Holiday season campaigns need to hit the mark. It’s a time of great opportunity for brands but also a period when the marketplace is at its most crowded and frenetic. Greater speed and agility, combined with customized creative can ensure a happy holiday experience.
For more than two years, Meta’s suite of Advantage+ tools have been turbocharging brands’ capabilities but now their Generative AI investment stretches further, into text and image generation, to further enhance the effectiveness of campaigns.
AI can help brands every step of the way from creative variations to increased automation of the entire process, leading to greater optimization and greater cost and time effectiveness.
In a recent study of US advertisers, Meta found that Advantage+ shopping campaigns drove $4.52 in revenue for every dollar spent. Meta’s AI investments have increased the overall average return on ad spend (ROAS) 12% since 2022.
The full picture
For the first time, brands can create full image variations (with text overlay capabilities) inspired by their original ad creative.
This tool gives brands almost limitless scope to reimagine the way their product is presented to the consumer. Within this feature, it’s also possible to provide text prompts to help Meta better tailor the creative variations they offer to a brand.
Image expansion is a feature that enables creative assets to be automatically adjusted for different aspect ratios. This is available on Reels and Feed across both Instagram and Facebook, and can now work seamlessly with text overlays on ads.
“Meta's investments in AI for advertisers have resulted in consistent performance for our business and allowed Casetify to focus on more creative and strategic work like building a creative diversification strategy,” said Wesley Ng, founder and CEO, Casetify. Ng added that the use of Meta’s GenAI Background Generation feature led to a 13% increase in ROAS.
Choose your words carefully
The text generation feature is available in Meta Ads Manager and enables advertisers to create a range of text variations to increase customer engagement. The feature can generate up to five variations of primary text and headlines, highlighting keywords and key selling points.
Taking Advantage
Among Meta’s AI-powered Advantage tools, Advantage+ shopping campaigns automates targeting, delivery and placement of ad campaigns. Marketers can also use budget scheduling when setting up Advantage+ shopping campaigns.
Advantage+ catalog ads automatically provide product recommendations within carousel ads based on a customer’s interests. Advertisers can provide people with more engaging product information with product-level videos in their campaigns. Advantage+ catalog ads also make Reels shoppable, allowing customers to swipe through multiple products at once.
Using Meta Advantage+ enables brands to get better results with fewer, more efficient campaigns. It’s easier for advertisers to reach more people likely to be interested in their products and deliver better-targeted, more personalised customer journeys. In the process, campaigns become more time and cost-effective.
32%
Increase in ROAS when using Advantage+ shopping campaigns
26%
Improvement in average cost per acquisition when using Advantage+ app campaigns
14%
More incremental purchases per amount spent when using Advantage+ creative
5X
Increase in reach when using Advantage custom audience
Four festive tips: how to take advantage of the seasonal spree
#1 Plan
Decide your budget in advance, guided by auction trends for high-volume periods when conversion rates and purchase intent increases. You can allocate budget to top-performing ads using Advantage+.
#2 Experiment
Meta’s A/B test tool can help brands amplify their performance. The first stage is to create a hypothesis to be tested. It’s important that the test sets are significantly different from each other so results are conclusive. For example, don’t choose two age demographics that are too close to each other. Only one variable should be tested at a time and ad tests should run for at least two weeks.
#3 Maximize
Weekly reports will show how campaigns are performing and allow for tweaks to improve short-term results. Reviewing creative strategies – keeping the ones that work and losing the ones that don’t – help optimize performance as does incorporating delivery deadline messaging which injects urgency into the campaign.
#4 Sustain
The period between mid-December product delivery cut-offs and late January – commonly known now as Q5 – is a hugely fertile period for brands when CPM can dip significantly. Purchase intent remains high during this time with 41% of festive shoppers continuing to buy beyond the festive period (according to the Meta Seasonal Holiday Study).
Happy Holidays
54%
Of holiday shoppers discovered brands or products on Meta technologies
55%
Of holiday shoppers reported Meta platforms helped influence their holiday purchases
77%
Of Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers said Meta technologies influenced their decision to purchase
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