- Meta’s AI tools helped rescue the advertising business after Apple rolled out its ATT privacy feature.
- These AI tools helped Meta regain the trust of some advertisers after their ads underperformed.
- But with Meta’s AI tools, advertisers have less control over their spending.
Apple’s app tracking privacy update was expected to hit Meta’s advertising business. Instead, Meta made adjustments that strengthened its business.
When Apple introduced its App Tracking Transparency feature a few years ago, which required developers to ask permission before tracking users across other websites and apps, Meta added $10 billion to its advertising business. said it would take a hit. Most users refused to enable tracking, making it difficult for meta advertisers to accurately target and measure their ads.
Meta invested heavily in artificial intelligence knowing that the user signals that made its advertising business profitable would be lost. The company’s AI tool, Advantage+, is designed to help advertisers find their audiences and improve campaign performance by automatically choosing where to advertise across Meta properties. .
Meta’s vice president of monetization, John Hegeman, told reporters at a media event announcing the new AI features on May 11 that Advantage+ is not a response to Apple’s ATT features or other privacy policies. said.
Nonetheless, Advantage+ has helped Meta retain advertisers, said David Dweck, senior vice president of paid media at ad agency WPromote. Advertisers trust Meta because it can track key metrics like return on ad spend, which measures sales per dollar spent on advertising, said Avi Benzvi, vice president of paid social at ad agency Tinuiti. said to have recovered. Advertiser acquisition costs have also improved, Benzvi said. And Ben-Zvi expects performance advertisers to spend more on meta at the expense of budgets devoted to other social platforms and displays.
“It’s basically about taking the strain off your legs,” Ben-Zvi said. “Overall efficiency has increased.”
A recent report from Morgan Stanley said these AI investments put Meta in a better position than Google and Amazon to weather the ongoing slump in ad spending.
Adam Heimlich, CEO of Chalice Custom Algorithms, said, “Meta’s advantage in AI is its advantage in training data.” “Any advertiser who puts meta tags on their site or app contributes to meta dominance by providing data. This is a big deal for emerging brands that receive
And Meta continues to ramp up its AI efforts.
On May 11, the company announced plans to roll out new Advantage+ features. It will soon be running video ads across news feeds, stories or reels, in slots it believes will work best for advertisers. Advantage+ will soon be able to find audiences for Meta-Her properties that advertisers hadn’t considered before, allowing sports brands to miss out on new customers by not targeting women with their ads. You may be able to tell Meta will soon also provide a measurement report comparing Advantage+ performance to manual campaigns.
Meta also said it is getting into generative AI with a tool called AI Sandbox that allows advertisers to create and test different iterations of images and text in their ads.
But Meta’s move to AI also comes with tradeoffs for some marketers.
For example, while campaign performance has improved over the past year, ad performance is still 10% to 15% lower than it was before Apple rolled out ATT, said WPromote’s Dweck.
Advertisers also say Advantage+ is a black box and don’t know how it works. Advertisers also have no control over what creatives and messages the tool ends up using during their campaigns. It also does not allow advertisers to independently gain campaign insights to improve future campaigns within or outside meta.
Advertisers are also concerned that their data could improve the performance of their competitors’ campaigns, Chalice’s Heimlich said.
“Given their core advantage, it makes sense that the meta has caught up,” said Heimlich. “The cause is thousands of big advertisers dozing off in his AI arena, unknowingly donating invaluable data on billions of purchases.”
