1. Ad Structures: The Cirqle & Meta Synergy
2. Optimizing Ad Sets: The Power of Personalization
3. The Cirqle's Ad Set Combination Strategy
4. The Linchpin Metric for ROI: Cost-Driven Analysis
5. Sustaining & Scaling: The Strategy for Longevity‍
6. Conclusion: The Future of Creator-Driven Paid Partnership Ads

Paid Partnership ads, where advertisers tap into a creator's handle to amplify their collaborative efforts, represent a powerful marketing strategy. Utilizing platforms such as Meta's Ad Manager for Paid Partnership ads with creators may lead to excellent outcomes. However, to fully exploit its capabilities and further enhance performance, a tried-and-tested strategy is essential. In this article, we'll explore Meta's data-proven method of simplifying ad-sets to amplify outcomes and we'll intertwine this approach with our established best practices for structuring partnership ads.

Ad Structures: The Cirqle & Meta Synergy

Understanding the architecture of your ad campaign is the first step. Your campaign has three layers. The Campaign Level: Your overarching advertising objective. The Ad Set Level: Houses multiple ads, a dedicated budget, and a defined delivery schedule. And then the Ads Level: The actual creative elements.

Having a diverse array of ads within an ad set allows for optimal delivery and audience engagement.

1. Campaign Level: The campaign level is where The Cirqle’s platform integrates seamlessly with Meta’s Paid Partnership Ads. Through our platform, advertisers can not only define their broader campaign objectives but also identify the ideal creators to collaborate with, all while keeping track of KPIs directly related to their Paid Partnership Ads.‍
2. Ad Set Level: The Ad Set level is where personalized targeting comes to life. Using The Cirqle's advanced metrics reporting, you can tailor each ad set to a particular creator's audience demographics, optimizing the impact of your Paid Partnership Ads on Meta.‍
3. Ads Level: The Ads Level is where the creative collaboration between brands and creators takes form. With insights from both Meta and The Cirqle, advertisers can fine-tune the visual and textual elements to resonate authentically with the audience.

Optimizing Ad Sets with Meta's Streamlined Approach

Meta emphasizes the importance of simplified ad set structures, highlighting its ability to drive more efficient advertising spend and lower costs. Based on this recommendation, we advise advertisers to create unique ad sets for every creator you partner with, ensuring it's tailored to their audience and content.

At The Cirqle, having managed an impressive ad spend of $50 million in the first half of 2023 for our clients, we've observed a specific ad structure that consistently yields the best results. Imagine you're partnering with five creators, and each of them crafts three distinct content pieces. In such a scenario, the ideal ad structure would appear as follows:

The initial ad set, known as the Broad Targeting Ad Set, aims to cast a wide net, targeting a vast and varied audience segment. It's a fusion of content, amalgamating the creativity of all five collaborators, thus presenting a total of 15 unique creatives.

Following this, we have the Retargeting Ad Set. The primary objective here is to re-engage and subtly nurture the potential leads that have shown interest in your brand before. Mirroring the broad targeting ad set, this ad set integrates content from all five creators.

After the primary ad sets, we introduce the Creator-Specific Ad Sets, labeled from 3 to 7. These ad sets aim to spotlight the creatives of each creator. For example, Ad Set 3 focuses solely on the content from Creator 1, showcasing their three pieces. Ad Set 4 displays the three creations from Creator 2. This trend continues, with Ad Sets 5, 6, and 7 highlighting the content from Creators 3, 4, and 5, respectively.

Practical tips & tricks
Meta suggests simplified ad set structures imply efficient and above all effective advertising spend. Following this advice, it's best-practice and our recommendation to create unique ad sets tailored to each creator you collaborate with.

This video demonstrates how to configure Paid Partnership Ads on Meta, using The Cirqle platform. For optimal results when setting up your ads, we recommend following The Cirqle's blueprint as outlined above.

Recommendation: scale budgets on best performing ad sets by a maximum of 10% on a daily basis. If you go beyond 10% increments, ads may go back into the “learning phase”, which may be undesired.

The Perfect Ad Set Combination Strategy

Once your initial ads are up and running, the next step is about refinement and enhancement. Over time, certain ad sets will naturally outperform others based on various factors like audience engagement, relevance of content, and overall reach. These better-performing ad sets are like your "winners".

To make the most out of these winners, it's advised to combine them. But why? Two primary reasons:

• Reduce Frequency: If the same audience sees the same ad multiple times (high frequency), it may lead to ad fatigue. This means your target audience might start ignoring your ad or find it less appealing (see image below). By combining ad sets, you're consolidating your audience reach. This reduces the chances of the same audience segment seeing repeated ads, hence decreasing the ad frequency. In the example below, you can see that for one of our clients, ad frequency has gone up significantly over time: Weekly Ad Frequency > 5.

For the same client, an increase in ad frequency corresponded with a drop in CTR. This implies that when viewers encounter the ads too often, their likelihood to click diminishes, which directly inhibits performance of your ads. This is the perfect indicator that creative assets need to be swapped much more frequently.

Recommendation. Consistently update, swap and change creatives in your ad sets to combat ad fatigue, at least every 30 days.

1. Reduce Frequency: Overexposure can lead to ad fatigue, causing your audience to disengage from your ads. Combining ad sets helps consolidate your reach and reduces the frequency with which an individual viewer encounters the same ad.
2. Achieve Better Performance: Think of it as creating a 'super team' from your best players. By merging the strengths of your best-performing ad sets, you not only conserve resources but also amplify the impact of your ad campaign.

This approach aligns with Meta’s guidance on ad optimization. In practical terms, Meta’s recommended structure implies that advertisers should initiate the creation of new ad sets, where elements, such as audience segments, ad creatives, are consolidated and have proven to drive success in the past. Essentially, this new ad set becomes an upgraded version that's built upon the success of all the learnings gathered and collected over time. For optimal results, consolidate all audiences from various ad sets into one singular ad set. From there, compare the estimated audience size of your previous ad sets with the new, unified and grouped audience size in your new ad set. By bringing all audiences under one umbrella, you can pool the budgets that were previously scattered among multiple ad sets, thereby centralizing your spending and optimizing reach, allowing for better performance.

The Linchpin Metric for ROI

1. Key Insight: 'Cost Per Result' (CPR) is the cornerstone metric for evaluating the ROI of your digital ads. It quantifies the financial efficiency across different KPIs like Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Conversion (CPA).
2. Why It Matters: According to research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), evaluating digital ad performance through cost metrics is crucial.‍

‍Recommendation: Utilize The Cirqle's dashboard to monitor CPM and other cost metrics in real-time. Make data-driven decisions to allocate your budget towards the ads with the lowest Cost Per Result for maximum ROI.

Deactivating Underperformers: Strategic Budget Conservation

1. Key Insight: Persisting with underperforming ad sets can adversely affect your overall ad account health, including metrics like relevance scores and ad placements.
2. Why It Matters: A study from the Journal of Advertising Research confirms that low-performing ads can negatively impact digital campaigns[2].

Recommendation: Regularly review the performance metrics of your ad sets. If you identify sets with low click-through rates or high CPR, consider deactivating them to better allocate your budget and protect account health.

Sustaining & Scaling

1. Key Insight: After an initial period of data analysis, consolidating the best-performing audiences into a primary ad set can substantially improve campaign performance.
2. Why It Matters: The Harvard Business Review emphasizes the efficacy of data-driven audience segmentation in boosting advertising campaign results[3].‍

‍Recommendation: After two weeks of performance analysis, create a consolidated ad set featuring your best-performing ads, especially those co-created with top-tier content creators. This focused approach is likely to amplify audience engagement and overall campaign results.

Sustaining Peak Performance:
The overarching goal is to consistently present the most effective ads to the most responsive audiences. Achieving an optimal balance between creative quality and audience relevance should be the focus. Once your ads are optimized, the aim should be to sustain this peak performance for about 3 to 4 weeks. This period ensures you maximize the benefits of your optimization while also providing a substantial data set for future refinements.

Onboarding and re-optimization:
Lastly, every time you onboard new creators, undergo this optimization process again. New creators offer fresh perspectives, styles, and potentially new audience segments. By adjusting your strategy each time, you ensure you're continually tapping into the latest potential for engagement and conversion. In essence, this cyclical optimization process ensures that your advertising efforts evolve to continually meet and exceed your objectives.

Conclusion: Perfecting Creator Partnerships in Ad Management

Navigating Paid Partnership marketing within Meta's Ad Manager demands both strategic foresight and tactical nuance. As illustrated, the structure of ad campaigns plays an instrumental role in driving results, from understanding the foundational hierarchy to refining and consolidating for optimal performance.

In a digital landscape where every click, impression, and engagement matters, advertisers are provided with both challenges and opportunities. Following Meta’s streamlined approach offers a clear roadmap, but the true magic unfolds when this is seamlessly merged with unique creator-specific strategies. By prioritizing individual creators, being agile in response to performance metrics, and ensuring continuous refinement, businesses can ensure a robust return on ad spend.