If you run Facebook Ads... everything just changed. transcript

Facebook ads just changed forever for marketers, for brands, for anyone that uses Facebook ads to build their business. We are entering a brand new era. Just like when the iOS 14 update completely changed the game and many marketers were never able to recover, we once again are facing another historic update. Now, the good news is there are ways to win that weren't even possible before. And I know this because I work with marketers and brands every single day inside of their ad accounts and we advise on over $200 million in ad spend. and I've started to see a pattern that's not obvious to the average marketer.

So, in this video, I'm going to walk you through the Metadama biggest three shifts that have changed forever and how to win after these changes. We're going to be going through the changes, the updates, and how to properly structure your campaigns, ads, literally everything that you need to know. And if you run Facebook ads today, this will be by far one of the most important videos you'll ever watch. Starting with number one, Meta now uses a new model for hierarchical indexing.

Now, let me explain what that means. First is your creative volume, but not in the way that you might think. You might run a handful of 3 to 10 creatives, swapping small elements like your headlines and images, but now you need a much larger creative pool, which is more diverse. Concepts that are different to be the system much better. The creative testing philosophy of test one small change at a time is dead. The system now prefers truly different ad concepts and most importantly messaging needs to be specific and reference audiences so that way Meta can dynamically personalize who it goes to.

Let's go ahead and walk through an example of what this looks like. So now that Meta can dynamically personalize your ads to specific audiences based off what you're targeting, we need to understand exactly how that works. And to do this, I've gone ahead and put together a visual for you. Now, whenever we're talking about 100% unique ads, that doesn't mean changing one specific ad copy or a headline on an image. No, no, no.

That means totally unique formats. And by that, I mean one ad angle that is truly different, like a before and after or a features and benefits or a reviewbased ad creative. Because what happens now is with this update, you have your audience. And let's say that you're selling baseball bats. Well, if you're selling baseball bats and you're targeting a broad audience, which is baseball, underneath that audience, there's going to be cohorts of groups of people who are interested in baseball.

You're going to have one segment that watches baseball. You're going to have a second segment of people who play baseball, whether in high school, college, you know, professionally. And then you're going to have a third group of people who know somebody that plays baseball, which is why they're interested in it. Number four may be people who are obsessed with baseball. They have baseball cards. They're big fans. They go to the games every single week and so on and so forth.

So all of these people are interested in the same thing, but each of them are different styles of people with very different needs. So if we're selling baseball bats, one of the angles might be, hey, buy this baseball bat because it has XYZ benefit and it's going to help your swing and help you get the ball farther and it has a better hit rate. Well, if that's the case, that may only apply to people who specifically play baseball.

And so, you're limited to the number of purchases you can get in this one specific audience. And what MATA is going to do is it's going to test that ad angle in each of these cohorts and see where you get the most sales and then leave your ad dialed in on that one segment. Whereas, if you only change the messaging ever so slightly here or the creative around that, you're still only going to get very similar results. So, what do we need to do?

We need to add in another totally new concept that appeals to a different audience in this group. And what I mean by that, instead of saying, "Hey, here's the features of this baseball bat that's going to improve your swing," we're now going to talk to grandparents, friends, family that knows somebody who plays baseball, and position this as a gift for them. Now, we're hitting a totally separate audience of people who don't play themselves, but we're now framing the messaging to get them to buy for somebody else.

This now expands our market opportunity, allowing us to get more purchases. and Meta now quite literally has more chances at bat to be able to get you more results. And the more unique messaging you apply to different audience groups, the better the system will be able to optimize and scale. So now the name of the game is the broader your messaging and the more people you can apply and hit in these different cohorts, the faster you'll be able to scale up.

So this means every variation needs to be 100% unique and also follow a specific format. By format, I mean you need to have a reviewbased ad for building trust, features and benefit based ads for demonstrating value, demoing for how to use your product through education, a comparison ad to position your product against another competitor and make your product the hero. Essentially, what is happening now is the system knows which format to show first, second, and third based on the lowest resistance path to purchase with this latest update.

And if you don't provide the system with a variety, the algorithm has nothing to optimize with anymore. And not only that, but Meta's new model can handle high volumes of unique creative and test them rapidly to identify which performs best. So, you need to be launching at least 20 to 30 ads every single month with this new update. Now, for number two, they made Advantage Plus prioritized over other audience types. So, your campaign structure is very important.

Most of you have multiple campaigns, adsets, manual budget shifting, and way too much going on. Whereas now, you're going to want to consolidate having fewer campaigns with many creatives in each, letting the system pick the winners for you across a very diverse creative set. Because back in the day, most of you had control over your campaign's targeting, your bidding, your budgets, your audiences. But now, the algorithm makes much more decisions based off of this new update with advanced matching, the placements, and the budget with way less granular input needed from you.

Meaning, you really only need three to four campaigns at most. Specifically, an advantage plus campaign. your creative testing campaign, a few interest stacks, and maybe a retargeting. Since creative is so important, we'll want to pump new iterations every week into our creative testing and migrate those winners to our other campaigns. Then you'll want to set up your audience segments. So, let's look at how these two types are structured.

So, here we are inside of a client ad account, and as you can see here, we have four campaign types, and each of these serve a very specific purpose, and we're averaging a near 4x return ad spend in the last 30 days. So, as you can see, we don't have, you know, 20 different campaigns, 10 different campaigns with a lot of targeting going on. We have very simplified campaign structures with budgets on the CBO level and maybe one campaign is on the adset budget level to have a little bit of control.

Now, when we look at this and we go into one of these campaign types, we can see that we only really have three audiences. Not too much else is going on in here. And each of these have a very specific product category. So rather than mixing all of our products into one specific audience, we're segmenting out our products into each with multiple 5, 10, 15 different creatives covering each of those formats. So we have a review, our features ad, we have all these different creative formats in each audience set targeting a very specific product.

And what that is allowing us to do is make the algorithm work in our favor, getting us a much higher return on ad spend and a very low cost per acquisition. Now, the other campaign is where we're testing lots of creative diversity. We're amplifying the system with a ton of creative assets, dropping in 10 to 20 variations in each of these to be able to identify what is working best. And once we see what's winning, we're migrating those creatives out into the rest of our campaign types where we only have really broad audiences at scale.

Because now what Meta is doing is they're optimizing for you. Since we have these broad audiences where we're taking our creatives from the other campaign that are winning and migrating them over, the system now knows which creative to show when to be able to get us the highest return on ad spin and be very consistent. So, we can pump much higher volume and spin behind these campaigns. As you can see, here's one of our Advantage Plus audiences, and we have a ton of different creatives in here that are winners, and we continue to scale these every single week.

Now, to set up your audience segments. This is a new feature that Meta recently released. And to do this, you'll go into your advertiser settings, and you're going to go down to audience segments. And what you're going to do is you're going to set this up to be your engaged audience. This will be anybody who visited your website, anybody who interacted with, you know, your page, people who essentially have interacted with you but have never purchased.

We do this because now we want to train the algorithm based off the new update to go after new people. and we're telling Meta who these people are. We're we're literally showing them these people have never bought from us and we want you to target them. And with this new update, here's our other audience segment group, which is going to be our existing customers, where we provide them a customer list. We'll do an all website purchases, 180day, and we'll say, "Hey, here's all of our customers right here.

This is for retargeting new customers. This is all the people who have never bought from us." And once you set this up, you can go inside of your ads manager, go to breakdown, and you can go to demographics, and choose audience segments. Once you do that, you'll literally be able to see exactly what campaigns are targeting existing versus new. And now we can start to measure based off of this where our new customers are coming from.

So we can see this audience is getting a majority of our new customers. So this adset is driving a huge value for us. We're literally getting a near 8x rorowaz on new customer acquisition, which is absolutely insane. So, that is an audience we should scale up because we're getting a ton of new people. Whereas, this audience here is going after maybe a 50/50 near split for new versus existing. Really overindexing on existing customers.

So, we may not, you know, scale this campaign. And if we look at some of the other adsets and campaigns we have, anything that we see with existing customers, we're going to, you know, stabilize budgets. And anything with the new audience that's crushing it with a high return in ad spend, we're going to scale because that allows us to bring in more new people. And we already know with this new update, Meta knows when to show the creatives to be able to get the most purchases.

So, we're just going to continue doubling down on new customer acquisition. And then that's just going to fill our bottom of funnel for Meta to be able to convert the rest of these people and get them to buy again and again. So you'll want to set up your new audience structure so that way you can measure exactly who is new versus existing and who's all buying from you. Once you set this up, you'll be able to know exactly who is coming from where and you can start optimizing based off of this new breakdown.

And this new change will allow you to make decisions based on where you're getting your growth from based on your different segments. So now for number three, they implemented a new ads retrieval mechanism with this new update. So optimization is very important. Used to we might wait a few days to see which creative wins, giving the system 7 to 10 days before we turn off a losing ad. Now the system is designed for faster matching across many creative options.

So performance shifts can happen very quickly. That means you can make decisions on cutting ads and launching new ones in a much shorter time frame of 3 to 4 days and scale way quicker. But this update can only help you speed up the process of testing if you're leveraging advanced matching in the conversion API and have matchback ratios of at least 8 to 10 plus on your pixel optimization events. To do this, you'll want to go inside of your pixel, go to settings, and make sure you have advanced matching turned on.

This allows you to improve the performance because Meta can now ensure it knows how to match somebody who purchased from you back to somebody's Facebook or Instagram profile. And the more data you feed it, the better the system is. And because of this system, they require such an ample amount of information. The more you provide, the better it is for you. This is by far one of the easiest ways to level up your ad data and get more sales by doing this.

The next one is you want to set up your conversion API gateway and make sure you have this done. Now, if most of you are in Shopify, this is one click of a button. You set your tracking to maximum and it's done. If not, you'll want to make sure you install a very specific tool to get your conversion API integrated. And that essentially means you're tracking data based off your browser and your API on the back end. Now, most of you already have this done, but you're going to want to make sure that your event quality matchback score at least eight plus because this ensures that you're getting the maximum amount of data necessary for Meta to be able to optimize.

Anything lower than these thresholds, it can be trickier for Meta to be able to find the people that you want to target and scale. So, make sure advanced matching is turned on and you have activated your conversion API for the richest data possible because when both are turned on, you can hit a eight plus percent matchback ratio on pixel events and Meta will know exactly who converted and how to find the right people.

And this allows you to have the right creative placements driving the right amount of actions. And Meta no longer needs a week of guessing. It can adapt in almost real time based off these new updates. And now I just broke down exactly what we are attacking with this new Andromeda Facebook ad update. And I want to make one thing clear. Nothing will ever be the same again. And it's imperative you follow this step by step because now you'll understand how to navigate this new update.

And I want you to understand the types of ad formats you need to be able to thrive in the new Adromeda era. So I picked out this video for you here where I'm giving you the five ad formats every marketer must have. So, I'll see you inside this next video so that way we can start crafting the perfect ad creatives.