If you are running ads on Facebook and have been relying on Facebook advertising to drive the majority of your eCommerce conversions, you’re most likely struggling with the current updates. In the last few weeks, performance on the platform, especially for lifestyle brands declined drastically. 

While we all have been discussing the iOS14 updates, what to expect, how to navigate within digital marketing groups, and with our clients for many months now, when the changes started to hit, it almost felt like we didn’t really know what’s going on. Partially it’s related to the communication from Facebook itself, and partially we somehow have been hoping for the best.

Now that more and more people started opting out from tracking, and even with the API integration, the data have been spotty. On a platform where many brands are optimizing towards conversion, with fewer numbers of conversions, it’s safe to expect a decline in performance. Another side note, especially for brands on Shopify, Shopify hasn’t been properly passing any data but Purchase back to Facebook since the beginning of the API integration. Extended data is to start on June 30th. 

There’s another factor we all have to discuss before navigating through iOS14 updates. And that is the world around us and consumer psychology. With many US cities almost completely open, and people finally having some sort of normalcy and freedom to do things they weren’t able to do for over a year, we can’t expect them to carry on with their online shopping behavior. Many people do have limited budgets, and now, as we all can tell, people are clearly and naturally – choosing experiences over products. We started seeing big declines in sales especially during weekends, which for lifestyle eCom are usually the strongest days. We need to allow this cycle to happen and be extra smart during these times with our budgets and strategy. Right now, we are not only navigating iOS14 and what to expect, but also a post-COVID world and people enjoying the outdoors (and in-person shopping), and life rather than tangible goods.

Back to iOS14 and Facebook marketing.

So what do we need to do to make sure we’re not wasting our money, but also making sure that we’re generating revenue and still growing? Cutting the Facebook budget completely is not a strategy many e-commerce brands can or should implement. It’s also not a smart strategy especially if you’re aiming for growth. We all need to test vigorously and find out the right strategy that works for each and every brand. We do need to be smart and adjust to survive. 

Some simple to follow strategies we’re working with our brand partners are

• Pulling site CAC, CPA, and ROAS rather than FB (channel) ROAS
• Comparing weekly conversions from Shopify Facebook channel to Facebook reported conversions to build your own predictive data
• Choosing an attribution tool that tracks their own data. Figure out the right attribution strategy for your business (linear, first touch/ last touch, etc)
• Adding an upper-funnel campaign to drive more traffic, adding more people to the funnel so we can still have a decent size audience to retarget and also, of course, generate more email conversions
• Building a better email/ text marketing strategy. We know first-party data is more important than ever. (On a side note, pay attention to iOS15 email browsing privacy updates. The email open rates/ click rates and many data points for email may not be as relevant starting September 2021.) Collect as many emails as possible. Sweepstakes, partnerships, anything relevant to your target market you could do to get data from them. Definitely separate these lists from your main subscribers while uploading those lists to FB to retarget or your ESP. Email conversion rates will be lower, but when we’re building retargeting campaigns, we don’t usually focus on the intend level of the first-time visitor. We target them no matter. So it might make sense to build the correct audience creative mix and collect as many relevant emails as we possibly can to feed the retargeting funnel. Also, testing out different landing pages for traffic campaigns to analyze email conversion rates will help.
• Creative: Building funnels, targeting second-timers with secondary points will still be a part of our strategy but we have to start telling a better brand story in our creatives. The rule of thumb is the same, the first 3 seconds need to capture attention. Test out different brand stories/ values in your assets. 
• More creative testing: We’ve been talking about this for years. Yet I still see brands running social advertising with 3-4 ads which are so very similar that it makes no sense to even put them side by side. There’s no way around this. Either find a partner who can also build your assets, or find the talent in-house, build partnerships with influencers but get a min of 8-10 assets a month to test out. Of course, these numbers will change based on your budgets, and we certainly aren’t talking about budgets lower than $10k a month. Test out variations of assets, UGCs, carousels, gifs, stills with lifestyle/ products. And also try whitelisting.

• Invest in ways to increase the conversion rates. If you don’t yet have installment payments like Afterpay, Klarna, Quadpay, Affirm, Shopify Pay, do add them to up the impulsive purchases. 
• If you can, increase your first purchase incentive or test out different first purchase incentives to compare the effectiveness. We want people to have enough reason to convert sooner.  

These are for sure extremely challenging times for digital marketings, more importantly, for company founders. We will adjust, figure out the right metrics to track, and still be able to scale businesses with a little bit of time and data. Facebook has so many different products they use to collect customer data. We will still be able to target people, but our tracking won’t be as effective. Remember that’s what the consumer wants. 

I also suggest every brand and digital marketer to consider adding more variety to their media buying strategy. Invest in a Google / Microsoft non-brand strategy. More and more people will start searching as ads become less relevant. Consider an Amazon strategy as well if you’re in the consumer goods space. Hulu has a self-serve advertising platform that starts with a monthly budget as low as $500 with CPMs around $25. Tiktok is out there, delivering the lowest CPCs (lower time on site & higher bounce rates as well) And definitely implement post-purchase surveys. They’re going to become more and more important. 

By the way, as much as we all discuss the iOS14 for Facebook, Facebook is still the platform that’s so far doing the integrations to match data. We don’t have any updates from Tiktok, Pinterest, SnapChat, etc on how to properly build any strategy. Also, does anyone agree that every Facebook account rep tells a different story? It’s worrisome. 

Please feel free to reach out to me at fulya@boweryboost.com to chat about your digital ad-buying strategy.