What’s the best way for advertisers to get the most performance possible out of their Meta campaigns?
The answer, according to Meta, is to buy more ads on Meta.
It’s recommending that advertisers launch new ads into their Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns every single week, especially leading into the holiday season.
Meta would say that, of course. But it’s not the only one.
Lather, rinse, perform
Yingying Kuang, VP of growth and ecommerce at haircare and beauty accessories brand Kitsch – which spends more than seven figures a month on Meta – has been taking Meta’s advice, and it’s working out.
Creative diversification, which is Meta’s term for using a variety of different ad formats and creatives across its platforms to help the algorithm learn, “has been great for us,” Kuang said.
“I remember the days when you had to pretty much just guess which audience would work for which messaging,” she said. “There isn’t that manual guessing anymore; we’re trusting the algorithm and the AI to find the correct audience.”
Kitsch tests between 50 and 80 new ad creatives every week, and at least 30% of its budget goes toward creative testing.
The more ad creatives that Meta’s algorithm can chew on, the faster it’s able to see what’s working – or what’s not – and optimize accordingly.
It usually only takes between three and five days to get to a spend level where Kitsch can determine whether an ad is a winner or not, Kuang said.
For example, Kitsch learned that ads for its shampoo and conditioner bars, which are good for hair growth, were doing particularly well with an older demographic on Meta. It changed its ad copy to reflect that and started featuring more mature models and creators.
“This is one of our top audiences now from a performance perspective,” Kuang said.
At home with AI
ObjectsHQ, an ecommerce site that sells modern furniture, has had similar experiences since starting to use Meta’s AI ad tools in Q2.
In the past, “we not only found it extremely tedious and time consuming to manually optimize campaigns,” said Alfred Chehebar, the company’s CEO and founder, “we also saw different degrees of success at different times and couldn’t pinpoint what the issue was or the optimal solution.”
One of the tools ObjectsHQ has seen the most success with is AI text variation on Meta, which generates multiple versions of ad copy, messaging and product captions to find the ones most likely to resonate with specific audiences.
ObjectsHQ has seen a 60% increase in its return on ad spend when using AI text generation compared with other campaigns, Chehebar said.
Heading into Cyber 5 – the critical, but also fraught and chaotic five-day shopping period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday – ObjectsHQ is increasing its spend through Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, he said, with plans to keep that going through the holidays.
ObjectsHQ will also use Meta’s AI tools to rotate between its top-performing products from the past 90 days, including older products, to find more pockets of performance among new and different audiences, Chehebar said.
Meanwhile, it’s been getting cheaper to acquire customers. ObjectsHQ’s cost per acquisition is 41% less with AI campaigns versus standard campaigns, Chehebar said, down from $161 to $95.
Kitsch’s CPA hasn’t gone down. In fact, it’s been flat year over year. But Kitsch has also been able to scale its spend by 46% this year without raising its CPA, Kuang said, which is noteworthy.
“Usually when you scale that much on spend, you see a pretty big increase in CPA,” she said. “But we really haven’t seen CPA increases at all.”
