The future of UA – Facebook ad best practices, creative marketplaces and UA bots

[Music] [Music] all right Uriel my name is Craig little tomatillo it's an acquisition via our Facebook and Instagram marketing partner founded in 2013 and what we do that unique is we take a creative person approach to doing some advertising we offer greetings fully managed services create a marketplace and form the to broaden reception a little here are some companies that offer a similar service we kind of broke them out into the penny components here my personal okay is if the company is focused on a self-service ad tech platform wholly without

incremental services they're in fairly deep trouble and that's because of the machine learning algorithms that have been implemented with Facebook and Google certainly over the course of the last six months but in those cases recently as February 19th and we'll talk about that something so you know the mobile ad industry is growing significantly and if you look at very eager stats on the first line there you see the size of the overall ad market and if you zoom in just a little bit you look at the duopoly between Facebook and Google and it's a material footprint in terms of the importance and as a bit of context last year we spent just over a hundred million dollars doing you a for our audience and about 65 to 60 to 65 percent of the time people are spending a bulk of their vote on Facebook Google comes in second somewhere around 15 to 20 percent and then the rest are ours now what we see is a fairly significant

shift into this market in particular who you see in Facebook and the thing that I just alluded to is this concept of machine learning radically simplifying what a you a manager does during the day if you look at the bottom there this is a particular footprint of what Facebook has changed over the course of the last few years and they continue to roll these things out with incredible frequency I would say even greater than once per quarter so it obviously started a quick optimization and ran forward into Abbadon stalls and then you got more sophisticated to say I'm actually not interested in dress the insult of those who are going to purchase and I don't want the purchasers I want the whales versus the bullpens versus the mouse and then this is February they not give it a name so we're calling it best practice and Tom will break down the specific changes but think of it as companies who say they have a built-in ad tech companies who are making substantial intraday changes two bids

and budgets will find a material decrement in their performance starting in mid-february so say that backwards people who are following the best practices we're not frequently changing bids and budgets and who are of waiting going from the optimized based learning pace will see the significant increase in their Facebook performance so if it's true that machine learning on facebooking who have gotten that good well what's next and in our opinion we believe that creative can be or will be a dominated driver of return on investment or rowhouse and so zooming into just Facebook for a moment and what's fascinating is there's multiple ways to capture a consumer are they on the go stay in a pattern in the subway are they leaning forward on their desktop are they leaning back on their outer you know their laptop each of those user experiences comes with a unique way of experiencing advertising

and in my opinion is video templates and assist with generic things like that's a travel where you may have similar look and feel across many hundreds of assets but they don't work well for non company creative things where you're looking to do a whole lap and soldierly generation those need to be generated by a human and unfortunately AI cannot address those issues just yet so okay a hundred million in spend here's what we notice about 95 percent of the time your testing is going to fail and by failure it means not outperform the best habits early in your portfolio so you have to do a tremendously heavy lift in order to optimize and find a numerator before that ad or without the more you spend the factory is going to fatigue the more creative you need in an effort to maintain your performance and if you

look at the bottom graph this is a it was a live example of first launched we need great spending those up as we increased send the fatigue started and then got a mirror and it pops back up so it's literally just a sine wave it keeps going but if you don't continue your creative testing it's gonna you know peter out your performance or properly substantially the problem on the creative side is the internet has gone from sills to videos obviously videos are order of magnitude more complex to produce because the failure is just as high it still ninety-five percent so there's an awful lot of work that goes into creating videos that probably aren't gonna live for very long so what's a potential solution we believe that create a marketplace and deliver a fairly substantial creative at scale and the key here is we work with a company whoever it is made sure that they truly

are experts in that particular channel Facebook or Z or Pinterest or snapchat or what have you the reason is creative each of these platforms really truly does have a unique flavor to it and the benefit of using an external company even if you really like their internal team is that you need a great benchmark a way of saying how good is good when there's a firm that looks across many other verticals not just more particularly one vertical it's an easy way of creating a healthy competition with the internal team to make sure that new ideas are flourishing one of the things we found is that creative teams have a free tendency of getting competition they learn what's working and what's not working and they slow down an explorative looks and feels because they know they're probably not going to work as well it's sitting in the track of what has been proved work overtime that performance will continue to dip also in this case if you

hit new creative winners from a national team that also is winners to your internal team and their ability to generate new ads is potentially higher so that is a great market place to keep it really simple it's a creative brief so the advertiser or service like ours writes a brief that's what do differently why are you partying this with your Facebook audience insights you know cool advertising - what do they read watch and listen - and why do they want to look at a particular at the advertiser that can come in the video images it adds an NBC will click launched into the and it also allows pretty easy looking out of creative assets and we've all had rave analytics so the business model of most of the companies that I showed in the earlier slide is a per-unit so

there's some fixed cost per image for video or aerosol etcetera this is a business model and imports very easily across your social channels and although it's a really great example is about 3 million dollars and spend for a particular client and y-axis is how much money that's spent and x-axis is how many videos or ads with credits you can see an awful lot of ads were created and only a handful were sales it's a different way of illustrating and person successor so when you're ready to work with an internal team that are obviously not as close to your assets as you are so these are some recommendations and we and other companies have good white papers on how to prepare for this type of work so please feel free to look it up if you want to look at brand assets what do you currently have available in a gaming world what we've noticed is

most of the assets reside in unity or some other 3d rendering technology and are not easily ported outside of the game to get layered individual assets so you can create new types of upgradable but you also have to understand what's the voice who's the audience if you can articulated in the document and it's very easy for the creative folks to come in and provide their look and feel and it goes on with wipes and brand nude and references one of the nice things is Facebook in Canada is currently testing the ability to look up all your competitors debts so yeah a team Canada they go to a Facebook page you can click on it and see all of the Facebook ads that are currently right it's fantastic for competitive research and it's something I would recommend you do my understanding is that we'll come to the US some Penta summer so we constantly get asked this question which is direct response versus branding and usually

those two things are in conflict where how do you make a data-driven decision with a brand and one of the things we try and encourage our advertisers to think about is this concept of a prototype at so most of it are going to fail relatively quickly so they're gonna last for around ten thousand impressions and then they'll keep around I so you can get consensus internally that we're gonna run fast we're gonna get a little brand compliant seventy-five percent and if it bombs we'll take it down if it works we're gonna do the rest of the twenty five percent on average what we've seen as it takes two or three times the level of effort to be for any component than it does to get to about seventy five percent meaning you can go really fast develop prototype adds bail fast and then only enhance that you know we're going to work where it requires the incremental investment because the spend is envelope so concepts versus

variations is kind of the fundamental of feasible talk one of the things you will find that most internal teams focus on is creating versions of ads that win because it's a known quantity a very difficult for me to do is to create new concepts something that hasn't been tested something completely out of the box often when you get in a new employee they're really good over and over or when you did an external team they don't have that same kind of tunnel vision so it's really helpful say this a little differently small changes will equal small impacts so that's the variations where large changes equals substantial impacts well we have seen is fresh creative in January between thirty to sixty percent reduction in our increase in performance and increase in growth so it's the easiest way to get to more profit is more creative dusting if we zoom in a

bit and on just skills what can I do with a still image in an effort to generate fresh thinking so this is a framework that we put together and instead of and I'm walking through each one on my one I just a little video of some of the work that we've done that shows in a visual way the differences here so you'll notice the differences between layouts vertical horizontal whether there's a grid whether there's not a grid to include or exclude a mobile device include your ex lugar characters I would recommend unless your video match reading don't use your characters

unless they're very well branded and understood of course you've got to test the calls to action whether you put them on the top whether you put them on the bottom in general I highly recommend you never put the App Store or Google Play logos at the end it'll need your help reading they people know that it's pretty well and said it's about 15 to 20 percent reduction in performance if you do include it with regards to colors always use bright super saturated colors as it has a tendency of capturing people's attention the best practice from Facebook and YouTube is that you've got two seconds at the start of the video to gather someone's attention after that you're gonna lose them the best link for it was somewhere between six is ten seconds long so don't convert your television commercial into the 30 second or 15 seconds turn it into a dr spot that puts call to action at the front and then shorten the length of it the most important thing

you can do though is Palace or e so you want to be able to visually communicate what the app is about quickly and shortly rather to people that are viewing you out because they're just coming through the Facebook newsfeed and you want to make sure that you can keep your attention and here's just kind of a montage of a variety of the visual things that you go through and it just keeps there's really no end to the level of creative that you could test so it's encouraging to see to see that so as I said earlier they definitely moved from stills to video I would say probably 90% of the time we're generating videos we have our own captive video editors and designers so most of our clients are requesting them and the idea is that Facebook created this concept from their creative shop they call it Greek to convert and it's a

simple way of taking limited assets and moving them into a video file again heylia rates very high you some video testing quickly so there's four basic examples that we're gonna walk through visually so you can get a sense of what they are this one is basics of motion so the idea is very simple video animation a little bit of animation to stills a few simple layers and then characters moving and if you've got the music use it so what we first are with is the assets so you can see how incredibly basic it can be and then we'll show you the video so this is from News Corp an entity called check out 51 where they're looking to people to use their app in its and their receipts the next example is brand emotion so let's go a little bit further in terms of the level of effort let's highlight the grand of the

game or the website or the asset and put it in motion so that you can see visually what it's about in this case this is from Glu Mobile and it's a design home app so it's simple this one targets wouldn't thirty-plus and let's go to benefit motion this is what is pignoli storytelling what does my app about Who am I trying to communicate with and kind of get people's interest quickly will break down the assets so you can see not very many assets being used and then the party again check out 51 simple assets did you create a video and then and by the way the benefit in motion is the one that usually performs to us demo a motion is the last of their framework and the idea

here is to just visually communicate that this is a lap by putting an inside of a poem that removes the need but download now and it helps the viewer understand that it's actually a mobile app the goal is to show the demo of the product being used they kind of zoom in so you can get a flavor of what the app is really about and in this case it's mobiles Gordon Ramsay cookie - that is it for the first section I'm gonna turn it over to Tom where he is going to talk about the substantial shift that happened in February and what it means to you alright so sucka literally about how things have changed on Facebook in terms of power acquiring users for games and apps so look at a couple years back we used to optimize for mobile app installs this is ma I and really what you're telling Facebook at that point is to go

out and bring in users at a low cost as we've seen the industry shift as a result of Facebook releasing new products there's how alphabet optimization which allows you to target users that you want me to purchase for instance or value optimization which is identifying users will make a purchase but also purchasers are going to spend more than average and so as we've seen the the quality of traffic kind of migrated over to AEO and vo really what we're seeing is that Facebook is skating and understanding of who the players are and presenting an opportunity for advertisers to go out and find the payers and effectively get rid of bringing on a lower quality profit but they know it's not going to monetize so this one here this is focusing on Anu I wouldn't say it's something that we

believe this become more pronounced and also metrics kind of Facebook because rolled out so basically there's a concept of as edit which is if you make any changes to your ads that are running on Facebook they're going to be reset and it's going to go back into what's called learning phase so in the past we used to take this really different approach from what we're doing today and a high level we're launching a ton of a super hyper segmenting and we were making many changes per day and the idea there was we have an army of elves out there and we've got the right tools that we can really start to manipulate Facebook's auction and go out and find the best users and gain some efficiencies in that process as pagelet is rolled out it's basically a penalty for making a high frequencies significant edits we've had to adjust our strategy and what we're doing now is focusing on fewer ads giving much broader from a targeting perspective and then making far fewer changes ads so

what that means is we're we used to try to cap capitalize on intraday volatility and kind of game the auction a little bit now we're writing out that volatility and what we're seeing is the face book is incredibly efficient if you just pass all the control to them and let their auction do their work they're gonna find the right payers rate costs for you and so this slide here talks a little bit about the relationship between reach and scale versus quality and costs so on the top the kind of biggest circle there's broad audiences which would be no interest arguing no look-alike targeting but what you can do is tell Facebook throughout that that optimization or value optimization I want to go out and find pairs and then cast a very wide net to allow Facebook to have a broader audience upon those pairs and then kind of moving into the smaller circles you get interest targeting you get look-alike targeting which is Al and

what you're doing there is you're restricting the size of the audience into what is hopefully a higher quality of audience so what we found is that if Facebook is fixed or really improved the quality mechanisms to run that optimization a value optimization we can now get away on advertising side with being just you know far more broad with our audiences so actually some of our best ads are running worldwide 18 plus of male and female with no interest in a little place but the really important piece there is to make sure that you're running value optimization or half of that optimization so that you're creating a layer to quality with your optimization type rather than historically I thought we've done that with higher quality audiences a couple couple things to note about this slide is the cost for an event is usually two to three times the cost of purchase and then the cost for of value event is of two to three times a year what that means is it has entity to

wreak havoc on your LTE model because now you can actually just buy the whales or you can buy the people who purchase so that you've taken into account only CPI costs you may need to devise a model in such a way that and have tears based on their return people as we've seen CPI let's go up effectively 9x over the course of the last couple years we've actually seen our labs or ROI improved through that process so Facebook is doing a great job of taking the lowest quality impressions off the table this this is slide area that's focusing on campaign structure so there are several best practices that Facebook recommends following to basically help their options do their work and there's a few things in there that matter a lot so when you look at the segmentation here basically at a country level you can break down your campaigns into different types of targeting so maybe you've got some that are targeting alpha pence others that

are targeting value optimization and then underneath each one of those you want to make sure to avoid audiences over a lot for you can when you have too many ads or out sets that are targeting the same users you kind of take away the fish so it's ability to do the duping on the back end and really make sure that the best ad is being shown users and then there's a couple other kind of changes so one is running many ad sets per campaign in the past when we were doing the party it out its with high frequency of changes we would want to make sure that we have one out of perhaps one out set for campaign and for the most part of that gave us control now handing control over to Facebook is where we're seeing a lot more efficiency so creating many outs of for campaign and then running many ads perhaps out there get Facebook all of the opportunity to control the auction and decide which of those out sets in which out underneath out says is going to be

delivered so if you ever wondered why your performance tanks are any middle of a great look at your campaign structure and map it to best practices included in here but you can look up Facebook blueprint certification online you don't need to take the quizzes or have your team and get the final LinkedIn certification but the logic and a breakdown on how the algorithm works is all there and very helpful so for us we're able to target much bigger audiences we're able to run far fewer campaigns and through that process so it's really becoming magnify this the kind of one variable that's gonna allow one advertiser it's outperform another is creative so we've been talking a lot about creative here and this side does they see the same that you should be doing more testing no matter who you are or how many ad is here you're currently testing you can always see more and it's

my belief that creative testing creative optimizations highest are live activity that any facebook advertiser to do so talking about testing best practices there's a few things to focus on here upfront you want to make sure you're forming and test hypotheses so what is it that you want to test and why do you believe that what's going to help perform your current your current winners to walk away from the steps of the commune data and it's very helpful to make sure you're testing one variable at a time paint a bunch of stuff you change your colors a copy and everything across each variation is just so different and you do produce winner you won't understand what are the variables in there that actually produced the winner the only end up going back and retesting those anyway so really important to get that right up front during the test just to make sure that no other variables are introduced if you ever do need to make any kind of change whether it's a budgets speed up the tops or bids to

improve delivery make sure whatever changes you make you're making to all address within that test so that they all get the same variable introducing anyone and then post have saying there's basically lift analysis that you'll be able to look at whether it's our wire cost repair you'll be able to see from the data which which your variations is performing best you can look at multiple hits there one really interesting one on Facebook it's just what are they biasing because the ads that start sending those money even if they're not the best performers from a broad perspective or our web perspective on curly spend Facebook is sending us a signal that they think those are the best ads and they're stealing them for easy so outsider curious cost analysis delivery is another one that matters much so on the creative testing hypothesis there's quite a bit of different attributes that we can pass and in variations that we can produce one really important one is

video length so Brian mentioned that somewhere between 6 and 10 seconds for most advertisers is a really you know strong type of video video length can be a little bit longer for more complex businesses that have a longer story of to tell but in any case you want to make sure that you're basically running the shortest videos possible to communicate the message that you want to communicate branding is something you can also test so you know the front of the video versus the end of the video at all all very good tests and easy in terms of refreshing creative Brian how the slide and there earlier that show basically what's gonna happen to all of your creative assets over time is they're gonna plateau and underperform so nine times out of ten when we see an account by filling the performance start to slip the path out there is a big creative win so making sure that we've

got the right kind of process in place to get ahead of the burnout that we know this gonna happen that's very important and then for gaming on the right side pretty interesting the looking at the concept of gameplay versus for instance trailers which are you know productions about the game that don't actually show how the game works so that's to just concepts you can test characters and to either really help or hurt depending on the type of vertical is your him in all of these videos it really comes down and creating fast action sequences and making sure that you're piecing together interesting contents and avoiding anything that's just kind of boring so if you tips on optimizing your videos so the first one is really just looking strong so I think this is a huge difference versus TV advertising where commercials kind of build up and then the climax and if they tell you the call to action or whatever it is they want you to do on the

internet you just don't have the time people are sit and watch ads and allow you to fill up to the very end so tell me you want to hit them immediately and try to capture within a few seconds what it is you want the user to do optimizing for sound is something that is also helpful or probably said better optimizing for no sound because a lot of people are just you know thumbing through their news feeds in the washer video and make a decision on whether it's click or taking the action there prior is actually turning on the sounds so it's important that your video makes sense without sound long mention this one make it only as long as it needs to be so get the kind of core called action out of the way early and then I have some interesting content behind that and then laughs if you have great characters use them Brian mentioned match-three earlier so this is one vertical specifically who ever seen use the characters matters a lot what separates one match three game from

the other hundreds of thousands of competitors out there it's a storyline that kind of exists in between crushing candy or whatever it may be so from a perspective focusing on characters something that can't help in that particular vertical but in other times the focus on characters to kind of steal away from the message you're trying to put out there and actually keep track from performance so this one here is talking a little bit more about Facebook best practices outside of a creative one of one of the things that we can test and there's hundreds so even though Facebook has simplified the landscape for fiying there's still a variety of inputs that allow us to create variance between our performance versus the next advertiser so there's kind of a army of acronyms out over the years he's got dynamic

creative optimization campaign budget optimization CCO CEO and then dynamic optimization yellow so the Facebook's have been rolling out a ton of new products and each one of these is is helpful for the most part some of them don't work for every client but I would say every single acronym here is working well for at least one of our clients and then of the data side of things there's new metrics coming out as well so Facebook is now it's the first time impression ratios so you see your ad starting to saturate a little bit you may be able to understands the correlation was in that metric and whether you need to refresh your creative so point here is there's a lot to test outside of creative and Facebook will continue to roll out new changes over time and as they do that always a good idea to jump on them early because those options for the Princeton's that exist for dynamic language optimization

they're less crowded when those products first roll out and I often see very strong performance Peggy Jo - Tom - our CMO so he runs a strategy anyhow he's on the leading front-end of trying to make the performance work I'm going to quickly go through a remaining few slides here this is let's call it my Gator smackdown why you should always be running some form of a copper a test and then a printer idea here is one a benchmark either your internal team or current agency with some other sources to make sure that they are focusing intensely on performance that are getting new ideas both in terms of campaign and that someone truly understands best practices of the vertical that you're in so here's how I would recommend minion you do a bake-off that runs about 30 days you want to spend between 50 100 thousand dollars per account so whether

you're running - that's you know if you're an H or 3 you want to be very specific in terms of the criteria we have a white paper for this - so love you know happy to send it to you for example if lots of ways you put more on Android or iOS so specify the distribution between iOS and Android specify the distribution between audiences no engagement and etc and then also the viewer window introducing or exiting and then make sure that once the bake-off begins nobody looks at the other person's data it's a problem see the internal team you don't share between external companies except for Tuesday and Friday so here's an example of the type of data that you can do and your why would you want to do that it really puts pressure on both a team that's losing and the team in its waning it keeps the intensity very high and then at the very end it's winner take all so whoever wins the bake-off affects us to the other person and control just as

context we've competed 54 times 10 were 54 now so we're yet to lose sure that will happen sometimes in terms of great lots and I want to go quickly through this machine learning has radically simplified what do you a manager does during the day so it's gone from intraday quantitative analysis into creative analytics and enough focus on making frequent changes we believe that the next year you're an app is all around the creative testing so as you move down this lifecycle of changes that they continue to make even post February creative taking a bigger and bigger role so part of what Tom laid out was this concept of automatic dating Facebook wants over control automatic places right at the right person at the right time on the right part of their network they want control is it a look-alike audience is it high value low value it's better if you give them control

they now have campaign budget optimization where they will automatically allocate ad set budgets between AD sets or you which is why I'm saying a traditional ad tech stack is going to suffer if a token of all because only Facebook truly has the data and they're making changes in your real time and then dynamically with optimization allows you to do things like a native thumbs to the appropriate person so in wrapping this up how can you work with us in one of three ways to create a marketplace and for full transparency all of our pricing on our site so it's slash pricing the Creator marketplace is per-unit managed services of the percentage of send and our satisfied form is also a percent decide can I answer any questions you look oh yeah I'm kinda thirsty really interesting the whole kind of different approaches you know idear getting to be able to be really

talkative I think are useful from what you seem to be saying this movement in a little bit I think three slips doing this because they want very small advertisers and very big advertisers to compete on a level playing field so it really sophisticated split testing and creative testing infrastructures in place that allow small guys to very efficiently compete with big eyes so you can kind of bifurcate the strategy and bring help on the creative side you'll find that you're you a manager when they get the account in this new structure will have more time to focus on creative testing you can yell well I just we don't video for you get worked right otherwise you're right with it thank you so much a great talk my

question has to do is can you talk a little bit about UAC as well I know the most of the talks on Facebook but you know how others USC fit in the mix and as somebody was trying to think about the Mesa advertisement Oh should we just focus on Facebook should we even consider you a see thank you sure so it depends where you are understand velocity say if you're sending less than half a million dollars from on Facebook folks on Facebook when you've reached a half a million universal audio to some other channels UAC is behaving very similarly to Facebook's algorithm meaning it's much less work to get them to function well however they're still a bit behind I would expect some large announcements from them by the end of summer in terms of how their platform is maturing at least that's a conversation you have with them it only goes Facebook first Google seconds and then depending on what you have you know unity Apple open will go a variety a little ad networks but once you get Facebook right you get

the audience to age the gender the demographics of psychographics a look and feel and then it's much easier to expand from that into tertiary or secondary add numbers anymore freedom oh yes yeah thank you so much I was wondering that last slide if you could explain the different services a little bit how they how they differ and if you guys also help with media buying or is it just the aggregation thank you managed services be variants all getting all great of all optimization so in case of blue mobile for example we are there Excel for the teammates and people running they if they do that any given week they get it we do better so it's all inclusive all

grated all hitting all optimization on the creative side you can work with us just to do creative and there are a variety of companies that are doing that like jam city and GSN help you so there's a variety of companies that need help on the creative or video side and that's isolated in its selling product either you can do it yourself and write the greater people we will do it for you there's no incremental cost just we have a sense for what's working across many verticals and we'd like to be able to help out and then the last side is the SAS platform so it's a you know like super power editor and to be honest I would not recommend it right now I would wait for a month where we are looking the whole platform on its head to be a creative creative analytic platform where we put creative first and the ability to analyze videos and images it's pretty damn exciting and what will what will release and in a week or two will be substantially better and the reason for this Busch as I mentioned is

Facebook literally it's me put a whole industry on our head mid-february we had to kind of figure out what the heck has changed so all two manufacturers need to rapidly evolve because of the moment as from by them being very smart in the way optimization worse [Music] [Music]