When launching new media, Facebook/Instagram is still my preferred channel. As a well-established platform, it still contains a broad swatch of American consumers with rich data about likes, dislikes, and past spending habits.
Sure, the advent of IOS14 decimated the pixel, but what it really did was decimated the reliance on the pixel to find consumers that were already shopping for the product that you are selling. In many ways, this helped smaller businesses. If you were selling an innovative new shirt through Facebook, the pixel would target you and send all of the big brands and their big brand ads after you.
What we have found, over and over again, is that if your creative does the heavy lifting of targeting your customer, you don’t rely on the pixel nor the algorithm, and you can still produce effective long-form ads that continue to perform long after the UGC that expires quickly and can’t seem to perform above the middle of the funnel.
Facebook’s attributable ROAS is not entirely trustworthy, but even with the pixel decapitation, it still performs better than the spray-and-pray method that our fathers and mothers had to rely on for marketing. The old adage was that 50% of your advertising does 90% of your work. You just don’t know which 50%. Current data trends give us better clues than ever before.
Youtube is still a vital channel for social media advertising. Attribution seems to be one step trickier than Facebook. We have found that some clients perform better on Youtube and some better on Facebook, but we always start on Facebook because it gives us enough data to build a more effective youtube strategy.
It should go without saying that any youtube strategy should have a robust keyword campaign (and honestly, any campaign should). We see the highest correlation between youtube spend and keyword performance of any other combination of media to this day.
Now, you can, and probably should, spend some time figuring out TikTok. There are several ways to approach your advertising on this channel, but it becomes a lot easier once you have some data from some of the legacy channels before you dip your toes into the unknown waters of Tik Tok.