How to Prepare Your Social Media Marketing Campaigns for Q4

In view of the upcoming Q4, which is the shopping season, social media marketing costs like CPM, CPC, CPA, are expected to rise.

Here's what the Heroes of Digital marketing team have come up with - a series of recommendations that should help optimize your social media marketing campaigns.

It's broken down into 3 categories: high priorities, mid priorities, and low priorities.

High Priorities:

Given the marketing trend during this time, it’s important to have a resilient structure and setup.

Consolidated Structure:

Many advertisers adopt a very segmented structure, where learning is not strong for each asset due to low conversion volume. Consolidate budgets or delete duplicates where there’s no differentiation in setups or no strong business reasons to segment so that the Learning can be completed, and therefore your Objective for the campaign can be achieved.

Placements and Audience Size:

With the supply-demand framework, we want to increase impressions (supply). Do this by adopting more placements or using automatic placements; don’t limit the audience pool that the platform can explore. Try broader audiences, less restrictive custom or lookalike audiences, and try exploring new markets.

CBO (Campaign Budget Optimisation):

Use CBO with multi adset campaigns to ensure the budget is not stuck with underperforming ads and can be spent on well-performing ads freely. Decrease use of single ad set campaigns as there’s no liquidity between campaigns.

Learn more about CBO here.

Mid Priorities:

Optimization:

Be mindful when using mid-funnel/top-funnel optimizations. The data shows mid-funnel/top-funnel optimizations are not as good as bottom-funnel optimizations (eg Purchase, Conversions) will result in higher CPA and lower ROAS.

Moving up the funnel is not a solution to combat declining ROAS, unless the purchase signal is lost significantly and the social media platform is no longer efficient at optimizing for purchase.

Value Optimization:

You can also consider mixing some Value Optimisations with your conversion optimizations. Some advertisers have expressed issues with VO’s scalability, as it relies more heavily on the volume of data, so VO wouldn’t work the best when ads can’t get out of the learning phase due to low conversion volume.

It also works better if the conversion value spread is more diverse.

Read more about VO here.

Product-Market Fit:

Think creatively about product-market fit during this time - what kind of sales to run to boost scale when people are more price-sensitive while maintaining ROAS?

Holiday gifting is a great time to boost sales but should be done more strategically with your overall brand message.

Low Priorities:

Bid Strategies:

Cost constraints and scale are trade-offs. Most advertisers use the auto-bidding strategy. Autobid and highest value have no cost constraints, while bid-cap, cost-cap, and minimum ROAS have cost constraints.

If you're not happy with the campaign performance, try using a cost constraint strategy as a way to improve performance.

Please note, this will likely limit scale. Pair with consolidation and liquidity recommendations above to expand the scale. Autobid is supposedly good for spending the budget in full, but could hurt performance metrics like CPA and ROAS when budget scales.

Expressing Differentiated Values:

When you don’t optimize directly for ROAS, ROAS will fluctuate depending on its relationship with your optimization. Optimizing for the purchase behavior doesn’t ensure high basket size. This is a low-priority task due to the complexity of the strategy.