Meta’s new Ad Objectives are elegant…but still do not enable buyers to optimize campaigns to an effective frequency. For media planners, this creates challenges in calibrating campaigns around harder-to-optimize upper funnel objectives like Awareness.
The goal of any campaigns should be to reach as many people as possible with effective advertising: A successful campaign should result in a statistically significant increase in Aided or Unaided Brand Awareness outside the Meta platform. Unfortunately, this is not an option. Meta’s Awareness Ads come in a few different optimization flavors.
- Reach: Shows ads to as many people as possible
- Ad Recall: Show ads to people most likely to remember seeing them
- ThruPlay Views: Show video ads to people most likely to watch for at least 15 seconds
- 2-Second Continuous Video Views: Show video ads to people most likely to watch for at least 2 seconds
- Impression: Shows your ads to people as many times as possible
In honor of Doom’s 31st Anniversary, I’ve borrowed the original video game “Pain Level” status indicator. The higher the pain level, the least likely the campaign is to increase brand awareness effectively.
Reach: Let’s first acknowledge that less than 1% of the measured impressions on Meta deliver enough attention to be effective with 1 exposure. The probability that a single, Reach-optimized, low-frequency campaign produces measurable lift is near 0…but if you have an Expert Skill Level (Nightmare for Doom-ers), there are ways to increase frequency. A rock-star colleague uses Reach in the following conditions:
- Paired with Retargeting to increase frequency and overall efficiency
- Smaller audiences that “top out” on reach and increase frequency
- Tight, core consumer audiences (like from 1st Party CRM) that require less frequency to be effective.
Pain Level: 10. These campaigns are doomed unless you are an expert. Like battling Pain Elemental, alone there is little chance of victory and suffering is inevitable.
Ad Recall: On the surface, Ad Recall feels right if your goal is to increase awareness. However, there’s a few gotchas that can give a media planner difficulty.
Survey Methodology: Meta’s single-brand 2-day survey will report higher results than outside trackers with longer look-back windows. Facebook “constantly updates” its estimated lift methodology and recommends running a brand lift test if possible.
Targeting: The willingness to answer a survey can create a natural bias in the audience targeting. Targeting will also favor those that currently engage with your brand as they will be most likely to remember seeing your Ad. This can limit your scale.
Pain Level: 7. With so many known unknowns, a formalized brand lift study is the best way to evaluate if the campaign is effective. Like the Mancubus, what appears to be easy is complicated by an endless deluge of rockets to dodge.
Video Views: The view-based campaigns come with targeting and cost implications that can limit your scale.
- Natural Born Viewer Bias: Just like there are natural-born clickers, there are a small group of people who are natural born ad-viewers.
- Cost: The premium might not be worth it based on your cost per view relative to other campaigns. E.G. Paying a 10x premium for 2 seconds could be be less cost-effective than multiple low-CPM impressions.
Pain Level: 5. In most cases, the Views campaigns are less cost effective than higher-frequency options. Like a Hell Knight, these campaigns are only easy in just the right conditions.
Impressions: Why would you want to show your ads to people as many times as possible if your goal is Awareness? Doesn’t this feel like a lower-funnel tactic?
Don’t be fooled. With the right frequency caps, Impressions can be the best way to maximize your effective reach. The hard part is determining what frequency is effective.
Pain Level 3: With the right targeting, benchmark frequency and capping, Impressions is a great way to boost awareness. Like an Imp, they are simple enough when taken seriously.
Conclusion
Your Meta Awareness campaign is not DOOMed…but there is no easy path to success. Nor is there “God Mode” technology that will make it simple. Unlike Doom, Meta is not a game you can beat; It’s a system that’s designed to maximize ad revenue, not your external marketing outcomes…but there are certainly “hacks.”
- Use third parties to validate efficacy and set benchmarks
- Compare efficiency metrics on an apples-to-apples basis
- Take advantage of targeting, frequency capping and campaign windows to best match your marketing goals with Meta’s optimization objectives
- Use campaigns together to achieve your overall benchmarked frequency
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