Deep Dive Wednesdays

Author

Crys A.
June 19, 2024

🗣 Running a B2B and want to reach 40,342 DTC Brands? Start here…

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DEEP DIVE WITH IBRAHIM

How to deal with Meta when it’s breaking

Happy Wednesday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re comfortable and ready to dive into Wednesday deep dive. Today’s topic is all about Meta… specifically, what to do when Meta is breaking, misreporting numbers, or just not driving results.

The punchline is—you need to build a brand, not just products that sell on Meta. When you have a brand, you have the leverage to turn on other channels quickly.

Before we dive into it though, it’s no surprise, Meta has been a mess for many brands since the beginning of this year. CPMs are up 5-50%, CPAs are up, and conversions are down. It’s been a bit of a nightmare scenario for brands who rely on DTC for all their revenue, and especially those who mainly rely on Meta to drive that revenue.

The weird thing is that not all brands are affected. Even with the most senior of reps at Meta, there’s not a whole lot you can do when the platform is having technical issues that affect performance. You sometimes just have to sit and wait it out… in some cases, the more you do, the worse it can get too.

For today’s deep dive, I wanted to go through 9 tips to combat the Meta mess when it's happening. These are in no way exhaustive, and they certainly don’t replace a brand’s reliance on Meta as a channel, but I thought it would be helpful to share a few things that have been on my mind over the last few weeks.

Alright, let’s get into it..

Try Catalog Ads

  • Why do catalog ads work so well? Well, they’re hyper targeted to a user’s own browsing activity

  • Meta knows if someone is into clothing, they know the style of clothing each user prefers, the colors they prefer, their size, etc. Using all these learnings, catalog ads either show you your next favorite product, or they show you what you just looked at

  • Marketplaces like Walmart, Amazon and TripAdvisor love the Catalog Ads product because they have so many SKUs, but if you want my opinion. Check out Marpipe for this, and here are some examples

  • Think of Marpipe like the Canva for catalog ads. It’s a web based design tool that allows you to add different backgrounds, design elements, fonts, sale tags and more (non-sponsored)

  • In general, I think Meta is clearly pushing this ad format and the performance has been undeniably strong for a lot of brands I’ve been obvserving

  • If you are having trouble with FB or even if you aren’t, I would highly recommend giving these a try

  • Generally, I believe that the future of most ad platforms is going to be catalog based advertising

  • We’re starting to see it pickup more, especially as platforms create their own “Shops” and need to get more granular learnings on their users. Because of that, it makes sense to master the catalog ads amongst your media mix

Test a New Ad Account, Pixel or Payment Method

  • If something is really wrong with your Meta ads, try creating a new ad account and a new pixel to test

  • Additionally, try using a completely new payment method

  • Now, keep in mind that immediately creating multiple ad accounts and running different credit cards can flag your account to get disabled—so proceed with caution

  • If you have a Meta rep, I would recommend making them aware that you’re going to try this, so they can help re-enable your account if it gets disabled

  • In general, I recommend having two or three ad accounts for your brand just in case one of them has issues and you need to migrate your spend within a day

  • Also, if you have external media partners, you can have them leverage a secondary ad account

  • I’ve seen instances where a rep has told us that a specific ad account is flagged in the auction and automatically gets dinged and pays a higher CPM. The reason? Unable to be figured out. The solution? Make a new ad account, which ended up working out!

  • Luckily, I made our Meta rep aware that I was doing this, and when the ad accounts got disabled after making another, they were able to fix it

Diversifying Channels

  • This is the most obvious thing that you need to do if your CACs on Meta are up 20-50%

  • You need to dial back spend on FB and start testing other channels as well

  • You might find that TikTok does a fantastic job driving awareness and Meta gets more efficient from simply retargeting that traffic

  • This means figuring out channels like YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, X/Twitter, TV, native ads, podcasts, newsletters, direct mail, etc.

  • Hopefully, you’ve taken some time to build up at least one other healthy channel for your brand that you can divert spend to when the sh*t hits the fan on Meta

  • Not many channels scale like Meta does, but getting a few channels to ramp up quickly can help soften that blow from poor Meta performance

  • You have to go one by one and start testing each of these if you aren’t already live on these channels. Obviously, they all have their pros and cons..

  • For example, X is getting tons of impressions and clicks but the conversions are low and you may see more bot traffic

  • TV is great for top of funnel and some direct response, but it’s more expensive and takes more time to stand up

  • Native ads on Taboola and Outbrain help you tap into massive amounts of non-social inventory, but the CVRs aren’t as good as Meta when it’s working correctly

  • Podcasts are a longer sales cycle, but they are a great way to build your brand and stay top of mind

  • Partnering with creators who have a lot of influence and organic reach is one of the best ways to go

  • Hopefully, you have spent some time building influencer relationships and you can spin this up quickly

  • Affiliates also work, but only if you incentivize them correctly and if you have a brand name people recognize

  • Snapchat is underrated and I think more brands should be experimenting with it. Here’s a bit more on each:

Partnering with influencers and creators

  • If Meta is drastically underperforming, I would take the next 4 weeks of spend that you have planned on Meta, cut it in half, and go find as many relevant influencers and creators to promote your product

  • You need to find the right mix of their audience, engagement and fit for your brand

  • Send them inventory and pay for posts, reviews, product in use content, before and afters, etc., or whatever term works out for you

  • If their posts perform, try getting them to agree to a contract to whitelist ads from their accounts. Whitelisting with the right creative via influencers is another great way to bring CACs down. This strategy has worked for many years on Meta and it still works today! I had a deep dive dedicated to whitelisting that you can read here

Affiliates and Partners

  • Affiliates only work when you have the right incentive model and you have a brand name that affiliates are confident will convert their audience

  • If they don’t feel like they are getting enough of a deal or your brand name won’t drive conversions, they won’t promote your product that much

  • I prefer to give affiliates a percentage of revenue (this can be anywhere from 5-25% depending on the contribution margin of the product/offer) and then incentivising them further with free products and cash bonuses based on milestones around how many sales they drove)

  • With affiliates, you have influencers/bloggers/content creators, you have publishers (think Popsugar, VOGUE, etc), you have networks (ShopStyle, LikeToKnowIt, etc.), and you have other media buyers (people who will work on a CPA basis and profit from the spread like). Sometimes you have publishers who work on a CPA basis, like SoYummy

  • There are so many places to get affiliate going, and I recommend starting with 1, then expanding

  • Another under-rated place to look for affiliates is within your own customer base. If you use something like Social Snowball, it makes this process very easy to turn customers into affiliates

  • Think about a referral program for existing customers:

    • Design an email drip sequence and send it to everyone on your list

    • Get your existing customers to become ambassadors by offering them the same affiliate style perks

    • This could be exclusive access to new items, free gifts, exclusive discounts, or a percentage of revenue from every sale they drive

  • This model requires no ads at all and can have a phenomenal ROI

  • It’s definitely worth trying if you don’t have this set up

  • It’s not going to make up more than a few % points of your revenue, but at a certain scale, those few % points can be meaningful revenue

Having your own organic content engine

  • Now is exactly the time that brands wish they made the strategic investment into building up their own organic content engine

  • I think about PeachyBbies when it comes to content. No ads? No problem. They drive all their sales (and literally billions of organic views on social media) by creating viral organic content

    • That said, it doesn’t mean the investment is free

    • They have a large organic content team making videos all day long

    • They’ve been spending over $100K/month to do this. That $100K/month has helped drive 8+ figures in revenue without paid ads

    • They also work with a bunch of native creators

    • They are making dozens of new videos for him every week

  • The reality is, having a strong organic content engine is going to do multiple things for you:

    • It will diversify your sales away from paid

    • It will make your paid efforts cheaper (from the halo effect of consumers recognizing and following your brand from organic social)

    • It will help you develop critical learnings from your audience about what offers, angles, and hooks resonate to drive sales)

    • It will allow you to test concepts cheaply before running paid

  • In Mini Katana’s case, they couldn’t run paid marketing on their katanas (since weapons are a blocked category for ads), so they had to develop an organic strategy

    • That organic strategy has a higher ROAS than most paid efforts I’ve seen

    • It’s been a massive win for them

  • More brands should really be thinking critically about this and leaning into more organic content strategies where they can

  • It’s a long term investment that can be worth its weight in gold (especially as paid social CPMs and CACs continue to rise)

Improve Your SEO

  • You know where most product searches start? A question that goes into Google or TikTok

  • SEO is a long term bet, but you tend to find your highest LTV customers come from organic search and discovery and is not something you can turn on overnight

  • Typically, you need at least 8-12 months of lead time to make significant progress with SEO, but once you have it, just like organic social, it can continue to compound at a lower cost for you than paid

  • In my opinion, the best way to improve SEO is to do these 2 things:

    • Get a bunch of relevant backlinks on high quality publisher sites in your niche. The links will send you more traffic + improve your domain authority to help you rank higher in the eyes of Google. On TikTok, the equivalent of this is product seeding to creators and having people review and post videos about your products

    • Produce great written content (that is hosted on your website) that Google can crawl and score. This should be related to your product, category, and FAQs. Take these same pieces of content and turn them into bite-sized content for TikTok too

  • Levels Health does an excellent job with their website blog—it drives a ton of traffic for them organically, and was what got them their first few millions in revenue

    • They have hundreds of valuable articles that they have written on all sorts of topics related to their product offerings that have helped their prospects better understand key concepts while improving the brand’s SEO

  • SEO is a long term game, but it’s definitely one of the areas where if you get it right, you can consistently drive more high quality, high intent traffic without paid ads

Performance-Editorial Content

  • Surprisingly, when Meta started to have issues, I had tried ramping up the budgets to have editors who publish content for brands, and then I tried driving traffic to those stories using Meta. Our Meta accounts had no affect with all the Meta bugs… CPMs stayed the same, CPAs stayed the same, and I just ramped up spend

  • Getting this channel setup is not only useful for moments like this, but it also drives a ton of awareness for your brand in a non-ads way. It feels organic, introduces your brand to someone through a story, and allows them to leave with more than just the value props of your product

Study Great Brands

  • The last thing I wanted to leave you with is the importance of studying great brands

  • Every eCommerce/DTC operator reading this needs to be a student of the game

  • You should be constantly looking at other DTC brands and category leaders to see if there’s anything you can learn

  • One brand that I love that were able to build a great brand before turning on paid is Jolie

  • Jolie focused heavily on organic content and creator seeding before scaling with ads

    • They’ve literally created over 10,000 pieces of organic content for TikTok and IG by seeding product to creators and affiliates

    • I think the majority of their revenue still comes from this vs paid ads

    • It’s also made their paid ads 10X more efficient

Obviously, there is no one size fits all solution to any of this, but my advice is to learn and test out all of the key strategies for yourself and to study the top performing brands to see what has worked for them.

IMO, success always leaves clues and it’s all right there. A little more research and you might just find the golden nuggets you were looking for.

Alright folks, that’s all for today.

What did you think of today’s deep dive? Please let me know here, and in the meanwhile, if you have any questions, feel free to ask here.

 

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