Session: Meta Ads: The Next Chapter - Volkan Satirtav, Meta.

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right. So, we just uh had a moment to come in. Nice packed room. Very good. Uh so, we're going to straight into our next talk on the marketing marvels track. Um it's from Meta Ads. We're going to talk about the next chapter. So, I'm looking forward to any new reveals there. Um so, please welcome to the stage Vulcan Sat.
Thank you. [applause]
Thank you.
Hi everyone. Uh my name is Vulcan. I am currently leading our mobile gaming Europe team based out of London. As you might know, historically our mobile gaming Europe for sales team are were

based out of Dublin. Uh now that has changed to London last quarter for two reasons. Uh one is the fact that um our product team is based out of London. So we want to increase our um pace of bringing new products to the markets in a faster way. That's one thing. Second thing is I mean we have a huge client base out of London and London is more of a hub than Dublin. So that's why we wanted to be closer to the action so we can also be participating more often in conference like this so that we can tell you guys more about what's coming. So without further ado, let's jump into our presentation. I mean this is the transformation graph you have seen all the time. Everything starts with the COVID boom and then we have the obviously the segnation period due to Apple's AT and now we're in the AI native area. We talk about AI every day, you know, day in day out. So but my presentation is going to be about two topics. Uh one is about AT. So what actually meta has done after the at how did we transform our business to you

know adapt to this new changes and there's a lot of things have come out in the recent years and uh and the second thing I want to talk about is our AI things like there's a lot of AI changes we have done in the back end but what does it mean for you like we hear about this Android meta stuff everyone talks about on LinkedIn but what actually it is for you and how can you as UA marketers you know maximize on those things so let's start with post at I mean at came 2021 we know it hit meta hards uh it took us a while to kind of get back to our feet and during that time we you know as a company made some decisions we increase our focus a bit towards uh verticles that have more robust signals right so we're basically web signals you know like e-commerce retail that helped us a lot we obviously were able to kind of come back in our feet but uh that came with the cost of us not innovating hard enough on the mobile gaming side. So we kind of lag that we kind of lag behind on that. We

tried to fix this in the last you know couple years and we made a huge progress on this as well. Uh why? Because I mean we know the app industry is huge. It's growing. It's going to continue to grow. Downloads are down yes but the revenues are up. These are the AP revenue but I I think is also up by like 6 7%. So obviously you guys are monetizing your users in a better way, but you have higher targets. I mean it's now you have obviously a lot of networks you work with and you're not just competing with your mobile gaming genre, you're competing with the apps, you're competing with short drama. So you're basically competing with this user attention, right? So it's it's not easy. So you also have, you know, hard um APIs. Um so we as meta, you know, brought some solutions to to tackle this problem. So I want to summarize our solutions in two pillars basically. One is performance and one is measurement. So as you can see also here our like after uh we our pace of bringing new

products to the market have significantly improved and in 2026 it's going to be even much better and we will talk about these changes not all of them but the biggest ones that's more uh relevant for you. So let's talk about measurement. So on the measurement side everything started with AM. So it's basically our way of counting you know both uh for iOS users both optin and opt out users uh data right both for measurement reporting optimization all those so this is kind of our first um step to to go back at so that was our first approach bringing back AM so AM was again it gives us the ability to you know report real time conversions optimize on real time things you can get more data more ground data and you can you know optimize more than just one day that scam was actually processing you to and now also we are supporting view through reporting as well with AM so you can see not just click through but also

view through reporting as well so after and again like we see the result with AM like you don't even have to create the AM campaigns all you need to do is just make sure the signals you send to meta are AEM eligible meaning like you guys are sending us parameters that we need to be able to count those opts and as soon as you do that you already get the you know incremental value because if you don't then there's no way for us to optimize on those opt users and optin is usually around very like 20% or something for mobile gaming in general so it's not much data there and the second thing we done once we have built our AE models once we have built our ability to optimize on on optin and opad we put that data in your source of truth because as manager is not to place that the unras normally I mean you look at MMPs because that's where you can you know compare different networks and we made sure that AM technology also works for MMPs as well so that's the second thing we have done

during that time we also brought engage view attribution why I mean engage view is something that can easily be missed because you know for mobile gaming view is not seen as like a very high quality conversion but for engage it's a bit different especially for a platform like meta Because meta is a social problem, right? I mean people are really engaged with the content that they are, you know, seeing. They don't want to leave the app. They want to stay in the app. They want to just see what's next and what's next, right? But even in those cases, they're engaging with the video for like 5 seconds, 10 seconds. But these things are not measured if you, you know, uh don't activate the right things in your MMP. So engage view is very very important if you really want to understand the impact of meta uh for your you know MMPs and also ads manager as well and it's basically what it is is whenever a user watches the ads for more than 5 seconds in the in the Instagram Facebook we send the engage view um claim and then this is both reported

separately so you can actually break down in MMP also in your ads manager as well and then you can see it as well. One thing maybe you haven't know is that engage view claims are treated same as the clicks for MNPs. This was something that was not there. Uh but we kind of I think lag behind there a bit because this was the same across the board for other networks. But this is also for meta is the is the case. The engage view claims are now is that as clicks and but you can still see the breakdown in your MMP and all you need to do is you just have to turn on the engage view toggle in your MMP and then you should start seeing the improvements as well there. I mean it's also the data tells us for epsilier that we see the view attributions are booming across different genres as well. So it's not just you know us talking about this it's happening everywhere. So make sure that you turn on the these features to make sure again you fully fully understand meta performance. The last thing we did on the measurement obviously we brought

back our AMM solution. So this was the one thing that mean we've been asked a lot from everyone because this was your ability to pull user level data and then you build your own user level cohort right so this was u deprecated after but we brought it back recently as well so you can again see more data and you can see the long-term journey of your users that's what we done for measurement but measurement doesn't mean anything unless we really you know improve the performance of our campaigns of our product so let's talk a bit about performance side. One important things we have done is we improved our alignment with the MMPs. So whatever is a new user definition for you in your MMP. Is it 90 days? Is it 180 days? So whatever that number is, we now pull that number from your MMP and we feed it into our system. Why? Because we heard from our clients that you know there's a gap between MMPs and ads manager. Obviously that makes as manager

numbers a bit less reliant. So that you're like you know I don't trust the as manager numbers that also doesn't work well for our algorithm as well. So we are trying to minimize the gap between MMPS and our uh own attribution algorithm. So we have done tons of improvements. You don't have to do anything to get like to make use of this. It just these things are get pulled in automatically. Another thing is that the way we work with uh the MMPs is the claim system, right? So whenever an install happens, MMP sends these claims to all the SRNs like you know do you have a click, do you have a view and then what we do obviously we respond with with an answer. So there were some gaps there as well but we made sure that we close those gaps and we still closing those gaps as well by the way in 2026. Again this is something you don't need to do anything. This is us fixing things in the back end so we can have more alignment with your source of truth. This is the one of the biggest thing we have brought into the market. This is

the value optimization product. So this was the product that's been used the most by the mobile gaming people because this is the best way to access those purchases on the platform and we made two big improvements on the value optimization product Q4 last year. One came in November, one came I think around beginning of Q4. It works much much better. The numbers here it's we seen that it brings 30% more higher ROS than it was before. And our aim is to actually make the value automation product that we have now like the market's best product in 2026. But there's already huge improvements. So if you haven't tried already, you should definitely especially if you're on the AP side. On the IIA side, we built our own IIA product. So you don't have to hack our purchase event to send us the IA revenue. You can use this one. It only now works for Android. We're testing it for the iOS as well, but this is also going to be fully available I

think somewhere in the Q1 as well. So and we also already start seeing good numbers with this. I mean we have the case study with Voodoo. Uh we were able to improve their day seven rorowas by 2.6 six and we dropped their cost per installs by 80%. Which is really really huge huge numbers. Also we are in investing more money on our performance. Playables is one thing we keep hearing from our clients like most of our clients ads they're mostly playables like almost 67% of their ads are playable. So we also want to make playables work for us as well. Uh so we are improving our load time. We expand the playables to other placements as well at meta. So it's not just audience network but we're also expanding to reels and stories because I mean reals is the most uh use most where the people are right. So we need to make sure that playables also work there as well. Second thing is the partnership ad this was not working for mobile app install now it is. It's also something that can be easily missed by mobile marketers

because it's they think it's maybe more like for e-commerce or retail but it's actually not. Why? because it gives you the ability to show a very authentic organic looking content and uh it's easy right I mean you just have a agreement with your creators they do the content and you just boost the content and you already get these good numbers and it also helps you access new kind of audience as well so the audience that you don't normally reach out to using your normal video ads you get to access a new audience as well but just by using this this ads SK overlay this is again to kind of have a less friction and the iOS devices one less click to install the ads again because users are very engaged we don't want to um interfere with that and watch and install is also uh similar format as well and defer deep things was also something we have deprecated after now we brought it back this could be interesting for you guys for those of you who are doing the mini games approach basically you're showing an ad in your creatives whatever game you're

showing you can actually redirect users to that specific specific game within your app as well. So it kind of has a very you know you you you kind of keep the user experience very coisive here. So I think that's also another interesting thing that you guys should definitely use and all these things all these recommendations and many more of them are going to be soon in ad manager. You probably start seeing this already there. It's called opportunity score. Basically whenever we do an improvement whenever we see that you're doing something like wrong and you can do something better there and it's going to be there. it's going to be telling you and you know there's going to be guiding you so that we don't have to talk to you and tell you about these things it will already going to be there and you can easily apply those recommendations uh in your ads manager so these are the things that helped us you know brought back a lot of things after again it was a tough period uh but I think we did a really really good job there and there's more products are coming on60 as well so besides those products we also invest heavily on the

AI approach what's our AI AI algorithm how can we improve we also spend a lot of time on that as well and um and our basically key thing is not going to change that we want to show the right ad to the right user at the right time so that's not going to change that's our goal always because we're trying to optimize the user experience with the advertiser performance so we cannot just you know uh um ignore the one area so for that uh I'm not going to take like get into the technical details of it but what I can say is that there is actually two stage uh process here. One, the first stage is called retrieval. So let's say you are a user, you are going through your Instagram feed and there is a millions of choices that you can see an ad from like there millions of advertisers wants to show you an ad. So first step is the retrievable where it's basically done by Andromeda is basically it filters out those millions of ads only a few thousand and then there comes the second stage which is called

ranking. So what ranking does it basically ranks all those ads in a way that we think most you know useful for the user also most uh you know uh which ads is going to be the most performance-driven for the advertiser and that has been done by the jam it uses the metalist and sequence learning uh just to give like couple words about both of things I think metal lettuce you can think of it like it's our way of um uh unifying our different optimization models into one basically you know if If you're optimizing on a on video on other things, we make sure that all those optimization models talk to each other. So like if we're optimizing for you know purchase obviously there are some clicks happening before that but the system doesn't go after the users who have most clicks but it needs to go after users who have actually purchased. So we are like improving the align within different models. So the system doesn't you know think that click is a purchase. It's not. It's actually a lot more than that. And the sequence learning is actually our way of um seeing what the

users have done pre and post ad as well. So this is I think one thing you can do here to maximize it is that you make sure you send us all the events that users are doing in your app. So it's not just install and purchase right that's what we see usually we see install and purchase event but the rest is usually doesn't come or you send us some custom events but make sure you send us all the events in the user funnel so the system actually learns those things and it can it can actually you know improve the performance but let's talk a bit about Android because that's one thing I think that has been in you know everywhere and it's been discussed um what does it mean for you like how can you maximize on this retrieval stage how can you make sure that you you you can you know do to to kind of improve the impact of this in your a day campaigns answers creatives I mean this is something we've been saying I think maybe for the a lot of time it's not new to you probably right and everybody is saying this but I can say this confidently for this new algorithm 50%

of all of our auction outcomes can be attributed to creatives so the good creative will give you a good performance that's the reality of meta you have to do better on the creative side and why because creative becomes again the new targeting part because there's less and less levels you can play on the meta now like everything is AI everything is controlled by the broad campaigns there's not many levers you can play so the one level you can play is creative so you have to do your best to be able to you know target your users and the more but it's not just about any creative it's not the name of the game is not about iteration but it's more about diversification So let me give you an example like if you have a good creative that works really well at meta and then you have a red button there and you change red button to a blue button and you put it as a new creative. So that's the system is now smart enough to tell that that's not a new creative. It's just a simple slight iteration of the previous one and it will not go to a new audience. So what you need to do you

need to truly diversify your creative and it's easy to do that. I mean there's a lot of AI tools out there. You can just create AI hooks and you can just connect that to your game play and there you go. You already have a new diverse creative. You can do like testimonials, street views, like different kind of things as well. Again, it's very easy with the AI to do those things. So, you need to kind of tap onto those and okay, but how you going to know if you're doing a good job or a bad job? Are your creative diverse enough or not? Well, you can see all those things in ads manager soon as well. So for example, we have a new thing coming up called creative similarity. So you can see how similar your creatives are, how diverse they are, what you need to do there. You can see the fatigue. So how fatig your creatives. So basically means like people are just tapping out of your creative. They don't want to see the creative anymore. So you need to change them, right? So you can see those things soon. And the theme inside that was one thing that's been asked to us a lot like tell us what's going on in your platform. What are the top the teams? what kind of hooks that we can do to

kind of you know make sure that we are getting the high clickthrough rate and high performance. All those things are also coming to ads manager as well. Okay, you do a good job with the creatives amazing. You have a really high diverse creatives. You're doing everything great but still somehow the system keeps going to the old creatives all the time. It doesn't give chances to the new ones, right? And we also hear this a lot from our our uh clients. So basically let's talk about so this is basically how you do your testing at the moment right you have a sandbox campaign you put there I don't know 150 creatives and then you choose like the top 10 right and then you and then once you uh see those top 10 you put them into your bau campaign and then you're hoping that it's going to be you know scaling but that usually doesn't work because the here the learnings are not being carried from that campaign to other and then the system will still going to go and try to scale the old ones again and then obviously with the fatigue creatives you're going to get a bad performance. Now there's a new way of doing creative testing which is basically you can

create a new test budget in your BAU campaigns and you can set up a budget so that system pushes impressions to those creatives so it learns for sure that there is no doubt about that and at the end of this budget has [snorts] ended if the creators are not good enough that means you know they were not good enough to begin with. So you don't have this idea of system not giving the old new creators enough chance. That kind of a question is no longer there. So for my takeaways I have 2 minutes. Uh for my takeaways you have to unlock am again. This kind of what makes us go back tot times we have a better alignment with your source of truth. So the gap between uh mmps and ad manager are going to be closing. If you haven't done value optimization test in the last two months do it. You'll see it yourself. it works much better and you got to play the creative game. You got to have the diversification in your creatives. That's the only way to be successful at meta. So what's next? I mean we don't have at the moment the 2026 road map but

I can tell you that uh with all the changes we're having with the teams with the product teams and everything the pace of again our bringing new products and relevant products to the market is going to be even higher in 2026 and we do have access to those users that you want to reach those we have four we have 3.4 24 billion users in the platform. So we have access to those players and there's 4.5 billion reals has shared every day. The real is the new way of communication between people. So we have those people we have them in our platform and our products are getting much better as well. Uh so please stick with us and I can say confident that for 2026 Meta is definitely back. Thank you. [applause]
Thank you so much. You can leave him there.