Brace Yourself for the Battle Against Signal Loss

Are you experiencing signal loss? Have you been noticing conversion events and data dropping off? Perhaps your CPAs and ROI are taking a hit? No need to worry - we’ve got you covered!

In the coming months and years, it will be critical to ensure you are getting a strong signal flow and measuring for resilient signals in your Facebook campaigns. See if you can find more value within Facebook's on-site events - events that don't need to be reported back by a pixel but rather are occurring in the closed ecosystem.

Do these signal loss mitigations fit into your social advertising strategy?

Facebook Conversions API (CAPI)

Facebook’s Conversions API (CAPI) helps advertisers prepare for the cookieless future. CAPI’s server-side data flows directly into Facebook from the website’s server and is treated similarly to pixel events, enabling visibility on the full customer journey. CAPI does not rely on a user’s browser or connection, and is not affected by ad blockers or privacy settings. This means that advertisers can both reduce the loss of customer data while increasing the reliability of data that they share with Facebook. CAPI also lets advertisers measure these conversions and make ad optimizations based on the data.

With privacy guidelines continually evolving across the digital ecosystem, CAPI is a solution to act on additional data points as well as on data with longer timeframes. For example, it allows for tracking of delayed events (such as purchases made after signup) and the usage of historical data (such as customer lifetime value scores). By leveraging CAPI and the Facebook pixel together, advertisers can paint a fuller picture of their customer data across the full funnel.

Lead Ads

Generating leads is a great way to learn more about your customers and their intent through on-site events. As users give information about themselves to advertisers through lead forms, those submissions create qualitative data points that would be otherwise difficult to obtain. Since lead ads can feature custom questions and fields, the possibility to receive stronger and more accurate data could be greater than running standard ad types.

Lead Ads can be used to: facilitate signups, book appointments, initiate phone calls, and send samples, as well as more generally to collect names, phone numbers, email addresses, user location, and more. At a time when users can now opt out of app tracking, they may still want to share their personal information with a specific business via self-declared data, so it will be essential to consider running more Lead Ads as the digital landscape continues to unfold.

Click-to-Message Ads

Click-to-Message ads are available under the Link Clicks, Messages, and Conversion campaign objective types. While most Facebook ads redirect users to a website or app, Click-to-Message ads are used to drive users to either Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram Direct. By enabling Messaging, advertisers are committing to communicating directly with customers and responding to their messages — meaning more on-site events that can be tracked.

The click-to-message strategy is an effective method of gathering insights and self-declared data directly from the customer, and engaging in dialogue that isn’t just a one-time transaction. After participating in enough Messaging conversations, an advertiser can even create a custom audience of users who sent messages to them. This is important since Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency removes the ability to track some users’ data.

We at Smartly.io can help you to optimize Messenger campaigns thanks to our joint solution with our Messenger partner, Spectrm. Spectrm enables businesses to automate one-to-one conversations at scale through contextual, personalized conversational experiences across the customer journey. Spectrm can pass back S2S events of engagement with the chat bot, and the events can be used across Smartly.io’s reporting, testing, and optimization suites.

What Else Can You Do?

Beyond these solutions to mitigate signal loss, here are a few additional things you can do to continue running successful social advertising campaigns:

Apply a creative-resilient approach to your social advertising strategy

By producing creative variations with consistent branding across all parts of the customer journey, you can personalize ads to your customer base—regardless of when and where the signal or tracking may fall off later in time.

Test and learn in the new era of digital advertising

Now is the time to reassess and rewrite benchmarks, as well as to expand your test-and-learn agenda. With the changes to measurement and attribution it might be worthwhile to try out new strategies, such as to compare performance across different objectives, audiences, and placements to see what works best for your business.

Embrace the rise of the mid-funnel

With a reduction in user-level tracking across apps, performance branding—or a consolidation of upper- and lower-funnel tactics into one—is becoming the new sweet spot for digital marketers and advertisers to master. This could mean audience consolidation, campaign simplification, or budget grouping for some of your advertising initiatives.

Explore broader targeting for lower-funnel campaigns

By going broad, you cast a wider net of prospective customers that ultimately could drive strong results. Putting more of a focus on Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences (DABA) might be a good remedy when standard Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) audiences start to get smaller over time. Since DABA can learn from similar users who may not have opted out of IDFA tracking on apps, it could be leveraged as a lookalike-modeling or behavior-based solution to expand your audience pool while meeting your lower-funnel needs.

Are you ready for the battle against signal loss? Don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to help!

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