We are excited to share the first installment of Social Bulldog’s Platform Insight series, in which we plan to periodically provide some of our thoughts, experiences, and data with you. As you’ll see in today’s write-up, we promise to share both the good and the bad of the market landscape — either way, we hope you find this helpful in evaluating and planning your growth efforts.
Facebook’s iOS 14 Reporting Faceplant
This past week Facebook published an article that spells out what we have all been feeling — iOS changes have really adversely impacted performance for everyone.
You can read Graham Mudd’s (VP of Product Marketing, Facebook) full article here. Below we will summarize what this means and share some of our thoughts on how to manage the current environment.
Social Bulldog clients have already heard from us regarding iOS changes that have affected the ability to report on website conversions. Across the board, Facebook has seen a 15% decrease in reporting of website conversions, although they point out this is a market average. In reality, individual advertisers are experiencing much worse data loss. We have seen instances where Facebook’s underreporting is closer to 40%.
The unfortunate news from Facebook is that there will be no quick fix to this situation.“We’re optimistic about our multi-year effort to develop new privacy-enhancing technologies that minimize the amount of personal information we process, while still allowing us to show personalized ads and measure their effectiveness.” You read that right…multi-year effort.
So what does this mean for you? Below are some actions you can take right now to navigate the new landscape that is performance marketing on Facebook:
- → Be patient. Set budgets at a level that you can walk away from for 7 days before analyzing performance. Due to delayed reporting as well as this loss of signal the platform needs more “time” i.e conversions to optimize. Unless you are driving close to 100 optimized conversions a day it is likely not a good idea to be making too many intraday changes to your campaigns.
- → Test less but smarter. We believe this is a time we need to be more calculated when it comes to testing. The platform is struggling with signal, therefore, to get meaningful results from our tests we likely have to run them for longer. We would recommend you plan longer, fewer tests to make sure you get something out of your testing budgets. When it comes to creative we would recommend testing concepts, not small tweaks. So test UGC vs short-form video vs long-form video vs statics for example but don’t spend time/money (and waste valuable platform signal) on debating which shade of green background maximizes ad conversion.
In addition, Facebook is working on the following: Improved 7-day click modeling to include purchase value. (If you plan to still use 7dc/1dv optimizations, which we recommend, you have to be aware that Facebook numbers may not line up exactly with your back-end revenue numbers as some modeled sales will be dumped in with modeled value, up to 72 hrs after they occured.)
If you are a Social Bulldog client and have questions on our Q4 strategy to manage the aforementioned challenges; or if you are interested in becoming a client, please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions.
Facebook by the Numbers — past 7 days
- → 61.48% of accounts saw an increase in CPM
- → 51.46% of accounts saw an increase in CPA
- → 27.05% of accounts saw an improvement in ROAS
Data powered by our partner Varos