THE POWER OF AUTOMATION – BOOSTING SALES 67% FOR LIFORME

ADVANTAGE+ SHOPPING CAMPAIGNS

Meta’s relatively new Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) may or may not be something your team has heard of – after all, after its launch last year, we saw many e-commerce brands struggle with learning how to make the tool work for them, oftentimes abandoning the learning curve altogether and returning to their standard mid and lower funnel campaign practices.    

However, Realtime has worked on testing ASC since its rollout, helping our clients determine exactly how the tool is best used for their businesses specifically, and how they can extract the highest ROI out of their campaigns with ASC capabilities.

For those who are unfamiliar with the new tech, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are Meta’s new, comprehensive advertising solution specifically crafted to empower businesses with a wide array of advanced features and e-commerce marketing tools. So why have some brands struggled to adopt it?

While most advertisers are well-accustomed to the idea that more control over campaigns means more control over the output, the reality is that this is becoming an obsolete truth. Enabling your business to have more levers to pull in optimization does, in theory, help produce stronger results than if you had no optimization levers to pull. And, many of us have even developed the majority of our ad buying skills with the knowledge that segmenting tests and manually optimizing would make for the fiercest campaign results. But with algorithms and AI becoming as sharp as it is, computers – most of the time – can do a much better and faster job of finding your exact target consumer and delivering your ad at the perfect time, in the perfect place.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are AI-heavy – meaning as an advertiser, you give up a lot of control over to the algorithm. In a typical advertising campaign, there are multiple levels of control: the campaign level, the ad set level, and the ad level. However, Advantage+ campaigns work a bit differently; they eliminate the ad set level – where targeting is applied – and rely solely on the campaign level. This absence of targeting may seem daunting to advertisers who value control over their campaigns, as it essentially means entrusting Facebook’s algorithm to understand their target audience better than they do. But – in most cases – it will.

ASC also uses dynamic creative – which means you won’t be utilizing separate ads to test creative and messaging variables. Instead, Meta’s algorithm dynamically tests different combinations of creative variables on your behalf.

In short, everything you thought you knew about good digital advertising is flipped on its head.

But, ASC works. Studies conducted by Meta have revealed that Advantage+ outperforms standard campaigns, delivering an average cost per purchase that is 12% lower. These findings are in-line with our own as well. Let’s look at a recent test we conducted for client Liforme, where ASC outperformed by an enormous 67%.

The Client

Liforme is a high-performance yoga equipment company, offering biodegradable planet and skin-friendly mat materials utilizing revolutionary, proprietary anti-slip technology.

And in this particular case, we weren’t actually testing Advantage+ because anything was wrong with Liforme’s campaigns – we often test new features and technology just for the sake of testing it and seeing if we can garner some better performance for our clients.

Seeing strong performance with ASC for other clients, we wanted to understand if it could potentially be more effective for new customer prospecting than our current mid-funnel setup.

As with any test we run, we wanted to ensure our results were founded in statistical significance – that is, that we can say with a high degree of certainty that the results of the test are due to the inclusion of ASC – not random marketplace costs, not variations in creative, not competitor activity, etc. To do this, the test requires a holdout and standardization across all variables except the campaign type. So, we used Meta’s holdout technology to split our campaign by region – with one region seeing ASC ads and the other seeing our standard, mid-funnel ads – all with the same creative and messaging.

The Bottom Line

Liforme is a high-performance yoga equipment company, offering biodegradable planet and skin-friendly mat materials utilizing revolutionary, proprietary anti-slip technology.

And in this particular case, we weren’t actually testing Advantage+ because anything was wrong with Liforme’s campaigns – we often test new features and technology just for the sake of testing it and seeing if we can garner some better performance for our clients.

Seeing strong performance with ASC for other clients, we wanted to understand if it could potentially be more effective for new customer prospecting than our current mid-funnel setup.

As with any test we run, we wanted to ensure our results were founded in statistical significance – that is, that we can say with a high degree of certainty that the results of the test are due to the inclusion of ASC – not random marketplace costs, not variations in creative, not competitor activity, etc. To do this, the test requires a holdout and standardization across all variables except the campaign type. So, we used Meta’s holdout technology to split our campaign by region – with one region seeing ASC ads and the other seeing our standard, mid-funnel ads – all with the same creative and messaging.

Results

Not only did Advantage+ outperform our standard campaign structure by an astonishing 67%, but we were able to conclude our test within only 5 days due to the overwhelming significance of the data collected at 95%+.

Lastly, keep in mind that while cost per purchase hugely benefited from using ASC, our ultimate goal was to understand if this technology could help us find new customers given the AI-powered targeting.

And it most definitely did; while ASC reporting capabilities are slightly different from standard campaigns given the nature of the campaign structure, one interesting feature you can analyze is the split between engagement from new vs existing customers. For this test, Meta noted that a whopping 99% of ASC purchases came from new customers – meaning Advantage+ is an enormously helpful tool for finding new, high-intent targeting pools.