Maximising Performance with Advanced Shopping Campaigns: A New Frontier in Digital Marketing

Success within digital advertising requires an ability to adapt, paired with a continuous implementation of new strategies to outpace competition. Meta’s launch of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) presents as one of these new strategies, offering an automated system that is advancing the way audiences engage with brands.

ASC provides your marketing team with the ability to craft more relevant ads and thus, resonate with their potential customers at a higher level. At its core, ASC is a new campaign type in Facebook Ads that uses machine learning to automatically optimise your campaign by:

• Mixing & matching prospecting and remarketing audiences,
• Leveraging machine learning to target customers with higher value,
• Testing up to 150 creative combinations automatically & placing the highest-performing variations in front of those high-value customers.

BFJ Digital Tip: Think of this campaign type as a supercharged, automated Lookalike audience. It looks at all the positive actions that your audience takes with your other ads, be those engagement, traffic or conversion campaigns, and finds similar audiences and then delivers relevant content to them at scale.

 

1. Enhance your Target Audience – Performance Marketing
2. How this benefits marketers?
3. The Art and Science of Testing Strategies
4. Incremental Gains: The Path to Enhanced ROAS
5. The Efficiency of Machine Learning
6. Privacy-Centric Audience Targeting
7. Meta’s Advertising Performance: A Case Study in Excellence
8. BFJ Digital: Pioneering Performance with ASC

 

Enhance your Target Audience – Performance Marketing

ASC casts a wider net so you can connect your brand with more people likely to be interested in your products and services. Its Auto Targeting Feature automatically create several target segments ahead of time and incorporates information to guide Meta’s delivery ranking models. Right now we use several target segments defined by ATF, for example:

• People who have had an upper funnel interaction with the website
• People who have purchased on your website
• People who have interacted with your Instagram or Facebook Pages

You can only define your audiences by country and can choose multiple countries. Targeting at the country level gives the system more opportunities to reach people likely to purchase your products. Because Advantage+ shopping campaigns benefit from maximal liquidity, restricting targeting (with interests, demographics, etc.) can hamper the efficiencies Advantage+ shopping campaigns can deliver. That said, it allows you to upload a customer list of you current clientele, which is used to build a profile on your high value target audience.

How this benefits marketers?

With Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns being a transformative system now breaking into performance marketing, it’s important to understand its capabilities and limitations. With its machine learning technology, ASC will work by testing many combinations of ads, and give the automated audience the highest-performing ad. This provides advertisers with more qualified audiences, increases purchases, and reduces cost per result.

For businesses looking to drive conversions, this is a great feature as ASC’s algorithms ensure every ad is optimised to convert. From this, it provides advertisers with the data from your campaign needed when analysing your copy & creatives, allowing for strong data-driven decisions. The data harvested acts as a guide when analysing the sales process with automating CTAs that are tailored to elicit desired responses from different audiences.

As powerful as ASC is, it does have its limitations. Some of the main issues when using ASC’s revolve around account size and spending. From BFJ Digital’s research, we have found accounts must have a rich history of data, paired with a sizeable spend on ads per month for the software to work successfully. Additionally, ASC is not a replacement for current conversion campaigns, it a complimentary campaign that creates more conversions. We recommend to run it as a top-level, always on conversion campaign in tandem with your normal campaign structure.

 

The Art and Science of Testing Strategies

As you analyse ASC and its ability to create successful conversion campaigns, its imperative that testing, and evaluation is considered. Fortunately, ASC does provide robust automated A/B testing at scale so marketing teams are able to thoroughly examine ad campaigns and determine that each creative element is optimised for engagement.

Alongside this, ASC’s testing capabilities enable continuous refinement by automatically turning analytical insights into action within the campaign. It is not only seeking to optimise for new customers, but to understand and re-engage previous customers to create a cycle of loyalty with sustained growth.

We’ve tested multiple creatives that historically have performed very well with our traditional audiences. Placing these in with new creatives has delivered intriguing results that allowed us to review and develop new content far quicker than with typical A/B experiments.

Incremental Gains: The Path to Enhanced ROAS

In the game of maximising digital advertising efficacy, increasing Return on Ad Spend is no stranger. Advertisers that leverage ASC have reported improvements in this key performance indicator. With the automatic optimisation of the campaign and providing the most refined ad targeting in real-time, conversions are increasing with a lower cost per result. This with lead a company into a much higher ROAS.

The Efficiency of Machine Learning

The optimisation of creatives through machine learning is one of the pillars of engagement that ASC’s deliver. With ASC, Meta is indirectly stating automation is the most efficient method of maximising campaign performance. Advertisers have reported that this can be the case, using machine learning to reach the most optimal audiences with refined creative elements. To this, not only is performance improving, but efficiency. Through machine learning, advertisers are using less setup time, and less optimisation time on these campaigns.

Privacy-Centric Audience Targeting

With the direction of privacy in digital advertising, it is paramount that each system and software honours and adheres to updating policies. ASC presents itself as a strategy that ticks this box while broadening brand reach. The campaign adeptly navigates privacy and precision by utilising implicit and explicit intent signals, allowing audience targeting to be as successful as possible while aligning with the rights of privacy each user has over their data. By integrating privacy-centric features, marketers can craft campaigns that have the best chance of resonating with audiences, turning interest into purchases whilst maintaining trust from their audience.

 

Meta’s Advertising Performance: A Case Study in Excellence

Meta has explored into the efficiency of this new campaign type and has noted insightful analytics. At the forefront, advertisers with ASC integrated have reported an increase in campaign performance across various metrics. Case studies have shown a 100% increase in purchases, a 51% lower cost per purchase, and a 100% increase in reach, highlighting the power that ASC’s provide. This directly exemplifies its ability to drive both immediate and sustained growth with a decrease in cost per purchase. With a sufficient budget and historical data, it cements itself as a pivotal tool available to advertisers aiming to develop future-proof, and efficient marketing campaigns.

BFJ Digital: Pioneering Performance with ASC

At BFJ Digital, we value digital marketing innovation highly, which is shown in our integration of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns into our Facebook Advertising services. It’s more than adding a new tool to our repertoire, it’s our dedication to implementing cutting-edge strategies that provide us with insights to make calculated, accurate, and beneficial data-driven decisions based on unique business objectives that our clients have. ASC’s are handing us the power of machine learning to curate impactful CTAs and content that resonate with our clients’ audiences across websites and apps. These campaigns allow us to ensure our services are providing optimised solutions, leveraging new technologies to deliver measurable success on every digital platform.

Our approach to campaign implementation is customer-centric, and tailored. We meticulously analyse our clients’ existing marketing to pinpoint any aspects that can be improved. Utilising ASC’s, we are able to create campaigns that are automatically optimising for performance from the beginning through automated A/B testing to refine ad copy and creatives. Our process extends beyond the campaign launch. At BFJ Digital, we emphasise the importance on engaging in continuous analysis of these campaigns to enhance strategies so they are calibrated for success.