutely can use and you can still edit your image for placements so you can turn on the enhancements and you can edit your image to make sure that it has the correct. If you're doing images on Stories, for example, you can make sure it has the correct image size for Stories. So you can use them both. You can have the best of both worlds.
- [35:34]
Michael Stelzner
So do you recommend then using Advantage plus Creative across the board without any question? You do?
- [35:40]
Tara Zuercher
Yes.
- [35:40]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [35:41]
Tara Zuercher
Yep. We're seeing fairly consistently across almost all industries and so many different account types. Types. It's great. Definitely enhancing performance. I would say there's nothing to shy away from there.
- [35:53]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, do you recommend then? I mean, I think what I'm hearing you say is you can have mediocre creative and Facebook slash meta is just going to help you figure out how to make it work. I mean, that's kind of what I'm hearing you say. But at the same time I also heard you say, hey, creative is your biggest opportunity. Right. So do they have a challenged with AI generated images and ads? What's your thoughts on that?
- [36:16]
Tara Zuercher
Well, okay, so here's the thing, right? A lot of these enhancements are AI enhancements. So if you use the creative, if you use these enhancements, your ad is going to be tagged with the little like ellipses again, like the three dots. And it will show it's like more info about AI this AI image. So it's, it's going to definitely market as AI enhanced or AI created. I mean, there's other tools too, such as AI generation, where you could upload image as like a source or inspiration and it will create other images with different backgrounds and things. So I guess.
- [36:51]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, okay. Yeah, that's kind of a big deal. So what I'm hearing you say is if you had like, let's say you were selling an iPhone case and you had it on a basic background, like a blue background, they can knock out that blue background and they can put it in all these different settings and then they can test how does it look with a waterfall behind it? How does it look with a wooden table behind it? Is that what I'm hearing you say?
- [37:12]
Tara Zuercher
That's 100% exactly. So, so this gets interesting, right? Because can you have mediocre creative that then you use these on platform tools to enhance. I mean you absolutely can, I would say your job as if you're advertising. I think you should go in with your best creative possible. So I would go for creative that's creative. I would go in with creative that's really, really good and then layer on the AI enhancements and things like that and use the AI tools. But yeah, I think that Facebook, I mean you can see that they are trying to make it so you know that it's so easy to run ads, right? So get rid of all this targeting and all the buttons you have to select and all of that with all of your advantage plus recommendations. And then now it's like they're giving you so many creative tools that will allow you to essentially and eventually just upload an image and allow the algorithm to create based on what it knows about your particular users and your customers, what they're going to be responding best to. So I mean that's where it's going for sure.
- [38:18]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, are there any other AI ad related things that Meta is working on that we haven't already addressed?
- [38:25]
Tara Zuercher
Well, we didn't even get to copy, but you have generative AI text now, those recommendations. So when you pop in your copy, it is recommend. It will give you suggestions about five suggestions for different variations of your copy as well as your headline.
- [38:43]
Michael Stelzner
But do you get to select it or is it going to automatically? Okay, got it.
- [38:47]
Tara Zuercher
And you could select any. All, None. I mean you have full control there. But that's pretty cool. And we've done pretty extensive testing on that feature and what we're seeing is our manual copy, which by the way is written in, in conjunction with ChatGPT is generally speaking outperforming the AI recommendations for the generative copy. But I think that observation, it's only a matter of time before that's as good or better in my opinion because it's getting pretty darn good. I mean, pretty darn good.
- [39:21]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And for those that don't know, I have another show called AI Explored which I alluded to earlier. And I am also a copywriter. I find that I use Claude AI in combination with ChatGPT and when I pit them against each other or where I start with one, then have the other enhance it, I find that that's often really some of the best copy that's out there. But the key thing you have to be careful of with a lot of this AI Generated copy is it can come off a little hypey. Are you finding this true?
- [39:49]
Tara Zuercher
Oh, for sure. Absolutely. So you definitely always want to take those recommendations and customize them, make sure it matches your brand voice and yeah, I do feel the same. I feel like you have to tone it down a little bit and just make it sound like you, your brand, you know, your company.
- [40:05]
Michael Stelzner
Is there any other AI stuff that we've not yet talked about?
- [40:08]
Tara Zuercher
Oh, boy. I think we've covered most of the big things.
- [40:12]
Michael Stelzner
What about this AI autopilot thing we had in our notes? Is this what we've been talking about or is there something else there?
- [40:17]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, I think that's kind of our generative text, which you and I had fondly nicknamed the AI autopilot. Right. Where it's just got it making all these AI recommendations all over your account.
- [40:28]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so a couple questions that I am pondering in my mind. How soon do you think it's going to be before as far as the creative front end side of things? Well, actually, no, this is the better question on the analytics side of things. Is AI helping advertisers automatically turn off ads? Know when budgets need to be improved? Is there a AI side of this that's essentially monitoring our ads for us, or is that not yet there?
- [40:57]
Tara Zuercher
Yes, there is. Okay, so when you create campaigns and there's not a name for this, but sometimes you will see certain recommendations, and this allows Facebook to have more control over your ads. This also would be kind of in that category of AI autopilot. Right. And it will create rules, it will turn off your ads. And I believe that these features are kind of being beta tested. Right. So I don't see them universally across all ad accounts or anything like that, but I'll see them kind of pop up on certain ad accounts here and there. Again, there's no, like rollout of this globally. There's no name for this. You just see all these little features, all these little recommendations basically asking that you would allow Facebook to have more control. We just did one of these, for example, in one of our accounts a couple weeks ago, and we noticed it created a couple of rules and it was turning off ads that initially were doing really well, but then over time started to fall behind a little bit. So it turned them off, whereas I probably would have left them out on a little bit longer to see if they or I might have popped in new creative to see if I could revive them. And so I know noticed that it did really, really well for the first little bit. And then it had too much control. It was like turning things off that I wouldn't have turned off. And so in the end, I think these little beta tests that you'll see kind of rolling out account by account or on certain accounts, I think they've got a long way to go. But I bet eventually that kind of controlling idea of AI autopilot, I bet that's going to be more prevalent feature that we see.
- [42:26]
Michael Stelzner
Fascinating times. Tara, thank you so much for answering all my questions and sharing your insights as to what's happen and where things are going. If people want to connect with you on the socials, what's your preferred platform? And if they want to work with you or join one of the products that you have, where do you want to send them?
- [42:43]
Tara Zuercher
Thanks, Mike. Okay, so at Tara Zerker on Instagram is a great place to connect and our website is successful ads club.com and we have a cool little kit for everybody called the Anatomy of a Perfect Ad. It walks you through exactly what you need to be thinking about for your ads and has a whole bunch of formulas to steal from us. You can get it@youradkit.com your adkit.com Tara.
- [43:07]
Michael Stelzner
Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.
- [43:10]
Tara Zuercher
Thanks, Mike.
- [43:11]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 640 if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. Hey, if you've been a longtime listener to the show, I would love a rating or review on your preferred platform. And would you let your friends know about this show? I'm Stelzner on Facebook, Stelzner on LinkedIn and ikestelsner on X. And do check out our other shows, the AI Explored Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Market Marketing Podcast is a production of social media examiner. Make2025 your best year ever. Grab your discount tickets to Social Media marketing world right now by visiting socialmediamarketingworld Info.