Changes Are Coming to Meta Will Impact Your Advertising Strategy 

Over the past month Instagram has released four updates with the aim of reaching a larger customer base: 

1. Music optimisation for Reel Ads {link to each section} 

2. Ads in Explore home and profile feed 

3. AR Ads  

4. AI-powered multi-advertiser ads 

But what do these updates mean for your advertising and will more impressions result in more conversions for you? We argue, only if the right settings and tactics are used for your brand. Some of these updates will be useful for you, and some potentially damaging.  

Our team are experts in Meta Advertising and whilst they understand the best practice as suggested by Meta, they also have a deep understanding of what best practice actually means for their clients.

What are the changes that are happening to Meta?

1. Music Optimisation for Reel Ads

Instagram is now giving the option within Ads Manager to select music from their free music library. With reels becoming ever more popular, times have changed from five years ago when creators were told to make all video content with subtitles so that they could be watched and understood without volume.  

Now 70% of stories are watched with the sound on. Audio can play an important role in advertising and can often be overlooked. Music can engage your audience by evoking emotional reactions when seeing and hearing your ad. From a psychological perspective, it can also strengthen recall, if associations are built between a song and your brand when your customer next hears that song, they’ll think of your brand.  

The song selection is limited to what is currently available in the Meta Sound Collection library. There is now a tick box to add music when creating an ad within Ads Manager, and there you can tick, or untick, and select your chosen song from the library. If the add music box is selected, but you don’t choose your music, then Meta will choose a song based on your ad content and your control over selection will be lost.  

2. Ads in Explore home and Profile Feed  

I am sure we’ve all felt the impact of the rising CPMs across Meta’s platforms at some point over the past months and years. This update attempts to tackle this by increasing the number of impressions available within Instagram. To do this, Meta has started to place ads in the Explore feed and certain profile feeds.  The explore feed was previously untouched by ads, it’s the grid that people will first see when they arrive on the explore tab.  

This means that people can be reached as they are actively looking for new content. As you can see in the example below, strong creative will be ever important as these ads will show just the creative and the call to action. Choosing the right creative for the right placement is an extremely important part of setting up a successful ad campaign. 

 Simply using the same image or video spec for every placement is no longer an option when the placements have their own requirements. Assets can be optimised, cropped or changed depending on the placement in the ad settings of Ads Manager, giving you control over how your ad appears without the need for multiple ads.  

Alongside this, Meta is also beta testing placing ads on creators’ profile feeds. This will allow the creator to earn extra revenue and will start with selected US creators, so it will likely be a little while longer before we start to see this over here.  

Alt txt – Instagram ads now showing in the explore page

3. Augmented Reality Ads

Meta takes one step closer to the Metaverse, with the rollout of AR ads. These ads are powered by Spark AR. They allow mobile effects to be overlayed onto feed and story ads to create immersive experiences allowing your audience to virtually try out your products. The example below shows how a furniture brand has created an effect allowing customers to see how the furniture would look in their own homes.  

To be able to create these ads, you’d first need to partner with an augmented reality producer to create and upload your effect into the Meta Spark Hub. Once this is done, an augmented ad can be created within Ads Manager. So, it might be a while before this is available to the masses as it’s not every advertiser than can afford to create their own augmented effect, nevertheless, it indicates the future is moving closer to interactive content.  

4. The introduction of AI-powered multi-advertiser ads 

Lastly, and of most concern to our team, is the introduction of AI-powered multi-advertiser ads. Again, the aim here appears to be increasing the volume of impressions available to advertisers on Instagram, however, we see a potential detrimental side-effect that all advertisers should be aware of. With multi-advertiser ads, a consumer could see your ad, click on the CTA and be directed to your landing page of choice, as normal. However, if they were to click on the image or the “see all” button, instead of being driven to your website, they would be driven to a page showing ads from other advertisers.  

The advertisers in question would be decided on based on Meta’s algorithm. It could be complementary brands, the example Meta has put forward, for example, is a wedding dress ad that could be shown alongside wedding cake ads. However, the selection is fully in Meta’s control, and therefore your ad could be shown against competing brands. So instead of potential customers being directed to your website, they could be driven to a landing page of competing products and your ad spend could be contributing to a competitor’s conversion. Even if these brands aren’t direct competitors, it dilutes the message to the user and could decrease the conversion rate. Within Ads Manager, there is an option in the settings to unselect this option.  

Our team have added this to their quality assurance criteria to uncheck this option on behalf of all our advertisers, after all, what’s the point in paying less for an impression, if that impression is of lower value?  

Adapting to the Meta changes 

One thing is for sure, Meta and the digital landscape is an ever-changing place, and it can pay to have experts at the helm helping you navigate these changes and protect your valuable marketing spend. If you want to hear more, contact our team of experts: chat@infinitynation.com