User Acquisition is dead, so what is next for UA managers and social advertisers?
Forget everything you thought you knew about Facebook & Google App Campaign ads. In this video, you will learn about the recent changes and what changes are coming in the near future. In addition, we will discuss the future of UA and the evolving role of UA Managers. Receive actionable insights on how to achieve and sustain high-performing, profitable Facebook & Google social ad spend.
Also, we will announce Google’s App Campaign product innovations coming out in June that are designed to give advertisers control. Find out why creative is king but 95% of new creative fails. Learn the best practices for competitive ad research and why Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) releasing in September will kill all 3rd party ad tech – once and for all!
“User Acquisition Is Dead – Facebook & Google Creative Are King! ” with Brian Bowman, CEO of Consumer Acquisition.
In the past year, Facebook and Google App Campaign optimization algorithms have drastically improved. This created a level playing field for social advertisers of all sizes. Advantages that were once held by third-party SaaS providers have diminished. As a result, media buying and bidding became much easier and faster with these improved native tools. This being said, Facebook and Google’s algorithm improvements may eventually kill third-party adtech.
We have been given some amazing new tools and capabilities in the last few years. But, it has also meant that we have to completely remake how we structure and execute campaigns. And the recent changes are just the beginning. As the ad platforms’ AI algorithms get smarter, like with Google and Facebook, we expect the role of user acquisition managers to evolve rapidly in the next few years.
User Acquisition is Dead. So while this statement might have jarred you, the old way of doing user acquisition really is dead or at least dying.
Finding a winning video ad can be difficult. Often, advertisers have to test many different variables. For every one of those variables and every version of them, the number of videos required to be produced multiplies. That’s why you need a bulk video editor.
Edit Thousands of Videos with Our Bulk Video Editor
In order to test just two versions of a CTA and two versions of an end card, four different videos must be created. You’ll need to make eight videos if you add two different images to that same test. If you wanted to test three images? That would warrant the creation of twelve videos.
And that’s just amateur testing. Our Quantitative Creative Testing method gives you a collection of variations like this to help you find your next 100x ad:
In this post, we’ll discuss how our Creative Studio bulk video editor can get help you edit thousands of videos with just a couple of clicks:
Create Video Variations with Bulk Video Editor
Without the right tool, the work required to make all of those video variations are enormous. To get it all done either your production schedule has to slow down considerably, or you may have to hire help to meet your deadline.
For advertisers who need to make a lot of videos with hundreds of variations, sizes, and concepts, you can bulk upload the videos you want to the Bulk Editor by uploading a CSV file that contains the videos’ required parameters. Our team has created CSV template that simplifies the process, allowing you to edit thousands (yes, thousands) of videos in a few simple steps.
Sizes
Once you’ve found your new 100x video, you need to convert it into a number of different sizes specific to each advertising platform. After that, you need to convert it into even more sizes to be used for different ad placements on each platform. You may also have to adjust the video’s proportions to fit square, portrait, or landscape measurements.
Customization
“Localizations,” or the customization of videos for specific countries and languages, can make a huge difference in performance. All of the videos you’ve created should be recreated to target the localizations specific to your audience.
Our Creative Studio self-service video bulk editor can create videos with the variations, sizes, and customizations you need in just a few steps. In just a few clicks, you can have dozens of versions of your original video.
Edit Existing Videos with Bulk Video Editor
The bulk editor feature also makes it easy to edit existing videos. This allows you to alter any of these elements quickly and effectively:
Intro and end cards
Banners
Footers
Headlines
Emojis
Stickers
CTAs
See how it’s done:
The Creative Studio video editor can also be paired with our new Performance Templates to help reach your advertising goals. These templates are basically blank concept ads that employ the top-performing elements that top-spending advertisers on Facebook and Google App Campaigns are seeing success with right now.
To use Performance Templates, simply add your creative assets into the template that best fits the goals of your ad. Then, you submit a brief to our team and we’ll create the video ads for you.
The options above allow you to have a body of high-potential ads right at the start. This allows your advertising to get up to speed quickly at a cost much less than typical creative development.
Final Thoughts about the Bulk Video Editor
The Creative Studio Bulk Video Editor, Performance Templates, and our designers and developers have helped thousands of advertisers build high-performance creative and scale their advertising. Our case study on Glu’s Mobile’s Design Home app is just one example of Creative Studio’s success – the team increased their ROAS by 70%.
Looking to test our Creative Studio and Bulk Video Editor yourself? Sign up here.
Having an internal marketing team is critical for businesses to reach and sustain the highest possible net profit. In order to maximize revenue, a focus should be placed on building this internal skill set. But, there is strategic value in benchmarking internal marketing teams against external teams. Benchmarking will help management validate the performance of the internal team, and increase team intensity by encouraging healthy competition.
This initiative will allow both the internal and the external team to render new ideas, eliminating tunnel vision and stale marketing. Further, internal teams that work in a silo for months often stop thinking outside the box and get stuck in a rut coming up with very similar ad creative concepts. By benchmarking the internal team against the external team, members from both sides will be encouraged to develop new concepts and media buying strategies and constantly be generating new ideas.
Below, we have outlined best practices for structuring the internal and external marketing teams to work effectively in tandem for success:
How Marketing Teams Can Work Together
Be Transparent
Total transparency and open communication are key to any successful venture. Internal marketing teams and external agencies that are working together should freely and openly share their ideas, strategies, and successful creative with each other. Open communication builds trust and ultimately allows the teams to generate more successes together.
Note: The internal marketing team should own all of these ideas and strategies.
In order to maintain transparency and cooperation, these two teams should be speaking on a weekly basis. This weekly meeting presents an opportunity to share information about work that has been recently completed and objectives for the coming week. More importantly, this meeting allows the external agency to talk to the internal team about upcoming objectives and marketing initiatives. This ensures that they both have the most up-to-date information and that they stay on track.
Use Project Management Tools
Email inboxes are messy, cluttered, and hard to keep up with. Team chat tools like Slack, Google Hangouts, Hive, and Fuze have become a popularized way to execute intraday communications across teams. These tools allow user acquisition and design teams to ensure that information is staying out of crowded email inboxes and stored efficiently within specialized communication channels.
For creative reviews and approvals, project management systems with simple UI, like Trello, are helpful. These platforms make it easy to share ad designs and provide teams with a streamlined place to gather and centralize feedback. And again, these deliverables stay out of email inboxes.
This way, both the internal and external teams are able to operate efficiently in regard to creative reviews and approvals. This is especially helpful to intellectual property holders as they often have a multitude of external sources that are contributing feedback.
Benefits of Supplemental External Marketing Teams
The job of an external agency is not to replace the internal marketing team. However, marketers are often apprehensive about partnering with an external team due to the fear of the agency outperforming them. This is certainly not the objective of an external agency and is rarely the outcome.
External teams are put in place to help ensure that internal teams are operating at peak efficiency. As a result, this offers a number of benefits to both the creative team and the media buying team.
Benefits for the Creative Team
External agencies are often leveraged on the creative side to assist in the brainstorming process and help deliver new concepts. When they find a high-performing deliverable, they share it with internal teams so that they can create variations. The creative testing strategies for finding high-performing ads are also recorded and shared between them.
This also benefits internal teams. It allows them to efficiently share the lessons of what has worked and what has failed. Consequently, this prevents them from making the same mistakes and wasting money. Both teams work closely in tandem to form a cohesive whole.
Benefits for the Media Buying Team
The two user acquisition teams are able to benchmark each other. When one account goes into a test bucket at Facebook causing something to stop performing as efficiently, it’s a good idea to have one or two more accounts running. It’s also more efficient to have one account that spends less because it does not reach as far, as it allows for more efficient running.
Giving media buying power to an external agency allows the internal team to separate their budget and run it efficiently in a split format. This is the concept of shifting budgets.
Final Thoughts About Marketing Teams
Both internal teams and external teams can work in tandem to learn, push, and drive better marketing results. To accelerate the growth of internal marketing skills and knowledge, consider partnering with an external agency. This will give your team the means to push further.
Learn more about our managed services, and how we help internal marketing teams innovate and optimize advertising strategies.
In September 2018, Facebook launched Stories Ads to global advertisers. This ad format offers marketers a new way to engage users and increase conversion rates on the web’s largest social networking platform. This presents marketers with a great opportunity to reach targeted users, as over 300 million people use Facebook Stories every day.
Facebook Stories allows users to share, discover, interact and engage with content on a vertical screen. Their ads are full-screen, vertical advertisements that appear between user stories on the Facebook platform. Video Stories ads can run anywhere from 1 to 15 seconds, while image ads in this format can appear for up to 6 seconds, and swipe up calls-to-action allow marketers to prompt users to visit their target landing page. These ads look similar to Instagram and Snapchat Stories, creating an immersive full-screen visual experience.
Facebook Stories employ full-screen visuals. So, if you opt to display an ad in this format, it means you can’t compromise on flat visuals. Due to the fact that users are able to swipe off a story, ad creative must be compelling and engaging and motivate the user to click on the call-to-action. Facebook suggests using minimal text at no more than 20% per piece of creative content.
2. Create Time-Sensitive Content
Users engage on Facebook to stay up-to-date with new trends and happenings. The stories are only visible for a maximum of 24 hours, and one of the main reasons that these stories are so compelling is due to the fact that they are so short-lived. Creating time-sensitive, urgent content makes it more likely that users will take action quickly. Use Facebook Stories Ads to announce important updates or offers that will be available for a limited time only, host competitions and sweepstakes, or reward engaged users with sales codes or discounts.
3. Make it Short and Sweet
Top-performing Stories ads tend to be shorter and contain branding elements earlier than lower-performing ads do. Facebook’s research revealed that, in video Stories ads that have multiple scenes, top-performing ads have shorter scenes and last for a duration shorter than 10 seconds.
4. Use a Straight-Forward Call-to-Action
Using a clear CTA in your ad simply and directly encourages a user to take action. The Facebook Stories advertising platform provides advertisers with a variety of different options for creating good CTAs. Remember to use the call-to-action option that relates most directly to your overall campaign goal. For example, mobile game or app advertisers should employ the “download now” option. This will help drive users to download your offering in the app stores.
5. Don’t Forget Mobile Optimization
Users consume content at a faster rate on mobile, so it’s important to deliver your brand message quickly (in the first few seconds of your ad) to boost engagement and CTR. Use vertical dimension ratios to ensure your ad is optimized for full-screen viewing.
Tip: Many mobile users opt for silent viewing, so don’t rely on sound to deliver your message – optimized visual creative is key.
Facebook Stories Ads provide businesses and marketers with yet another tool for gaining user attention. This placement offers a great opportunity for advertisers hoping to boost leads, conversions, traffic, or brand awareness. These types of ads also give marketers the ability to repurpose creatives for both Instagram and Facebook platforms. Thus, saving them time and money on creating extra content, and enabling A|B testing over both platforms.
At this time, Facebook Stories Ads drive lower competition and therefore present lower CPM rates. Facebook’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, expects Stories to be shared more often than news feed content in the future. In addition, platform Creator, Mark Zuckerberg, has said that one of Facebook’s goals is to ensure that these ads perform as well as they do in the news feed.
Our creative studio can help your team develop high-performing Facebook creative at scale.
Facebook launched Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) a year ago to give social marketers the option for machine learning to control their budget at the campaign level. When CBO is activated, Facebook can automatically move the budget to the most effective ad set in a campaign and distribute budgets in real-time to increase efficiency.
This allows marketers to run multiple ads within a single ad set. Once CBO is turned on, Facebook will optimize to find the best ads and ad sets based on performance across a campaign. Then, it will distribute the budget to automatically maximize financial results. Campaign Budget Optimization is a powerful optimization tool offered by Facebook to simplify account management and reduce daily tasks for social advertisers.
In this post, we’re discussing what marketers need to know about CBO:
Campaign Budget Optimization
Changes to Facebook Media Buying
It’s no secret that Facebook is evolving, and two key changes will have a significant impact on media buying:
Facebook is simplifying its optimization algorithm.
Facebook announced that CBO will become mandatory starting in September 2019.
This means that budgets will no longer be controlled at the ad set level, regardless of if you are using Facebook power editor or a 3rd party bidding tool that has its own rules or algorithm for budget distribution. Marketers will have to adjust how they manage and build Facebook campaigns. Starting in September, Facebook will be the one to decide how to distribute the campaign budget across ad sets. In short, marketers will no longer be able to make intraday changes, which will fundamentally change the way marketers buy media on Facebook.
With this move, Facebook is signaling a move to automated media buying and automated management of budget and ad set optimization, much like their biggest competitor – Google’s Universal App Campaigns (UAC). Sometimes, Facebook will “pre-announce” big changes and new features, like hiding device IDs from custom audiences, which allows time for the market to provide feedback and for Facebook to validate their approach and determine if it needs modification. Other times, such as with the “significant edits” roll-out in February of 2018, Facebook will just release the big change and the market is required to adapt to stay current with best practices.
Why Mandatory, and Why Now?
In making CBO mandatory, Facebook is reducing the complexity of media buying. This will further level the playing field between large and small advertisers. In addition, this appears to be a crucial step towards the simplification of their overall algorithm. Ultimately, moving towards offering a more Google UAC-like product.
With other optimization improvements, Facebook has made it easier than ever to buy media on their network. As they continue to roll out new features, they gain more control over the media buying process and will continue to automate processes; decreasing complexity and increasing efficiency for all advertisers.
Be Ready for the Change to Mandatory CBO
On the bright side, marketers will have time to experiment with this feature in preparation. Come September, all campaigns will automatically migrate to CBO, and this will impact how all existing and new campaigns run. So, it is vital to test CBO now to be prepared for this transition.
Of course, there’s always a way around rules. For a short while after the September rollout, you could “game” Facebook’s CBO requirement by restructuring accounts into thousands of campaigns with only one ad set—grabbing back granular control over budget allocation. There are, however, a few challenges with this approach:
You will be fighting Facebook’s best practices. As we’ve seen time and time again, their best practices do work overtime.
You will take a large number of significant edits across your entire account.
Facebook could potentially cap the number of campaigns that you are allowed to have in an account. Then, you have to rebuild again and take the significant edits.
Final Thoughts About Campaign Budget Optimization
Our key takeaway on this transition is to take advantage of the months between now and September. This will help you to gain a full understanding of how to use CBO efficiently across your accounts. Test and re-test structuring campaigns so you are not penalized with the mandatory migration in September.
There is still a huge potential advantage to CBO. If marketers embrace CBO, it will be easier to maintain accounts. This means they may be able to hire lower-cost staff to manage Facebook campaigns. This ultimately redirects capital back into top-of-funnel marketing.
