Meta Ads: Running effective ads in an iOS 17 world + Tips for Q4

Episode Description

The privacy changes that iOS 14.5 had brought in had been detrimental for marketers. And the iOS 17 update is rolling out soon which is expected to bring in even more challenges.

So how does it change things? What about campaign tracking? And how should you adapt?

To learn more about this, I spoke to Andrew Foxwell, one of the premier names in the Meta Ads space, in this episode of PPC Town Hall.

Andrew spoke about the impact of the iOS 17 update and how ad tracking is going to change as a result. Plus, now that we’re entering Q4, he also shared some interesting tips on preparing your campaigns for the holiday season.

Tune in to learn:

- What is the iOS 17 update and its impact on Meta Ads

- What’s working and not working in Meta Ads in 2023

- Why “ugly ads” work

- Tips for Q4

Episode Takeaways

iOS 17 Update and Its Impact on Meta Ads:

iOS 17 mainly affects app advertisers and continues to emphasize privacy, affecting ad targeting due to limited data tracking.

What’s Working and Not Working in Meta Ads in 2023:

The shift towards broader targeting and campaign consolidation is key, with a greater focus on creative diversity to engage users.

Why “Ugly Ads” Work:

“Ugly ads” perform well as they appear more authentic and resonate due to their organic and relatable look.

Tips for Q4:

Focus on innovative ad formats and engaging creatives to stand out during the competitive Q4 advertising season.

Additional Takeaways:

• AI and machine learning are compensating for data privacy impacts by reducing micro-targeting.
• Advertisers need robust tracking strategies that align with business goals despite new privacy regulations.
• Community support is crucial, enhancing strategy effectiveness and adaptability through shared knowledge and feedback.

Episode Transcript

ANDREW FOXWELL: You want to try to establish your soft KPIs, like hold rate or hook rate we use in our industry a lot, or the cost per click or whatever those things are, you get to determine that suite of what’s important to you. And then you’re going to develop like what we’ll call like a King KPI, which would be conversions or something.

And you’re going to look at, you’re going to look at the soft metric. And determine, Hey, this has been pretty good. And you’re going to look at a combination of kink APIs or, you know, the things that are more important. If you have a video in an ASC with any other type of creative. So a static ad, which would be just an image, right.

Or a catalog ad where it shows your product catalog or something. The video will always take a lot of spend. So there’s this other school of thought too, which is, do we take videos and separate them out? Or, you know, if we’re, if do we have them in their own ASC, if we have enough scale or, you know, do we utilize catalog ads and static ads for the middle to low part of the funnel?

And that’s done differently.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co founder and CEO at Optmyzr. So today we’re going to talk about something a little bit different. Usually we talk a lot about search marketing and Google ads and Microsoft ads, but what if you want to go beyond that?

What if you want to generate some sales on an entirely different platform? Obviously. There’s Meta, there’s Facebook, there’s Instagram. There’s many places where you can get your ads and get generate sales from social media. Now, that’s not my area of expertise. So we decided to bring in one of the smartest people in social media ads, Andrew Foxlaw.

So we’re going to hear from him what is working in social media ads in 2023 and also learn from some of the common mistakes that he sees people make. So let’s get rolling with another episode of PPC Town Hall.

And here’s my guest for today, Andrew, welcome to the show. Great to have you.

ANDREW FOXWELL: Yeah, so good to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. So where are you calling us from today? I think you have residences in both. What is it Wisconsin and Santa Barbara?

ANDREW FOXWELL: That’s right Yeah, we live in we live in Madison, Wisconsin a little bit in the summer And then we live primarily in Santa Barbara, California.

So I grew up on a, on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. So it’s I’ve, you know, lived here a long time in Wisconsin where I currently am. So the, the West called me and love it out there. Love, love the California beach life and love being able to walk outside in winter as well. Big highlight.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Well, Wisconsin is beautiful too.

And even in winter I think you can play some good hockey there, right? So.

ANDREW FOXWELL: Yes, absolutely. You can play a lot of hockey and many of my Many of my friends growing up did. I was never allowed to, my parents banned me from playing hockey.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So,

Didn’t have the concussions and you’re actually you remain a smart guy and can actually May I, for the folks who haven’t met you before.

So you’re one of the main names in education when it comes to social media ads. So tell us a little bit about founders and Foxwell digital membership and what it is to do in the social media space.

ANDREW FOXWELL: Yeah, definitely. I’ve been doing paid social advertising for, gosh, 14 years now. And, you know, I’ve been doing Facebook ads since they were invented.

So I did Facebook ads for members of Congress. That was where I started my career. Then I went and worked in Silicon Valley and then started 10 years ago Fox World Digital. The firm that my wife and I run together and have done for 10 years now. So we do we have an agency side and that’s primarily, that’s how we started running Facebook ads for a lot of brands, a lot of D to C, D direct response brands.

And kind of started to do education about six years ago. And then we released our own courses and I had no idea how they would do. And over time we’ve now had over 2000 customers take our courses. And still to this day, less than 15 refunds. And I’m really proud of that. And none of them were because, Hey, this is trash.

I didn’t learn anything there all for mostly technical little reasons, but that’s huge for us and something I’m proud of mentioning and. You know, I try to bring to our courses what I want to learn as an advertiser. So they’re not flashy, they don’t look cool. They’re, they’re literally just me walking through a diverse set of ideas.

And that’s really kind of why we, that’s the philosophy we take is to bring transparent and honest ideas to it all. So a couple of years ago, we started the Foxwell founders membership and our membership is mostly meta advertising, but we also have a For those in the PPC community called Fox will founders PPC.

And those two communities now consist of over 500 advertisers from 28 countries around the world spending many hundreds of millions at their fingertips. So I have a good look across both industries, primarily in paid social though, you know, I can, I, that’s what I’ve been doing for so long. I know it so well.

So I get a good read of not only my own opinion of read from others in the membership.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I think that’s what people respect, right? As someone who goes out there and teaches, but who’s also actually run the campaigns and who’s currently running the campaigns. And I read somewhere in your bio, I think that it’s around 300 million per month.

Between yourself and some of the others who train on your platforms. Yeah, so yeah each year old dog food, right and practice A little bit you know, I come from maybe the old school of thinking where I always thought about facebook ads as I am Maybe it’s legion. Maybe it’s branding, but you’re not actually going to sell anything But then thinking about it now, like when I’m on Instagram, like I buy so many things on Instagram because it just seems

ANDREW FOXWELL: good.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. Right. So what are the kind of like the current trends in, in 2023 here, if you’re going to run ads on Meta and when we say ads on Meta, I mean, break that down to like, when are we talking about Facebook ads, Instagram ads, or is that the same thing? Like talk to us about that.

ANDREW FOXWELL: Yeah. I mean, so, so ads on Meta can mean Facebook at primarily it means Facebook ads and Instagram ads.

The two primary places. I mean, it’s starting to mean also advertising on what’s app, but it’s not something really that’s part of the mix for a lot of us that are in direct response advertising at this point in time. So, you know, I think if you’re someone that’s looking to sell online, the current trends Have changed a lot in the last couple of years because the data loss and the data signal loss that we saw from iOS 14, which was now three years ago.

You know that the things have become more machine learning oriented. So whereas you used to do a lot more micro targeting with audiences and with campaigns, you now are using what we call a lot more of consolidation. So obviously this parallels the narrative in performance Max with Google ads a little bit too, right?

So you are, you’re targeting less and you’re utilizing micro targeting less and you are over time putting more campaigns and audiences together so that you’re have a simplified campaign structure. So I’d say that’s one of the main themes. Another main theme is, you know, creative is now the biggest lever.

So. Creative and what we call kind of creative diversity and the ability to speak to problems or problems that people don’t even know that they have and have, make sure that those ads can, can identify a problem to, to a person and convert them through your funnel, that kind of kind of creative diversity and different hooks and, and pitches that are going to get in front of people as a way to reach customers versus the targeting being the way to do that is a big theme of where we’re at.

And I think another one, you know, thematically that you can’t roll over is tracking, you know, how are you tracking? How do you think about tracking? And how are you and measurement right at this point in time? So there’s a whole bunch of nuance into that, but I think those are probably some of the big themes that we look at right at this stage.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So yeah, let’s start unpacking that a little bit and going in depth on some of these things. And maybe let’s start with iOS 14 and the data loss and then how you were saying that machine learning and artificial intelligence is starting to fill in those gaps using maybe predictive mechanisms. So my first question here is like iOS 17.

Is rolling out soon. What sort of that trajectory of data loss like is data coming back? Are we looking at different ways of having the data? Are we still concerned about Facebook’s ability to target or is that getting better?

ANDREW FOXWELL: Yeah. So, so If you’re, if you really want to dive into this on our blog, foxworlddigital.

com forward slash blog, there’s a post that’s about iOS 17 that a colleague of ours wrote that gives a real deep view of sort of like what it’s going to do. But the, the general consensus is. The big one that we lost, to be honest, with iOS 14 is we lost on both ends. We lost the, the measurement isn’t as good because it’s harder to, there’s less people that have opted in to be tracked.

So that’s one thing, even with the conversions API or what we call Cappy, capturing conversions. It’s harder to get. The complete picture even on a click basis than it was before so that’s some of that’s come back But it’s not perfect. So that’s one thing we lost on the front end we the big one that people don’t understand is if you looked across in let’s say 2017 or 18 at a campaign That was running a direct for a DTC company.

It was running a direct response campaign. I would say 90 percent of those would have been using a purchase lookalike audience. So you, you know, say to Facebook, find me people that look like these people that have made a purchase. And that was the most powerful prospecting mechanism because it was so good at what, at finding those people.

And where we find ourselves today is. The signal that you get because of what I mentioned, there’s a reason I mentioned the back end at the beginning, is because of that being lost, the signal on the front end isn’t as good for creating a lookalike audience of people that are likely to look like those people.

So, What we have now is so, you know for a long time in the last couple years the narrative in our industry has been well You know what just run it all on a broad campaign So 18 to 65 united states wide let it roll and see what happens from there. What we have and that’s Mixed results and it depends on who you talk to How that’s gone and I think most people still have a broad campaign running but you can see the difference, right?

We used to do these Little tiny pieces. Now we’re doing big ones and the AI and the way that sort of machine learning has been brought into this is in Q4, well in Q3 really of 22. Advantage plus shopping campaigns, which is Facebook’s or Meta’s version of performance max, essentially at this point in time they started to be tested at, at a bigger scale.

Not everybody had access to it, but they started to be tested and, you know, see how they could go. If in Q4 of 22, we saw that they helped scale. So, you know, it’s not you putting something in an advantage plus shopping campaign. And at that point, maybe 30 percent of advertisers had access to it. You really didn’t have any other levers other than your existing customer cap number.

So you load in and say, here’s my customer list. And I only want to hit, excuse me 10 percent of those people. Okay. 10 percent existing customers, whatever that is. And then you put in your best performing creatives. Into that, into that, what we call advantage while shopping campaign, we call it an ASC.

So you put it in ASC and then you just let it run. Like that’s it. And you don’t really know what’s going on with it. Right. And so where that leads us today is these are now an integral part of a lot of people’s campaigns. They’re not a be all or end all for a lot of people. They’re there. Usually they’re running parallel.

Again, you’re probably noticing a lot of parallels here with performance max. It’s like, it’s not performance max isn’t everything people are doing, but in some cases it might be, it’s a similar concept. And what would

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: you say that the ASC campaign is ideal for a specific type of advertiser? Cause I mean, for a conversion based

ANDREW FOXWELL: advertiser, it is.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, right. But, but also like in terms of sophistication, right. So I think of Emacs as it’s a great solution if you’re not a PPC expert, if this, if you just realize like, listen, I should be advertising online, but that’s not my role within the business. Maybe I’m the business owner. So if I’m going to build a manual campaign, I’m just going to.

Muck it up, right? So PMAX is a better solution than doing it all wrong in a search campaign. But if you’re a really sophisticated larger company, then you still get those additional controls like you’re mentioning, right? There’s so few controls in ASC, so few controls in PMAX. So you actually do benefit from the additional control and the additional transparency that comes out of PMAX.

So, so for ASC, like, is that similar what you’re seeing?

ANDREW FOXWELL: I mean, I could talk about that specific topic for like an hour nonstop. So the answer is, I think business wise, strategically, clearly the reason that Meta is doing this is because the adoption rates that you see coming from ASC are, it’s faster and easier, right?

And, and the, I, so yes, like, I think. If you’re a beginning advertiser and ASC makes a lot of sense and that’s, that will help with the adoption rate of advertising on the platform. Where we, I agree with you that right now where it sits is it’s part of people’s campaign, even campaigns, even if you are a sophisticated advertiser, it’s part of them.

But it’s not all of it. So some you’ll have them running in parallel to other things at this point in time, because they are an effective campaign mechanism for a lot of folks. But. Yeah. So that’s kind of how you, that’s kind of where it’s at right now. Because what would

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: you say is that the right mix, if it’s part of your overall campaign structure, is it like one ASC campaign and then a bunch of, you know, more traditional campaigns?

ANDREW FOXWELL: Yeah, the, so the, it depends on the level of scale of spend that you have. So if you’re spending, let’s say like. Under 10, 000 a day, or even let’s say under 5, 000 a day. Like you’re not going to have more than one ASC running. Okay. But if you have, but if this is sort of the high level thinking of this now, and again, this isn’t like a best practice, but it’s being tested because it’s still so new is can we use advantage plus shopping campaigns as a way to forward push product categories.

Separately. Okay. So, you know, if we have a men’s cat, a men’s, you’ll say we have a ton of skews and we’re a big business that has a lot of different pieces. Let’s say that we have men’s clothing, we have children’s clothing, we have women’s clothing, and then like children’s toys. If you’re spending, you know, 10, 20, 000 a day.

I talked to a colleague last week, who’s spending almost a hundred thousand dollars a day. And he has like six ASCs running because it’s utilizing and sending it to different. Landing pages and PDPs and they’re, that’s how they’re scaling it horizontally is by separating the ASC. So it depends on the level of scale.

I would say in most cases you have. You know a normal person that’s running a direct response like I would say the average advertiser across the western world on Meta, that’s a direct response d2c advertiser is going to be spending. Let’s say 75k a month And if you’re spending like 750 to 75k a month, you probably have one asc You probably have a broad campaign running and you might have a campaign budget optimization campaign running And those are like the top two are like 80 of the prospecting budget that you’re pushing You There’s a lot of different schools have thought of that.

But that’s primarily where people are. Sometimes there’ll be an interest stack in there. We call them where you have a much interest in one place too, but

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay, that makes sense now. So what you’re basically saying is asc Almost everyone has it at some level. And then you talked about sort of the controls being very limited, right?

And one of those controls that you do have is the creatives that you put in and I think you said put in your best creative Let’s talk about creative a little bit. Like how do you think about the breakdown? Of different creatives and the frequency of testing new stuff.

ANDREW FOXWELL: Yeah. I mean, my gosh, there’s so many ways that you can go about this and the way that the issue I would say with, as it relates to testing in the industry and the issue with advice that’s out there on testing is people set up a test.

On anything, but specifically in relation to creative without understanding what the outcome desired outcome is that they, okay. So, and you know, you’re like, right. Yeah. And everyone, you know, like I want to test, well, that’s great. Like you should be, but what are you hoping to learn? Right. And so what ends up happening is people task way too many variables.

Concurrently. And there’s not a real clear read of what takes place from it. So I would say that the way that you want the framework in, in, in, that you want to get through in terms of thinking about creative testing at this point in time is, Breaking it down by what we call brand aware, so, or excuse me, unaware, like they didn’t, you know, they don’t know the problem or they’re, they’re unaware of the problem entirely.

Then there’s problem aware and product aware and brand aware. So an example that my colleague Phil Kiel from hello earth agency in the UK, he said is. Unaware is, did you know that collagen is a secret ingredient to unlocking your inner radiance? Problem aware is, ditch the juice fast, fast with bone broth.

Product aware is, here’s the name of the company, high quality ingredients loved by these many customers. And brand aware is, hey, you know, you’re aware of us and we’re advertising to you again. So, a lot of this comes down to consumer psychology. If you had asked me four years ago or five years ago, what Andrew, what would you launch?

What would be the best ads that you could launch? It would include language that was mostly you know, centering on like product aware, like we have 3000 customers come check it out, you know, and it’d be like a mixture of kind of those two. So now when you’re thinking about creative testing, one thing is, is.

Setting forth and saying, what do I, what do I hope to learn? Number one, and what are the desired outcomes that I believe I can achieve? So in most cases, you want to try to establish your soft APIs, like hold rate or hook rate we use in our industry a lot, or. The cost per click or whatever those things are.

You get to determine that suite of what’s important to you. And then you’re going to develop like what we’ll call like a King KPI, which would be conversions or something. And you’re going to look at, you’re going to look at the soft metrics and determine, Hey, this has been pretty good. And you’re going to look at a combination of King KPIs or, you know, the things that are more important to you.

Once you’ve established that, then you can back it out and say, okay, I want to start developing tasks. For those people that have no concept of who I am, because that’s really what you’re going for, right? You’re trying to find the magic. One of the big magic of meta is it can find better than like on par with, with Google products.

People had never heard of you before. And

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: so just to be clear, right. You’re talking to him about brand under there, but problem of error. Is that, is that right? So the problem, exactly, exactly,

ANDREW FOXWELL: exactly. So it could be, or, or maybe they’re, they’re, they’re unaware. of the problem. It’s like, they don’t, maybe they’re not.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Social science, right? Because on Google, to know that you’re unaware about the problem, like there is no way to communicate that to Google until you’ve done a search, you’re aware of the problem. Totally.

ANDREW FOXWELL: Exactly. So that’s, and that’s what I’m talking about in terms of unlocking the scale. This used to be done via targeting and now it’s done via creative.

And so looking at totally unaware, what are the ways that you can rethink the problems that your product product products are solving? And pushing it forth that way.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And letting, sorry to, to interrupt, right. But I wanted to but so you’re saying use an ASC campaign and put in this variety of like sort of the four levels of creative that you described, and then that campaign type will automatically put it in front of the right audience so that you’re actually building your funnel basically.

ANDREW FOXWELL: So there’s, there’s multiple ways to think about this. One of the ways that you could, what Metta would want you to do is yes, what you just proposed, which is to put all of them in one. Okay. What I would propose is to try as much as you can to use advantage plus shopping campaigns, a lot too, as a vehicle to find new people.

And to be more hardcore on exclusion. So we exclude purchasers from our, you know, like Shopify purchase and, and meta purchase. Okay. So that’s what we exclude now. Other people will even exclude like engagements or people on their email list or, you know, that they’ll get really hardcore and exclusions.

And that there, this is sort of like there’s best practices that you can argue for both, both of those. But I would say that you want to try to exclude the purchasers and then yes, try to make sure that you’re utilizing People that are unaware or problem aware. And that’s the type of testing that you want to do.

And then you’re using a normal, let’s say a campaign budget optimization campaign, or you’re using. You know a larger 180 day re kind of engage your campaign as a way to, or website visitor or email opener, all lumped into one that you’re using for people that are brand aware to try to get in front of them the way that this is getting really nerdy.

So hopefully people are following along, but the way that this is developing is. Meta is saying, let us, just let us decide and yes, put them all in one and we will serve them properly across the funnel in the way that we believe is best and set your existing customer metric at 30 percent to 40 percent and let it run and don’t have anything else running.

And I think that right now at that, at a certain level of scale, like 50, 000 a month or something plus. In that neighborhood, which is, or 50, 000 a day, rather like crazy high spenders. I actually think that can be effective for those of us that are in that 50, 000 a month, the 75, 000 a month. I think we’re not there yet.

And it has to pick and choose which ones it’s going to show. And the one, you know, if it’s, let’s say it’s a video with a lot of comments, it’s going to show that one first, and it’s going to take all your spend and the other ads that you have in there. Aren’t going to get any play. So you have to make sure that you’re.

You have intention around what you’re kind of how you’re going about containerizing those Those creative tests as well

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So kind of the classic problem that the machine learning system to do its job well needs a ton of data So that means yes High spends Correct. And then the second problem I think you’re describing is once it identifies something that works well enough It’ll tend to over allocate money into that before it starts trying to Some new things that were, that’s the value of machine learning, right?

Is like find the stuff that I couldn’t find myself, but if it’s not so focused on doing the easy thing. And so in performance max, we look at remarketing brand keywords. I mean, like, duh, I could have figured that out, that that’s going to have a pretty good conversion rate. Right. But go and help me find these new broad match queries or these new consumer trends that we weren’t aware about.

But it only wants to invest in that last because that’s going to be more expensive. It’s going to take more learning. And so the advertiser, even though you’re doing what, what they should be wanting, looks at those numbers that are like, wow, it’s bad performance.

ANDREW FOXWELL: Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s got holes, right.

And I mean, that’s our big, the big issue that we currently face is you, you want to, you want it to work that way. Like you want to put them all in one and let it see. But if you have a video in an ASC with any other type of creative, so a static ad, which would be just an image, right? Or a catalog ad where it shows your product catalog or something.

The video will always take a lot of the spend. So there’s this other school of thought too, which is, do we take videos and separate them out? Or, you know, if we’re, if do we have them in their own ASC, if we have enough scale. Or, you know, do we utilize catalog ads and static ads for the middle to low part of the funnel?

And that’s done differently. Or so, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, everybody has a different opinion on it, but I think where we’re going is continuing to develop and think about testing. That are less audience focused and more about creating creative that that’s good that people are engaging with that they are clicking on and watching a lot of or that they are, you know, not only is it delivering sales, but, you know, you’re looking at it, it’s holding attention and that can, that can give you early signal that it’s good and that it’s going to bring high quality people into your funnel.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Interesting. Now, as far as the ad format, so we talked about video, you talked about static. But I’ve also heard you talk about ugly ads. What are ugly ads?

ANDREW FOXWELL: Well, I mean, yeah, so, so, you know, so Barry Hoth, who is an interesting wonderful advertiser, honestly, he has this interesting opinion of you know, look, you don’t, you don’t have to create something super polished.

It doesn’t have to look that great. Like the, the, the more it looks like something you’d see from a friend, the better. An example of this recently is, You know, a product on a table with a post it note next to it with the main ad message and that’s, you take it on your iPhone and like, that’s what you put out there.

So, you know, it’s, this is the idea of, of various kind of thing he’s pushing called make ugly ads. And I think there’s both of these can be true. It doesn’t have to be all one. It doesn’t have to be all polish or all ugly ads, or, you know, I think you can have you can have both types of, of them depending on where the people are, right.

But certainly. Don’t his point is there’s a lot of people that overthink this and you know, if you want to have something that doesn’t look very good, like it’s probably going to do better than you think. And that’s really where you should try to focus your creative efforts as you are going through, you know, this kind of process we taught, we we’ve aforementioned.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard this myth that on Facebook video ads and basically moving ads came about because somebody made a mistake and Submitted a gif, but it was actually an animated gif and it had like a one pixel variation So the ad was basically flashing on the screen and then all of a sudden that had like amazing engagement rates and people at facebook were like, well, that was clearly a mistake But it worked really well, right?

And then along the same lines I was reading about netflix how They were producing a new show in Korea but the Korean writer of the show had said, like, I want this to be for a global audience. So they brought in elements of what resonates in America, what resonates in Europe, and they’d lost the authenticity of what was out there.

And basically, you can think about machine learning the same way, right? Machine learning is always going to try to go for the best, the thing that resonates everywhere. But in doing so, it also makes everything more homogeneous, more bland. And when everything looks the same, then nothing stands out. And I think that’s kind of the point there where, you know, try something new so that we can all learn from it.

We can see what works and don’t over polish everything. So, yeah, definitely.

ANDREW FOXWELL: I mean, the, I agree. And usually at this point in time, you know, You try to think about like, what can I say that I’m uniquely as a company? What can we say that we’re uniquely positioned to say better than anybody else? So that’s like number one and number two is like what are the crazy ways that we can address this and bring it up?

And as it relates to the homogenization of creative The thing that is being tested now by Meta that they talked about in their growth summit a month and a half ago was they’re automatically, they’re changing colors automatically of the background images of products in a product feed based on colors people have responded to.

And they’re changing the text and the. Video sizing and all this stuff automatically based on what segments people are going for So I think or what they’ve clicked on and engaged with previously, right? So I think what we’re getting to is, you know, you will You’re going to upload assets. You’re going to put things together and you’re not going to have a ton of control and You’re they’re going to be able to you might think you have Three ad variations running, but in reality it might be any, you know, 300 variations running based on color and based on product, you know, video length and all this kind of stuff.

Like that’s kind of the where we’re headed. So I think if you’re a person that’s really hardcore on brand. Which certainly some advertisers are. I worked with an advertiser worked with advertiser last year for about six months, kind of helping them get the DR program going and they were really hardcore on brand and it was really tough for them to release that control.

And I think that you need to know that that’s coming. If, if meta is your engine, you have to be okay that it’s going to show things.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, I mean, listen, if you’re T Mobile, your color is magenta. And if now they show an ad from T Mobile, the latest iPhone, but it’s got like a green background. That’s completely off brand, right?

That’s a, that’s a pretty good concern. Right, right. So, like, do you think there’s going to be any level of control? Or, or where do we as agencies and the account managers fit into that? Like, can we actually see what meta’s been running? And can we say, exclude these colors? Or, don’t do this AI? You know, I

ANDREW FOXWELL: don’t, I, these, these, those were all tests that they ran.

So, you know, we don’t know how, what it’s going to look like. We don’t know the control. I mean, I, I think, There will inevitably be adjustments to this as time goes on, but I, I would, I would probably say that, no, there’s going to be certain things we’re not going to have control of and there’s, you know, of, of where it’s going to show, how it’s going to show and we have to be comfortable with that if you’re going to be somebody that’s advertising there.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Cool. So let’s, let’s go to maybe the final topic here, but you also mentioned about tracking, right? And so you’ve talked about soft KPIs and the, the King KPI, and, and that’s great because that’s what you communicate to Facebook as what it is you’re trying to achieve. But in terms of like the tracking setup, are there any concerns around.

Ios 17 as far as how things are tracked and how do you track things across platforms? So obviously people are not just on social they also go to google they do searches How do you get a more holistic picture? And how do you make sure your client understands that social is one piece of the puzzle and may actually drive engagement somewhere else.

So, so that’s our happy.

ANDREW FOXWELL: Yeah. I mean, as it relates to iOS 17, you know, there’s nothing in there necessarily. It’s going to change the game for us right now, because we, a lot of the iOS 17 stuff that came out as a lot of adjustments for app advertisers, which our folks, most of them are not. So. That’s not a huge change from what we’ve seen.

Huge deviation as it relates to you know, how you measure and the, and the way that people think about this and looking at multiple channels, I think where people, it’s hard to know what to believe, and I think what it comes, the biggest thing you have to do and what it comes down to right away is.

establishing just like you have a creative test outcome plan is establishing the same thing with a measurement. What are you wanting to measure? And how, what are the things that are important to you to measure? And for some folks, that’s, they just want to be able with their agency or by themselves to be able to look at, you know, Metrics coming from meta and the rest of it, they feel confident they can get figured out for other people.

You know, they’re like, look, all I need is 100 click conversions for meta week. And you know, we got the rest of it. I think for other folks, there’s been a helpful overall shifting in the industry. And maybe you’ve seen this as well. You know, knowledge as it relates to measurement and the way to think about measurement and the way that you establish an overall business plan for measurement.

So you’re looking at cogs, you’re looking at, you know, kind of the, the real numbers behind this. And if, and you know, so everybody’s different in that. Some people have the agency that’s helping them with that. Some people. Don’t and some people are doing it on their own like It and agencies have had to play this game of understanding the whole business And so for me, I think it’s just establishing first what’s actually going to be important to scale as the, as that channel that you’re in charge of, or those channels that you’re in charge of contribute to the overall business plan.

So that’s one, like how much can we spend and, you know, not looking at the ROAS from any of the platforms, like, let’s just talk about what do we need to get back from the spend that we have? And how does that relate to the overall business itself? Then you start to get into, you know, from, from, from our standpoint on meta, the, the click based conversions that come from meta.

Are more reliable than they were at the outset of iOS. So we are able to, as an advertiser, not use it as perfect answer, but use it as a you know, an in platform King KPI of saying, okay, these are driving conversions. That’s a good thing. And in most cases now there’s some third party tool that’s being used for measurement.

And it depends on how involved the client is or how, you know, the brand is in, in working with that, but yeah, it’s, it’s different for everyone. And there’s not a perfect answer, but I think a lot of it comes down to is like, what do you want to know? How fast do you want to know it? How regularly do you want to know it?

And what does the communication stream look like between me as the agency and you, or maybe I’m internally the media buyer and you as the owner, and how are we going to look at this? A lot of people, I would say, are looking at two different sources. They’re going to look at meta, and then they’re going to look at either GA4.

They’re going to look at, you know, and or they’ll look at in a third party tool, like a North beam, like a rocker box, like a triple whale, they’re going to be able to, you know, look at that and measure their efforts. If they’re, if, if they’re, what I would say is a meta forward spender. So I’m sure there’s maybe there’s other tools in the BBC world that for PPC forward spenders, but those that’s kind of that’s kind of where it’s at, because a lot of those tools have third party pixels.

And so they can they give you their own read on it as well. So you sort of looking in multiple places to make determinations. And as long as you and the client whether that’s internal or external are on the same page it can be it can be It’s okay, you know, you’re gonna look at these things daily.

You’re gonna look at these things weekly You’re gonna look at these things monthly and I

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: suppose in the world of imperfect data You just have to make sure that you’re looking at the same data consistently and even correct Enough then, you know tomorrow it’s going to be 10 off as well But we still want it to be better than today

ANDREW FOXWELL: exactly exactly and making sure that you that you have a discussion Let’s talk about the overall business first.

Let’s talk about what ads been, you know, what percentage of ads spend may make sense for you in terms of overall budget. Let’s talk about what you’re hoping to get out of this, et cetera. And that’s just where I see a lot of folk missing the mark right there. That there’s still people stuck in the old school way of, well, I’ve always had a four on Facebook.

Four X row as on Facebook. And you’re like, well, that you just can’t do that now. Number one, like return on ad spend is like basically trying to, you know, you get an input. You can’t get there because it’s not something that can be trusted necessarily. Row as on Facebook. And so you have to look at the clicks and you have to look at the conversions that come from it.

And, you know, so there’s, there’s issues to that world. I just got an audit from a member yesterday and they were worried that their client was going to come back because the client wants a five X on Facebook. Well, you need to go back and have a whole conversation with them. That’s like a, a one day workshop about, okay, here’s how this works today.

Cause there’s so much more to this now. And I think, you know, I really view the work that we do as an agency. I’m sure you feel like this, you know, as a fiduciary, you know, those dollars are my dollars. And so I have to explain this to you because in order to move forward, they’re the right way. We have to understand it and be on the same page.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, absolutely. As a tool vendor, we feel the same way. I mean, we are the independent representative for you who helps you optimize what your business criteria are and not just give more money to Google. Makes a ton of sense. And yeah, I think it’s a really important role that agencies play.

So because you work in this so deeply, you understand it. And it’d be interesting, right? Because somebody could come into Facebook and say, Oh, well, I’m going to get a 500 percent ROAS and trust that that number is correct. But clearly. There’s a nuance there that needs to be understood. So people want to learn more where do they find your courses?

How did it get ahold of you if they want to work with your agency?

ANDREW FOXWELL: Yeah, yeah, you can you can email me anytime andrew at foxworlddigital. com would love to hear from you regardless of where you’re at in your journey or questions and things like that Our foxworlddigital. com is our courses our membership Are all there you can check out the pbc membership for many of you listening to this.

Maybe our ppc people professionally And so you can check out that membership at foxworlddigital. com forward slash all caps p p c and we’ve got 50 experts that I spent a long time recruiting to be in our membership to make sure That we have the best of the best in there to answer any questions you might need and yeah, it’s a it’s it’s it’s it’s really it’s helpful You know, my big belief is That it’s lonely.

Sometimes this work that we do, and I think that the marketing conferences are good, but having a space and almost a safe space that you can go to to talk about things and ask vulnerable questions and get advice and help right away. It’s so great because so many of us run these little one to 10 people shops and you’re like, Everything from, you know, do I, how do I help this on a contract?

How do I write a contract the right way to, how do I optimize my performance max campaigns properly, or what’s going on with shorts, you know, like all of these things, we need other places to go to. And so that’s really why we have built the community. And I. They’re as strong as they are.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I mean, this is still such a big industry.

There’s room for all of us. And I’ve also found in my career that helping people eventually the good karma comes back to you. Right. As opposed to guarding every detail. So, so yeah, thank you for all the work that you do in that industry and teaching people. Sharing your personal email address there.

And thanks for being on the show today. If people have enjoyed the show, you can subscribe. So you’ll see all of our future episodes. We also list all of the old episodes on ppctownhall.com. And then of course, I’d love it if you subscribed or at least gave Optmyzr a try. So we’ve got two week free trial, check it out.

And thanks again to Andrew and thanks to all of you for watching. We’ll see you for the next episode.

ANDREW FOXWELL: Thank you.