The Media Buyer Index #16

Welcome to The Media Buyer Newsletter, where we deep dive into the latest ecomm data (powered by Northbeam) to see what trends, anomalies, or interesting findings we can uncover. We keep it simple with three sections: The raw numbers, a quick summary, and our key takeaways.

In our 16th installment of The Media Buyer Newsletter, we’re digging into Meta, exploring Advantage+ campaigns and sharing some cool links we found. Let’s dig in.

The Summary

No index this week on Google budget split - we're reworking that data this week.

The effects of last Sunday's "Meta meltdown" are clear. Meta's CPMs (+4.49%), CPC (+7.29%) and CACs (+10.10%) are up by stunning levels, even when diluted by six other days of data. ROAS is down on virtually every channel - a sign of Meta's dominant role in the funnel. Most channels like Tiktok and Google remain relatively stable, good news for omnichannel brands. Still, a difficult week overall for advertisers, less so for those lucky (or brave) enough to leave their Meta spend on throughout Sunday and the rest of the week.

The Takeaway

The impacts from Meta’s bugs are going to be felt for a long time. Lots of campaigns are not back to “business as usual” and even previously-performing ads are struggling. This feels like a soft reset for advertisers. Challenge any assumptions you have from before the bug. Reporting feels delayed, wrong, or piecemeal. Many of our brands still aren’t back to normal, and it’s hard to know how long it will take.

We’re hearing that Meta will be issuing refunds automatically for brands affected by last Sunday’s bug, and that no claim is required. This may take “a few weeks” according to Meta’s client comms. It’s unclear what will be reimbursed or what accounts are eligible. Our previous advice remains: stay in constant contact with your Meta account rep to ensure you get reimbursed quickly and properly.

ICYMI: Meta announced they will be “phasing out” onboarding of new shops without checkout on Facebook and Instagram enabled. These changes will happen slowly over the next year. These changes will help Meta track conversions with even higher accuracy, which would improve their AI-driven advertising systems. This is also the latest shot fired in the social media “walled garden” war. Make sure you have checkout enabled on both Facebook and Instagram right now: we know TikTok is prioritizing their own shop-enabled ads, so Meta probably won’t be far behind.

Advantage+ is crushing it. Here’s some tips, tricks and insights we’ve heard:

1. Struggling to scale more than 2-3 assets in your ASC campaigns? Try “manually segmenting” your creative out by product, landing page, etc. into separate ASC campaigns. This will allow you to horizontally scale while ensuring potentially winning creative actually gets spend.
   
2. ASC is working because it’s helping people target audiences they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) before. What many advertisers saw as strategic targeting was actually limiting their accounts. Barry Hott says it best here.
   
3. Add your customer lists at the account level. This will allow you to better target and report against new vs returning customers with ASC, but a lot of people missed this.

Now, a collection of helpful things we found this week:

1. A guide for using ChatGPT to help with SEO: discover what your brand should be talking about.
2. A step-by-step workflow for shooting ad creatives with actors on set: make better ads faster with real-time feedback.
3. A lean P&L framework for DTC businesses under $2m revenue: break that revenue ceiling with excellent fundamentals.

Extras

In this week's webinar, we hosted Nehal Kazim, founder of Ad Pros and fan of Northbeam. He showed us how to benchmark with Northbeam so you can scale your business predictably while creating alignment across your organization's paid media goals.

Important Links:

The deck: download here.

The SOP: download here.

The template: download here.

Looking forward:

Join us at the virtual DTCx Media Buyer Summit in June! You’ll learn the newest tactics for media buying, meet with the smartest minds in the biz, and prepare yourself for the future of performance marketing. Plus we’ll be speaking, so come say hi.

Happy media buying!

Join us next Monday at 10:30 AM PST / 1:30 PM EST for the weekly Media Buyer Webinar, where we’ll discuss these trends in greater detail. Come with your questions and takeaways! We’ll see you there.

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