Bram's Buzz - Edition 7, 2024

Lots of new updates in the 7th edition of Bram's Buzz. The newsletter that keeps you updated on new features, insights and more about Meta Ads and all things digital marketing.

Before diving into the content, I would like to thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. From now on, you'll never miss any of the good stuff. 🤓

This newsletter covers updates from Week 5-9, 2024

Most important Meta Ads updates

🏘️ 2 New metrics available for 'group membership' ads: 'join group requests' and 'cost per join group request'. When setting up a new Engagement campaign to get people to join your Facebook Group, your ad will feature a 'Join group' CTA button. When people click this button from your ad, they send out a direct request to join the group. You can now report on the volume and cost per request.

🎯 Meta is expanding the availability of Advantage detailed targeting to all campaign objectives and optimizations. Campaigns that are optimized for Impressions, Video views, Reach, Engagement or ad recall lift now have the option to opt-in to Advantage detailed targeting.

🛍️ New 'Add items from Catalog' option for Advantage+ creatives. This option automatically adds products from your catalog to your video/visual creative. If you wish to gain more control on which products it shows, you can create a dedicated product set and select that one in the configuration of this option. This new creative enhancement is available for the Facebook Feed placement.

🎞️ Update on Engaged-view attribution: Meta shared more details on which placements are available for Engaged-view. Engaged-view can be counted in ads measurement reporting when someone plays your video ads for a minimum of 10 seconds (or watches 97% of the video length if it’s less than 10 seconds) and converts within a 1 day window. Engaged-view is available for all placements except Facebook in-stream video ads that cannot be skipped.

🚨 Events Manager may now show a notice about data restrictions in the settings of your data source. You may see a notice about Core settings being enabled for your Pixel. When this is showing, it means that Meta Business Tools may restrict data such as custom parameters and sharing of URLs after the domain.

🛒 When available for your ad account, you may now select any active event to optimize for in your Advantage+ shopping campaign. Before this update, you could only optimize for the Purchase conversion event.

🖼️ Now you can access Advantage+ creative features, previews, and preferences in a new 'Advanced preview' interface. You can filter by 'Feeds, in-stream ads for videos and reels, search results' / 'Stories and Reels, Apps and sites' and 'Right column, Search results'. To review all previews, click to Edit your Advantage+ creative and select 'Placements advanced preview'.

👀 You can now also enable the 1-day engaged-view attribution setting for Advantage+ shopping campaigns. Navigate the he campaign/ad set level and expand the attribution setting. Select '1 day' for Engaged-view. This will use sales performance signals coming from video ads for reporting and optimization of your Advantage+ shopping campaign.

📊 GA4 now supports more manual UTM parameters for your ads. Some new UTM parameters to consider adding to your Meta Ads are utm_source_platform (type of platform and/or placement), utm_creative_format (type of creative, for example: carousel, still, video) and utm_marketing_tactic (type of targeting, for example: retargeting or prospecting). Leverage these parameters to get insights about the performance of your Meta Ads in GA4.

💰 Meta is introducing 'Audience Network pricing reports'. When you navigate to Ads Reporting, you can now export Audience Network pricing reports. And when you review your ad account settings, there will also be a new option that let's you choose aggregate or ad level price reporting.

🎯 Some detailed targeting options are being discontinued on March 18th, 2024. This may include interests, demographics and behaviors. You will see a notice banners in Ads Manager when your ad sets still use these options. Navigate to the affected ad set and click to remove these detailed targeting options that are no longer supported. Also do this for paused campaigns when you keep seeing the notice banner.

🖼️ Advantage+ Creative is getting more attention in Meta Ads Manager. It now has its own dedicated section at the ad level. This allows you to quickly see which of the available creative enhancements are being enabled. I expect more AI-powered options for ads coming this year.

🦾 Meta is rolling out a new 'Generate backgrounds' AI-powered creative enhancement for your ads. This option is available for carousel ads in Sales campaigns. When available, you may see preview samples with up to four AI-generated backgrounds for your products. These backgrounds are generated based on your original images.

🤖 Generative AI is now creating and suggesting AI generated copy based on your original copy. This new option is only available when you provide English text. You can add up to 5 variations of primary text this way. Be sure to always review the copy before adding it to your creative.

AI-Generated Ad Copy

When you write your initial copy, Meta may now generate multiple versions of ad text based on your original copy, using AI. You can then choose to add these to your creative and add up to 5 variations of primary text.

New 'Background generation' creative enhancement

When you create a Sales campaign and select the carousel ad format, you may now see 'Background generation' appear as an option to enable for your Advantage+ catalog ads. When the images of your catalog are eligible for using this feature, you may see preview samples with up to four generated backgrounds.

The background are generated based on your original images. They are often simple backgrounds with colors and patterns. They can't be changed manually. You will also not be able to breakdown performance by generated background.

New optimization options for Advantage+ Shopping campaigns

When Advantage+ Shopping campaigns were introduced, advertisers could only optimize for the 'Purchase' event directly. Now Meta updated this option to include other conversion events to optimize for such as 'Add payment info', 'Initiate checkout', 'Add to cart', 'View content' and any other active event supported by Advantage+ Shopping campaigns.

POLL: What’s your best performing audience targeting option?

1.989 People voted on their current best performing audience targeting option in Meta Ads. Broad is winning the game (no surprise), however, 42% voted on the interests and lookalikes targeting options.

Click here to read why people make a specific choice.

More Buzz

A new GA4 report is here and it is great

The 'Manual campaigns' report shows all traffic coming from campaigns that hold manual UTM parameters.

To find this new report, navigate to the 'Acquisition' > 'Overview' report in your GA4 property. The last card shows a 'View Manual campaigns' link. Click it to access the new manual session report.

Customize this report to your needs and change/add dimensions and metrics that are important for your business.

Uncover additional insights of your Meta Ads in GA4

Here's an example on how to leverage all NEW GA4 manual campaign UTM for a Meta Ad. When you add these UTM parameters to your ad, you can now breakdown all metrics in GA4 to gather additional insights on performance of different ad setups.

The Manual Campaigns overview supports the following parameters:

• utm_source

• utm_medium

• utm_campaign

• utm_id

• utm_term

• utm_content

• utm_source_platform

• utm_creative_format

• utm_marketing_tactic

To find this new report, navigate to the 'Acquisition' > 'Overview' report in your GA4 property. The last card shows a 'View Manual campaigns' link. Click it to access the new manual session report.

That's all folks! 💙

Thanks for reading the 7th edition of Bram's Buzz.

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All the best,

Bram