If budget cuts are stopping you from hitting your new customer acquisition and sales targets, then it's time to adjust the way you approach your Meta ads to unlock the potential of your current budget and maximise your results.

Here are three go-to-strategies to test in challenging times that can help hit cost-of-sale targets and lower cost per acquisition costs to increase new customer orders.

These strategies are focussed on looking beyond in-platform Meta metrics and using new customer cost per acquisition (NC-CPA) and cost of sale (CoS) metrics to support growth and unlock potential. If you're using third party tracking tools like Triple Whale it’s going to make you a lot more efficient with your Meta buying too - real time data allows you to make the right decisions and the right time, and not waste a day's budget waiting for sales to populate, due to in-platform lags.

Understand your attribution settings on Meta

Your attribution campaign setups have a direct impact on your site's NC-CPA. If you drive 2,000 new customer orders per month and you’re using the correct attribution, you can potentially shave off £2-£3 per new customer, and you want to know you're using the right attribution. For example, you have driven 2,000 new customers a month, saving £2 / new customer = £4,000 saved.

What are Meta’s attribution settings?

• 7DC + 1DV (7 Day Click + 1 Day View) - Meta’s default
• 1DC + 1DV (1 Day Click + 1 Day View) - users buy 24hrs after clicking/seeing the ad
• 7DC (7 Day Click) - users buy 7 days after clicking
• 1DC (1 Day Click) - buyers buy 1 day after clicking

Meta have also recently launched 1 Day View Engaged (user’s have watched a video for 10 seconds). This is not available on every account.

For any budget evaluation, you must understand your spend levels and 1DV (1 day view) conversions share of sales. You can view this in Ads Manager or pull it via Supermetrics. For small spending / conversion accounts, you need the conversions from 1DV to acquire new customers.

If you have a very large email base and your customer mix is higher for returning customers than it is for new customers, chances are you are driving a lot of repeat customers using 1DV attribution.

Therefore, test different attribution settings (knowing you're using the right attribution) to drive new customers for your website. Using tools like Triple Whale will provide NC-CPA data alongside your ad sets and campaigns to drive the account forward and lower NC-CPA.

Strategy 1: Align your Meta spending with your site revenue.

Every day of the week will be different. Make spending on Meta align with your site's real time revenue and orders. For example, don't spend the same amount on the day that drives the least amount of revenue to the days that drive the most amount of revenue.

If you make 30% of revenue on a Sunday, then you spend 30% of your budget on a Sunday. If you make 10% of your revenue on Friday then you will spend 10% of your meta spend on Friday.

Go further, and compare weeks of the month - if you make more in the first week of the month vs the middle week of the month, then you should adjust your budgets too. Use last year's data to help predict how users are spending, as it can align with paydays and bank holidays and seasonal trends. Users' buying patterns change both monthly and quarterly, so align your Meta spend here.

Also double check the breakdown of spend vs hours so you have a clear understanding of how users are buying across the day. If you know 7-10am are high revenue hours, then plan to increase your budgets ahead of peak revenue hours. Similarly, don’t touch your campaigns during high revenue hours too.

What about the learning phase? This is where third party tracking tools can provide real-time data to support your spending and add confidence. When using small budgets, some of the best ad sets are always in limited learning.

When should you push spend?

• Have more than one campaign and schedule both campaigns to increase in spend at different times if this is possible with your budget.
• Use tools like Triple Whale to monitor real time performance as Meta can not attribute in real time and has a lag. This will allow you to trust your data more and help you stay ahead of poor performance and spend more efficiently.

Why does this work?

• Allocating more spend when your target market is in buying mode will yield better results then spending on users when they aren't in buying mode.
• You can achieve lower CPMs as the probability of finding users ready to buy is greater.
• The Meta pixel is getting a lot more purchase events and could think it’s a stronger day for your target market.

What to consider

• If your budget is small, consider turning off all your campaigns on days you see poor CVR or low share of revenue to test this approach.
• Monitor NC-CPA, CoS (or MER) to measure daily and weekly success.
• The intent of pausing activity is to end the week with better results and efficiency, not worse than what you were achieving previously.
• If in doubt, have a second campaign running with zero changes in ad spend throughout the week.

However, you shouldn’t follow this strategy if you have very little sales data, as this will make the daily trends in-accurate. You need consistency in your daily trends.

Strategy 2: Cost cap bid strategies to launch

Using cost caps can unlock new opportunities in your account and find easy wins. Using a different bid strategy will force the machine learning to behave differently compared to the highest volume and value bid strategy.

Move top performing ads into a consolidated cost cap campaign using an ABO (ad budget optimisation) set up. Separate ad sets by SKUs / landing page, and generally use max three ads in the ad set.

If top performing ads start to deteriorate but carry a lot of value and engagement, add them to a cost cap ad set - don’t just turn the ad off.

You can also test a bully method - set a cost-cap 2-5x your target to drive competing ads out of the auction. Once you have consistent sales and start spending, look to move the target closer to what you want to achieve, but bid slightly higher than you want.

If your cost caps aren't spending and you’re being conservative, then make iterations to your cost cap.

What to consider

• Always use best performing ad IDs, and avoid launching new ads in cost caps as you are most likely not going to get the traction you need.
• Test running two different cost cap ad sets with the same ads, one set with a max target and one set at the lower end.
• If struggling with budget, consider launching new creatives in engagement campaigns to boost engagement and allow organic engagement to decide the winners.

Strategy 3: Pause remarketing campaigns

Sometimes, Meta will be running remarketing within your prospecting campaigns, so pausing your remarketing campaigns can help with budget. Running too much remarketing activity can provide a negative experience for users and turn users away from your brand. Before we decide to turn off remarketing activity, let's confirm that your prospecting audiences are already remarketing and justify this idea with the following metrics:

Ad Set Frequency: 1.20 = 20% of all profiles were remarketed again in-the ad set

Create a Custom Metric: Outbound Click Frequency (Outbound Clicks/Unique Outbound Clicks:. Similar to Frequency but for clicks, to understand how many users (profiles) clicked on the ads. Eg: 1.2 - 20% clicked on the one of the ads in the ad set again

CPMs: Review CPMs against frequency - higher frequency usually means lower funnel ad set. Higher CTR is also correlated with higher CPC and a higher frequency, and higher CPM, this suggests the activity was at the bottom of the funnel. You pay more to retarget.

Is this affected post iOS 14?

Achieving true prospecting with purchase conversions campaigns has deteriorated.

• Meta can not retarget properly as users have opted out of being tracked. So the in-platform frequency is much higher, despite your efforts to exclude engaged users/site traffic from your ad sets.
• We use Frequency to understand how many times our ads have been shown to users in the ad set / campaign / account. This also helps with understanding where the ad fits in the funnel. Higher frequency ad sets have lower spend when compared alongside other ad sets.
• Outbound Frequency (a custom metric we’ve coined) can help us understand how many times the same user has clicked on the ads or in the ad set. An ad set with 1.20 suggests 20% of everyone who has clicked on the ad has clicked on a second ad. Thus suggesting Meta is using ad sets as a full funnel.

What happens when you stop your BAU remarketing campaigns?

• Remarketing conversions will populate within your prospecting ad sets.
• Prospecting ad sets perform better due to the increase in conversions data.
• If your top spending campaigns are driving better results, your account wide CPAs are going to be looking a lot stronger.
• Test targeting broad only with past buyers as exclusions - these traditionally perform the best and have open targeting with no restraints. Create ad sets that serve as full funnel creatives.
• You’re not creating a bad experience for users who are seeing your ads too many times, you're allowing Meta to decide how they feel towards your ads.

Final thoughts

Difficult times provide an opportunity to try something else and test new strategies to unlock potential. Here are our key takeaways:

1. Review your site wide revenue and align meta spending with the weekly peaks of your site-revenue.
2. Test cost caps with best performing ads, and bring back old ads that you have turned off that performed well too.
3. Test turning off your remarketing / retargeting BAU Activity to boost the overall efficiency of your Meta account and efficiency.

If you want to learn more about some of the strategies we’re rolling out across our meta accounts, reach out today.