Facebook Ads Just Had a HUGE Update... Here's What You Need to Know

Facebook has released one of the biggest campaign optimization updates perhaps since iOS 14.5 the changes that they released today are some of the biggest changes we've seen on the platform in literally years so in today's video I'm going to do two things first I'm going to lay out the entire white paper we're going to read through the most important parts of the white paper and second I'm going to break down how I see each of these changes playing out over the short term long term and I'm also going to show you how some of these

features might already be present in other platforms you're familiar with finally I'm going to break down what you need to do today to prepare for these changes the article I will link down in the description below it is called campaign optimization updates to improve Advertiser performance this first section here simply just states that they want us to deliver better results no matter what the conversion is there's three portions to this entire white paper first is defining the conversions business's value most second is supporting new attribution models and third is more powerful analytics integration so finding

the conversions businesses value most over the past years we have taken steps to try and deliver more of the outcomes businesses value for example we've created new optimization options that allow advertisers to move from optimizing only for conversions to optimizing for Value what they're actually referring to here is the changes that they made to your performance goal in the last year the performance goal section here used to just be maximize number of conversions without maximized value of conversions this change this value of conversions has been a staple for the brands that we work with that

have different variations of products and are ultimately trying to find more valuable customers for most cases we do actually select maximize value of conversions however when you select maximize value of conversions and you try to select an attribution setting you actually can't select a viewr setting which makes things really tricky because we like that viewr data so what I'm more focused on is that they're actually going to be adding additional goals and that ways we can bid on goals based on the information that we know as business owners and not just the information that Facebook's

trying to gather from the pixel so digging in deeper we plan to support optimizing for new definitions of value such as profit or predicted lifetime value that is huge so what this is going to allow us to do is set our targets or potentially set our budgets or tell the pixel to optimize maybe even for profit and how this is going to be done we plan to expand our testing of a new feature called conversion value rules this part might sound extremely extremely similar you notice here that they have conversion value rules capitalized that means

it's a definition somewhere in their book now conversion value rules are not a new thing to advertisers if you've ever advertised on Google ads you've seen conversion value rules so I'm going to pop into a Google account and actually show you exactly what this looks like and you click the segment button and you click conversions and click conversion action you'll see that you may have multiple conversion actions working at the same time in this case it's important to note that I have different values Associated for different conversions so for this client in particular particular we

are tracking new conversions and repeat conversions because of that we actually value the new conversion higher than the repeat conversion in that case I'm actually able to track and understand which of these conversions we actually focus on we can track which of these conversions most of our spend is going to which of these conversions we're driving more or less of this is a really important distinction here it's going to allow us to see a ton more data and actually really help us optimize our ad so I love this change furthermore it sounds like these are

value rules not just conversion value assignments which is a huge difference here businesses can use this feature to express which audiences or conversions they value more or less which we plan to then use to optimize their campaigns let's say you run an e-commerce store and you value a certain price on signing up for your email list you could assign based on what I'm reading a value to a sign up per email list in the same campaign that you could assign a value for the purchase so what this might tell you for example is that email

list sign up might be worth $1 to you and the purchase will be worth however much the purchase is so now Facebook could actually optimize and figure out there's this whole pocket of people here that are good for email signups there's a whole pocket of people here that are good for purchases now as a result you don't have to have two separate campaigns running to different objectives you can actually Target the same person based on what they're most likely to do which is going to open up our advertising pool and ultimately it's going to get

us more value it's actually going to help us tell the algorithm exactly how much to spend and how much people are worth moving to number two supporting new attribution models first off before before we talk about what they're going to support let's note that they made a bunch of changes in the last year to attribution models anytime that you go to your Facebook campaign you click on columns you scroll down to compare attribution settings we're actually now able to see view conversions click conversions and different variations of Click conversions furthermore they added engaged view conversions

here as well and then finally we did see the introduction of thirdparty reporting as an individual breakdown it's always been available this section was updated very recently what I love to do I love to see an optimize based on a 7-Day click instead of a 7-Day click and a one-day view which is most common now there's this section down here that hasn't been talked about that much at all choosing the conversion count do you want to see every conversion meaning if I made two purchases I see both or do we want to see the first

conversion only meaning I clicked the ad I made the purchase and then if I made four more purchases in that same session I would only see the first we like to see all cuz we run e-commerce businesses primarily now the big news here in supporting these new attribution models is starting later this year we plan to introduce a new optin attribution setting that optimizes for and reports on incremental conversions which are conversions that we believe would not have occurred without the ad being shown first off this is necessary this is critical to Facebook this is

going to deter some advertisers away and it's going to discourage people because a lot of brands are going to see the amount of incremental returns that they are getting or the amount of incremental conversions they're getting and they're going to think maybe I shouldn't be advertising on Facebook because it looks like I can get these conversions without Facebook on the flip side some brands are going to recognize that this is going to be very very high maybe even in the 70s and 80s of percentages that will be massively impactful I like their notes here too

to be straightforward here we haven't gotten such a clear-cut white paper in quite a while from Facebook starting later this year new attribution setting for incremental conversions this is in contrast to optimizing for volume which focuses on driving as many total attributed conversions as possible this setting is designed to shift ad delivery to specifically f focus on driving more of those incremental conversions when we tested this in an experiment earlier this year advertisers saw an average Improvement of more than 20% in incremental conversions and this is what always throws me off about Facebook results are

based on tests run between January 2024 and June 2024 the experiment compared campaign performance for 45 advertisers across 11 verticals in North America EMA and against the average of conversion lift studies run in H1 this is provided to give you an idea of possible performance performance isn't guaranteed here's why I don't like this there are thousands of advertisers that join Facebook every day and there are hundreds of thousands of advertisers who spend thousands of dollars every single day I believe this number should be 10 times at least higher than it is there's no way 45

advertisers are going to be equivalent to the result of the entire industry now to compare this to a different feature that was rolled out and claimed to be great we saw multi- Advertiser ads which used to have a flag down here that it would improve ad performance by around 5% they've completely removed that little flag wi that they used to have here we also saw this here which was adding more primary text help we then also saw this which is the scariest part Advantage Plus creative you can get a 16% lower cost per result with

four Advantage Plus creative enhancements now it's a 3% you know what this means means that these enhancements are not good because as they've rolled these out to more and more advertisers that has regressed back down to the mean these enhancements are actually not very good and who they tested it on originally were just outliers truly what we see here when it says has improved average incremental conversions by 20% this is going to basically be a newly supported algorithm and there's no reason that you need to be a guinea pig in any of this testing you

need to actually know that this is going to work for you or that many advertisers are seeing this to improve their incremental conversions there has been such a gold rush for these third-party attribution platforms we like some of these thirdparty attribution platforms we like ad Beacon it'll be like triple whale those platforms specifically help with clickthrough attribution and help you tie different platforms in together however merging these into Facebook can be a little tricky before making a purchase people may click or interact with several ads from businesses across a multitude of platforms and Publishers in

order to understand what's working and what's not businesses may use external analytics AKA ad Beacon triple whale northbeam Google analytics and so on we believe that understanding how businesses view what's working and what's not working across their marketing mix can help us optimize for what businesses value starting now and continuing into 2025 we plan to introduce the the ability for businesses to set up their analytics tools directly to our ad systems through a simple API setup we plan to start with Google analytics in North beam and we hope to expand this to Triple oil and

Adobe soon by integrating their analytics tools businesses will be able to share aggregated campaign information such as how many conversions they believe we helped contribute to give a campaign compared to other channels I think this is a huge red flag some people are going to completely disagree with me here when you think about this on a high level when you just simply say we're going to have more data and it's going to inform us on where to insert your ads and so on and it makes sense and logically it's a sound argument and you want

to say yes of course sign me up take a step back here Facebook's job is ultimately to get into the front of as many people as possible with your advertisement that are most likely to convert Facebook clearly does an amazing job of this it's done this for 15 plus years when we start to invade on what data is available there's two possible issues that I see first off we have UTM that disappear we have UT M that break we have miscommunicated UTM so that's just one little segment of it which could effectively ruin your entire

optimization process big issue this will tank ad accounts if it's done improperly second let's say northbeam or Google analytics or triple will or ad Beacon see the meta conversions as less valuable therefore meta is only actually getting 50% of the value and where the value is coming from is actually not as impactful what could happen here is a scenario where these third party attribution platforms could potenti potentially tell meta where they think the conversions are coming from and then that could actually change how meta is bidding and if those third party attribution platforms are wrong

in any way shape or form that could hurt the reason this could hurt so much is because the buyer journey is not a straight funnel so when you think about the buyer Journey these days we've all been taught the classic marketing funnel and you see ads up here and these ads are very Broad and then you see ads in the middle of the funnel and that's where you want to start to tell them about different features of your product and then the bottom of the funnel they visit your website and then at the very very

end of the funnel right here that's where they convert this funnel is totally non-existent at this point funnel now looks like this there was a touch Point here on Facebook there was a touch Point here on Google there was a touch point on Facebook there was a touch point in person there was a touch point on TV and there was a touch Point somewhere else five touch points in a row and then after all of these touch points my buddy sends me a screenshot of a Tik Tok that says you would look good in this

hat guess what I made the purchase that is the new funnel the new funnel is completely unpredictable it is so far off from what used to be this nice straight path that is just not the case anymore once social sharing became the dominant way of purchasing kind of threw a lot of this out of the window so when we start to integrate different pieces that are more funnel specific that actually show a funnel and show each touch point is individualized that could hurt us because the funnel is unpredictable and multiple touch points absolutely could interfere

with each other and then finally on the improved optimizations portion this entire section basically says that they're doing better on the cross publishing Journey which could mean that Facebook's going to do do a little bit better job of not just sneaking in at the last second right before someone was about to buy and doing a better job of driving more incremental conversions I imagine this article alone took Facebook months of refining to get down to these three core components that they are changing I think we're going to see a massive massive change in the algorithm

I think we're going to see a huge change in how businesses operate the only thing we have to cross our fingers for is that this does not impact Q4 too heavily while it's nice to have these features often times when Facebook rolls out new features and they're used in an uninformed way and they're not carefully used advertisers sadly become guinea pigs we saw this in 2020 we saw this in 2021 with iOS 14.5 we saw literal ad accounts deplete overnight so anyway I hope this update was helpful if you have questions I try to answer

every single comment here so absolutely let me know and finally if you want to see our total Facebook structure everything that we like to do with all the ad accounts that we currently manage at the moonlighters you can click the video right here I'm going to go into deep detail on literally everything that we like to set up all the structures that we like to run through because yes some some of these changes would be impactful but to be honest most of these changes Don't Mean a Thing If you have a completely out of wax

structure and that is all for today see you guys in the next one