Most Meta product news isn’t a flashy announcement or the debut of a hardware line. For many products, it comes down to yearslong evolutions and incremental change.
That’s the way of it with a set of new features introduced on Wednesday that give advertisers more granular metrics for how they value traffic and ad campaign conversions – such as ROAS based on profit margin, rather than total sales, or particular conversions that aren’t immediate or online, like subscription sign-ups or someone signing up to test-drive a car.
Meta’s new AI campaign refinements “allow [advertisers] to optimize and then maximize how much profit they’re actually driving,” Fred Leach, Meta’s vice president of product management, told AdExchanger.
Something old, something new
The changes announced today expand on what’s already available for three tools within Meta’s AI-based product suite. There’s Value Rules, which lets advertisers determine particular customer attributes to prioritize; Value Optimization, which determines the metric for success to define ROAS; and Incremental Attribution, a setting meant to hone campaigns on net-new customers to the brand.
Incremental Attribution used to be available only to a select number of advertisers, but is now globally available. Meta’s Value Rules is available to 50% of advertisers, and Meta is aiming for 100% in the near future – up from 10% in the past.
In addition to expanded reach, Meta has recently unveiled new features that allow advertisers to target their audiences and track their data with more precision.
Meta’s Value Optimization solution now allows users to track ROAS by a wider range of KPIs – specifically, profit margins and specific events.
If a company earns more profit for an item at $20 than with another product that costs $30, the campaign logic could optimize to the higher profit margin. Although, to do so, the advertiser must also provide the Meta ad platform with its item-level profit margin information. There are no privacy concerns, but it is sensitive data for the business.
Customers can also optimize for what Meta calls “custom events,” such as first-time purchases or customers who buy multiple related products. Businesses can connect their “third-party analytics information back into Meta and optimize for those insights,” Leach explained.
Adobe, Northbeam, Rockerbox and Triple Whale are the ad analytics vendors currently available to sync data for the new custom events metrics.
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ROAS isn’t going away as a term or shorthand for campaign success. But the one-size-fits-all approach to ROAS measurement is going away.
Quick fix
Meta is asking a lot of advertisers to pipeline over their profit margin particulars and other granular business info. Meta isn’t providing a window for advertisers to see more data; it’s asking to get more data from advertisers themselves.
What Meta offers in return for that level of data access is ease and efficiency.
For example, the new Incremental Attribution tool functions as a one-click lift test and ongoing incrementality measurement solution. Advertisers “simply toggle the setting on in Ads Manager,” per the release.
Behind that on/off toggle is a massive data science and measurement services endeavor. Lots of brands work with (pricey) standalone incrementality measurement vendors, perhaps layered on top of a testing services provider like LiveRamp’s Habu. Creating city-scale control groups for geo-testing incremental attribution is a huge endeavor.
Or a toggle switch.
In a traditional lift test, Leach pointed out, “you do have to withhold your ad from some people”
to have a control group for comparison. Meta’s system has already been trained on preexisting data from thousands of past campaigns, he said, and it uses that data “to generate incremental conversions for an advertiser from that large corpus.”
Advertisers nowadays are looking for more “easy buttons,” so the appeal of replacing outside lift tests with a one-click optimization is clear.
But the product also needs to perform.
Meta cited an average 46% increase in incremental conversions from users who tested Incremental Attribution compared to those who stuck with a business-as-usual campaign.
Leach said Meta hasn’t had much pushback regarding the greater data and controls passed to the AI ad platform.
“They’re much more focused on performance than the particulars about this data,” he said.
