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The advertising ecosystem has fundamentally transformed for performance marketers. Evolving data policies have required businesses to augment their strategy to find, understand, and convert customers. Simultaneously, artificial intelligence and machine learning have changed how digital advertising works, pushing marketers to move from buying space and audiences to buying outcomes.
Although these changes and uncertainty have been difficult, performance advertisers have been adapting their approaches and seeing greater success while mitigating this new environment. This shift has been propelled by marketers who have seen that while prioritizing in-market audiences can drive results in the short term, embracing a combination of reach and performance strategies builds greater sales momentum in the long term. In fact, across more than 40 conversion lift studies, we observed an 87% correlation between increasing audience size and driving more incremental purchases.
Stronger campaigns have been powered by the revelation that marketing solely to people who are already interested may no longer be enough, a strategic insight we call Performance 5. Here are five approaches that enable businesses to unlock their full performance potential.
Simplify account structure
In the past, assigning one campaign or ad set to each customer segment seemed more efficient. Today, it can prove to be limiting to artificial intelligence tools. Simplifying account structure by having a single campaign that targets all ad sets to all customers enables AI to learn more quickly and deliver more efficient results.
Optimize performance with automation
Complete automation solutions like Meta Advantage+ shopping campaigns and Advantage+ app campaigns help maximize results by creating the strongest possible setup across audience, budget, placement, ad creative, and conversion destination. We've seen Advantage+ shopping campaigns achieve an average 17% improvement in cost per conversion, while Advantage+ app campaigns have seen a 26% improvement in average cost per acquisition.
Build diverse creative
To introduce new audiences to brands and products they're unfamiliar with, creative needs to evolve and work harder. Expanding creative approaches with new formats and sizes can improve campaign performance. We found in a study that diversifying creative can generate 9% incremental reach and a 32% increase in conversion efficiency.
An example of the power of diverse creative in action is cosmetics brand MAC. The company launched a branded content campaign on Meta targeting Gen Z with a wide mix of creators that spanned a range of content types, including reels. The effort delivered an 11% boost in product awareness and an 8.5-point increase in purchase intent among 18 to 34 year olds. This success led to lasting changes in the brand's approach. "Since the campaign, we've continued to utilize this framework for all future campaigns in order to engage a broad spectrum of audiences," Erica McCarthy, the consumer marketing manager at MAC Cosmetics, said.
Ensure data quality
High-quality data is increasingly vital to campaign success, especially as performance marketers seek to maximize effectiveness by capturing the fresh intent signals generated by new audiences. For advertisers on Meta platforms, the Conversions API is especially critical. With this tool, marketers can reliably improve measurement and targeting, while also gaining the ability to optimize for deeper funnel actions.
Measure incremental sales
As performance marketers adopt fresh strategies, such as adding reach, it's important to measure incrementality – the additional business value generated as a direct result of each marketing effort. By focusing on incrementality-based measurement such as sales via lift rather than using methods like last-click or internal attribution models, advertisers can truly understand what's driving results.
How can the Performance 5 be supercharged to deliver even greater results? One path forward is to focus on maximizing performance by determining the right time to scale with reach. New audiences are especially important for advertisers that have hit, or are close to hitting, saturation, meaning their current performance spend is going toward the same people over and over, delivering diminishing returns.
Combine reach tactics with a sales and performance objective, and compare results with the business-as-usual approach over time. By looking at impact across a range of metrics such as conversions and awareness, it will be possible to see the incremental impact of adding reach to performance spend. Advertisers often see that activating reach campaigns pre-peak, before full saturation, can drive better results across a range of KPIs, including intent, search volume, and retargeting signals.
What does scaling performance campaigns with reach look like for advertisers? Pandora, one of the largest jewelry brands in the world, has been among the businesses that have adapted to the new ad ecosystem by embracing this strategy. As part of its evolution, Pandora has developed approaches for Meta technologies that have united reach and performance objectives, and deliver fresh creative to new audiences.
This effort has enabled the brand to boost both the effectiveness and efficiency of its spend. After it added reach campaigns to its performance strategies, Pandora achieved a 148% increase in reach, a four-times boost in the size of its retargeting audiences, and 73% lower cost per incremental conversion. "A fundamental thing for marketing is that growth comes from reaching new consumers," Kasper Moll, the global paid social manager at Pandora, said.
Embracing the Performance 5 approach and focusing on how to optimally scale with reach can feel daunting for marketers who are already overburdened. However, making the effort to do so can deliver powerful results, helping to boost interest, consideration, and conversions. Most importantly, it can set businesses up for sustained success.
This post was created by Meta with Insider Studios.