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Workshops · BFCM 2024 · English · Day 2 - Workshop

(4) Meta Media Buying During Black Friday

(4) Meta Media Buying During Black Friday

  • In what context do we operate?
  • Clear numbers, easy decisions
  • Media Buying summarized by phases of BFCM
  • Ad Account Structure
  • Testing Strategy
  • Optimization
  • Retargeting
  • Horizontal Scaling
  • Vertical Scaling
  • Common problems and solutions
  • Security and best practices

In what context do we operate?

  1. A lot of competition
  2. High CPMs
  3. The auction is everything
    (“The ROAS is guaranteed, delivery and reach are NOT”)

Basically: Every time there is an opportunity to show your ad, an auction occurs (every millisecond). In that auction, you compete against other advertisers. The advertiser with the highest total value wins and successfully delivers their ad.

  • Advertiser Bid: This is essentially how much you are willing to pay to get a purchase.
  • EAR (Estimated Action Rate): What is the likelihood that if I deliver your ad instead of your competitor's, the expected outcome (a purchase) will be achieved?
  • Ad Quality: Is it a good ad, does it follow the policies, and will it be relevant to the user?

Highest possible total value

  • Overbidding
  • Out of the learning phase
  • Winning ads (engagement, following policies, …)

You set the bid yourself.

Then, you can analyze the EAR and ad quality with "ad relevance diagnostics."

  1. Quality Ranking: How the perceived quality of your ad compares to other ads targeting the same audience
  2. Engagement Ranking: What the engagement rate of your ad is compared to other ads aimed at the same audience
  3. Conversion Rate Ranking: How your ad's conversion rate compares to other ads that have the same optimization goal and compete for the same audience

*You can’t always see these metrics, a bit strange

Clear numbers, easy decisions

Clarity in:

  • Minimum ROAS you can tolerate on Meta
    (High volume, still profitable)
  • Minimum Blended ROAS you can tolerate
    (Shopify revenue / Meta ad spend)


Media Buying summarized by phases of BFCM

Phase #1: Since you start until November 24th (Sunday)
This is the period before the Black Week,

The period before high high demand.

  • Maximum focus on TESTING

Efficiency doesn’t matter,

Consolidating ad sets for maximum delivery doesn’t matter,

Look for finding the best of the best combination of assets

  • Offer
  • Ad creative format
  • Ad creative angle
  • Landing page
  • Manual Bid
  • (...)

  • Collage first launch
  • Collage sneaker
  • Collection Ad

Where do you see initial traction?

In this period, CPMs will still be “normal”.

Just be aware that the conclusions are semi-solid.

Phase 2: BLACK WEEK

  • Mix of testing and scaling
  • The testing becomes REAL now because demand is high

  • But you need to already start scaling

If I want to spend €10k on Black Friday, I need to at least spend €3k on the day before (Thursday).

How much you can spend during the Black Week, determines in part, how much you’ll be able to spend profitably during Black Friday.


  • Testing the scalability, what’s best for your scaling? You can’t figure everything out on Friday, it must be before:


Advantage+ or CBO?
Where do I see better CPMs, manual bid or automatic?
What’s the best converting landing page?
Which manual bidding works best?

Compared to what I was doing before the Black Week:

  • Leadgen
  • ABO testing 1 campaign
  • Maybe 1 advantage+

Now check the amount of campaigns added:

PHASE 3: Black Friday (November 29th - December 2nd)

  • ABO Testing campaigns: leave the winning ad sets and even scale them vertically
  • Efficient delivery and scale will be in
    Advantage+, Advantage+ Cost Cap
    CBO, CBO Cost Cap, CBO Bid Cap
  • During BFCM I prefer vertical scaling,
    You still can duplicate and scale horizontally,
    But just pushing budgets is better as you don’t start from scratch and you have the advantage of having previous sales

Ad Account Structure

In general, nothing changes compared to other flash campaigns:

  • Testing campaigns
  • Retargeting campaigns
  • Scaling campaigns

Another example,

  • The ABO winners cascade into CBOs and Advantage+ campaigns
  • Just make sure you build your “Architecture” of campaigns before Black Friday

As an example:

  • 11th-24th: Testing creatives and finding winner ads
  • 24th-28th: Testing where do those winner ads scale better,
    Advantage+, Advantage+ Cost Cap
    CBO, CBO Cost Cap, CBO Bid Cap
  • 29th-2nd (BFCM):
    Hyperscaling your winning creatives in winning architecture,
    Advantage+_(Winners Mix)_CostCap100
    CBO_(Winning Images)_BidCap120
    CBO_(Winning Videos)_BidCap120

    ABO testing BF
    ABO bf 24h urgency

Evergreen
Evergreen

RET BF

Testing Strategy

  • The testing setup is nothing crazy, ABO testing
  • 1 ad per ad set or 1 concept per ad set
  • It’s very important WHAT you decide to test
  • It must have a determining impact for Black Friday

    Image vs Video (ROAS, CPM, CTR)
    Offer 1 vs Offer 2 (ROAS, CPM, CTR)
    Evergreen creatives vs BF creatives
    Ad format 1 vs Ad format 2
    Product page vs Collection page
    Collection page vs Listicle (CVR -> Trident)
    Angle 1 vs Angle 2
    Cost Cap Overbidding vs Bid Cap Overbidding
    Dynamic ads vs Static (ROAS, CPM, CTR)

    These are relevant tests, the result I get out of the tests really determines what I will scale during Black Friday

We stop testing on the 28th (Thursday).

Before BF, of course the ROAS is important, but do not only check the ROAS.

The ROAS also depends on market demand, conversion rate, the weather, the news, etc.

But the CTR doesn’t lie. If the ad is really good, you’ll see good traffic metrics. So also check the CTR.

Optimization
Pre-Black Friday: Monitor your KPIs. If the ROAS isn't being met and you've spent the AOV, turn off the ad set (approximately).

CLASSIFICATION

  • Promising: Ads that during Black Week have very very good CTR and CPM, good engagement, but weak ROAS.
  • False Winners: Ads that during Black Week have poor CTR, poor CPM, no engagement but have profitable purchases, amazing ROAS,…
  • Unicorns: Good CTR, good CPM, good ROAS.
  • Shit: Poor CTR, poor CPM, poor ROAS. Turn off.

By the time you reach Black Friday, you really should only have winning assets:

  • There’s no question about: should I turn it off
  • It’s only about scaling it or leaving it at low-mid budget

________________________________________________________










If you get to BFCM with an architecture of campaigns where you have lots of scaling campaigns, then monitor them and the ones that don’t perform well, turn them off.

  • CBO
  • CBO cost cap A
  • CBO cost cap B
  • CBO bid cap A
  • CBO bid cap B
  • Advantage+
  • Advantage+ cost cap A
  • Advantage+ cost cap B

Retargeting

These are the low hanging fruits.

This should be easy conversions.

We want to cover all types of retargeting, and most importantly, we want to reach everybody, here’s my plan:

  1. Recover the short term add to carts and short term website visitors
    → 7 days
    → Added to cart or viewed content (also can be “all website visitors”)
    → More aggressive
    → If you can have BF ad copy, better, URGENCY, PUSH
    → “Black Friday ending soon… Finish your order today!”

  2. Reach everyone who showed interest in the past (scales well)
    → 180 IG engagers
    → 180 FB engagers
    → 180 All website visitors
  3. Convert existing customers and increase LTV
    → All past clients
    → All the leads you’ve captured
  4. *Retargeting with REACH objective (mix audiences)
    During Black Week →     “Black Friday Sale is LIVE” “Limited Time”
    During Black Friday → Urgency Ads
  5. If you have A LOT of website traffic and let’s say, you spend >1k per day, try to do a 1-3 day reach retargeting. You want to maximize reach on the people who show purchasing intent. But also you want to avoid your competitors from stealing those potential customers.

High frequency retargeting, no fear!!

  • Frequency of 5 in the last 2 days is ok


Just don’t over scale it because they charge higher CPMs.

Horizontal Scaling


November 1st to 24th:

  • Manage your campaigns as if this was an evergreen campaign.
    Keep on duplicating the things that work.
    Build scaling campaigns.
    Follow KPIs.
  • Please be intentional with the “campaign architecture” and build something that can intentionally last the whole black friday campaign
    “Develop campaigns that get to BFCM being smart”

During the Black Week

  • Build the campaign architecture and perfect it

These 2 scaling campaigns were created on the 19th last year (5 days before Black Friday), and they were the best:

Horizontal scaling will diversify your ad spend.

This means = lowering your risk.

Nobody knows how BF 2024 will perform, but I’m not investing 50% of my budget into 1 advantage+ campaign, for example.

Diversify.

How do we scale horizontally? Options:

At a small scale, just duplicate a winning ad set and…

  • Add your winning cost cap
  • Add your winning bid cap
  • Make a small change in the ad creative
  • Change the URL

At bigger scale, look for stacking, consolidating and efficiency into bigger campaigns to have more scalability and consistency:

  • Duplicate 3-10 winning ads → Advantage+
  • Duplicate 3-10 winning ads → Advantage+ Cost Cap
  • Duplicate 3-10 winning ads → CBO
  • Duplicate 3-10 winning ads → CBO Cost Cap
  • Duplicate 3-10 winning ads → CBO Bid Cap

Example of an efficient campaign + overbidding:

CBO_CostCap100_(Mix winner ads)

  • Ad set 1: images about wrinkles (3 imágenes)
  • Ad set 2: images about beauty (2 images 2 women)
  • Ad set 3: video UGC, results, reactions
  • Ad set 4: vídeo UGC, tutorial

✅ Overbid

✅ Creative diversification

You can diversify the media buying by creating an advantage+ campaign with the cost cap 100, with all the 7 ads inside.

Benefits of diversifying the media buying:

Vertical Scaling

This is important for the 4 days of BFCM.

It’s better to push budget on winning assets rather than keep on duplicating in the middle of Black Friday.

Also please, start scaling budget as much as possible during the black week,

Your black week budget determines your black friday budget.

  • 18th: ad spend 5k
  • The day before Black Friday: 10k
  • Black Friday: 23k
  • It’s easier to get to 23k if I spend 10k the day before

How to scale vertically during the Black Week:

  • Daily 20-50% increases if KPIs are achieved
  • I check yesterday and also today + last 2 days,
    Check both for double confirmation
  • If a lot of oxygen, 40-50%
  • If it’s good but ROAS is not amazing, 20-30%

50% sounds like a lot, but if you have an ad set at 20€ it’s just scaling to 30€.

Or from 50€ it’s just scaling to 75€.

----

Of course wave surfing is vertical scaling, we’ll see it in the next modules.

Common problems and solutions

  • Ad set appears as active, but not delivering
    Duplicate
    Also when possible, schedule your ads
  • Ad set not spending 100% of the budget
    Duplicate
    Or if it’s manual bidding, raise the bid 10%
  • Very high CPC
    It’s normal

    But if it’s extremely high in a few ads → isolate the ads with lower CPC and squeeze those with horizontal duplication

    If it’s extremely high in the whole ad account → vertical scaling doesn’t make sense because you will get more of the same, so you have to do more horizontal scaling, test more things, until you find a combination where CPC is not so crazy

    This is the reason why previous testing is super important
  • If it’s due to huge CPM, but CTR is good, we’ll check in the CPM module
  • If it’s because of CTR, but CPM is decent, then it’s the ad creative and you must improve it or substitute it.

Automatic Rules

  • Mainly Stop Loss
  • If ad set spend is >200
  • And ROAS <2
  • In the last 24h
  • And the machine runs a check every 24h
  • Then turn off ad
  • If ad set spend is >200
  • And ROAS <3
  • In the last 24h
  • And the machine runs a check every 24h
  • Then decrease daily budget by 40%

Security and best practices

  • If your ad gets rejected, don’t just delete it or simply turn it off; you must correct it so that Meta sees you have learned from the mistake and approves that ad instead of leaving a black mark
  • Schedule your ads if on Black Friday for any reason you need to post new ads. This way you avoid long review times.
  • Backup ad account/page/…
  • Updated payment method with no billing limits
  • Check Shopify every hour or two to make sure it hasn't gone down, that there's no bottleneck failing at checkout, cart, or anything else (i.e., at most you lose 1-2 hours)
  • Automatic Rules in Meta
  • Put an emoji on campaigns where you do wave surfing and have strong budgets, so you can see them more easily and pay more attention to them

Doubt:

  • Can you manually boost the “Engagement Ranking” in ad diagnostics to have higher total value in the auction (lower CPMs)?
    → Option 1: engagement campaign with post ID
    → Send the link to the ad post to 3 friends

    Only on winner ads,
    Imagine it’s Tuesday of the Black Week, to get to Black Friday with a “matured winning ad”

  • Ask Vanesa and Peter

  • ADVANTAGE+ EXCLUDING EXISTING CUSTOMERS
    (you can’t exclude engaged audience)
    → 10% if the budget is not huge
    → 2% otherwise
Synced from Manel’s Google Drive · images and tables are shown as in the original doc