As a DTC brand, you may have experienced strong initial traction from Facebook advertising, only to see your growth plateau at a certain revenue mark. Audience targeting and creative testing may provide temporary boosts, but without a strong enough return on ad spend (ROAS), it's challenging to justify scaling your account. This is where Flighted comes in, offering four strategies to break through revenue ceilings and take your Facebook advertising to the next level.
WHITELISTING AT SCALE
Whitelisting involves adding creators, influencers, or publishers as approved sources of content for your ads. This technique can work wonders when you reach out to the top 20% of your ad creators and ask to whitelist directly from their handle. While some may ask for payment, try negotiating a lower rate in exchange for a short 2-month license. By then, you'll know if the ad is valuable enough to pay more for. Run these ads in a dedicated whitelisting campaign, which should ultimately make up at least 25% of your overall campaign.
INVEST IN NEWER, INNOVATE AD PRODUCTS
Facebook has introduced two new campaign types that have proven successful for Flighted's clients at scale: Advantage+ Shopping and Shop Ads. Advantage+ Shopping can handle a higher volume of creatives than standard campaigns and, while targeting is opaque, often outperforms Business As Usual campaigns. Shop Ads allow users to check out directly on your Instagram or Facebook shop page rather than Shopify and often have lower cost-per-click (CPC) than traditional campaigns. By launching these campaign types for the first time, Flighted has seen ROAS increase by 25% or more.
INCREASE YOUR CREATIVE TESTING RATE
Many business owners struggle with spending more on creative when their ad account is struggling. However, a struggling account is a sign to spend MORE on ad creative. Flighted recommends allocating 10% of your ad spend towards creators and agencies to produce new ads. If you're already spending this amount, look at the creative formats you're investing in. You may be over-investing in a certain ad type, so try testing different formats to unlock different customer cohorts on Facebook.
CHECK YOUR DATA QUALITY
What is your event match rate across your Facebook events? Do you have aggregated event measurement set up, the Conversions API enabled with maximum data sharing, and server side events firing properly? It might be worth investing in an attribution tool like Triple Whale, which allows you to make more informed media buying decisions at higher spend levels, or a data enrichment tool like Popsixle, which feeds missed server-side conversions back to Facebook to enrich the strength of its delivery algorithm.
Breaking through revenue ceilings with Facebook advertising is challenging for DTC brands, but these four strategies can help you overcome this hurdle. By whitelisting at scale, investing in newer ad formats, increasing your creative testing rate, and checking your data quality, you can achieve greater ROAS and scale your account successfully. Don't let a plateau in growth discourage you - with a little time and effort, you can take your Facebook advertising to new heights.