"reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated" - facebook

It’s a story we’ve all heard over and over again:

• “facebook doesn’t work for us anymore”

• “we’re getting squeezed hard on our margins”

• “does anybody know how to run ads on tiktok?!”

It’s true too. Facebook ads aren’t what they used to be. Why is that?

• Tim Apple took Zuckerberg’s existence personally and decided to torpedo his business model with iOS14.5 - giving the world the option to opt out of tracking

• Said opting out means facebook massively loses it’s ability to track

  • facebook used to be able to track you for 30 days. Now it’s only 7. Thereby shortening the window of time that it can count purchases

  • facebook used to be able to count every single action the advertiser wanted to count - but is now only limited to a select few actions

• and facebook’s weakened ability to track has the dual effect of making their results look worse in reporting as well as actually making their ability to target weaker

So almost overnight ROAS tanks, CPAs moon, and my wife (VP e-commerce) is looking for other channels to hit her goals.

Treat facebook like it deserves to be treated at this point - a top of funnel channel that still has some legs down funnel if you have 1st party data.

You can still get massive reach through facebook at low CPMs if you’re bidding appropriately and use it to drive new people into your funnel - even if they’re not directly turning into purchases immediately.

Use facebook to:

• drive email sign-ups / organic following

• power your creative and messaging tests

• keep your email sign-ups warm as they get to know you better

and beef up your:

• organic social strategy

• email / sms drip programs

to help close the sale.

I was getting a 3x ROAS for an apparel client last year - basically breaking even. Not great. We diversified our goals and switched some of our spend from optimizing for purchase to optimizing for email capture and started seeing our Klaviyo email list balloon. We were getting a $3 CPL and all of a sudden our email team was all smiles on the weekly calls - reporting pretty large gains in sales.

People coming in through our email signup were taking us up on the 15% incentive and converting at a 15% rate over a 30-day period. That’s a $20 cost per purchase (6x ROAS off facebook spend).

Many of you already have email sign-up forms on your landing pages. I think it’d be worth a test to make that the focus of your optimization strategy on some of these top-of-funnel channels. For every 1 purchase, you probably get 9 emails. That’s +8 data signals for facebook to utilize in its algorithm.

Last thoughts

• fixation on ROAS can be myopic and lead to death spirals

• avoid death spirals by filling the top of the funnel and entering new audience segments

• consider taking a portion of your media spend and unchaining it from ROAS

• chain it to a pure top-of-funnel metric (ideally CPL but if that doesn’t work, cost per engaged session is also worthwhile)

  • you can import cost data into google analytics and calculate (engaged session / cost)

• your channel reporting may start to look terrible so be sure to look at something like MER (marketing efficiency ratio = total sales / total spend) and your attribution model to see how things are looking from outside the channel silo