The notion that patience is a virtue has been repeated so often that it has become almost meaningless, like a motivational poster in a dentist's waiting room. But Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is now asking advertisers to take the aphorism seriously — and to apply it to their holiday advertising budgets.
In a new best practices guide released ahead of the holiday shopping season, Meta urged marketers to resist the temptation to tinker with their campaigns too early, arguing that premature adjustments deprive the company's ad systems of the data they need to optimize performance.
"Peak season doesn't reward the advertiser who watches the dashboard most closely," Meta said in the guide. "It rewards the one who wrote the clearest instruction and then had the nerve to leave it alone."
The advice arrives as retailers prepare for a holiday season whose contours remain uncertain. Meta noted that 42 percent of shoppers said they planned to spend less during last year's holiday period, yet actually increased their spending by 4.2 percent year over year — a gap between intention and action that advertisers have learned to regard as both maddening and exploitable.
Meta's prescription is twofold: clarity at the outset, and restraint thereafter. The company described each campaign setup as a kind of brief, with the optimization event serving as "the ask," the budget as "the constraint," and the attribution setting as "how you agree to be judged."
Ad sets that generate fewer than roughly fifty conversions per week are essentially guessing, Meta said, and run about 28 percent more expensive per purchase than those with sufficient volume.
(The advice to trust the system and stop looking at the numbers is, of course, advice that primarily benefits the system.)
Original story published in Social Media Today | A business community for the web's best thinkers on Social Media: "Meta says advertisers should let campaigns gather data"