How To Increase Facebook Catalog Ads Profits by 50%

I know that you're used to your catalog ads having a white background and being boring as hell and yeah they make money but they're not exciting if you're not using marpipe then you're missing out on one of the greatest creative strategy leverage points in your Facebook ads to make easily an extra 15 to 50 cents for every single dollar So today we're going to break down the creative strategy to maximize this cheat code in Facebook and if you want to learn more about marpipe there's a link down below you can sign up you'll never pay

full price you get white glove treatment from day one anyway Dan the founder marpipe and I sat down to really break this down let's get into it let's talk about creative like why do all DPA ads look like crap yeah no there's there's there's three reasons for that one because the product feed was initially set up to just pull from Shopify so it's the ugliest boringest thing that you have on your website but also that worked and to be fair it there's it's not an accident that DPA ads look like Google shopping ads and look

like Amazon there is a reason that these experiences are all very Universal and it's because basically the consumer expectation has been set by the market got it number two it is extraordinarily difficult to manually go and make this thing exciting I've done it and uh like I've had designers go up and update the thing and you can have like one Vari and like that is extremely expensive and in a massive time set and I've dealt with other Solutions over the years that like kind of optimize that stuff but it is it is extremely difficult to

even know if it's going to help because by the time you get done doing it and deploying it and testing it maybe the market shifted and all advertising get better or worse you don't even know if your effort paid off right and then like the third thing is that I don't think people realize the value of how to optimize the creative exposure for these types of placements because they just say oh that's a thing I'm checking that box I don't like it because I'm motivated by to be fair I think a lot of creat are

motivated by what's exciting and their ego being like I made this ad it looks great I'm going to run and see if it makes money I don't care I want to make money and if I can give people a user experience it's exciting then I'll lean into that and I think because of so many of those things the lack of ability for people to easily do it on their own and also it's a sandbox with a with not a lot of options yeah so people just look at it as like I can spend my time

making this catalog and maybe it's and I'll do some colors here blah blah blah or I can go make 10,000 ugc videos where I'm on camera having fun right one of those things will print money for years the other one is you on camera yeah so and and this is why like we started marpipe right because we like we saw back in the day before marpipe I used to run a performance creative agency right and and and we saw we would start working with these like Ecom brands that had these ad we'd look in their

ad account and we'd be like godamn 85% of their ad spend is going into DP ta like and assuming that they have the setup correct there's nothing we can do as uh as like as as creatives right to to to like optimize to make that any better right yeah may maybe you're starting to play with the frames or something like that which are which are nerfed yeah frames no yeah also did you little known fact frames are all fra when you run a frame it only runs on Facebook feeds is the only place Instagram so

it won't show anywhere else so it's like only this set so if I'm like a cool brand with 90% of my deliveries on Instagram and I'm and I'm testing frames you're not doing anything other than making machine dunk also it like always cuts off your product image and stuff and it's just people don't get the padding right like I'm I was dealing with a business where all their product image from Shopify are 4x6 yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and and I'm just like well so all their DPA ads have these white borders on them yeah

yeah and just like we there's a simple fix it's just a matter of you caring about this delivery exactly so so that's why we built marpipe because we were like man like if what if someone had the ability to like totally have complete creative control over what their catalog ads look like right and be able to do like experiment with things like bringing in more product data into the actual creative like you see when you see a catalog ad you just see the image of the product right but like there's so much more information about

the product that can help consumers make bringing in the price into the creative if it's on sale slash through the original price and show the sale price ABS right if if if it's like if you have like a buy now pay later scheme going on calculate what the buy now pay later price is that's like having an always on sale slap on the Clara logo call it a day right right right right and and also multi IM like bringing in multiple images into into the like like um to be able to see like um you

know if you're selling furniture right um imagine being a and F like DPA rips for like Furniture HomeGoods apparal compan being able to not just see a flatlay of like the shirt or or the couch like in in floating in the white space in The Matrix but Al but seeing it in like a nice interior design setting or seeing the clothes on a Model uh like just gives more product context to that specific skew that um that defin like that will will lift conversion right um and so but it's just impossible to do that because

if you have like 100 SKS 500 SK you're going to have to design phot Sho will be like yeah you just can't do it you can't do it so you need to have a system that actually can scale it and that's exactly what what marpipe does so using a tool like Mar you're able to have go from having zero creative control over your catalog ads to having complete creative control over over them and so so you're able to sort of bring in elements that you were never able to include in your creative before and and

start start testing and experimenting with yeah and without having to invest heavily in making 10,000 images because the program is doing it in like a minute ex exactly and ultimately one of the things I love about that is like if you do have that new customer conversion event and what what what creative treatment appeals to people that haven't bought from you before what creative treatment gets people who do know you to really be interested like maybe there needs to be heavy branding in the color scheme or maybe there needs to be more highlights in the

these are our CAC products that we're running a discount on let's make sure that these individual items have the discount labeled on all the on all the prices and as we change the price we don't have to go back and rerender a thousand images exactly right like the fact that you can do that dynamically in a way where you don't have to actually change the ad means that you don't have to reset the machine when you're when you're paying a hefty price to teach it how to do it job that's one of the coolest things

about testing catalog creative is because you actually have there's no learning period um it's actually just like you normally when you test like static image ads you have to wait for them to learn and and see like what how they perform in a few days you do not have a learning curve like that with catalog creative yeah cuz they're leveraging so much you uh so much Facebook data and the sour speed and consumer buying uh information like you're leveraging trillions of data points that already exist Facebook's using your content to give somebody that highly engaging

positive user experience so there's like it just it just makes sense that you should be also treating this thing that could easily be 20 30 40 50 60 70 80% of your budget with the same level of intent as you do your landing page yeah exactly and I think like it gives marketing teams like more more ability to have like more influence over how their DPA performs over time because like like let's say you're running a Sales Event right man that is one of the lowest hanging fruit like performance wins for DPA like you would

have no way of showing in your DPA creative that you are running a sale previously so sale heavy Brands like dude I mean like they could not run sales using DPA before right I you could not visualize that there's like a sale happening in the actual creative that changes the game completely for them no absolutely like the fact that you could have a custom set of info on on the on the just the the the treatment that says this is a Black Friday sale and and I know that like as performance marketers we don't really

like to talk about like brand and brand lift but like um for brands that don't run sales right they are really heavy on like okay like we need to get like they're heavy on brand lift right and brand recognition right and and so um when you're running catalog ads for like a brand that doesn't rely on sales and promotions it's important to like all the every you know you're paying for every impression that you serve with calog creative and it's traditionally unbranded yeah right and in in marpipe there's a button where you can just you

literally press a toggle button and it removes the white backgrounds from everything and makes them transparent slap in a branded background with your brand colors and slap in your logo boom you are now for for free like for every impression that you're spending you are now getting brand recognition and Brand L for impressionwise you would not running that exclusively will improve the efficiency on your Google search that's I I never even thought about that actually I mean I've done it at scale trust me because now you just made your brand something that people know because

oh yeah well the brands up the page logo okay cool but now if it's in each individual product I wonder if there's like a way like and I'm just thinking in real time here I wonder if there's a way we could approach brand like these big Brands who run DPA like they're serving so many unbrined Impressions sure is there a way we could like show them like hey here's how much brand lift you might be missing out on yeah that's interesting I mean I I I've done powerlift studies with Facebook and crossplatform studies for incremental

lift with branding and not branding and um back in the day I've done I've done some of this stuff uh like the in the original disruptor group and some other things and there was a direct correlation to Google search in Amazon traffic when the brand was actually reflected in the DPA ads if the DPA is a significant portion of the budget right I mean if if you're if you're getting 5,000 Impressions a day with your DPA odds are it's not going to move the needle right if you're spending $5,000 a day yeah you're probably going

to rank higher on Amazon and make more money with your branded search right because now your brand name exists and if you have you if and also like one of the things with EPA is there's only so many things you can do right there's the there's the primary text there's the Highlight like and all it's trunca so one of the beautiful things with these overlays with a brand or anything else is you can squeeze more information and ultimately I also want to call out that maybe more information isn't necessarily a good thing sometimes the best

performing DPA ads aren't the one that are squeezed full of stuff yeah it's I know what I'm looking for yeah this is it oh I haven't seen this like the number one experience that I see is I know what I'm looking for I'm shopping for dog leashes or t-shirts or whatever I know what I'm in the market for this is a new brand yeah I haven't seen this one yet I haven't bought yet yeah I've said no to everything else immediately I'm going to scroll yeah right so while all of this stuff is fun also

remember that the real hack is making it interesting but simple yeah there there's also like um a c categories of of like companies that into this thing where it's like they need to add product context to their product image like forance like like Beauty and healthare companies like the picture of the product is just a cylinder tube yeah like you don't know like okay like you're let's say you're in the market like you know not you but maybe you're what or no you you're in the market for nail polish okay so uh so so like

you know you just see like a tube right and and like for for healthcare companies they have like very like they they all have like these value props that really differentiate them from others like maybe they like um have like you know a certain ingredient that is really special right maybe or maybe they have lack thereof like they're all natural right and so there's all these like there's specific it's a very competitive space in like supplements and and in Beauty and and in cosmetics um and then there's G free vegan all natural whatever you're like

these things should be like cuz otherwise you're just looking at pictures of tubes yeah like what can you put in 10 letters or less yeah right so so like having that sort of added context is I is like can be can be a make or break for absolutely and if it's a vertical product you can have iconography on the other side yeah yeah exactly boom done de like the fact you can put that the trick is making it simple iconography with with product images is great and um I I mean ultimately you have to understand

the DPA ad is not uh video ads are there to educate people and to get them interested um image ads are there for people to understand more context which is generally why videos hit higher than funnel uh images sit more lower in the funnel you can check your cpms and your frequency your percentage of spend and like you can do a 4pi analysis and have Facebook SE and your ads DPA ads are generally speaking I'm in the market either I like this brand and want they have or I don't know about the swingers I haven't

made a decision yet that's like 85% of the use case and if you're a retailer for instance like selling other things like if you're Macy's you can have Nike Adidas you know you know and I whatever you can have all the brand logos in if you want to but like the point is it's just a little bit more and what really have to figure out is how do I take how do I make the simplest best sales pitch by adding a little bit of value that is a pattern interrupt from what most people are seeing

right right right and I I I'll say this too some of the best DPA exposures I've had um some of the best brands that I've seen are ones where what they're using is they're using this space to push lifestyle yeah right very that's very interesting and and and like Dandy delmare I mentioned them earlier The Dandy delmare catalog is all lifestyle pictures yeah dude yeah there's no product they don't have flatlay product no flatlay product it's just these people living like their best life and you're like I want to live that life here are all

the products which one's right for me right and they Crush right so and and then and one one interesting piece is like we have Brands who come to us who want to do exactly that but cannot because they're doesn't already include lifestyle images and they're like okay so the way we have our feed set up is you know it's all just like flat lays of our products it's like products on white background but or it's like 3D renders and it's not even a real product sure right but we do really want to test bringing in

lifestyle images into our feet and running that in our catalog ads but maybe we don't want to have that as image number one in our on on our PDP sure so like marpipe is a tool that you could use to actually just like insert the uh creative and and then just like test having lifestyle creative in in your catalog ads as opposed to you know uh the flatlays without having to change what your image one in your PTP yeah no absolutely like and and and what is really important here too is your Facebook ads should

be incremental to the rest of your business it's a business amplification device so if I know that my website is kind of dialed in I'm just trying to find what is the Facebook ad that best sets people up to land on my website and be ready to buy now now if if that means that I've got a lifestyle business that's heavily branded if my ads are also lifestyle and heavily branded then when somebody lands on my web page that user experience has far more continuity conversion rate could to go through the RO Dylan Ander from

heat map was here yesterday we were talking about that right and and so that continuity isn't just in images it's also in Vibe it's also in brand and you'll see a lot of performance marketers don't really about brand and I think that's because they're not motivated by the business results of their marketing yeah right and if you are a there's a big difference between a growth marketer and a performance marketer yeah and you'll see performance marketers run catalog at the bottom of the funnel to get the best return on ADP they possibly can and then

the business owner says great where's all the extra money yeah and it's not there yeah so if you can push these product design treatments yeah and your catalog it will lift all other things yeah because Facebook is ultimately the volume knob on the rest of your business model and if that first touch gets the rest of the brand Vibe you've nailed it like one of the best treatments of that that I've seen lately just in in like branding stuff uh Balenciaga had this thing where it was like the most obnoxious stuff ever right but like

you knew it immediately right like and they maybe made sales who knows but like the idea is the the ads got the vibe of the brand across you immediately knew what you were buying into because to be fair nobody cares about your product yeah nobody cares about your business you are not special like 99.999% of products are Commodities the reason somebody buys from you versus somebody else is either because you've been able to solve a problem by overcoming objection for value they're like but wait there's more moment of like Ginsu Knives and and all the

guthy ranker infomercials which you should 100% be looking at but also like those are textbooks is there functionally that big of a difference between like any number of like New Balance to Nike to Reebok to Hoka it's the reason people are buying and I think the best example of this and the lesson if you ever watch Mad Men Don Draper's character part of the treatment for his psychology is that he was teaching people the the the consumerism that was pushed by him was not that you're buying this product to solve a problem you're sure but

you're also buying this product because of a lot of other reasons and one of the most important ones is what it makes people think about you and ultimately you're spending money for aspiration whether it's giftgiving for Mother's Day I want to make my mom or my wife my do mother of my daughter I want to make her feel a certain way I'm buying to Aspire to that emotional response or I'm buying this car versus that car because when I roll up people are going to think a certain way which is also one reason I love

going to like high flutin events in my Kia and like everybody's got their Lamborghini Porsche all sorts of stuff and I roll in in like a like a a $30,000 electric car from like Korea I'm like here the keys homie and like I didn't get it car washed like it's it's a complete whatever but like we are able to spend money on items to ultimately help us with our identity and the quality of life and who we are going to be and if your ads can push that across then you are now no longer a

commodity you are helping people ultimately spend money to be to improve their selfworth and their image of them and what they think people think of them and being able to get that into your catalog ad versus just a picture of a sneaker right is fundamentally different right so like if it's just the shoe great but if it's the shoe and it's like a runner in Central Park and like oh I want to be that guy I really want to get out and like I got to start run all this stuff the ad it itself the

creative can get you buying into that lifestyle and ultimately that should be as early in the touch point in the customer Journey as possible and the fact that people don't look at that in their catalog ads and creative to ultimately hack brand growth and repurchase rate and LTV and stickiness is to me at one point upsetting and shocking but also an amazing opportunity to provide people a turnkey solution to some of their biggest business problems that allow them to spend the other 98% of their time worrying about things that are more important dude the honest

truth is not every tool is right for every use and not every business business is the same so Dan and I dive into probably the most valuable part of our conversation right here with our DPA ads right for you and the honest truth is the real answer might be no and that's okay