Today in Digital Marketing - BONUS: An Inside Look at Meta's Performance Product Roadmap

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

Kristen Durkin, Meta's Marketing Product Director for Ads, walks through their roadmap of upcoming ad products they say will impact campaign strategies in the years ahead.-Each day this week, we are putting an extra episode in your feed — earlier this month Meta recently held its Performance Marketing Summit. Since Meta is such a big part of many marketers' spend, we are replaying some of the most relevant presentations from the summit.This is not a paid placement — Meta hasn't paid for this, and didn't ask us to do this. Also, of course, these are Meta reps at a Meta conference, so it's pretty heavily promotional, sometimes comically so. That said, there are some pretty important things discussed in these sessions — like their take on AI modeling, how they see the future of creative, and a bunch more.If this isn't your jam, you can just delete these — our regular daily newscasts will continue to come your way.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Each day this week, we are putting an extra episode in your feed. Earlier this month, Meta held its Performance Marketing Summit. Since Meta is such a big part of many marketers' spend, we are replaying some of the most relevant presentations from the summit. I should note, this is not a paid placement. Meta hasn't paid for this. They didn't ask us to do this. Also, of course, these are Meta reps at a Meta conference, so it's pretty heavily promotional,

sometimes comically so. That said, there's some pretty important things discussed in these sessions, like their take on AI modeling, how they see the future of creative, and a bunch more. If this isn't your jam, you can just delete these. Our regular daily newscasts will continue to come your way. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen.

Today's episode is from a session they did called An Inside Look, Meta's Performance Product Roadmap. Kirsten Durkin, the company's market product director for ads, walks through their roadmap of upcoming ad products that will impact your campaign strategies in the year ahead. I've worked at Meta alongside our ads product and engineering teams for nearly nine years and the best part of the job have always been the times where we are in the room with all of you. Lately we've been making the most out of our ability to travel and get back in the office with each of you and we've been hearing a lot from you in terms of what's working and what's not. You've been giving us lots of feedback, and the feedback is so valuable with regards to

what we need to build and how we can improve the features of our solutions. Lately, you've been telling us that you've been tasked with doing more with less. Less people, less resources, less budget. And so we know that every minute that you spend on our platform and every dollar that you spend with Meta needs to deliver impactful results. It's through these conversations with partners like you that have influenced our strategic priorities, our roadmap, and ultimately today's session. I want to bring this to life. Before I jump into today's content, which you will hear about more AI, it's through conversations with many of you that have shaped the priorities up here.

Some of these priorities include, one, AI and automation. This is all about driving performance and making the most out of every dollar that you spend on meta. Two, engaging experiences. This priority aims to create meaningful connections between people and your business using our consumer experience. Three, reducing advertiser friction. We have heard you. Our goal is to make it easier for you to drive performance while removing as much friction in your day-to-day experience as possible.

And four, building for verticals. Where necessary, we do want to ensure that we both understand and solve for areas of unique vertical needs. Now, reducing friction in your day-to-day and ensuring that your platform is stable, reliable, and healthy, this is something that our teams are focused on across our roadmap. From the most senior of our leadership down to the individuals on our product teams, this underpins our entire roadmap. And with regards to solving for verticals,

we've refocused several areas of our product team in order to ensure that we're unblocking key use cases where unique needs for certain verticals might exist. Now, you'll see some of this reflected in our features and products, but for today, I want to walk you through how we intend to help you save time and budget more efficiently by honing in on two of our strategic priorities, AI and automation, and engaging experiences. The first one is AI and automation. This is a topic that you're going to hear a lot about. Luckily, you all want to. I want to talk to you about how AI fuels our products,

including our meta-advantage portfolio. And then you have engaging experiences. This is all about helping you connect with your customers in order to drive results across our family of apps by using products that are really an extension of our consumer experience, the consumer experience that people have come to depend on our apps and services for. Together, these investments help businesses like yours

maximize performance on meta. So let's dive in. As everyone in this room knows, AI is having a moment, and it's for good reason. For us at meta, AI isn't new. It's underpinned our apps and services since the earliest days of newsfeed in 2006. As Simon mentioned, we are betting big on AI. Later in the day, you'll hear from my colleague, Matt Steiner. He'll talk to you about where we are investing in AI. These investments are foundational to the infrastructure of our ad platform. He'll also talk to you a bit about generative AI. For now, I get to share with you how we're applying AI more broadly and deeply across our products to improve advertising performance and help make campaigns easier to set up and to manage.

A lot of this is through meta advantage. This is our portfolio of AI-powered automation business tools that help you maximize the performance of every dollar that you spend on meta. We think of meta advantage in two ways. The first are our end-to-end complete campaign solutions. These products are really designed to be the most efficient way for you to reach your customers and help you achieve your campaign goals by applying AI across all steps of the campaign. The latest product here that we released is Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns. I will speak to our improvements there momentarily.

Second, we offer single-step advantage solutions. These help you leverage the power of AI in individual steps of your campaign while keeping other criteria of your campaign more specifically defined. We're making improvements here to add AI to your creative, audience targeting, as well as some improvements in catalog ads. Jumping into our complete campaign solutions, last year we launched Advantage Plus Shopping campaigns. This is an ideal solution for e-com, retail, and direct to consumer online sellers. With Advantage Plus Shopping

campaigns, you simply choose your business objective, you select your target country, you import ad creative. You set a budget. And then you allow our systems to do the rest, allowing for AI to optimize to find the right person with the right message at the right time. We are seeing significant performance improvements with Advantage Plus shopping campaigns. The results are why, as Simon said, it is our fastest growing product.

And we plan to keep the momentum going. We're releasing new features and enhancements to advantage plus shopping campaigns that we're hoping will make a big impact. Starting with you can now turn your manual sale campaigns into advantage plus shopping campaigns with just one click. Before, you had to create a brand new campaign from scratch, which we continuously heard was taking time and resources. Not anymore, with a single click, you can now turn a manual sale campaign into an Advantage Plus

shopping campaign. We've also heard you loud and clear that it's important for you to maintain some control when using AI to reach your customers and audience. That's why we're releasing two new features to enhance our targeting to enable you to adhere to any business constraints that you might have. The first is minimum age constraints and the second is our ability to exclude locations. These are for the people in the room who have been itching to try Advantage Plus shopping campaigns,

but have non-negotiable business restrictions in who you can reach with your ads. For example, if you advertise to an over 21 demographic, or if you have shipping restrictions to certain states, these products and features will be helpful to you. Now you're able to choose a minimum age anywhere from 19 up to 25, as well as exclude locations you're unable to ship to. And lastly, we want to help you view the performance of your Advantage Plus shopping

campaigns, especially relative to your manual sale campaigns. And so the performance comparison report allows you to do that. We will deliver insights to determine what's working and provide you with actionable guidance to help you enhance your AI-powered campaigns. Now, as Simon mentioned, we're also seeing great results when businesses add shops as a destination to Advantage Plus shopping campaigns. On average, businesses who add shops as a destination see a 20% improvement in ROAS and CPA. And we've recently made shop ads available to all checkout-enabled shops within the United States. So everyone can try it. I know there's a lot here, but we do truly believe

that these features and product improvements will help you get even more out of Advantage Plus Shopping campaigns. And for those in the room who have perhaps not tried it, perhaps entice you to give it a try. As I hope you can see, our end-to-end complete campaign solutions like Advantage Plus Shopping campaigns are powerful tools to help you reach your sales goals across a broad audience on our platform but we also know that sometimes you need your campaigns to do a more specific job that's why we offer advantage single step solutions think of these as building blocks that help you use the power of AI while keeping certain criteria of your campaign

more specifically defined. First, you can apply AI to components of your creative. We call these standard enhancements. These are a part of our Advantage Plus creative tools, and when you use them, we'll do things like automatically adjust the brightness and text placement across your ads. This is to help your ads perform better. On average, businesses saw a 14% increase in incremental purchases when they used this tool. It's a pretty small change with a really large impact. Next, we're testing a new product in meta advantage suite known as advantage plus audience.

This is a product that will help you reach customers that you may not have initially considered. Let me give you a quick example. Right now, when you go to set up a campaign, there is a section where you choose your audience. And if a brand that advertises, let's say baseball caps, goes in, they may tell us that they want to reach men ages 18 to 35 who like baseball and running. Seems fine, right? Of course they know who their audience is, but this can actually hurt performance. That baseball hat ad won't reach customers like me,

a woman over the age of 35 who has spent many of her summer days in Yankee Stadium, and who very proudly wears her hat all over San Francisco, including around my native San Franciscan partner. By using Advantage Plus Audience, you allow us to look outside of your set parameters to find people who are most interested to purchase your products. In cases like this, you'd find customers like me. We plan to make this available in Q3. Do you have business insurance?

If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. And the last AI-related investment I'll share today are two enhancements that we're making to Advantage Plus catalog ads.

One brings video to your catalog, and the other enables a more advanced local inventory capability. Let's start with harnessing the power of video. I'm excited to share that later this year, you'll be able to add video to your product catalog alongside static images. You can do this through Advantage Plus shopping campaigns or through standalone campaigns in catalog ads.

We want you to be able to combine the power of catalog ads with a video format for better storytelling. Whether you're partnering with a creator and you want to leverage a demo, or you're announcing a new product, you can now use video in your catalog, and our system will then dynamically show people the best content across feed, stories, watch, and reels. If a video is more likely to drive the conversion, then we'll serve video to people. But if not, we'll serve the static image. Automation will decide based on what

is most likely to help you achieve your campaign goals. This is another example of how AI and automation can really be put to work for you and your campaign performance. Now, for all of the retailers and omnichannel advertisers in the room, I'd like to shift to some exciting products that we're testing to enhance how people purchase products that are in stock and available with our local inventory product powered by Advantage Plus catalog ads. Now, you can promote availability, location, and pricing of an item, product, or service nearby, and our AI will do the work of ranking the products and dynamically serving them to the highest intent shoppers near the geographical location of the store or item.

We're testing these products now, and our goal is to continue to roll them out through the end of the year. So let's talk about how this can help improve holiday campaign performance. Let's say a person named Leo forgets to get a gift for their partner. It's two days before the holiday,

and they start to panic shop online. Then he remembers that their partner has been trying to get into golf. If you're a golf pro of America, which is not a real store, you can now have a video ad, or a video, potentially reach Leo, that serves ads of golf bags,

great golf outfits, golf tees, and that Leo's partner might be interested in. But the best part is that they're all available and in stock at Leo's local store. This is the type of holiday cheer that we know performance marketers love. AI touches a lot of what we do and how we do it, but the goal of each of these AI-driven solutions is to make your life easier while finding customers to drive the most efficient results across Meta.

Now, moving on to our engaging experiences. As Simon mentioned, there are over 3 billion people using at least one of our apps each day. With such a thriving and active community, we are committed to improving how we drive meaningful connections between people and businesses in the most seamless of ways. Ultimately, advertising is successful for you when we build for people first.

And our building for people first is how businesses are able to reach new customers through new and exciting ways starting with video. People interact with Meta's video content about 19 billion times a day. That means liking, commenting, resharing, and reacting. This includes Reels, which is our fastest growing content format and our short form video format. Who isn't guilty of getting a little swept up watching Reels and sharing them with your best friend?

I know I'm not alone, because people reshare Reels more than 2 billion times every day. Making Reels one of the best ways on our platform for you to find new customers and get more of your products and services into their hands. So we've been upgrading your Reels experience in a few new ways. We want your Reels ads to feel native and engaging to the consumer experience, both in how they look and how they sound. To make ads more native and perform better in the full screen immersive experience,

we've been testing and launching a variety of creative enhancements for images and non 9 by 16 ads. This includes everything from animated templates to resolution improvements to text optimization. Now, music and sound is also an integral part of the Reels experience. So last year we launched music optimization. This allows you to add over 10,000 songs of free music to your Instagram Reels image ads. You can now make selections around specific songs, tempo, or mood.

We're currently testing this on Facebook. We're also making ads more interactive. We're testing a larger call to action button with more information on Facebook and Instagram Reels ads. This is to help people who are interested in showing interest in your products take the next step to click. And we're rolling out new ways of navigating ads to stay engaged. Watch and browse allows people to pause a Reels ad and see a preview of a brand's website

or app store without leaving the ad itself. This makes for such a better user experience while still driving performance. This is now available on Facebook and we're testing it soon on Instagram. Next, to enable a more frictionless shopping experience, we're testing multi-destination carousel ad experiences for reels. Within it, people can easily swipe to see each product without leaving the reel

that they're watching. They can then go on to click and buy directly from the product page. What we're doing with each of these new experiences is leveraging how people use and experience the content on our apps, while ensuring that we build new ways for them to engage with brands like yours.

Now, this, of course, goes beyond brands creating fun reels. People come to our platform to be inspired by their favorite creators to discover new creators and if you're like me, to be easily influenced to buy that next piece of furniture from your favorite content creator. That's why we're making it easier for you to partner with creators through partnership ads. Now, you might partner with creators through partnership ads. Now, you might remember these as branded content ads. They allow you to amplify the content from a creator or other partner's handle in addition

to your brand handle to scale your collaborations. Brands can now boost more types of organic Instagram content as partnership ads. Now you can use Instagram collab posts with at mentions, people tags, product tags, and we've refreshed our permissions to support these additional use cases to make partnership ads easier than ever to use. With these changes, you can lean into the authenticity and engagement that creators bring to our platforms to resonate with your audience more than ever. Now, people are already following their favorite brands, celebrities, and TV series.

They want to be reminded when a product they love is releasing a new line or when the season finale of their favorite show is premiering. As consumers, we've all been there. We see an ad or an in-product feed post, and maybe it's for three weeks from now. And so we go on. And a reminder might actually be very welcomed. If you're like me, it's completely necessary.

Enter reminder ads. Reminder ads help you build awareness, anticipation, and consideration for upcoming moments. We've recently partnered with brands such as Starz to test this new format, and we're already finding that this is helping businesses announce, remind, and notify people of future events or launches that they might be interested in. As of last week, this is available to all brands. And in the spirit of making it easier to discover and find new products and services, we're making two updates to our lead generation products. Now, lead gen is not new, but we have received lots of feedback,

and we've continued to make and dial up our investment for lead gen. First, we're adding conditional logic so that your form can change dynamically based on how people respond to your survey questions. Second, businesses can now overlay instant forms on their web pages within our app browser. So people can engage with rich media and then easily submit their info using our autofill capabilities.

Given the climate, perhaps now than ever, people are always looking to save money. In fact, 85% of shoppers actively seek out promotions and offers before making a purchase. This is why we're experimenting with new ways to drive performance by tapping into people's desire to save money, discover, and manage deals. Now with promotional ads, you're able to extend your promotions and help shoppers save on products that they love from your brand, and help them score a deal,

whether it's for a first-time purchase or a seasonal promo you're running. They get a deal and you drive more sales. It's a win-win. Promotional ads are just one incentive-based product that we're testing right now, so if this is of interest, I would continue to watch this space. Billions of people come to our apps and services every day

to connect and share with friends and family, to watch video, to discover new products and services, or to connect and share with friends and family, to watch video, to discover new products and services, or to find that next deal. Our goal is to develop new ways for businesses like yours that integrate really seamlessly into the consumer experience that will delight customers and also lead to better performance for your business.

And that brings us to our final minutes together. I hope through our time together, you were able to see that we are deeply focused on developing products to maximize your performance on Meta during a time where we're all doing more with less. We believe our investments in AI and automation will result in stronger ad performance while also making the most out of your time.

We also believe that the engaging experiences we're building across our apps will ensure that businesses can drive meaningful connections with people that drive real business results. If you're wondering how you can take action, my recommendations are to, one, determine your always-on strategy for advantage plus shopping campaigns. All of the enhancements and features that I've discussed today are to help support more use cases. So if you've had reservations about the product or restrictions on the product, now is a good time to see if this fits your needs and give the product a try. Two, put Meta's investment in AI to work for your business.

Our single-step advantage solutions help improve elements of your campaign while allowing you to more specifically define criteria. You can use them either standalone or you can use them together. And three, take a test and learn approach by trying out any of our engaging experiences that we discussed today. Some are here and some are going to continue to roll out. Speak to your meta rep about taking part in our alphas and betas to see whether or not they're the right fit for you. And I want to say again that it is our conversations with partners like yourselves that have led to this product roadmap and many of the products

and features that we're announcing. The success of our roadmap really does depend on each of you. Thank you so much for your time.