This Is What Matters in Your Facebook Ads Strategy in 2024

The golden days of Facebook Ads are certainly over - but Facebook and Instagram Ads are still among the best digital media for winning new customers. Unlike SEA, where already existing demand is captured through an advertisement, social ads work as a push channel to generate not yet existent demand. So basically, you give the users an answer to a question they haven't even asked yet.

With Facebook Ads, it's about inspiring, creating needs and solving problems where users have not yet even considered looking for a solution. For this, Facebook offers you a variety of ad formats and placements,. With the 32 million users in Germany, which are composed of different age groups, Facebook Ads reach almost every target group. They are therefore suitable for both e-commerce shops and for SaaS and lead generation - but not for every product. We show you the 8 points you absolutely have to consider for your Facebook Ads strategy 2024 and which tools will assist you.

8 important tips for your successful Facebook Ads strategy 2024

In 2024, we are increasingly dealing with weak phases in e-commerce,. The consumer climate index is at a historic low,. This is naturally also visible in e-commerce. It is noticeably more difficult to sell products via social ads than it was in 2021. But success is still possible with the right Facebook marketing strategy.

1. Market only products with a high product-market fit

What has always been the case becomes even more apparent in a difficult market situation: The better your product is, the better you can market it. The worse your product is, the more expensive it will be for you to sell it. Make sure you only include in your Facebook campaigns products that have a high product-market fit, because popular products are still easy to sell via Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads in 2024 are usually no longer worthwhile for products with weaker demand, as advertising costs have risen too sharply.

2. Ensure a sufficient shopping cart value

Facebook ads are getting more expensive - the CPMs have been rising over the last few years and it does not currently seem likely that they will decrease again,. Parallel to the increasing marketing costs, logistics and production costs are also increasing due to the Ukraine conflict, inflation and the China crisis. All this is shrinking your margin. In 2024, you should therefore make sure to only market those products via Facebook Ads that convert well and have a high price point. Pay attention to your shopping cart values (AOV) - are they high enough to make the purchase economically worthwhile for you? How can you increase the AOV to increase your profitability? Product bundles or larger packaging units, for example, are a good opportunity.

Development of CPC and CPM on Instagram and Facebook since the beginning of 2020 - average of all customer accounts

3. Use broad audiences when targeting

In the past, targeted Facebook advertising was one of the great strengths for marketers - the detailed targeting options based on numerous characteristics and interests allowed Facebook Ads to be served to individual target groups. The different target groups were then addressed with specific ad content to perfectly match their needs.
⁠
⁠This practice is no longer applicable today. In fact, we keep noticing that different target groups also respond to the same Ad Creative. There are often strong overlaps in the needs of different target groups, so the Pain Points with which you market your product can indeed work for different target groups. You would therefore be severely limiting the impact of your Ad Creatives in advance if you only serve your content to a particular target group. Our recommendation is clearly towards Broad Audiences, i.e., open targeting. Allow Facebook to choose who your content is served to, thereby maximizing your potential.

4. The Facebook Ads game is won with good content

One trend we're seeing more and more: 80 to 90 percent of the success of your Facebook Ads strategy is based on good content. Only 10 to 20 percent of the success is due to configurations in the Facebook Ads Manager. So your success depends on good content, and good content is not what an art director considers artistically good. Good content is the content that converts users to buyers and is determined data-based. The interplay of creativity and performance is becoming increasingly important for your Facebook Ads strategy.
⁠
⁠The goal is not to find the one advertisement that has fascinated your customers for the next few years, as is often the case on TV. On the contrary, for your Facebook marketing strategy, you work with hundreds of small content pieces that you combine into different storylines and constantly test for effectiveness. Ad Creative Testing is the keyword here: different content pieces are combined into different advertisements and tested against each other in split tests - the example of Frank Juice illustrates this approach. Which advertisement variant appeals best to users? Which scroll stopper captures attention most strongly? Which storyline encourages clicking? Experimentation is extremely rewarded here for your Social Ads strategy in 2024. If you run twice as many content tests, you are usually also twice as innovative. You can see much faster what works and iterate faster.

Example of 2 ad concepts with 3 different ad variants (starts) each from our client Frank Juice

5. Speed is crucial

For many marketers, Facebook and Instagram are fast media, but TikTok is currently gaining speed. If you want to play along in the social ads game as a winner, you have to optimize your processes for speed. The creation, testing, and performance evaluation of Ad Creatives have to go faster and faster. Even if you don't want to play TikTok as a marketing channel for now - which we strongly advise you to do - the new social medium will probably ensure that your competition will speed up its social ads processes. A few commercials taken from TV to be played on Facebook and left running for the next few months, that is far from enough. Instead, you should urgently learn how to test at high speed. To be exact, that means:

1. You produce large quantities of content.
2. You create different ad creative concepts for this content.
3. You produce these ad creatives based on the concepts.
4. You run the finished ad creatives in testing campaigns.
5. You analyze the test results and derive important insights for addressing your target group.
6. You optimize the Ad Creative concepts based on your learnings.

All with the goal of addressing your potential customers even better with your advertising media and enticing them to buy. But how exactly is it possible to produce these large quantities of content that are necessary for this? The answer is User Generated Content.

6. User Generated Ads as a main component of your Facebook Ads strategy 2024

User Generated Content (UGC) refers to content created by other Facebook users. The people do not have a large reach or fame, because it is only about an authentic recommendation for your product. In contrast to Influencer Generated Content, where the organic reach and the Influencer x Brand Fit are extremely important for success, it is much easier with UGC to get a large amount of different content quickly and inexpensively,
⁠
⁠This is a great advantage for use in performance marketing, as mentioned before, by testing different Ad Variants (e.g. two different scroll stoppers, the storyline remains the same) and Ad Concepts (e.g. two different storylines, focusing on other pain points) Winning Ads can be identified. The User Generated Content is actively commissioned by users - it is important to find users who your target group can identify with and who have a genuine interest in your product. This increases the likelihood that the people will be willing to produce videos for a free product.
⁠
⁠On the basis of a briefing you create, the users produce exactly the content pieces you need for your later Ad Creative Concepts. This makes the content predictable for you. Apart from the fact that UGC can be produced relatively easily in large quantities, the content format offers other advantages: The contents are produced by users themselves with their mobile phones and thus integrate absolutely naturally into the social media platforms. This results in authentic content that is more like a friend's recommendation than an advertisement. This is what makes UGC so successful in Facebook Ads marketing - it strengthens trust in your brand and makes your products tangible.

Example of a UGC Ad from our client Frank Juice

7. Video Ads make your evaluation easier in 2024

For some time now, the trend in Facebook Ads marketing is moving more and more away from static images and towards Video Ads. In 2024, this shift is particularly important. Not necessarily because videos work much better than static images, but because you receive a lot more First Party Data from Facebook for video ads. Since the iOS 14.5 update, and Google's privacy efforts have severely messed up our performance marketing, we all have to find new ways to cope with the restrictions.
⁠
⁠The enormous loss of Third Party Data makes previous Facebook Ads strategies impossible. In the past, it was a common process that Image Ads were booked into a Facebook test campaign just like video ads, a small budget of about 150 € was invested, and then it was seen which Ad Creative generated the highest turnover and ROAS. The winning ad was then scaled with a budget. That is no longer possible today. Particularly the transactional indicators that are sent between Facebook and the website are often lost. So revenues tracked in Facebook no longer match the actual revenue in the shop. So in 2024, you can no longer optimize based on this transactional data, but you have to adapt your Facebook Ads strategy.
⁠
⁠The solution: First Party Data from Facebook. And that is exactly where the Video Ads come in. You get a much larger data volume from them than from Image Ads. While you can only evaluate impressions and clicks for images, you can evaluate metrics like the scroll stopper rate or the 25 % / 50 % / 75 % / 95 % / 100 % video views for videos. You can thus very quickly see how users react to your creative and optimize videos accordingly. Creatives that work particularly well, you isolate and move from the test campaign into a scaling campaign with a higher budget.

8. Know your data

This last major trend continues from last year: data in performance marketing is becoming increasingly opaque. In the past, you had one tool that told you how much money was spent and taken in through an advertising measure. Today, we have many tools, all of which tell us what we've taken in, but they all give different numbers. The sales tracked in Facebook, Google Analytics and the backend of your shop system, differ significantly. There is no longer a single source of truth.
⁠
⁠Does this mean you should abandon performance marketing? No, absolutely not. But does it mean you need to take a much closer look at your data? Yes, definitely. It is essential for a successful Facebook Ads strategy in 2024 to engage intensively with your data on a meta level. To successfully control Facebook Ads today, you have to move away from detailed sales metrics per Ad. Instead, you can consider the Media Efficiency Ratio (MER), for example, which shows you how high the share of your advertising costs is in the total net sales volume of your shop.
⁠
⁠You should keep an eye on whether you are profitable overall with your marketing strategy. Other business metrics are also becoming increasingly important for online marketers: Consider your Customer Acquisition Costs and your Customer Lifetime Value and try to track your advertising budgets not in Facebook itself, but in the balance sheet of your company.
⁠
⁠There's a paradigm shift in online marketing: It's no longer about looking at and controlling ten different marketing channels individually. Instead, it's important to develop an overall picture where there are metrics that can no longer be influenced by individual channels, but that can still be decrypted through a healthy marketing mix, good observation skills and a high level of analytical understanding. Many companies are wrongly relying on numbers that don't provide a clear result. So there is huge optimization potential here and we strongly recommend the use of an appropriate BI tool,.

These tools will assist you in your Facebook Ads strategy 2024

To meet the growing challenges in Performance Marketing and E-Commerce, we strongly recommend the use of a Business Intelligence tool, for implementing your Facebook marketing strategy. These help you bring transparency into your company's data, bundle data from different sources, and keep an eye on the success of your Facebook marketing in the context of your other marketing channels at the meta level. Instead of looking at revenues at the ad display level, we believe that in 2024 it will be primarily about focusing on the overall profitability of your company. There are a multitude of possible BI tools that you can look at more closely on the software rating platform OMR Reviews. As a performance marketing agency, we work with the tool Y24, but we can also recommend the BI tools Minubo or especially for Shopify Stores Klar to you.

Of course, there are also some other BI tools on the market, such as:

Tableau

Microsoft Power BI

Apteco

Adverity

looker

Additionally, Facebook Ads in 2024 are mainly about quickly testing different Ad Creatives, especially UGC. To speed up this testing process, we use Miro. The mind mapping and collaboration tool, helps you to visualize Ad Creative Concepts quickly and simply. Based on screenshots of the individual content pieces, a storyline can be conceptualized so that the Creative Designers can quickly implement the Ad. Speed in the conception and production of (UGC) Ads is crucial for conducting Ad Creative Testing at a high speed.

Example of an ad concept in Miro