What to Do With Your Marketing Budget if Facebook Is No Longer Performing
“When it all, it all falls down, And when it falls down, who you gon' call now?”
- Kanye West
How odd that Facebook’s platform is about the same age as Kanye’s The College Dropout? The parallels end there (sorry, I’ve been watching the Kanye documentary and it’s top of mind).
So your Facebook ad management platform game is crumbling as fast as Meta’s stock?
I hear you, and feel you. As the number 1 source of advertising for most of our clients, the ripple effect from iOS 14 changes- and the heavy reduction of available data on Facebook advertising- has been profound as we see both return on advertising spend (ROAS) decline and an overall poorer new customer conversion rate.
We’re frequently answering the calls that ask “Is this happening to everyone?” and “What can we do to stop it?”
The immediate short answers are “yes” and “not much.” We can’t stop the attribution issues on Facebook as this is a global issue caused by a few major corporations. But we can seek alternatives to improve our understanding of what ads are working best, and where we should allocate our ad dollars.
The first thing to do when you evaluate your advertising strategy in a crumbling cookieless world- and trust us, this is not the last time we will face increased privacy and limited visibility into online behaviors- is gain a real sense of the magnitude of changes to your business.
Answer these questions:
Has your total ROAS (ad attributed revenue/ad spend) changed in the last 6 months vs the previous year?
How has your total Marketing Expense Ratio (all revenue/ad spend+fees) changed?
How is the Facebook / Instagram ROAS compared to other channels such as Google Search, Youtube, etc?
If performance is down, consider shifting strategies and consider shifting your measurement strategy as well.
Here are some intelligent ways we’ve seen clients reallocate their Facebook ad dollars:
Create more owned media, investing in organic content for your website, organic social and blogs
Shift your media budget to top performing channels that occupy a similar place in the funnel. We’ve seen some clients have great success moving dollars from Facebook to Pinterest ads.
Try something new. Take 10%-20% of your media budget and try Tiktok, or if you are heavily tied to local business, we’ve seen great awareness increases from Spotify and Youtube targeted at the zip code level.
Try to change your target audience on Facebook ads. The reps, and our performance in Ads Manager, shows that broader audiences are working better, as are bigger percentage allowance (i.e. 5-7% vs 1-2%) Lookalike audiences.
Invest in 1st party data gathering: email / lead ads and tighten up/create Klaviyo flows
Before you make these changes (or maybe even in tandem with them), consider opening up your measurement strategy to a more platform agnostic analytics tool such as Northbeam or Triple Whale. These can help give you a wider perspective of how all of your ad channels work together to drive sales. Investments range based on page views for these tools between $500-$5000, so you’ll need to work with a rep to implement these solutions.
After 1 month of trying some new things, circle back on performance and reassess. We recommend NOT looking at things every day. It’s hard to see trends and easy to push the freakout button. Think of advertising like the stock market in many ways. Just because your portfolio dips for a couple days by a few points, it doesn’t mean you should sell off everything and start over.
Still struggling with where to start? Give us a shout. We’d be happy to help out.