3 Exciting Meta Updates

Welcome to this issue of The DTC Insider newsletter. 👋 

We'll send you weekly emails, every Wednesday, trying our best to deliver great value to your inbox.

In this newsletter, you'll find:

💠 4 Things Media Buyers Can Start Doing To Add More Value

💠 3 Exciting Meta Updates

💠 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Are Over. What's Next?

4 Things Media Buyers Can Start Doing To Add More Value

This is the perfect time of the year for doing a balance.

And if there's something I've been thinking about the whole year, it's the media buyer's role.

After all, media buyers shouldn't ONLY be the go-to people for implementing and optimizing ad campaigns.

Actually, there are 4 things media buyers could start doing today to add more value to their clients.

You see, the media buying role is changing FAST.

And if they don't adapt, they will really struggle to add value in the near future.

At the end of 2022, ChatGPT was just gaining popularity.

Fast forward to today, many core platforms media buyers use (ie. Facebook Ads Manager, Google Ads Manager) have already embedded AI features.

And are automating almost every single process (ie. ad creation, target audience, ad placements, and more).

So, what can they do about it?

At BSR Digital, for instance, we have structured our SOPs to allow our media buyers to evolve.

This means, to start off with, to STOP LOOKING AT THE AD ACCOUNT AS THE "EXCLUSIVE SOURCE OF TRUTH".

And start looking outside, where they will find many more growth levers:

✔️ Backend (ie. Shopify and/or attribution tools) analysis

✔️ Ads analysis & proposals

✔️ Website check

✔️ A clear roadmap

Let's break them down:

#1. Backend analysis:

Looking at the backend's data will help them understand way more than just numbers.

It will actually help them better understand the business:

👉 Top-selling products

👉 Seasonalities

👉 Cohorts (aka. how many times - and when - customers return and how much they spend)

👉 Products that are usually bought together (aka. Basket Analysis)

And more...

#2. Ads analysis & proposals:

I've personally hired many media buyers since 2013.

And I can tell you...this is a highly overlooked part of the ad accounts by most media buyers.

In plain words, most of them don't like looking at how ads perform or propose improvements.

That's why our media buyers have a specific SOP for analyzing the performance of each ad in detail and for suggesting improvements.

#3. Website check:

Media buyers don't need to be CRO experts.

That being said, they need to know what's happening on the website.

Now, it's easy to do it when a client is onboarded.

But not having a recurring process to check on the website, means losing sight of important information, such as:

👉 Landing pages info & structure

👉 Sold-out products

👉 Current promotions & discounts

👉 Up/cross-sell opportunities

👉 User experience

If they have basic CRO knowledge, even better.

#4. A clear road map:

Clients hire agencies/media buyers to help them grow their businesses.

And that requires a professional growth strategy.

I acknowledge that before iOS 14 it was easier to get away without it.

But at the same time, many of those brands are not around anymore.

At my agency, we create 90-day roadmaps.

They include the high-level goals our clients need to achieve and high-level tasks that will allow us to do so.

Then, each month we update it and adjust accordingly.

3 Exciting Meta Updates

I've honestly lost count of how many updates Meta released this year.

TBH, many of them have been very useful for advertisers.

Here are 3 recent updates that could be really useful too:

🚦 Focus only on customer acquisition:

Meta added a toggle to focus only on "Customer acquisition".

Before using this new toggle, you'll first need to define your audience for existing customers in the Ad Account Settings.

By enabling the toggle, Meta will automatically exclude defined existing customers from all ad sets that have "Customer acquisition" turned on.

NOTE: it may still serve your ads to existing customers when they can't match users to your list.



💰 Some Bid strategies were updated:

When optimizing for purchases, they updated the following bid strategies:

👉 Cost per Result: this update is supposed to improve the conversion volume. Until now, using this many times led Meta to underspend the budget.

👉 ROAS goal: this update is supposed to increase the overall value. I'm still not clear on how this one would work, but I'll definitely test it.

🎨 Ad recommendations for new sets:

Tired of copying/pasting an endless list of ads when you duplicate an ad set?

Worry no more...

Now, when you duplicate an ad set to another campaign, Meta will suggest ads to add 🔥

Although this was already available for Advantage+ shopping campaigns, it wasn't for the rest.

Now...what criteria will they use to suggest ads to duplicate?

Those suggestions will be based on relevance to your ad set and past performance.

You can choose to import at least 3 ads or, of course, skip this option.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Are Over. What's Next?

If you think the year is over. Think again.

Even though the peak season is indeed over for many brands, there are still some things you can leverage before the year ends.

In this episode of The DTC Insider podcast, we discussed:

👉 Record-high Black Friday-Cyber Monday sales for Shopify merchants

👉 What can DTC brands focus on before the year ends?

🎧 Tune in to our latest episode: https://thedtcinsider.com/

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