Meta has been dishing out a slew of ad incentives, including on its shopping ads, where it’s been making a big push for ad revenue, and a new iteration of its “reach and frequency” campaigns, as it courts back advertisers. Some advertisers said the social media giant has been ramping up these offers, or “coupons” as the company calls them, as performance capabilities start to improve following Apple’s iOS privacy changes.
With these ad incentives, which range between $40,000 and $200,000—and as the social media giant continues to use artificial intelligence to improve its ability to track and target audiences across Facebook and Instagram—advertisers are starting to pour more of their ad dollars back into Meta, according to three media buyers.
“Similar to others in the industry, sometimes we offer advertising credits as part of our normal go to market process. This helps us understand product-market fit and how well a product might perform before launching it more broadly,” a Meta spokesperson wrote Ad Age, declining to comment on the specific offer amounts.
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Clients are spending about 20% to 30% more of their overall digital ad spend on Meta this year than they had in 2022 as they see performance start to improve, the media buyers said.
One media buyer said they’ve received $50,000 in ad credits for their clients on a new iteration of Meta’s “Reach and Frequency” campaigns, something it’s calling “Moment Maker,” which launched sometime around its IAB NewFronts presentation in May. “Reach and Frequency” campaigns are supposed to give control to the marketer, according to Meta. Brands buy ads at a fixed rate, versus based on auction rates, and they get predictability over how often ads are shown, when they are shown, and to which audiences.
“With ‘Moment Maker,’ the goal is to get the max reach out of your budget, against a given target over a three-day period. ‘Reach and Frequency’ campaigns work the same way but the flight can be longer than three days,” the media buyer said.
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“Moment Maker,” the Meta spokesperson wrote, is “a buying strategy that groups all Meta’s video solutions in one easy buy: In Stream, Reels, Stories, and a comprehensive measurement plan.”
Meta has also been making a “huge push” for advertisers to invest in its shopping ads on Instagram, a second media agency executive said. Meta improved its Shop ads this year to make it easier for users to make purchases directly in the app, which is not only convenient for shoppers but it benefits Meta in a post-iOS privacy changes world because the company can better collect and track their data when they stay within the app.
The second media agency executive said they received $200,000 in ad credits on Meta’s Shop ads for a brand they declined to name but said spends “millions” across Facebook and Instagram.
“Shops is a genius product,” the media agency executive said, noting how it’s helped Meta recover the signal loss from the Apple privacy changes. “People are buying directly in the app. You’re seeing who’s going to these pages. It’s Meta taking back control over the customer journey.”
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Meta’s reps also understand what type of brands will do well with which products, and offer ad credits accordingly, the media agency executive said, adding that Shop ads naturally work better with “consumption” products including apparel and food.
The first media buyer said the $40,000 to $50,000 in ad credits that Meta has more often been offering is in line, or slightly higher, with what other platforms such as short-form video app rival TikTok will offer, but anything over $100,000 is “meaningfully higher.”
“It’s simple from a sales strategy perspective,” this person said. “Meta knows that they have some momentum, that they’ve addressed some of the concerns that advertisers have had with respect to measuring and attribution, and the wind is at their back. I think they’re leaning into that.”
A significant factor in Meta’s ability to start recovering from Apple’s privacy changes is in the company’s ability to get advertisers to “adopt and use their conversions API” method, the first media buyer said. A lot of “walled gardens,” including TikTok, Snap and Pinterest, have developed these conversion APIs—which are platforms that help marketers measure the outcome of their campaigns by integrating more closely with the company’s, including Meta’s, technology and data.
Meta outperformed Wall Street expectations in its recent second quarter, with revenue up 11% to $32 billion and profit up 16% to $7.8 billion from a year earlier.
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When it reported those results, Meta noted two key areas in which it was leaning into to help it bounce back from Apple’s privacy changes. Of AI, it shared: “We’re leveraging AI to move our systems towards using fewer, larger models that enable us to leverage learnings across product surfaces and deploy improvements more quickly, broadly, and efficiently. We’re also leveraging AI to power advanced ads products, like Advantage+ shopping, which continues to gain adoption.”
Second was onsite conversions through features such as its click-to-messaging ads. Meta announced: “Daily Click-to-WhatsApp ads revenue continues to grow very quickly at over 80% year-over-year. We also recently started testing the ability to buy Click-to-WhatsApp ads directly from the WhatsApp Business App, which now has more than 200 million monthly users.”
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