1. eCommerce 1: We don't spend as much on Facebook, so we have a little bit more flexibility to kind of wait and see, but right now we're not seeing a huge impact just yet. We shifted everything from 7-day click, 1-day view to 1-day click and are in a wait-and-see mode. The data I've been seeing from AppsFlyer with pretty good industry breakdowns is showing opt-in rates are much lower than what Facebook saw in their initial tests. (4% of users are allowing app tracking opt-in per Flurry data)
2. Bev Marketplace: Our main focus right now is to create a bridge from our old attribution to our new attribution so we’ve created multipliers for all our channels to understand a 7-to-1 reading on top of which we layer in incrementality. This is more about buying time for 60 to 90 days, because it won’t give us huge insights, but it will at least tell us where and if the wheels are falling off the train in the short term. We also don’t run app install campaigns, which may seem strange because we're an app, but we mostly run web conversion campaigns and we get a lot of conversions on the app from that. Most concerning part: our understanding is that we’re not going to be able to measure app installs from web campaigns, we're only gonna be able to measure conversions from app install campaigns, which we don't run. This may mean we’ll likely lose another 50% of our attribution on Facebook, hence our focus on building bridges from old to new.
3. Fintech App: For tracking, we’ve fully adopted SKAN and have SKAN campaigns running on all channels, and are able to standardize all different media buying platform’s implementation of SKAN via Singular. They have a tool where we make our model with the events that we care about, and they hook up with all media platforms to translate our model to something compatible with that platform.
4. eCommerce 2: We’re seeing degrading performance and rising CPMs on Facebook. We use a great agency, Decoded, and have a good relationship directly with FB—they recommended we consolidate our ad sets, which is obviously good for Facebook, but we feel may be bad for us because we’ll lose some level of audience segmentation. We also started pulling off of the Facebook pixel at the beginning of ‘21 and have already plugged in Shopify data as well as reduced our retargeting. We're also working with our BI team to reprioritize looking at the value of an email and an SMS capture. We're incentivizing an SMS capture and email capture and playing with the offers there because the value there obviously goes up with this new environment.
5. eCommerce 3: At my previous company, (eComm beauty/self-care product), we were a huge fan of the consolidation of FB ad sets. We found that it was a huge unlock even at scale. It improved efficiency incredibly because the algorithm could do the targeting so much better for us when we were at the stage when we were ready to go broader than the natural deodorant diehards—it was a big unlock for us. The way we organized our campaigns was around gender base and location but other than that it was 18 to 65, and that was the entire consolidation except when we were doing like you know campaign-specific efforts, whether it was a new product launch or hyper-targeted. But long story short, for evergreen campaigns, consolidation was a huge unlock.
6. eCommerce Marketplace: We knew this was coming and made some changes middle to late last year that inoculated us a bit. We’ve also done a lot of incrementality testing on the role that our app plays in our acquisition journey and not surprisingly no one wants to deal with an app and make a purchase the first time they've heard of a brand. They want to come to the website, make sure you’re legit, etc. so we actually moved out of all App Install campaigns, which up until that point, made up 50% of our digital marketing budget. They're gone now.
So knowing that the windows were going to change on Facebook, we set up some proxies to see what 14, 21, and even 28-day look like. 7-day is actually pretty accurate for us so that ended up being fine. We haven't seen any negative impacts—we are a little concerned that some of the current changes will be measured on time of conversion, which Facebook shared with us is new so it's more, We're more worried about what it's going to look like on the back end with respect to how we track and measure and what our new baseline will look like vs. our actual performance being degraded.
Facebook’s Collaborative Ads Program
One member shared a new program that he’s been utilizing; although, while the program has clear benefits, it’s currently experiencing issues related to iOS 14.5 so he’d suggest holding off implementing until they’ve fixed the current problem.
The program makes it simple and safe for retailers to empower brands to run performance marketing campaigns for their products, driving sales on the retailer’s website or mobile app.
Retailers who are set up with dynamic ads can create a segment of their catalog consisting of a brand’s products. Brands can use this catalog segment to run dynamic ads that show the right products to people who have shown interest in them on the retailer’s site, app or elsewhere on the internet.
They’re able to see the closed-loop purchase behavior. However, this program, while exciting, was completely thrown off the rails by the Apple iOS 14.5 announcement and is currently broken. Facebook’s communicated a fix no earlier than Q3, so if you’re interested in checking it out, you can learn more here but this member wouldn’t try it in earnest for at least 75 days.
Driving to Web vs. App Installs → 4X Volume, CAC Plummets 85%
Question: For companies not using App Install campaigns on FB and instead driving to web, why has that been beneficial? We’ve always found that those who enter on web, transact on web, but then it's very difficult to convert them into the app afterward where LTVs are higher.
Large Marketplace (22-28yo target user): We see our app as a loyalty play. Certainly, a repeat purchaser who installs the app and uses the app for those purchases repeats at a higher rate and therefore has a higher LTV. But, in order to even be able to put them into our repeat customers CRM and loyalty files, we need to get them to convert for the first time. I was able to nearly 4x our new buyer volume on Facebook by pushing the web vs. mobile app—so it's certainly worth it. Our CAC went from $200 to $30 overnight by making that switch.
Anyone Contemplating Migrating to Facebook Stores?
Currently, Facebook takes 5% of those transactions (including CC processing fees)
eCommerce 1: Unfortunately, we're not on Shopify at my new company, so it's a pretty big engineering lift, but my peer at a large activewear retailer (who is fully integrated there) is seeing about a 30+% increase in conversion through direct shop checkout versus what they would see linking—so it's still a small percentage. Not sure it’ll ever get above 10% of total transaction volume for their business. That said, Facebook is really doubling down on building out a Creator network and an affiliate network of influencers so it's definitely an area to watch.
