Meta Ads Is Changing Fast, Here's How To Keep Up!

0:00People are doing different things on Facebook and Instagram than what they used to do. And that change in user behavior means that us Meta advertisers need to update our strategies as well. My agency is currently working on more than a thousand meta ad accounts, which allows us to test new strategies and new things all the time. And we've discovered something that is going to reshape meta ads best practices over the next few years. I'm going to share that with you in this video. So, I've got a statistic for you that really surprised me when I first heard it, and it really represents a big shift in meta user

0:29behavior, which us advertisers obviously have to respond to, and that's that Gen Z or Gen Zed is twice as likely to make a purchase without clicking on an ad. Now, that's not to say that advertising is becoming less effective to that generation. The the purchase that we're talking about here were still generated because of the ad. It's just that the people in that generation are more likely to purchase without actually clicking on it. The user journey from ad

0:55through to sale is becoming less neat. And there's a few different reasons for that. One of the the main ones is that that generation is far more likely to see an ad for something they might be interested in. Instead of clicking on it, coming through to the website, and purchasing in sort of a nice neat order order that we can easily track, they will bounce out and they will check some sort of third-party information to see is this thing actually any good? So, they're far more likely to look at reviews, uh, Trust Pilot, Google reviews, wherever they can find information, more likely to to take a

1:24look at influencers or creators that they may know operate in that space and have perhaps done some reviews of that sort of thing. And they they might trust that person's opinion already and think, okay, anything in in in the makeup space, I'm going to go to such and such and see if they like that brand to see

1:39if I might be interested in buying it. And that will apply to all sorts of different industries. people follow creators, influencers, and people that generation more so um than ever before. They're also like because the generation is more techsavvy, they're also more likely to bounce out of the ad sort of journey instead of just clicking the ad, coming through to the website, and then buying immediately and try and search around for discount codes. You know, we know there's tools that are available for that. You can do some searching to try and find that that sort of way. So, this new user behavior makes total sense. The fact that you might take a

2:08bit of time to look at reviews or seek out the opinion of a creator influence you trust makes it far more likely that if you do go ahead and buy that product, having found out, yeah, actually the general consensus seems to be that this thing is good, you're more likely to buy something that you are happy with, less

2:23likely to regret it later down the line. So, it makes total sense. I would expect to that trend to continue. The fact that Gen Z are twice as likely to go ahead and do that um as previous generations um is significant. This isn't a small shift, but it obviously creates challenges for tracking and attribution because instead of someone neatly sort of seeing an ad, clicking on it, coming through to your website and buying, very easy to track, they instead see an ad, don't click on it, search for the product name, take a look at the reviews, then pop the brand name or the product name into Google, search for it

2:54elsewhere, come straight through to the website and make a purchase that way. Or they find it on Amazon, or they've hunted down a discount code to make things even more complicated. much more difficult to then attribute the sale that's generated from that to the ad even though it was the ad that generated it and should be factored in. Can easily lead to significant under reporting of your ad results which makes it difficult for you as an advertiser to work out are these ads actually working? How well are

3:16they working? How profitable are they? uh but also for Meta to optimize because if Meta is not seeing as many conversions um as as the ads are actually generating then they're potentially missing out on data that can be used to optimize and we know how significant that is to your uh to your results. So there are some things that you can do to fix this problem to overcome it. Two main actions that I recommend you take. First I want to quickly let you know about our done for you Facebook and Instagram advertising services. So we can create, manage and optimize your ad campaigns. Almost certainly help you get significantly

3:46better results. take that workload off your hands, including things like overcoming this issue and helping with uh with attribution. If that sounds like a good deal, go ahead and click on the link in the video description below. You can book in a free no obligation call with one of my team members to find out more about how we might be able to help and hopefully we get a chance to work together. Okay, so what changes do you need to make as a meta advertiser to help overcome this issue? And this is particularly important if you find that meta is under reporting results. You're not able to accurately see your

4:12profitability, can't optimize properly as a result. So what should we look to do? Well, the first thing I'd like you to do is not only use click attribution. Okay, so just to quickly explain attribution windows and how that works. In fact, I'm going to jump into an example ad account. I've just created an example sales campaign. I've jumped to the adset level because here we have the attribution um settings. So underneath this conversion section, if we just scroll down, uh we've got show more settings. I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And then we've got this attribution setting here. If I click edit, we've got standard attribution or

4:42incremental attribution. I've got a whole separate video about incremental attribution. You can search for that on my uh on my channel and that video will pop right up. For the purpose of this video, I'm going to be talking about using standard attribution which is still the default. And then we have standard attribution selections. Okay. So, if I click into this, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about attribution windows. So, here by default we've got clickthrough 7 days. And what this means is that someone needs to have converted in this case as a sales campaign made a purchase within seven days of clicking on an ad in order for

5:15that conversion to be registered and that sale to be attributed to the ad campaign. Also allowing Meta to optimize for it um and therefore improve the campaign over time and for us to know how profitable all the important things but needs to happen within those seven days. Now this is set up to just have click-through conversions. someone has to click in order for them to go on uh once they convert for that to actually be counted and appear as a result in your ad account. But we've also got this section here view through right the default uh the selection there is none but we can change that to ad in one day

5:47and I would typically recommend that advertisers do this and I think it's becoming more and more important particularly with this shift in user behavior. If someone does exactly what I described, and a a Gen Z individual is more likely to do this than others, where they don't click on the ad, they instead search for reviews for the product name, then later come through to your website, then go ahead and and and make a purchase. They haven't clicked on the ad. So, if you just have it set up to do click-through conversion, that

6:13conversion is not going to be counted. Your campaigns are going to look less profitable than they are. Um, you're not going to be able to optimize properly. Meta is not going to have the data, all the negative issues we've talked about. Whereas if you add in view through conversions as the attribution window and the the max we can add in here is just one day. The defaults for the standard attribution windows by the way will vary depending on your campaign setup and structure. Uh it is just one day. So they still need to have done it within one day but that's better than not having that data. And we used to

6:41have much longer attribution windows. It was like 28 day click 28 day view and you could really see a lot of stuff. And that was great for a lot of businesses because a lot of businesses the sales cycle is quite long and if people don't typically convert within seven days, it's actually really useful to be able to have those longer windows um to see what your results actually are. For a lot of businesses, what this means is that your ads are going to under report

7:03and and uh that presents challenges. Obviously, you can try and work out by how much they're under reportporting on average and sort of factor that in. Okay, we know that our ad campaigns under report by 30% on average. Therefore, we're going to look at our data and know that in reality, they're 30% better all the time. But we always want to do what we can to get better data coming into our ad account. And I think for a lot of businesses, adding in view through conversions like I've just

7:26shown you here makes a lot of sense. Secondly, I'd recommend you set up the conversions API as well as just the Metaixel. A lot of advertisers are just using the Metapixel to track the results, the actions people take on their website, and you absolutely want to get the Metapixel set up. but also taking that extra step to get the conversions API set up makes a lot of sense. It's going to become more important with this change in user behavior because the conversions API is going to do a better job of matching up people who have purchased who haven't necessarily come through that neat sales funnel process where they click, they

7:58come through and they um make a purchase and that's it. That's the whole salesunnel, right? Where they do do other things and go around and there's more time in between. Conversions API is more likely to pick those up. So, I have videos on how to set up both the Metapix and conversions API. So, you can check those out. If setting up the conversions API feels a little bit too technical, and this will depend on what type of website you have. With some, it's just a really simple, easy integration. With others, it can be a little bit more um complicated, you can absolutely hire someone to do this for you very

8:24inexpensively. Upwork, Fiverr, something like that. Someone come in, get this set up, and uh well worth doing to make sure that you have that extra data just like we talked about. And thirdly, you can go one step further and ensure really high levels of data accuracy by using Hyros. Hyros is the best tracking and attribution software for meta ads. It's a software all the big players in this industry use, including myself. I use it to track results for my own ads as well as all my organic results as well. So if someone books a call for our done for you services, for example, I can see

8:52exactly where that person came from with a lot of accuracy. That allows me to make better decisions for my marketing and my business. High rose has been able to track that from our ad spend in this campaign we've generated 96,000 but £58,000 of that was not reported by meta. So if I was just looking at my data within my meta ad account I might come to the conclusion that this campaign is doing okay but in reality

9:14this campaign is doing a lot lot better. Now this is a relatively extreme example because of the nature of our business. So most of our products services have recurring billing elements. Meta might be able to see what we make initially from our ad spend on that initial transaction, but not those subsequent payments. That's why it it shows the importance here of being able to accurately see what we actually get from our ad spend in order to be able to make

9:37better decisions and optimize correctly. So, if you want to improve the performance of your ad campaigns without having to touch your ads, go ahead and sign up to Hyros. There is a link in the video description. Now, like I said, this is a trend that I think is going to continue to become more and more significant as Gen Z become more and more of the marketplace as they age and replace um other generations. And as future generations become of purchasing decision age, like when my kids grow up and and they start purchasing things, they're only more likely to do this. Uh there's also shifts amongst older people

10:07in their user behavior. How many people now are using things like chat GPT to verify whether or not something is good or worth doing before they purchase it? I've certainly done that. I' I've gotten in the habit of doing that and I found it really helpful. Going to go to a certain location on vacation and you think, "Oh, I just quickly see what CHBD thinks. Is this is this the best place for my circumstances?" Sometimes say, "Yes, sometimes actually would recommend you do this instead." Great. That's really useful information. Uh people are doing more and more of that with products. Uh if you're not doing it yet,

10:38there's a good chance that you will start doing it at some point as this becomes more and more common. Particularly as Google integrate AI mode into um regular Google search and it becomes more and more prevalent and maybe even the default within Google, people are going to get in the habit of verifying and checking and asking questions of things that they just didn't before. And I think a lot of that will be around purchasing decisions and

11:01trying to come up with the best option. I think in five years time it'd be very standard behavior for people to see an ad of something and grab the link to it, pop it into chat GPT or Google AI mode or whatever and say, "Is this the best version of this thing or is there actually something else that you'd recommend instead?" really simple way of finding out potentially a better alternative that could save the searcher tons of time if you it was a big considered purchase and before you had to spend hours sort of combing through reviews and going through lots of different options to find out well these

11:33tools are going to make that um a lot easier. It's also worth just quickly noting that because of that the best products and services are likely to win. that's going to benefit everyone unless you are operating a business in a niche where you obviously don't have the better products or services and that's going to force businesses to improve the quality of their stuff, improve the quality of their customer service and all those sort of things which is generally a good thing. So just really give that some thought like we put a lot of effort into our business not only to deliver a really good service but also

12:02to then collect and collect really good reviews. So, we have someone as part of our team. It's part of their job to ask the clients of ours that are getting fantastic results, would you mind leaving a review? Would you help us out? And have that regular touch point so that we can help encourage those actions. I think I would definitely recommend you do that, particularly if your potential customers are going to be taking those steps and doing more

12:26verification before purchasing. Obviously, this is going to impact some business more than others. if what you sell is very much an impulse purchase, probably less important than if it's more of a considered purchase, but probably a good idea to do for everyone um within the marketplace anyway and and put that as a higher priority as opposed to other things that we used to focus on. That's going to become more and more important. Now, attribution and how that impacts the correct optimization of your ad campaigns is all about data. Data is going to be one of the most important things, like I've already said, going forward for meta advertisers. The other

12:56is going to be creators. I think a lot more Facebook and Instagram advertisers should be using influence, should be using creators in their ads. One of the easiest, most reliable and effective ways to massively improve your results. And Meta have created a free tool called the creator marketplace that I demonstrate in a lot of detail in this video here. In the creator marketplace, you can find creators, you can connect with them, you can tell them exactly what it is that you're looking for, create whole campaigns, really easy to use, really a much easier way of actually connecting with creative influencers that can be quite a a

13:25challenge otherwise. So, if you haven't already, go ahead and check this out and uh give using creators a go in your ads.