Rules for META ads in 2022
If you've seen a massive decrease in your ads in the last year, you are struggling to keep your ROAS stable and your business is not as profitable as it once was, rest assured that you are not alone and we understand you. 😎
Meta Ads (former Facebook Ads), were undoubtedly one of the best - if not the best - tools to put your new brand out there in the world or scale it, even if it was an already well-established brand.
But that was before iOS 14.5. When there were no restrictions whatsoever on cookies and any type of tracking. The ads scenario stopped being so bright for most of the advertisers. Does that mean running ads on Meta stopped being profitable? No, not at all. ☝️ It's just more difficult and challenging. So, to answer the question "Do META ads still work in 2022?", the simple answer is "of course" BUT you will have to look at it holistically.
We know it has been a hard year so far and adding to the tracking issue, consumer behavior is also changing due to external factors like inflation and fear of the recession.
If your main thinking is how to improve ads instead of thinking about how to improve your e-commerce game as a whole, you will probably have a hard time.
But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! 🤝
At WeScale we are being challenged every day and that’s why we’ve got our departments adapting our eCommerce approach frequently, to make sure we test concepts fast and we scale them even faster when they prove to be working.
So, sit back and get your notepad 🗒️ because we think it will be worth it!
AD ACCOUNT STRUCTURE
🎯Naming Convention
Ad accounts can be a mess and confusing if you are not structuring them well.
Imagine dedicating 10-15 minutes of your day just to find a specific campaign, ad set, or ad. To avoid this, be sure you have a naming convention that helps you to be more efficient and quick to find the information you want in a matter of seconds.
🎯 Funnel stages
Having a good funnel structure inside your ad account is halfway to a successful eCommerce business.
There are a lot of ways you can structure your funnel but the two most known and used structures are the 3 Stage Funnel and the 5 Stage Funnel.
If you have a low budget you could benefit from structuring your account based on the 3 main stages of a sales funnel.
💡Awareness - Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
💡Consideration - Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
💡Conversion/Decision - Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
Make sure you reach all stages of your funnel. From engagers and video viewers to all-time buyers, you shouldn’t be missing anyone.
If you have a higher spend, you can optimize your funnel for 5 stages.
➡️ Awareness - For a cold audience (people who don’t know you at all)
➡️ Interest/Education - For all the social media channel engagers or visitors that already know your product or service (e.g. people who’ve interacted with your Instagram profile)
➡️ Desire - For people that deeper into your website and visited specific webpages or products (e.g. Viewed a specific product or category)
➡️ Action - For people that had any action closer to the purchase (e.g. adding a specific product to the cart)
➡️ Repeated Buyers - For people that already purchased any product or service from you
🎯 Lookalikes on early-stage
Since iOS 14.5, tracking lost its accuracy but, any action taken inside Facebook or Instagram is still 100% trackable. That being said, you can take advantage of the lookalike audiences at an early stage of your funnel. Video views, Facebook and Instagram engagement.
🎯 Don’t use too many ads
Don’t push too many ads inside your set. Depending on your budget you can use between 3 to 5 ads inside an ad set.
🎯 Don’t underestimate an ad
Sometimes Facebook will use a big portion of your budget at an early stage, just on a single ad. And this is only because it showed promising results at the beginning. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the other ads you have on that same ad set are not suitable. If you believe they will also work, try to isolate and test them. Sometimes this can surprise you.
🎯 Exclude audiences
Make sure that you are doing the right exclusions. If you don’t do proper exclusions you will not be able to tell what stages of your funnel are working better or worse.
🎯 Frequency and Creative Rotation
Don’t worry about your frequency as long as you are getting conversions out of it. But plan ahead! You may need to change the creatives quite frequently and if you do not have the assets prepared, the moment your performance starts to die, you may not be ready and will probably lose traction on your ad spend.
👉 Placements - Do not take a placement or an ad format as a permanent winner. If a collection ad has been working for you, this doesn’t mean other ad formats won’t work in the future. On the contrary, different people reacted differently to creatives and ad formats. That said, keep testing these formats through your funnel and combine them with different types of creatives.
👉 Use Automated Rules - Use rules to scale and do early cuts if needed. This will save you time and of course, money. Some automation tools we recommend are Revealbot, Madgicx, and ROI Hunter.
AUDIENCES
You may have noticed that some audiences have disappeared from your ads manager and that your lookalike audiences are not performing as well as they were in the past.
We advise you to always dedicate a portion of your budget to test new audiences and combine new angles with those audiences to find your perfect combo.
💡 Broad audience - A broad audience with no interest or age limitation will most probably not disappoint you at all. But don’t forget, your pixel must have collected data! A well-seasoned pixel will drastically decrease the chance of a broad audience not working for you.
💡 Test “stupid” interests - Yes, that’s right, you can find interests that apparently have nothing to do with your target audience but they simply work. And sometimes they outperform some of your most common audiences as well!
💡 Audience Size - Try to use audiences bigger than 2M people.
If you are targetting small interests you will saturate your audience pretty fast. So, be cautious when targeting smaller audiences.
💡 Lookalike audiences - Although some lookalike audiences are not performing as well as they once were, the combination of the timeframes and events you can make is insanely high. Taking video views as an example, you can make lookalike audiences out of a 3-second video view and explore them between the last 7 up to 180 days.
The number of tests you can do between ad creatives, copies, landing pages, placements, formats, and other elements is amazingly high! So, your best friend should be testing! Set up a testing system and try to find new combinations between those elements and draw conclusions from them.
🎯 Creative testing - As soon as you find a new winner in creative approaches it will be “happy times”....until it stops working. That’s why one of our main mottos is “act rather than react”. You can read articles and do a deep analysis of your competitor, or even do a perfect scripted video, but there's a huge chance that a simple creative, recorded with a phone, will convert better than a high-end production. But hey, don’t take our word for it! Go on and test it.
🎯Copy and hook testing - Test new hooks and copies with a clear offer and a message that resonates with your audience. Sometimes using those hooks on an image or in a video can grab that extra attention you needed to increase your CTR.
🎯 Format testing - A collection ad may be working for you but there are so many formats that you can try that could help you bump a few more sales. As we previously mentioned, different people react differently to other format types.
🎯Types of content - Go bananas with the types of content you try. We’ve got a few types of content for you to try.
- UGC
- Reviews
- Testimonials
- USPs - unique selling points
- Unboxing
- Renders
- Studio shoots
- Lifestyle
We hope this article was helpful. We are a team passionate about our job and we breathe eCommerce every single day.
Don't be shy and hit us up to see if we are a good fit for your company.
And if you want to be a successful e-commerce brand, WeScale it! 🙂
