Ep 567: Ecom CMOs: How Pilothouse Used Meta’s Update to Drive 30% Higher CTR with Fewer Campaigns

0:00There has been the shift away from testing in separate ad sets and gradually over time continuing to just feed high confidence concepts into existing campaigns organized by the alignment to the persona or the topic.

0:16Taylor Cain:What's your take on how impactful the changes that Meta has made to their ecosystem actually are? I'm a huge fan of what Meta has done with partnership ads this last year. It felt like they really listened to advertisers and that they've made it really dynamic.

0:39Taylor Cain:Before we dive in, let's take a minute to talk about what happened this BFCM because the numbers were massive and they reveal a lot about the state of e-commerce performance right now. Across the Triple Whale platform, brands processed more than 26 million orders and over$2.9 billion in revenue in just one weekend. Brands also spent more than$600 million across the major ad platforms, and Triple Whale brands alone represented nearly 20 % of all Shopify sales during BFCM, which is pretty incredible when you consider the scale. But here's the part that actually matters. The brands that performed best weren't reacting blindly.

1:13Taylor Cain:They had a clear understanding of what was driving results, which channels were truly profitable, how ROAS was trending throughout the weekend, how AOV shifted as promotions rolled out, and where they had the strongest opportunities to keep momentum high. That level of clarity only comes from having all your data in one place, updating in real time. Triple Whale is the agent-powered intelligence platform trusted by more than 50 ,000 brands like True Classic, Way, and Olipop. It unifies data across every channel and tool, giving you a single source of truth and actionable AI insights so you can make confident decisions faster.

1:48Taylor Cain:If you want that level of visibility heading into 2026, you can create a free account and see the platform for yourself. Visit triplewhale.com slash DTC. That's T-R-I-P-L-E W-H-A-L-E dot com slash DTC. It's all killer, no filler. I'm a little subdued today because we We just had the Pilot House Christmas party last night. Taylor, you left early to get back up to Chimayness. I raged. It felt like, I was just saying, the last couple of years, it felt a little bit stuffy, the Christmas parties. This one was a true return to form for the Pilot House team having an epic throwdown. Did you have a good time?

2:25Oh, it was awesome. Yeah, lots of familiar faces, lots of new faces. It was a great time. Really enjoyed it and was stoked for the grand prize winners, too, of the company draws there.

2:35Taylor Cain:Yeah, a couple of great prizes, some AirPod Pros and some phones. It was great. It's just when you work remote, it's just so amazing when you can get together. Like we've been a remote team kind of since we started. And I think a lot of us are here local on the island. But still, just bringing everyone in, getting everyone together, mixing it up, drinking some shafts. If you don't know what shafts are, it's a Victoria special drink. You should Google it because it's amazing. But let's kick it off here. I wanted to talk about Andromeda. We've talked about Andromeda quite a bit. And the first question I wanted to ask you was, because I had someone on the podcast the other day say that so much of the discourse around Andromeda was blown up and overblown.

3:10Taylor Cain:And it's really not that different. I'm wondering, I know Andromeda has been around for over a year now, but this was our first Black Friday, Cyber Monday, kind of with it in full effect. What's your take on how impactful the changes that Meta has made to their ecosystem actually are? Yeah, I think quite impactful, honestly, as we were kind of deep in a lot of the postmortem now and chatting with various POCs and looking into things. And one of the biggest things that I saw across the portfolio, it's tricky when you're when you're trying to understand all the variables at play, but a really big incline in outbound CTR that translated to high quality traffic for a lot of brands on the meta side this year.

3:51So one thing that we're seeing is it's continuing to get smarter and smarter. You know, CPMs were up, as everybody would kind of expect during this period. They climb every year. But when you think about it, too, like when you have potentially finite inventory, depending on kind of how you how you look at that, like a CTR increase to offset the cost is really, really powerful. So we did generally see that. I think the number that was floated around and this isn't official yet or anything like that, but potentially as much as like a 30 % improvement in CTR year on year for a lot of brands is kind of a benchmark.

4:27Some exceeding that, some maybe being a little bit lower, but basically the system handled a real range of creative effectively from what we threw at it. And we had some really interesting trends though. I think one of the big things to call out is that we still saw scrappy statics perform in a lot of places. But a little bit more, to me, it goes hand in hand with the kind of overall trend where it feels like we're seeing more and more of what you would expect as a marketer. Like when you have good video content, the system can handle it. It can deliver it really effectively towards the targets that you have.

5:09and then you can reinforce it with offer messaging or static style content down funnel to keep it really oversimplified. But yeah, it was an interesting year for sure.

5:18Taylor Cain:That is interesting. Did you find, I know in the past it's, you know, 80, 20 or even 90, 90, 10 in terms of the creatives that actually drive the results. And in theory, because you've got this gem lattice, you know, in Andromeda actually matching people up on a creative per profile basis. Did you actually see more creatives maybe get served than you would have in previous years? I think so. Yeah. Cause I'd say like there was still a tendency to see majority of spend go to top performer. But what I would notice within campaigns is that the ads underneath would kind of go up and down in the like spend and ranking order as you continue to filter in more ads.

5:57So super interesting because in past years, you, if you launched the like new ads in the same campaign you'd probably just see like things keep going as they were going and those don't get any spend this time we did see more delivery to ads within the grouping and basically a really helpful system from my perspective around being able to just keep feeding that top performing campaign and just keep going up and up and up like my my accounts i always try to focus on consolidation but they were even more consolidated they were probably the most consolidated they've ever been this year based on the delivery patterns that we saw and the ability to just keep investing into what was working and see that delivery move how we wanted it to.

6:37Taylor Cain:Very cool. I've heard a lot of talk about sort of foregoing traditional testing campaigns and just having them all kind of rolled up into one consolidated campaign. Is that kind of what you mean? Or were you still operating, you know, testing and retargeting campaigns, things like that? I believe there's still a place for it. It's a little bit more, the account structure has kind of changed in terms of we might have a certain topic or core concept. So it might be product drop, it might be promo, it might be evergreen angle or like a seasonally relevant message. We're still generally segmenting some of that type of content campaign to campaign, depending on how we're rotating creative in.

7:18So there is an element of segmentation happening. There's still breakouts for very specific audience segments that we want to try pushing harder with like your email segment alignment and stuff like that over black friday but generally speaking there has been this shift away from testing in separate ad sets and gradually over time continuing to just feed high confidence concepts into existing campaigns organized by the alignment to the persona or the topic so like it still happens we still use those testing campaigns a lot of it is still that diversification of risk? You know, is it like based on what's happening in the account?

7:59Are we taking a big risk by moving a test ad into like our top spending campaign? You know, if it's your first time doing that, like my philosophy is always tried in like a secondary or third campaign, not your top one, like those kinds of things. So we still use that kind of logic. But generally speaking, yeah, it's continuing to change and shift. And it's interesting for me to reflect on because it felt like it feels kind of like it's accelerated a bit in the last few months. But like, this has been a long time coming, like compared to where we were five, six, seven years ago. So yeah, I think it's interesting.

8:33It's gonna be interesting to see what 2026 holds as well.

8:35Taylor Cain:I was reading a message from a friend and rival David Herman the other day, he was talking about the Andromeda system talking about Jim. But he also mentioned something that I wasn't as familiar with, which was this idea of event based features or EBFs, which are basically what meta uses to sequence a user's journey. So I think traditionally, you'd want to have all these stepped out campaigns for different parts of the funnel. In this Andromeda world, it seems like meta is using these event based features in order to really understand where people are in the funnel and be able to serve them a court because it can look at your creative, it can look at where someone is and, and find the right ad to meet them.

9:14Taylor Cain:Is that something you found where you didn't, you weren't having to break things out as explicitly into different campaigns, but you were using these events or that you were allowing them the algorithm to use these EBFs? Yeah, yeah, definitely to an extent. And I think we tend to view that differently depending on the moment and the type of content and what the overall objectives are, because there is still an element of if you lean too heavily into that, we see the risks as being you're delivering potentially depending on the brand, their existing audience size, their warm traffic, what other channels they have coming in, you run the risk of staying in kind of a warm zone of traffic, which isn't always bad, especially at this time of the year when you're trying to convert revenue.

9:52But then with some of the, like we are still running max exclusion, like very tight top of funnel campaigns and monitoring how many new visits were driving over a period compared to previous periods for growth and thinking about things through that lens too. So there's, I would say yes with the asterisk that there is still an element of applied kind of marketing foundations to help guide the growth pattern that we want to see in addition to what the machine is doing for us. But it's super cool to see how, you know, a lot of the time, a lot of marketers operate with a certain idea about what frequency should be.

10:30And like, I'm seeing that kind of get rewritten in real time where your CTR might go way up within a segment of your audience because you've driven the frequency up and it's doing it cost effectively. And it's kind of interesting to see those types of patterns happen. And that is, in my eyes, Meta getting smarter and managing this kind of delivery based on that.

10:51Taylor Cain:Now, we've done on the D2C side, done a bunch of podcasts with Meta this year, which has been awesome. And I think the most recent one, which is out maybe next week, is all about partnership ads and how much of an emphasis they're putting on partnership ads in their ecosystem, which I guess are formally what we would have hacked together as whitelisted ads. Or is that something did we see that trend as well with with some of our accounts that that people were really getting a lot of value out of those partnership ads? Totally. And I'm a huge fan of what Meta has done with partnership ads this last year.

11:20It felt like they really listened to advertisers and that they've made it really dynamic. So when I go into Meta to build a partnership ad, back in the day, like I used to have to either choose between dark posting or use the old partnership version, which was brand name in partnership with creator. Now they've got a dynamic system with it where you can set it up every you can basically do either of those by setting it up through the same system, officially using the partnership feature. And you can either choose to show one profile dynamically show both allow the system to optimize to whoever it should show first based on what Meta thinks will perform better, likely related to people's user behavior with influencers and things like that.

12:02So we saw really, really good results with partnership ads. It's been a pretty common area of investment for a lot of brands who maybe had stepped away from it for a little bit, depending, or for brands who wanted to kind of jump in and take advantage of that. And it really paid off for a lot of our big brands, both from a retargeting perspective and also from a top-down investment perspective to reach new audiences. Because I think a huge part of where meta has gone has been delivery to personas based on where they most deeply engage with content and are likely to act. So if you have a certain persona, maybe they're on reels rather than feed, you work with a creator that can reach that audience well, even beyond what your brand typically delivers to.

12:47That's a big opportunity in the modern meta ecosystem.

12:50Taylor Cain:Did you find that those partnership ads had higher incrementality or higher, I guess, new audience? I think that's probably the big idea with them is that they come with their own audience, but they also come with who they are in a way that appeals to maybe new audiences in the way that your brand might not be doing. Yeah, again, a little bit of both. There are moments where they overlap with existing ones, and that sometimes drives an exceptionally high conversion rate because there's a high amount of interest there within a slightly warm or maybe slightly lower new visit percent. But totally, there were pockets where we saw it looked from the incremental kind of modeling tools we use.

13:29Typically, those partnership ads were maybe not the strongest on the direct click compared to like branded promo ads and things like that. But they were up there in terms of the top down impact and how they were reaching people that were getting warmed up and then converting downstream. So super, super cool and a big opportunity, I think, for anybody who doesn't have that in their growth mix coming into next year.

13:51Taylor Cain:And it's just worth noting how much of a focus these kinds of ads are for Meta themselves. I was just chatting on the podcast and they were talking about, I don't think they've ruled them out, but they're very close to ruling out catalog ad supported partnership ads where you basically will have a partnership ad like a UGC from someone's handle. And then they'll have the catalog of products directly under them where they'll be able to speak to specific products. It'll almost feel like that creator's like personal store, which is kind of is giving like TikTok shop vibes, right? Oh, that's super cool.

14:21Yeah, because we already leverage the catalog AI feature that pops it underneath those partnership ads, which we're seeing that happen. But really relative to the brand's side, not necessarily like a curated creator's kind of collection, which I think is a super cool opportunity as well.

14:37Taylor Cain:You mentioned it's funny. I was really enjoying going and seeing the ads that were being pumped out in the real-time updates in the general channels over Black Friday, Cyber Monday from the team. I'm thinking specifically about some of Abe's creatives that she was just hammering in all these like funny stick figure, like prime millennial, just like 35-year-old prime millennial ads tickling people's funny bones. And I'm curious how much of like we have always known that that like scrappy standout attention kind of style of ad is really good bottom of funnel, especially in these heavy sales periods.

15:12Taylor Cain:Do you think there was like how much of what we went into Black Friday was like plan versus how much was like quick pivots in order to create clever, you know, engaging moments on the fly? Yeah, it's a good question. I think if I had to give you like a percent breakdown, it's probably something like 75-25 planned versus kind of in the moment. And like, basically, I think what we did really well this year across the board was every brand had a really clear creative range based on their core audience and persona for their offer creative coming into it. So that's kind of where the 75 % comes in. Most of our brands had some sort of meme style variant, product focused, UGC focused, more organic feeling stuff, lo-fi type stuff, just a real range of things happening that we went live with.

16:02And that paid off. And then in real time, when you started to see things shift and, you know, you're navigating the reality of real time retail, we were able to move pretty quickly and lean in and take advantage. And because of the delivery system, prioritizing things that would hit that way, it worked out really well. I will say like one huge thing to consider in the creative side with that from my POV is alignment to persona. Like you hit it on the head, like the millennial in that case, like that was a huge pillar in the success of that. And another big one is the offer alignment behind it.

16:34Because I think when it comes to the types of ads that hit, like if it's like a stick figure type ad and you need to back that out with either a really good offer or like all the info someone needs on the landing page behind them. So that because there's always the risk that you're going to end up driving less quality, like lower quality click throughs for people who aren't warm and they're in, if they don't get the right message about what kind of value this product can bring to their life, like at some point in that key part of the journey, you may see like a really high CTR, but not quite the same conversion rate as others.

17:05and you might give up on a concept like that. So it took a lot of work to get everything dialed together and huge credit to Aves because she was going in and doing all that heavy lifting to make sure everything was organized that way and we had all that behind it. But I think we saw like a real mix. If I gave you the two kind of key performers for everywhere, it was like the funny attention-grabbing style backed out by that. And then the other was like the very much the evergreen that has momentum coming in tons of value, tons, like a strong hook, more like your CGC video that explains it, because it makes people want the product or the solution so much that they end up buying it when it's that peak buying moment and it's on sale.

17:49It just elevates that to another level.

17:51Taylor Cain:If I'm thinking right, Abe's the offer that we're talking about here too was like a BOGO offer of a pretty high value AOV thing. So it was like buy one, get one of this pretty expensive, high quality product you get another whole one so it's like her if you know if she was doing all those funny ads and it was like oh you get 20 off like it might not be as cool but this idea that you can buy something for yourself and get a gift for your family member kind of free of charge probably helped that as well because it's kind of a really standout offer yeah it created like the perfect storm because there was also a lot to play off of in the offer itself and like you know play on like jokes related to it so it worked out really really well did you like because i think And you sit, you're not just on meta, right?

18:31Taylor Cain:You sort of sit astride a lot of the different platforms that we operate with. That's correct. Yeah. Were there any, any trends you saw there? And I think I had, I think I'd heard one of my podcasters mention that they saw a bit of a shift. Some spend shifted from meta toward Google in their case. I forget the exact reason why, but like when it, when it came to other plan, other channels or omni-channel presentation, like, were there any trends you saw there this year? Yeah, I think like this year, especially with everything that happened and with what a lot of brands faced throughout 2025, a pretty tumultuous year with the tariffs and various things happening.

19:07So like, I'd say like the general trend was a harder kind of shift from a lot of awareness effort in the build up to Black Friday, lean into what's converting those those click outs, like how you're how you're driving your email list, all that kind of stuff. and then shifting even a little bit more aggressively towards some of those more like bottom of funnel or intent based kind of areas. So generally speaking, still like just to give you the kind of quick channel run through, app loving still very strong for us in general, year on year meta, meta, we saw what felt like pretty strong improvements compared to last year, which was really great to see.

19:45We saw a ton of growth. I know within our email side of things, Google looked really strong as well, for sure. Some emerging channels too, like Pinterest and Snap looked better than they have in the past for me. And TikTok shows are really strong signs too. So I know for most brands, and again, this is a pretty broad generalization for a lot of brands, you've kind of got the big two in meta and Google. And then TikTok's kind of that third, and there are these other channels. But I definitely feel that Pinterest and Snap are are two to watch on top of AppLovin, which kind of emerged into that category as well, as they're all competing and continuing to try to drive more incremental settings for advertisers, whether it's AppLovin's new customer only campaign type, or it's Snap really focusing on TCPA plus a click optimization.

20:33There's some really cool, cool opportunity out there on these channels as they all compete. And I think it's good for advertisers because it just diversifies and continues to hold innovation to a very high standard. That's cool.