Introduction

User acquisition advertising never stays still. Best practices that worked even six months ago can become today’s mistakes. And the more money you spend, the more those mistakes are amplified. A two percent inefficiency in a $10,000-a-month adspend budget isn’t too dire. But in an account that spends $2 million per month, it’s half a million per year.

Because advertising strategies have to change so often, our recommendations for those strategies change constantly, too. So while we know the best practices outlined here work now, there’s no guarantee they’ll be as effective even a few months from now, much less this time next year.  Citing “best practices” is also problematic. While these strategies will help most advertisers, they won’t help everyone. Or maybe they can help, but they have to be implemented and managed in a very specific way. There is no “one size fits all” for campaign management.

That said, there are massive shifts in advertising that are affecting all advertisers. For example, thanks to new machine learning algorithms on platforms like Facebook and Google, the playing field is more level than ever before. Many of the advantages 3rd party adtech tools once delivered are now available to everyone natively on Facebook and Google, though native tools are lacking in efficient reporting and workflow automation features.  Advanced bidding algorithms like app event bidding, value bidding, and LTV / ROAS bidding take some aspects of campaign management out of advertisers’ hands entirely.

All that has pushed creative development, creative testing, and audience selection up as the primary competitive advantages for social advertisers. It is possible to use both the new tools and some aggressive creative development and testing to maintain performance, but it often requires an amount of creative and rigor of testing that most advertisers just don’t normally do in-house.

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