Hey,
Hope you’re having an amazing day. It's been a little while; life has been somewhat busy. I'm back today with some updated thoughts after the Meta Performance Summit. I wrote most of this on the plane about a week ago; but I got busy catching up and had a few sick kids. But I've had some more time to reflect on this, which I think rounded it out a bit.
I was on a panel day 1 talking about value and measurement which was fun. We recorded a Marketing Operators and Operators live podcast which was also really fun to do. Check out our episode here with our main takeaways and feedback, and The Operators here with special guest from Meta Yoni Levy.
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So here are my big takeaways. Hope you enjoy this.
1. Incrementality - It’s no longer just a buzzword. It’s what brands and now Meta cares about. Two years ago, there was a larger focus on MMM and triangulation. There was almost no talk about it this year, and almost all of it was on incrementality. My guess is they realized it got too complicated, and they are stripping it down to what brands really care about which is incrementality. Expect them to continue to double down on it.
2. Value - There is a huge focus on their value suite of optimization products. They are listening to advertisers about what brands are caring about, and it’s not to maximize conversions. Brands care about incrementality, profit, high-value customers, etc. We’ve been testing through a roadmap of value products and I am very excited. Profit is one we have been testing and have had good success with. We also tested Value Optimization and it's now about 40% of our spend, and the results are solid.
My panel was about measurement and value, and I mainly talked about value. I shared what we've been testing in terms of the value optimization suite of products, and how it's helped us improve business outcomes and allowed us to further consolidate our account.
3. Convergence of Measurement and Optimization - I think this one has been overlooked, and I cannot stress how important it is. Meta is no longer just saying that we can track incremental outcomes; you can now literally optimize for them. They’re saving whatever your business cares about, you can optimize for it. Incremental attribution has now rolled out to all ad accounts. I've persoanlly heard mixed outcomes, but I still think this is huge.
Now I do think all of these settings are creating more complexity and potential confusion for advertisers; should i be using profit or value optimization? Or incremental optimization? There used to be one best practice, which was simpler but didn't always work for all brands. Now Meta is giving us the tools to use their platform in the most effective way for our business; but
Meta will have to continue to educate us all on this so brands don’t get too overwhelmed. The cool thing is, you can layer these. So you may be able to do incremental value optimization. If you care about MTA or last click data, you can do custom attribution and optimize for that. And you can do them at the same time as VO or Profit even.
4. AI - Lots of AI talk, of course. You shouldn't be surprised. Meta has thrown whole developing nation’s worth of GDP at compute power, and a lot of it is powering their ad models with things like Andromeda and Lattice. I’m still trying to dive in and understand the specifics of them, because it’s way over my head. But there are practical applications, which is that it should make our ads perform better and the system can more effectively deliver more ads to more users, so creative diversity is even more important. Andromeda can now surface more ads at a time and do more analysis on them, so more creative is needed than ever before.
There was also a lot of talk about generative AI and the work Meta is doing there. I am more interested in “Iterative AI”; which I think there is a ton of value in. I don’t want AI to generate net new creative from scratch; but I do want my designers or editors to make just 1 ad and have AI resize it, reformat it, create variations with different hooks, etc. That would save a ton of time and allow us to be way more efficient. I don't think Meta's stuff is there yet, but based on how much they are focusing on it, we all ened to be payng attention.
5. Partnerships - There was a big focus on partnership ads, which was cool, and a funny change of pace from AI. There have been several improvements to the partnership ads product, like adding catalogs, being able to now run partnerhip ads from just the creator’s handle, or more. We’ve been having a lot of success with Partnership ads lately, so it’s something I am working on scaling up quickly. It’s cool to see Meta leaning in here so much. Note: Even since the summit, this is something we are 10xing our effort on. We're in some betas with softwares that are partnering closely with Meta which is cool. We're almost entirely done testing or creating any random "UGC" and are leaning super hard into partnership ads.
What are you doing this Tuesday? The Operators has assembled the avengers of ecom live this Tuesday for the online event of the year for ecom operators. It's our first online event, and it's stacked with a guest list that the president of Shopify himself said is "THEE most stacked lineup ever. RESPECT." It's a live, free, half-day blowout event about growth, leadership, commerce, finance, and more. It's headline by Dan Martell, and featuring all of the Operators, Marketing Operators, Finance Operators, and some other awesome guests, many of which have been guests on one of the podcasts. There's also prizes from many of the brands which you ar eligible to win if you show up. I'll be there, hope to see you there. Sign up here for free and to be entered for the prizes.
Until next time. Hope you enjoyed this recap, whether you were there or not.
-Cody