With Meta’s ad landscape changing so rapidly, it’s hard to keep track of which campaigns are working.

At Socioh, we work with 100s of eCommerce brands and ad agencies. Based on our learnings from this consolidated data, here are our top 9 campaigns for Summer 2023.

Prospecting Campaigns

Top-of-the-funnel campaigns targeting new customers. These campaigns are designed to catch the attention of potential buyers and encourage them to learn more or take action, such as making a purchase.

While prospecting campaigns may not appear to perform as well as retargeting campaigns in terms of CTR or ROAS, it’s crucial to run them so you always have enough new shoppers to include in your retargeting funnel.

In fact, at Socioh, we recommend spending 80-85% of your ad budget on prospecting campaigns.

1. Advantage+ Shopping Campaign (ASC)

ASC is Meta’s latest campaign. The idea behind it is twofold:

1. To improve targeting based on Meta’s latest AI-based algorithm. This is Meta’s answer to iOS14.
2. To streamline or simplify campaign creation. The advertiser can now focus on the creative, leaving targeting and placement to Meta.

This campaign is great for testing creatives and scaling spend. All you need to do is define the percentage of your budget you’d like to allocate to retargeting existing customers. The remaining budget will automatically be used for prospecting.

Campaign type: Conversion

Target audience: Decided by Meta

ASC is great for both prospecting & retargeting as it combines both in the same campaign. I recommend starting with this campaign for Prospecting.

See best practices for ASC campaigns here.

2. Broad Targeting

Since iOS14, targeting options that actually work for prospecting campaigns have become far more limited. Broad or open targeting is one of the few that remain effective for almost all accounts.

In broad targeting, the advertiser does not specify any information while setting up the ad. This gives Meta free reign to use its AI to target anyone that it believes could be your potential customer.

Campaign type: Conversion

Target audience: Broad/Open (based on Meta’s AI)

If you’d like to narrow your audience, you could layer on interests that are relevant to your brand. We usually recommend at least 3-5 interests, each of which has millions of people. Try not to select narrow interests that have less than 2 million people.

‍Tip: This campaign, along with the Creative Testing retargeting campaign, is great for testing new creatives or for scaling existing top-performing creatives.

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3. Dynamic Ad, Broad Audience (DABA)

DABA stands for ‘Dynamic Ads, Broad Audience’. These are feed-based ads that are shown to anyone that Meta thinks is likely to purchase from you.

This is one of the most effective campaigns to run at the top-of-the-funnel and is favored by ad agencies. I highly recommend running this campaign as part of your prospecting strategy.

DABA campaigns have become extremely popular since iOS14 as they harness the full power of Meta’s AI and match specific products from your catalog to shoppers browsing for similar products in other stores.

Campaign type:>  Dynamic Catalog Ad

Target audience:Broad/Open (based on Meta’s AI)

The main difference between this campaign and the Broad Audience campaign is that DABA is a dynamic ad – it is based on your product catalog or product feed. Learn more about dynamic ads here.

‍Tip: Using an enriched or designed product feed can significantly improve the performance of your dynamic ads. Meta’s design options for dynamic ads are fairly limited, but tools like Socioh’s Branded Catalogs can help you get more control over your dynamic creatives and messaging. See how to optimize your catalog ads with examples from real brands.

4. Creative Testing

This is a Socioh-specific campaign, but you can create it yourself in Meta’s business manager.

The 3 main targeting options that are being used post-iOS 14 are:

1. Broad or Open targeting
2. Interest-based targeting
3. Lookalike audiences

Typically some combination of these audiences will work well for most accounts. That’s why at Socioh, we have created a CBO campaign targeting all 3 audiences.

Socioh’s Lookalikes are based on custom audiences determined by our machine-learning algorithm. The seed audience for the Lookalike consists of each store’s best customers and is based on the store own data and purchase history.

This campaign is ideal for testing new creatives as you target all 3 main audiences, but let Meta decide which audience would work best for that creative.

Campaign type: Conversion

Target audience: Broad/Open, Interest-based, Lookalikes of your best customers

5. Capped Scaling

This is an advanced campaign ideal for experienced marketers and is used to scale your ad spend once you have a proved set of creatives.

First, select your bidding option. I recommend cost caps over bid caps if you are not a pro advertiser.

Bid cap places a hard limit on the maximum spend on acquiring each customer (CAC).

With cost cap, the advertiser specifies an average cost per conversion. This gives the ad platform the flexibility to go above your specified budget for some conversion as long as the average conversion cost stays below the cost cap amount.
See examples here.

Next, select the ad sets or audiences you’d like to target, ideally select audiences that you have already seen success with. Finally, launch the creatives that you have confidence in and would like to scale your spend with.

Campaign type: Conversion

Target audience:Broad/Open, Interest-based, Lookalikes of your best customers

Retargeting Campaigns

These bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns target shoppers who already have some awareness of your brand. This includes your website visitors, social media engagers, email lists, etc.

Since these campaigns target a qualified audience, they tend to perform better in terms of conversions but are often more expensive than top-of-the-funnel campaigns.

One potential issue is that you can fatigue this audience if you don’t keep adding to it constantly.

We recommend spending only about 15-20% of your budget on retargeting ads, and using the rest of your budget to prospect.

6. Full Store DPA

For most accounts, this is the most profitable type of campaign. If you only run one campaign for retargeting, this should be it.

The Dynamic Product Ad is a carousel ad based on your product feed or product catalog. It shows your site visitors the same products that they have already expressed interest in, which is why it tends to be extremely effective.

For this campaign, we suggest breaking up your audience into ad sets based on the volume of traffic to your website.

Example: A site with a large number of visitors might want to split its traffic into 2 ad sets (cart abandoners for the past 60 days + website bouncers for the past 90 days), while a brand with less traffic could have a single ad set targeting all website traffic for the past 90 days.

Campaign type: Dynamic Catalog Ad

Target audience: Pixel-based

7. BOF Conversion

This campaign can be used as a secondary retargeting experience along with the full-store DPA or as an alternative campaign to the DPA.

Good reasons to run this campaign:

1. Supports all ad formats. With a conversion ad, you can run Videos, images, carousals with a first card or any other ad format that is supported by Meta. Unlike DPAs, conversion campaigns are not restricted to feed-based ads.

2. Another reason you might want to run a conversion ad is if you don’t have enough SKUs to run an effective DPA but still want to retarget your bottom-of-the-funnel traffic.

3.  If you sell products with a longer conversion cycle like luxury items or furniture, you may need to nurture your leads for a longer period. The BOF conversion ad is a great additional campaign in this case. You could use this to address any known objections, build trust, show off user-generated content, or highlight a new customer promo to encourage your audience to convert.

Again, like in the DPA, we recommend splitting up your audience based on traffic volume.

Campaign type: Conversion

Target audience: Pixel-based

8. Product Category

For stores with a number of distinct categories or with more than one dominant category, it makes sense to run a Category retargeting campaign.

This helps you run focussed ads for each audience segment so you don’t waste your ad budget on non-customers.

Example: An apparel brand stocks products for men, women, and children. When they release a new spring collection for women’s dresses, they probably don’t want to retarget past purchasers of men’s shirts. It would be far more profitable to retarget only those shoppers who have viewed women’s dresses in the past 90 days.

Campaign type: Conversion

Target audience: Pixel-based

9. Consolidated

This is a great campaign for time-sensitive promotions. When you are running a sale or have a new collection, you want to get in front of as many people as possible.

The ‘Consolidated’ campaign combines all your existing warm audiences.  This includes your social media engagers, past purchasers, website bouncers, and any email lists you want to retarget – basically any potential buyer who has shown interest in your brand.

Campaign type: Conversion

Target audience: Combination of all retargeting audiences – pixel-based, past purchasers, social engagers & email lists

Use a creative that highlights your promotion and run this creative across all your ad sets. You can easily test different catalog designs without losing campaign learnings with Socioh’s Smart Switch.

Conclusion

These campaigns are the only campaigns any brand needs to get started on Facebook.

Here’s a cheat sheet to help you understand and create these campaigns directly on Meta.

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PROSPECTING CAMPAIGNS

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RETARGETING CAMPAIGNS

I’d love to hear how these worked for you. Drop comments and questions below!