Meta Ads Performance Analysis

The biggest money-losing mistake we see when auditing Meta advertising accounts: Recklessly investing on advertising to existing customers. Why is this a problem? Marketing to existing customers is one of the lowest hanging fruits to drive revenue when advertising on Facebook/Instagram (or any other channel). Therefore the high ROAS you see upfront can be extremely misleading. Think about it. Existing customers have experience with your product/service already. Their likelihood to buy again is either unprompted or prompted via marginal cost channels like email/SMS. Ads commonly have little to no impact on their decision. But that’s not what Facebook Ads reporting says to the naked eye. In fact when we first started Disruptive Digital we inherited a client who was in this exact situation. Their previous agency kept telling them how great of a job they were doing according to the strong ROAS in Facebook’s Ad reporting. We came onboard and decided to run a test. Shutting off ads for half of their existing customers, and keeping ads running for the other half of their existing customers. What happened next was astonishing. Facebook reported a 4X ROAS for the client. But the sales numbers only saw 7% more revenue generated to the audience we advertised to, compared to the audience that we didn’t. Our 4X ROAS was actually a 0.4X ROAS! So a pathetic incremental $0.40 on every dollar we spent advertising to existing customers. The client was shocked. The performance they always thought was strong, was actually a money-loser. Does this mean you should completely stop advertising to existing customers? No. There are still a number of benefits to running ads to existing customers: - Some people need to be hit with multiple reminders to buy again.   - Some people don’t read their emails and need to be reached in a different medium like Facebook or Instagram. A recent Meta Ad product opportunity is to experiment with the existing customer budget cap setting in ASC. This allows you to still prioritize new customer acquisition at scale without potentially completely sacrificing incremental sales from existing customers. Beyond that, consider the following tactics to ensure you’re driving incremental and not duplicative impact: - Separate campaigns by new versus existing customers based on targeting exclusions - Monitor frequency: aim for 1-2 per user per week, consider decreasing your budget if it's significantly above this - Monitor view based conversions: a large percentage of 1-day view or low percentage of 1-day click is a telltale sign that credit is being taken from other sales channels - Limit your audience to people who are harder to reach on email/SMS: e.g. non-email openers #facebookads #facebookmarketing #facebookadvertising #facebookforbusiness #instagrammarketing #instagramads #facebook #meta #metaads #ecommerce #socialmedia #socialmediamarketing

7-day click vs. 7-day click or 1-day view: We all know with Meta ads, it's best to be extremely specific about the action you want users to take. 7dc (or 1dc) are the best options, in my opinion, because you spend every ad dollar to train an algorithm to acquire click-based conversions. More importantly, you eliminate view attribution and force Meta to optimize for users most likely to click and navigate to the website. Here's what I mean: When you let Meta optimize for view attribution, more often than not, it feeds off conversions from other channels and does not show the true incremental impact of Meta's performance. The key point is, that Meta's attribution setting is also an optimization setting. Why would I let Meta optimize for data signals that are not the most incremental to the business? That's why, in almost all cases, click-based attribution is the way to go. View attribution does a lot of harm to businesses that think Meta ads are driving a lot stronger performance than it actually is. In most accounts I audit, I see inflated view performance being 50-70% of conversions... oof. That's why I am writing this post, to help you avoid this! From an attribution reporting standpoint, 7dc or 1dc shows a much more realistic picture of Meta's true impact on the business. If someone clicks on your ad and navigates to your website, you can be confident that Meta significantly impacted the customer journey. Isn't that what we want too? Clicks -> Purchases. So optimize for it. This is why I always preach, that attribution settings are also optimization settings. Meaning, that you are investing in a system that will acquire you the specific type of conversions you want. If you want to learn more about this, check out my new video where I dive deeper into this subject! https://lnkd.in/gRYSUCM4

Not nearly enough advertisers use or even know about breakdowns... They're found by clicking the breakdown dropdown menu in between Columns and Reports in Ads Manager. There are six categories of breakdowns. By Time: - Day - Week - 2 Weeks - Month By Demographics: - Age - Gender - Age and Gender - Audience Type (for Advantage+ Shopping) By Geography: - Country - Country and Audience Type (Advantage+ Shopping) - Region - Business Locations - DMA Region By Delivery: - Placement - Platform - Time of Day (ad account time zone) - Time of Day (viewer's time zone) - Impression Device - Platform and Device - Placement and Device - Media Type - Product ID By Action: - Conversion Device - Carousel Card - Destination - Post Reaction Type - Brand - Category - Video Sound - Video View Type By Dynamic Creative Element (from the ad view only): - Image, Video, and Slideshow - Text - Headline (ad settings) - Description - Call to Action - Website URL When you use one of these breakdowns, Meta will create a separate row for each breakdown element. For example, when breaking down by placement, you get a separate row for each placement to see how budget, impressions, and performance break down. Go ahead and poke around breakdowns if you haven’t already. They can uncover some valuable info.

Meta is 100% biased. And you’re probably testing creative wrong 😑 When adding in new creatives to a Meta ads account there’s really only 1 way to give the creative a fair test. If you’ve run ad sets with 4-5 creatives you’ll notice how Meta will prioritize 1 creative. It’ll get all the spend and all the impressions. It’s a common fallacy to then look at the other creatives in that ad set and think “okay these are not performing well”. This actually may not be the case. For creative testing in Meta, I recommend having a separate campaign (not ASC) just for testing. Do not turn on CBO, to let each ad set have its own budget. I prefer HV but you might want to test with a cost cap, either is fine. If you use a cost cap I would set it a bit higher than usual just for testing. Now, for the ad sets. Each ad set should really only have 1 ad. Or maybe you can test 1 ad creative duplicated 3 times with 3-4 different headlines or primary text. Set a daily budget at the ad set level to ensure Meta spends enough to give each creative a fair shake. So if you’re testing 4 new creatives, you’d make 1 testing campaign with 4 ad sets. Each ad set has a different creative inside. This is the best way to find true winners in your paid social performance. And it completely sucks when you pay a lot of money for a bunch of new creatives or videos and half of them “don’t perform well” and get turned off within 2 weeks. This way, you can see if the creative really works! #marketingstrategy #creativemarketing #performancemarketing

Most brands treat Meta ads like a slot machine. Put in money. Hope it works. Pray for a winning ad. But here’s the truth: Meta ads aren’t a gamble. They’re a system. If you’re just trying random creatives… If you’re scaling without signal… If you’re blaming the algorithm every week… You’re thinking about Meta the wrong way. Here’s how high-performing brands think instead: ✅ Test with purpose → Not “let’s try this” → It’s: “We noticed X… so we’re testing Y to get Z.” ✅ Track what matters → Not just ROAS in Ads Manager → Blended CAC, landing page CVR, backend AOV all of it ✅ Creative = the strategy → Not just “make something cool” → But systemized hooks, offers, formats, and feedback loops ✅ Scale what proves itself → Not “this feels like it’s working” → But “this has consistent metrics now we scale with confidence” You don’t need luck. You need structure. Meta isn’t broken. Your process is. Fix that and results follow.

I'm sharing some tricks and tools for #marketers to reverse engineer what companies are doing with paid demand generation. These are useful for competitive benchmarking and intelligence, and I find they're incredibly valuable when prepping for an interview with a company.  (Personally, I tap into these when evaluating the go-to-market motion for #startups pitching us at Cervin Ventures.  If you’re a founder and tell us you have demand gen “figured out” be prepared to answer some data-driven questions based on what we can see.) Tricks and Tools: 1. Paid traffic sources – Use Similarweb's free account to look at the sources for a company’s web traffic.  (https://lnkd.in/gyEqbwWV) • If you see Paid Search, or Display Ads as a traffic source, they’re working on demand gen.  The traffic distribution gives you a sense of how traffic they're buying. 2. PPC spend and keywords – use Semrush's Advertising Research free tool to look up the keywords, budget and estimated paid traffic for any domain.   • You can also see specific ad creative they're running against different keywords.   • There are limits on the details in the free account, but you can see a lot more details in the paid version. 3.  LinkedIn – LinkedIn launched an ad transparency center last year that enables you to look at the ad creative for any advertiser.  (https://lnkd.in/gMrQpVe5) • Search for ads by advertiser, keyword, country and date range. • Ad creatives become available ~48 hours after their first impression and are available for 1 year from their first post. • For ads that run in Europe, you can also see some information on overall impressions and ad targeting used. 4. Facebook – similar to LinkedIn, Meta has an ads transparency center for any company with a business account.  Simply go to the company’s FB page, and go to the About section.  You'll see a notification if they're running ads and then you can go to their ad library to see all of their creative, what Meta properties they’re running on. In addition, I always look at their website tags using BuiltWith to see what tracking pixels or ad network tags they're firing on their website. All of this gives you a relatively good view of what channels companies are using for demand gen, and in many case the actual creative they are running. What tools did I miss or what are your favorite ways to evaluate a company's marketing efforts? #marketing #demandgeneration #tipsmarketing

If you were to ask my team, they would tell you I’m bullish that 2024 will be the "Year of Measurement" for businesses. Simply put, if you can’t understand what works and what doesn’t you’re not able to strategically allocate your investments in areas that will have the greatest ROI. We tell our advertising partners the best way to understand what’s driving ROI on Meta is with incrementality, using the gold standard of running randomized controlled trials to measure the causal impact of Meta ads above and beyond the rest of your marketing investment. A great example of how this mindset can be applied is demonstrated in a new meta-analysis. Using the "channel lift" methodology, we proved that on average advertisers misattribute 39% of total incremental conversions caused by Meta to other channels, and of those 39% misattributed conversions, 50% on average are misattributed to search channels. These learnings can allow businesses to adapt their attribution model for impact.    In a special installment of Performance Talks with Nicola Mendelsohn she gives her advice for 2024 which includes leaning into AI and robust measurement strategies. Check it out here: