Dispatch № 5 - Tactic Decay
And how the idea can lead to more creative thinking.
Hello and welcome to another free dispatch with me, Jake the Ad Nerd 🤓 (< not me)
In this dispatch, we'll be breaking down a concept.
I hope that this "break down" will lead to a realization for many of you.
We’ll be looking at a concept and digesting it, then revealing how it can be leveraged to directly impact your decisions moving forward.
When you think about it, we're all still learning, right? And with that, comes my take on how ideas should be presented to those in this industry.
Much like learning a new language allows an individual to understand abstract concepts which can result in new creative thought processes...
That's the goal with this one.
It's not so much the concept, but the results that could stem from providing you with a new way of thinking about it (which you can apply to anything we talk about).
This is another text-heavy dispatch with as much knowledge as I could cram in here.
I'm recommending a block of 15 minutes to consume everything here.
If you're new, I always provide two disclaimers before we get into everything:
1. There is no one unicorn source (including this one) that will teach you everything you need. If that’s why you’ve decided to be in this community, you’ll soon be disappointed.
2. What works for one advertiser, might not work for you. These are merely observations on what myself and others see is working across accounts and verticals. And, our interpretation of ideas. You need to test responsibly and at your own discretion.
⁉️ What Are We Nerding Out On?
Your tactics eventually decay.
That statement should get you fired up!
That's arguably one of the most exhilarating aspects of being in advertising or marketing.
There's a never-ending challenge of finding new and creative tactics. Which not only drives growth but... it's fu*$ing fun! Which could explain why we all love what we do...
Alongside that, every platform being leveraged for performance marketing is constantly increasing and accelerating decay in our tactics. Thus, the entire principle behind tactic decay is the realization that it ultimately leads to more creative thinking for us.
Which in turn creates opportunities for advertisers like you and me to capture value.
The performance marketers that understand the creative importance derived from the decay, will always be the winners.
“Is Jake about to get deep...?”
Possibly. But, an explanation is coming in a little bit.
I'm also a simple man. So, keep that in mind
Tactic Decay is not a revolutionary new theory that I've developed. However, I'll be using the idea so that I can spin it just perfectly to drive a point home. At least, that's the hope…
My goal is to provide something deeper (not too deep). I'll know by your reaction after reading this dispatch, if that goal of exploring an abstract idea such as this, was worthwhile 😰
I strongly believe that this can also help explain and connect other strategies, and I’m excited to explore those parallels in future posts. Especially creative.
As I mentioned before, my goal with the first few months of this newsletter is to introduce you to ideas from different perspectives. To get you thinking.
Remember my realization of the arbitrage opportunity...?
(you can read about that here)
🍯 The Good Stuff
Excited?
As I write this, I'm almost positive that there's something in here for everyone.
And that truly has me on the edge of my seat in excitement as I type this.
So, thank you for giving me that!
I was fortunate enough to have two brilliant advertisers join.
That would be Florian Litterst and Nicholas Kneuper.
Wait... Wasn't Chris Mikulin supposed to be here as well?
He was. But, we agreed that his contribution could provide more value for an upcoming dispatch. You'll have to wait and see what that is exactly. It's pretty freaking (yes, I still say freaking) cool how it all came together.
I touched a little on it earlier, but I went a new direction with the idea for contributors to this dispatch as well.
The idea: Rather than ask a series of questions, I wanted to simply provide our contributors with the opening paragraph and the idea of Tactic Decay.
It was then in their hands to produce the honey-dripped spider web of correlation you'll read here.
Why?
I wanted to get more into that abstract concept mindset, that I mentioned before. And, attempt to push you to continually evaluate your understanding of the topic(s) that myself, or anyone in this industry, have covered or will be covering.
Back to that arbitrage, right?
(possibly you right now...) "Ohhhhh! Now I get it!"
I personally think this dispatch is also an absolutely beautiful look into how we individually think about ideas in advertising (biased of course). Maintaining fundamentals but approaching ideas in our own unique ways.
In my opinion, this is exactly what you should be doing and I don't think this could have come together any more perfectly.
If you're worried this might be a little too far out... stick around. There are very actionable words here, and yes... even some tactics.
And, I promise that I'll tie it all together for you in the end.
Deal?
Alright, let's keep going!
I've teamed up with Nicholas Kneuper before and I don't think I'll stop. We're becoming better friends and there's value in having been in this game for a while. It's all that we do! That's not flexing but simply a truth. With that, we're still evolving.
If you do not know Kneuper, he is the Founder of Ecom.ly and has managed paid ads for some of the fastest-growing e-commerce startups in New York, such as Adore Me & Mott & Bow. Nick and his team (predominantly family) are also one of the few eComm agencies that specialize in Shipping Contract Renegotiations.
It's a level of complexity layered on top of performance marketing and I personally believe it adds a touch of logistical thinking when it comes to how he approaches Facebook advertising.
Nick, would you please start us off?
"I’ve been running Facebook ads since 2015 and the one constant is the landscape is always evolving. Because of this, certain tactics decay over time and others rise in prominence. This can happen across the entire ads ecosystem or inside a specific account.
Whether you run ads for clients or yourself, it’s important to understand tactic decay and how it impacts your performance.
Sometimes a Tactic stops working due to a change in the Facebook ad product or platform:
Boosted Long Form Image posts are a great example of this. It was my #1 ad style in 2017 and partly through 2018, before it slowly faded out of existence.
During this time, Facebook allowed you to attach super vertical photos to a text post.
The posts looked something like this ^. Why did this tactic work so well for so long?
A. Since the image was super long-form, it took up almost 100% of the user's mobile screen, resulting in super high engagement and CTR.
B. Very people knew how to create the ad.
You couldn’t just create these ads in the ads manager, Facebook would crop them by default. So you had to create a dark post, grab the post id, and load the ad as an existing post into the ads manager.
Since so few people knew how to run these long-form image ads, it stayed an effective tactic until Facebook made a change that killed it. Instagram became a more prominent ad product for Facebook & long-form images don’t work on Instagram. In an effort to make posts cross-compatible on Facebook & Instagram, Facebook standardized images to be 4:5 max, and started cropping down these long-form images.
As a result of this change, the tactic died off.
Sometimes a Tactic stops working due to too many people using it:
This is what happened to the tactic “Get duplicate ads to share social metrics”
This was one of the hottest tactics in 2016-2017. Most people, when posting the same ad to different ad sets, would duplicate the ad but it would be considered a new ad by Facebook, and not share social metrics with the previous ad.
Imagine fragmenting your social metrics for an ad across 20 variations…. Not good. Instead of 1 ad with 10k likes, you had 20 duplicate ads with 500 likes each.
Account managers that knew you could maintain social metrics by only duplicating “existing post” ads had a HUGE advantage over those that didn’t. Are you more likely to click on an ad with 10k likes? Or 500 likes?
When you compound this tactic over millions of dollars of ad spend, it’s safe to say that ads that shared social metrics saved accounts tens of thousands of dollars over those who didn’t.
Over the years since 2017, more and more account managers understood the necessity of this tactic. As a result, the edge from using this tactic diminished. There’s still a HUGE downside to not using this tactic, but if everyone does it, there’s no advantage.
Finally, Facebook integrated a solution so that almost anyone duplicating ads will share social metrics unless they turn it off. So alas, this tactic finally hit peak tactic decay and died off.
Sometimes a Tactic stops working due to user fatigue:
We see user fatigue cause tactic decay all the time on the ad creative front.
Certain ad styles will work great when it’s an unusual/new format. As more and more brands jump on the ad style, it becomes less effective over time as the user becomes fatigued by that ad style.
This is the most common form of tactic decay that we combat at Ecom.ly. It’s why half our team is focused exclusively on ad creation and creative testing.
If you find a new creative style that works before everyone else, you have a huge arbitrage opportunity. As more brands & account managers jump on the style, the tactic decays and you need new styles to offset the performance decline.
A great example of this is Harmon Brother-style video ads.
If you haven’t heard of Harmon Brothers, they are a famous video production agency behind some VERY famous e-commerce direct response videos: Purple, Squatty Pottie, Poo Pourri, to name a few. Later on, other brands successfully mimicked this style, like Dr. Squatch soap.
These ads dominated the e-commerce space for a long time, and still do occasionally.
In 2017-2018 they were the “perfect” ad. Funny, engaging, and kept the user entertained as they slowly got reeled into wanting to buy a product.
However, it’s very clear to anyone watching the e-commerce ads landscape, that these styles of ads have faded in popularity over time.
One reason is the production costs vs. risk of a successful ad. These videos cost $40k on the low-end and $200k on the high-end, with no guarantee you will get a winner. Why take that risk when an influencer video ad shot on a phone can match the performance and scale?
Another reason is the shifting landscape. Content has evolved quickly over the years and people want fast/easy to digest content, and users quickly scroll over what looks like a “traditional ad” in favor of styles that look more organic.
But more importantly, the user lost interest. We all remember some of the first Harmon Brother-style ads we saw. For me, it was the Squatty Potty ad. I watched it probably 10 times the first day I saw it.
However, each new version of a Harmon Brother-style ad I saw, the less I got excited and the more I thought it was another somewhat-funny video to try to sell me a video. The last one I saw was a guy being dragged by his socks behind a pickup truck and it just felt…. Super played out.
Is this to say the style is dead? No. There will still be success stories with this method for years to come. But tactic decay has fully set in on this creative strategy, and I’d rather focus my clients creative budget on lower-cost influencer style videos that seem to work just as well.
The risk vs reward just isn’t there.
A great final example is a good friend and client of mine. He has a home goods brand and spent $40,000 on an HB style video ad. It flopped. 0% ROI. I worked with him to get a UGC video done of his product. Shot and edited in-house by someone on his team in 1 day. The UGC video is crushing it, and more than made up for the $40k flop.
(To be clear, Nick is using the company to reference the style of the ad and this is not a dig at the creative minds at HB).
Account-Level Tactic Decay
Up until now, I’ve talked on “industry-wide” tactic decay. Essentially tactics that work/stop working across the entire industry and has nothing to do with your individual account.
However, there is also tactic-decay that happens on purely an account level.
A simple example would be, what if you ran only-video ads on an account for 6 months. And then you launched a series of image ad tests? What do you think would happen? I would bet the image ad tests do fantastically well because it’s a tactic you haven’t used on your account yet.
It will be a fresh look for your brand, your target demo, etc. The video-only ad tactic will decay over time, as your target demo becomes ad-blind / fatigued to one style over time.
Now, did anything change in the industry to cause image ads to work better?
No, it was an account-level tactic change.
On the targeting front, a great example would be only running lookalike targeting. I see it all the time, an account has been running for 6 months - 1 year and has slowly declining performance. They are running only-lookalike targeting. Their issue is account-level tactic decay.
The tight targeting of a lookalike worked great for them at first, but over time as they pulled customers out of the lookalike groups, the audience stopped converting as well. There could be huge pockets of potential customers sitting outside the constraints of the lookalikes, but the pixel can’t explore these without permission… interest or super broad no-interest targeting.
My closing recommendation is this:
The best antidote to Tactic Decay is an open and creative mind.
As long as you are always testing new creatives, ad set targeting, etc., you will rarely find yourself dealing with tactic decay issues.
And these aren’t things you have to consistently manifest yourself: follow great brands and research their ad styles and other tactics.
🤔 Pause for a second.
Seriously...
Pause and think about this:
"The best antidote to Tactic Decay is an open and creative mind."
Let that sink in and then let's carry on.
Florian is, for the lack of a better term, an industry leader when it comes to Facebook Ads. With over eight years of experience, Florian has a clear understanding that "yesterday's strategies in this agile advertising environment are often just that: yesterday's."
Florian is also one of very few advertisers that can present complex issues in an understandable way. Which is probably why he's regularly speaking at various online marketing conferences and guest lectures at universities.
Florian, what do you have for our reader?
"More than eight years ago I've started with advertising on Facebook. And believe me, in 2020 it's not about some quick hacks or crazy bidding tactics - they come and go. Yes, there is nothing wrong with testing them in your account (while keeping in mind that every account and audience is different) but in 2020 you should step back and think about the fundamentals.
Media buying on Facebook in 2020 is different than eight years ago - it is less tactical work in the accounts.”
(Jake sneaks in... you already know there's a theme here... don't you?)
“We can compare this to the work of a pilot in his cockpit.
The longest time of a flight is on autopilot with pretty much no work for the pilot (besides checking that everything is fine). To arrive at the right place, the pilot has to program the machine accordingly and intervene manually during take-off and landing. But most of the time of the plane works on autopilot while the pilot mainly has to keep an eye on the control units and has almost no manual work.
And this is how you should look at media buying on Facebook in 2020 with lots of tools for optimization and automation (CBO, Dynamic Ads etc).
Here is what you need for a machine (ad accounts) that runs on autopilot (which means: less manual and tactical work) and arrives at the right place (which means: brings you the best results):
Get your signals right and double-check your Pixel: Is you Pixel firing all events and parameters right? Is value tracking in place? Use the handy Test Events tool in Events Manager (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2040882565969969?id=1205376682832142) or debug your Events in Facebook Analytics (chose Pixel as event source and head over to "Activity", "Event Debugging"). For a proper E-Com setup, you should at least have ViewContent-, AddtoCart- and Purchase-Event firing with content_ids and value - at least. There more data fuel into the system, the better it runs!
Build simple and clever full-funnel setups
Rely on CBO, bigger audiences/less segmentation and cost cap bids as much as you can (but never stop testing anything - f.e. split out of audiences and placements like IG stories)
90% of our campaigns run with CBO - for 10% we make use of ad set budgets (ABOs) which sometimes make sense (f.e. if you want to use different bid strategies into one campaign which happens often for DPAs in remarketing)
Use creative testing campaigns and try to test 5-10 new creatives every week - if they work, dupe them to your core campaigns (see more on that below)
Make use of creative sandbox campaigns to keep your account organized while testing new creatives (more to come!)
To start with a cost cap bid look at your CPO in TOFU/MOFU of the last 7-14 days (f.e. TOFU CPO last 14 days is €22, MOFU CPO last 14 days is €15)
Start your TOFU/MOFU campaigns with a cost cap bid 10-15% above your actual CPO to give it some room
Give the algo some time (cost caps usually take 3 days to dial-in) and then look at CPA/reach
If the CPA is in your target range and you get full delivery try to walk down your bid (by ~10%) and increase campaign budget by ~25% (every 3 days) - our goal is to find the sweet spot of bid/budget for profitability and scale
Monitor your CPA/reach to see if auction competition rises and you need to adjust things — when inserting new creatives every week chances are high that you’ll win the auction (remember what’s the most important factor in the auction: creatives!)
No historical data to analyze? Test value bidding with no manual bid in TOFU!
In 2020 I rarely split out audiences based on their sizes (f.e. 10% LALs into their own CBO campaign vs. 5% LALs into their own CBO etc.) but that’s still something to try if budget flows into just a few ad sets
Instead, I do use stacked/super Lookalike Audiences + increase cost cap bids to get more spend in ad sets with under-delivery
That's why we try to test at least 5-10 new creatives each week in every account. But when you test lots of new creatives things can get messy (really messy!) Here is how we do it.
I recommend using sandbox campaigns (always paused) to organize your creatives as you do in your Google Drive or Dropbox files, f.e. Campaign: 2020 - UK - Creatives + Ad set name: 2020 - July. The goal is to put in new creatives and prepare everything for the testings.
After we’ve prepared new creatives in the sandbox campaigns we dupe them to the testing campaigns where we A/B-test and prove all new creatives. This way I’m not resetting learnings of my core campaigns and keep things organized.
In our testings campaigns, we use MOFU/TOFU audiences (no manual bid, PUR-optimization) and try to prove every creative before we dupe it to the "core" campaigns. MOFU = 180 days WCA + 365 ECA, TOFU = 1% or 5% general purchase LAL.
For the testing campaigns we use automated rules to pause creatives if performance is low (f.e. spent is 3-5x CPA and ROAS is below 1). Only when creatives have been proven to work we duplicate them to our core campaigns.”
Thank you, Florian!
I told you that there would be some opportunity for tactical ideation in here for you.
And now, let’s close this out!
🏁 In Closing
A keen observer, like yourself, might have noticed that the trend towards creative importance lately is like a return to the way that advertisers worked for years before us, and suggest that maybe decay in advertising is simply recurrent.
Bringing you and me to the antithesis of what we're creating here together.
We're 5 dispatches in now, and all the while... we've been building to one, very important revelation.
Have a pulse on what that is yet?
Hint: Advertising is, and always will be, about thinking creatively
(^ also the answer)
It's my sincere hope that by presenting a concept, such as Tactic Decay, I've allowed you to look at things in a new way. The shit we do is not rocket science. It doesn't have to be presented as such, either.
The concept of decay was simply used to promote the point of creative thinking.
Which brings us back to the continual challenge I referenced in the beginning.
My task to you is to go forward and start concocting a recipe of balance between, throwing dollars at ad campaigns and tactics that produce results today, whilst also investing brain power and sandbox time to new and emerging creative ideas, that could drive future results.
See...
I told you it wouldn't get too deep and that I'd tie it all together 😉
With gratitude.
Your next dispatch will be delivered on 8/4. This was essentially the appetizer dispatch for the main course of creative and the contributors are... Well, they are creative bad-asses. That's all that I'll say.
Until next time.
Cheers,
Jake the Ad Nerd🤙
PS. If you enjoyed this dispatch please consider sharing it with others and please let me know on Twitter if this was of any value.