ASC: the PMAX of Social? Our feedback and the conditions for success.

If Google was very much on the offensive at the start of the year with Performance Max and artificial intelligence, Meta replied over recent months with the launch of the Advantage Shopping Campaign, or ASC. Behind the announcement, what is this new tool really worth and, above all, beyond the novelty effect, how do you use it to support your performance?

ASC is a Meta innovation developed to increase the performance of brands’ lower-funnel campaigns through the platform’s AI. A campaign structure that makes it possible both to target prospecting and retargeting audiences, to deliver on all placements simultaneously and to let the algorithm modify the ads through machine learning, with one objective: to sell better than manually operated campaigns and to do more for the overall profitability of your ad accounts.

While some immediately matched and deployed this automated format, we took the time to question and dissect this seemingly perfect picture to find the solution that would suit our clients. Because the stakes are many, notably on brand compliance or the real productivity observed in GA.

A few rules to keep in mind before starting:

• The campaign structure is particular and does not allow you to choose delivery placements, which are all active by default.

• On the targeting side, you only control geolocation.

• Your objective will necessarily be purchase (keep in mind that for the campaign to be optimal you must report at least 50 purchases over a 7-day period).

• You will need to put a delivery cap on your retargeting audiences (site retargeting and database).

Protect your brand, brand safety first

Context matters and misusing ASC will affect the perception of your content in the medium term. We do not run display campaigns, but campaigns on Social platforms where users have specific behaviours and usages towards brands. Keeping control of what we deliver so as not to end up anywhere and anyhow is essential.

Whether you are a luxury brand or a mass-market brand, the choice of your ads and where you deliver them is important. We therefore recommend putting this on the to-do list before launch: no image modification. Otherwise Meta will do it dynamically, notably by integrating CTAs on the visuals.

Optimise your ads for all placements, notably fullscreen (stories), where, unlike square formats, there are no texts or titles to explain your visual.

Watch the integration of dynamic ads (with catalogue): Meta recommends including all creatives including dynamic formats since we are potentially targeting our basket abandoners. We very quickly understood that the algorithm, in sole pursuit of growth, delivered dynamic ads, carousels notably in story, to prospecting targets, not very appealing to prospects and above all not always respecting brand guidelines on certain placements.

Keep control over your priority audiences

ASC must be part of a complete strategy and cannot on its own answer all your business issues. Admittedly the loss of signals affects targeting capabilities, but first-party & second-party tools remain to personalise, segment, test and be more productive. Thus, concentrating everything on ASC means developing a bad dependency and losing business opportunities.

Running ASC campaigns does not mean forgetting the other types of campaigns. Indeed, if you can choose the maximum percentage of investment on your hottest prospects in retargeting, you cannot choose the minimum, which can be problematic on certain key moments.

So remember to keep a campaign dedicated to your customers and your database, and a dynamic retargeting campaign (DPA).

Your loyal customers are the most likely to buy and thus maximise your profitability. Moreover, if you want to address specific messages to them, reassurance messages you do not want to communicate to other audiences, ASC will not allow it.

Audiences of users who added an item to the basket or viewed a product are very valuable; you must be able to press them harder and analyse performance precisely, which requires a dedicated campaign. ASC does not replace DPA, it accompanies it. ASC is a new key tool to go and get more performance. It is necessary to integrate it into your media mixes and campaigns. Its weight will tend to grow depending on learning and on the tool’s evolution. However, a singular adaptation has to be made according to your stakes, and thus intelligently, integrating planning and creative best practices. Already a success at tigrz, we have deployed it for numerous brands, often demanding on the delivery framework and the choice of placements. Performance is there, with on average +95% ROAS overall on e-commerce set-ups.

In the practical deployment of campaigns, it is worthwhile to add campaigns in parallel with the best-performing campaigns to assess productivity between these campaigns and against the other levers, and thus allow you to accelerate on your e-commerce at the end of the year.

Keywords