Last week, Meta held their third annual Performance Marketing Summit, gathering 500 advertisers and 50 agency teams in San Francisco for the two-day event, including Alexandra Lance and Natalie Abouk from Croud’s US Biddable team. This was Croud’s first time attending the event, and while there was no sighting of Zuckerberg himself, the summit offered an insightful collection of presentations, panels and workshops from key Meta executives and industry experts across a variety of verticals.
Croud has always been a big believer in the adoption of Meta best practices, especially when it comes to automation, in order to make sure we deliver consistent and optimized results for clients that do not fight the system itself. This is all done, of course, with our own data validation and “test & learn” approach that (for the most part) supports these “best practices.”
Much of the content presented was a good refresher on Meta best practices, including Performance 5, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and creative diversification which, pleasingly, some of our clients in the audience exclaimed they were already implementing with Croud’s support. Continue reading for some of the key takeaways and themes from the summit.
Increasing investment in artificial intelligence
It was no surprise that artificial intelligence (AI) was a hot topic at this year’s summit, with Meta’s VP of Global Business Group, Simon Whitcombe, sharing insight on Meta’s approach to AI. As Meta continues to position themselves as a leader in the AI space, they’ve increased investment in large computing data centers to help better fuel their algorithms with more instantaneous data output.
This comes off the heels of Meta’s Llama 3 AI integration in April, which introduced multiple AI features such as search assistant and image generation. Meta is embedding these features into their suite of apps to encourage the adoption of AI technology, while also keeping you on their platforms.
In terms of AI and ad products, the industry has been reaping the benefits of Advantage+ Shopping campaigns’ powerful algorithm when finding and converting new customers (primarily in the purchase event), since Fall 2022. While Meta continues to build out their Advantage+ suite of products, it's the Advantage+ Creative that took centerstage at the summit. They are continuing to refine and improve their dynamic text options and creative enhancements products, which had previously lacked adoption and received much negative sentiment from brands.
Meta described an ideal world where the primary text served to users is dynamically crafted to fit their preferred tone of voice and paired with a 9:16 Stories creative that had been automatically expanded from the original 1:1 asset through AI image generation. This reality may seem far away, but we’ve only leveraged approximately 1% of AI’s predicted capabilities and the acceleration of growth will be quicker than we expect.
Continued creative as targeting
Throughout the summit, Meta continued to double down on their popularly coined phrase “creative is the new targeting.” While this is nothing new, it is something we continue to hit home to clients on a daily basis, stressing the importance of creative diversification. This does not mean five different variations of a product shot, but rather a diversification in concept (themes/messaging), imagery (visual elements), and format.
Format seems to currently be one of the more important factors to consider, as 60% of time spent across Meta is in video and 50% of time spent on Instagram is in Reels. Not only should brands be running video ads to capitalize on a large portion of users, but they should also be testing Reel-optimized creative (vertical, sound-on, strong narrative) within some of their direct-response and conversion campaigns to drive incremental reach and improve conversion rate (based on Meta case studies).
Product roadmap & measurement
While there were no major, groundbreaking announcements at the summit, the summit heavily focused on ad-level enhancements and measurement solutions.
Most ad-level product developments are already across most ad accounts or are becoming available very soon. This includes highlighting promotion codes, reminder ads (which received a lot of buzz), and products videos within the catalog. This was also combined with a whole host of AI-image generation solutions, such as image expansion and background generation, which are currently in a very limited testing group.
There was also a greater focus on data validation, with a couple of exciting products expected to be rolled out later this year - Google Analytics 4 analytics integration, optimization towards incremental attribution, and target frequency recommendations. Our team is personally most excited for incremental attribution, where they will be able to compare and optimize towards incremental purchases and campaigns, driving incrementality directly in the platform. Many of Croud’s clients have already been investing heavily in conversion lift and attribution window tests, so this could be a solution for both of those combined.
Key takeaways
This year’s Meta Performance Marketing Summit was nothing short of exciting and insightful, and our team was thrilled to be amongst a community of leaders driving this industry forward.
As discussed throughout this blog, here were the key takeaways from the event:
- Familiarize yourself with Meta’s in-platform AI solutions for consumers as variations will soon be rolled out in ad products.
- Invest in creative development, in particular video to make sure you are reaching all of your potential users.
- Continue questioning, measuring, and validating results on Meta as more advanced solutions will hopefully be rolled out by end of year.
If you’re looking to learn more about optimizing your Meta performance, or would like to chat with one of our experts, please get in touch with our team here.
