Ep 591: Meta Andromeda: 3 New Tools (CASC, AI Assistant, Creative Testing) to Improve DTC Performance

0:00Exciting developments on the meta platform. What is Cask? New thing rolling out to some accounts, you might see it in your account. Basically combined awareness and sales campaigns. It really comes down to intent. You kind of have to do the groundwork to really define the intent of who you're trying to bring into your funnel. Do things like, well we're seeing most brands ship more and more to video. 80 % of our brands, the majority of their creative they're pumping out now is video. There's a new creative testing feature that's rolled out. One of the biggest things with Meta is...

0:46This episode is brought to you by Contentful. Marketers, you know that feeling when your creative clicks, when that social post sends engagement through the roof, when your outside-of-the-box campaign hits ROI positive, When a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers, it's utter marketing bliss. Contentful helps you create tailored omni-channel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels at contentful.com. It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric, and I'm here with head of meta, Jacob from Pilot House, to talk a little bit about some of the new exciting developments on the Meta platform that all brand owners need to know about.

1:29So welcome to All Killer in a Filler. How are you doing, Jacob? Thanks. Yeah, pretty good. How about yourself? Beautiful day here in Victoria. Someone said it snowed, but I don't believe them because I didn't see it. So it's still spring as far as I'm concerned. What's new on the platform? What is Cask? Yeah, there's a bunch of new stuff rolling out pretty quickly here. We've been in touch with our agency advantage reps they're kind of keeping us in the loop casc uh new thing rolling out to some some accounts you might see it in your account basically combined awareness and sales campaigns so there's been a lot of chatter about engagement traffic how low quality you know it can end up being when you're you're optimizing to sales that's what you care about historically we've always kind of pushed our clients to, you know, optimize just to purchases, right?

2:18You don't want those window shoppers, but what they're doing now is, you know, testing with specific brands who are running some reach or video view campaigns where you can actually set like sales as another, another optimization point on, on top of that and layer that. So it's actually saying, you know, we want to push your ads out, get a ton of awareness going for that longer term view as you grow throughout the year, stock your pool, but also we need immediate sales. So it's like best of both worlds. And, um, yeah, in terms of like the brands, it was listening to the all killer, no filler podcast, because I feel like we've been talking about that for so long and people have been so hesitant as you're saying to, you know, just run awareness style creatives or targeting.

3:05Uh, so they're kind of like, let us just do it for you. Makes sense. Yeah, a lot of brands will have their awareness campaigns running and then their purchase campaigns running. It's hard to map like, you know, what is the true value of our awareness campaigns as it translates into our sales campaigns. But this combined campaign is really going to kind of bring it all together, optimize for both within that, allow you to consolidate even further, have less campaigns, but have higher budgets on those campaigns, which, as we know, is a big win with Andromeda. So a lot of these changes we are going to talk about are pretty related to Andromeda, and they're just building upon that.

3:43But yeah, it's pretty cool. We've seen it on just a couple accounts. It's very select accounts right now, so you probably won't see it in all your accounts. But it sounds like May is when it's going to be kind of rolling out further. They're seeing pretty good success with it. And yeah, it'll be interesting how it kind of tails into Q4 this year, as people really should be having, like I said, larger stock of engaged audiences at that point, which will be good. Which brands is this for and who is it not for? Just so our listeners know, is it something everyone should be running to test or do you need to meet at certain thresholds?

4:18So the ones it's coming out to right now are people who have been running some reach or video view campaigns at a large scale, but it is like direct response heavy brands that this is geared towards. it's not necessarily a lot of brands that are fully focused on awareness. You know, the old structure maybe has worked for them. This is more direct response for brands looking for purchases right now, but also looking to build up that awareness for, like we said, that longer term play as you plan out quarter two, quarter three, quarter four. Running these now should start to build that quicker while also not sacrificing the direct response that you're hoping to see in the short term.

4:59For brands that have been running on a purchase objective for a long time and are now looking to either use Cask if it's available to them or experiment with a higher upper funnel creative, what's your sort of high level take on how they should be thinking about creative differently for those segments, for the awareness sort of audience? Yeah, I mean, it really comes down to intent. So you kind of have to do the groundwork to really define the intent of who you're trying to bring into your funnel. You know, you do things like go into SEMrush and search the brand, you know, search the top 100 keywords that people are looking for.

5:39use Gemini or GPT to really distill that down into, okay, you know, the intent of our audience is people who, let's say you're doing a board game company or something, you know, the true intent is people are looking for party night games, right? Let's just say that. To get together with friends, the togetherness of friends is what it is. Yeah. And then you address within that, the intent of like their worries. Oh, like a common theme here might be that they're worried about buying the wrong game for party nights. Or too complex. Everyone hates games being explained games. So that has to be a simple game because if it's too complex, everyone will hate you.

6:17Simple rule, fun, great for party nights. And then you're not just guessing, right? You're not just shooting in the dark. You have this like intent bucket. You're developing creative around that. Mostly video. We're seeing most brands shift more and more to video. I would say like 80 % of our brands, the majority of their creative they're pumping out now is video. and the first two seconds you got to hit it like you know are you worried about buying the wrong game for game night boom our game is here for you and you're starting to build this strategy around that intent bucket and then you're working some other intent buckets in terms of variety you need variety with andromeda and what you're going to find is combining that into these new you know combined awareness and sales campaigns should give you the best of both worlds it's gonna make people aware of you.

7:05It's going to get chatter going, comments on your ads, right? That's one downside of purchase-focused campaigns is that a lot of time people will just purchase. They'll click through, they'll purchase. They're not those engagers who are building up your community. They're not commenting. They're not liking your posts. So getting best of both worlds in there is going to just be huge for your optics, finding other endorsements or brands to partner with and social proof. So I think like in terms of what you're thinking of creatively, it needs to come down to that, that intent. And you really need to bucket that into your strategy.

7:42If that makes sense. Makes perfect sense. So cask is coming, start thinking about other parts of your funnel. Uh, super exciting. Now the other piece is meta has its own clippy now. Is that, is that right? Do we have our own little campaign helper that, that talks with us as we're building campaigns? Yeah, we've just like last week, we started to see this show up and agency advantage again, sent us a little blurb on it, very brief, but basically meta AI business assistant is rolling out to accounts. It's going to be like a little chat bot where you can just go in and just start asking it questions right in the account.

8:18You know, what are my top ads based on conversion rate the last week? What's a common theme between these ads? Things you might, you know, you might ask GPT or Gemini, but the fact that this business assistant is completely integrated to your meta ad account is obviously going to be huge. It's going to be a big win as we're generating reports for clients or as clients are needing specific insights. Just asking this bot is going to be super helpful as an assistant. Mobi in Triple Whale is kind of similar. A lot of these brands are pumping out their own sort of chatbots because they want to keep you on platform, right?

8:57They don't want you using the other companies. But yeah, the first version of Meta is rolling out and definitely look out for it in your accounts because it's going to be helpful in a lot of varieties. There's also like image uploading functionality where you can like upload specific images, ask it how it's going to do, like in the, you know, what campaign might be best for an ad like this. and you upload the image and it's going to distill that, cross-reference it against your data. So it's going to do a lot of that work, but at the same time, you're still going to have to do that groundwork to know your intent buckets.

9:36You can't just rely on what you're seeing in meta because it's a self-learning system. You might get into your own little corner and back yourself into that corner unless you're doing that external research, right? Yeah, I think that's super interesting. And it's, I saw an interesting tweet. I forget who it was by last week, but it was about how much money Meta spent on the metaverse versus like giving their advertisers some creative intelligence, like some data, you know what I mean? Like actually, uh, I just used motion actually for the first time last week on, on our account on DTC's like a subscriber account.

10:10And it was great just, just to see all those, like, you know, those insights about, about your campaigns and, and, you know, see, see the, the intent it'll, it'll also help you find like the intent behind the creative you're running, even if you haven't like articulated it yet. And it's so, it's going to be interesting to see how much this helps meta because it's like a little could go a long way in a world where creative is, does the heavy lifting for all your targeting, right? Yeah. A hundred percent. You're getting, you know, faster answers, basically like getting what you need quicker and then you're reallocating that time into the, the groundwork essentially.

10:42um so it's not like it's gonna run your ads for you like that's a clear sort of distinction but it is gonna layer on top of that and give you what you need a lot faster but when you are using things like this new meta you know business ai assistant it's super important your fact checking at the start manually checking like okay you know it's telling me these are the top ads don't just blindly trust it because it could be you know going off different metrics at that point um so So actually go in, fact check it, do your usual due diligence. And as the tool matures, it will become way more and more accurate based on feedback, based on what people are doing.

11:20But as with every AI tool, the first time you're using it, definitely triple check the data it's spewing out. And again, it will save you more time down the road. But I think it's just important to mention that as well. We need a better name for it, though. Meta AI business assist, like Maba. Corporate sounding. Yeah, we need a Zucky. Can we just call him Zucky? Zucky, yeah. Not everyone will like it, but we could try it. What else is new on the Meta platform that our listeners need to be aware about? Yeah, there's a couple other things. There's a new creative testing feature that's rolled out just at the ad level.

11:57You'll probably notice it in most of your accounts at this point. You go into the specific ad, you'll see on the left side, there's like a creative testing button. Click that. you can do up to five tests per once. So you could actually basically say, and again, this is aligned to Andromeda and needing creative variety. You could say, okay, we have a sale coming up for Easter. Let's take our Easter hero creative that we've developed here. Maybe it's a UGC video. Let's get five versions of it with different hooks in the first three seconds. Let's use this creative testing feature in our top campaign.

12:32And you upload those five creatives within it. You could change the headlines if you want, the copy if you want, and then it's going to basically stagger the audience within those equally across the five and run that test for you. So you don't need additional campaigns. You don't need additional ad sets. You don't even need additional ads. It technically kind of does it within the one ad unit. So it's very like small distinction, but it is super helpful because you can run that. It'll show up in the experiment section of the ad account and it'll give you, you know, the data points for each of those five creatives, cost per clicks, conversion rates, everything.

13:10You're going to, you know, identify your winner from that. You're going to pause the losers out of this test and then you're going to roll from there. So it's like a. It's less clutter, right? It helps you keep things streamlined where you can just do the tests on the campaigns you're already running versus setting up dupes or things like that, which just kind of clutters the data. Yeah, exactly. Less clutter, more integrated with Andromeda, and just split testing right at the ad level is nice. And we've actually found another use where you can basically, it goes back to meta trying to keep you on their platform, but you can use it to split test pages.

13:45So you could say, you know, we have this ad. Let's do five versions. let's actually keep the same creative in every ad same copy same headlines and the only thing we're going to change is the url it allows you to do that so you could have the same ad running to home page to the product page to a pre-sale page to a collections page and just run it for the experiment and again look at the data throughout the whole thing add to cart rates conversion rates boom our collections page you know has performed better in this instance let's pause the others and let's actually switch all our other links to this collections page now that we know that.

14:22So we've used a lot of tools in the past, split testing our funnels behind a link because you basically want one ad and you're split testing the funnel behind that ad. This allows you to do it up front. And then you pick the winner. It keeps all the social proof. Maybe down the road, you want to test another page. Just set up another creative test on that winner with the new pages. but your original ad still runs with the likes, the comments, you know, that doesn't reset. So that's another big win to kind of, you know, split test, not just creative, but also, also your funnels using that creative testing feature.

15:00They don't call it like a page testing feature, but it's a little, a little thing you can use it for, for sure. That's like Rubik's there. They, they, they must buy what we've had a lot of people from meta on the podcast. They must listen to the podcast. It's actually like, there's a lot of brands that maybe are worried about it. I'm not too sure, but like volume is another one, like where it's, you know, that is their main thing is like split testing funnels and not just meta, but all these, you know, Google meta, you know, Axon, all these big, like, uh, ad platforms are trying to keep you on platforms.

15:31So they are slowly rolling out more and more features for things like this. And AI is of course, pushing a lot of it through making it easier, but definitely need to be taking advantage of it. I was saying it feels a little bit like we hit the beginning part of the singularity right now. We're literally using these tools. You can kind of solve any problem. You can build any software. It feels like that. We're in the shiny, everything is shiny period. I think once you have all these AI built softwares trying to operate out in the world, there may be other problems. Wild times. Speaking of wild times, I hear Meta announced that they're changing the way they do attribution in Ads Manager.

16:08Absolutely wild. Yeah, and this is going to be more in March, but one of the biggest things with Meta is brands will complain like Meta is over attributing. They're taking way too much credit. Hey, there's more. There's our total Shopify revenue is the same in Meta. Like, how is it possible that 100 % of our sales have come from Meta? That's impossible. And it's because of this whole idea of view attribution, right? Meta, you're pushing ads on everyone through Instagram, through Facebook. Anyone that foresees that ad and purchases another way, maybe they purchased through Google, but they still saw a meta ad, even if they scrolled right by it, meta would claim attribution as a view conversion.

16:56So you could still break it down like click versus view, but they're changing the way they do that. And basically the way they're defining an engaged view. engaged view has been around where it's like they actually have to watch you know 10 seconds of a video to count as a view attribution but that is shifting apparently i don't know all the details i don't know if they're giving you the option to define an engaged view or if they're just changing it but i think it's going to be like layered into that what we talked about at the start the combined awareness and sales campaign makes sense in that case for sure it's just a long history of traffic platforms trying to make you pay for views and not clicks.

17:39Yeah. You'll be like, oh, my CPA is$2. And then you actually spend a bunch and then you break it down. It's like, oh, well, like actually they would have all converted anyways. So defining that further, giving you more control and then layering in this combined awareness and sales campaign, we're still going to recommend you use third party tools, of course, like, you know, Triple Whale. We use a ton of Triple Whale for all our clients. And you still do want that unbiased source of truth because Triple Whale doesn't have loyalty to Meta more than it does Google, right? They're trying to define a single source of truth.

18:16But if Meta is working on that to try and get you to trust them more, it's just a good thing for brands at the end of the day. So yeah, we'll have more info and maybe on our next podcast, we could chat on it again, because it should be rolled out by then. But yeah, they're changing the way they do engage views, which will be great. Nice. And so does everyone have the AI business assistant now or is that just being rolled out selectively as well? Not everyone, no. We've seen it on just a few of our accounts. I don't know exactly how they're choosing. I think it's top spending accounts mainly, but it is rolling out.

18:52So they're kind of beta testing it. The listeners will probably start to see it pop up here and there. and yeah, we'd encourage you to use it and we'll be using it and we'll just make sure. Share tactics on how people, because that's what's so neat about all this stuff is everyone can have their unique take on how to use these tools effectively. So if you're out there using ZuckyBot, let us know, send us an email, eric at directtoconsumer.co and let me know if you're using, you know, what the best query you've done so far. I built a website on Claude the other day for my rowboat business and when I was asking it like about the project or whatever or something I'm like okay let's do it he's like and the and Claude was like let's go like whoa Claude take it easy how did you know how did you know I go hard like that but uh but anyways what a brave new world I keep saying uh and I'm so glad to be able to connect with the experts like you Jacob to keep me connected on what's happening on meta of course yeah I love coming on and look forward to the next one

19:58Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the D2C newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer.co. And if you want to learn more about Pilot House's all killer, no filler services, take off to pilothouse.co. I'm Eric Dick, and this has been the D2C Podcast. We'll see you next time.