Video vs. Static Ads on Meta: Audience Behavior

I am back from my first break of the year! 😅 Batteries are renewed and I feel fresh to grind again so let’s start again with this interesting case!

If you follow Marcus Burke (you must!), you will like this one😉

Marcus has been consistently saying that in Meta, the type of creative (video or static) really affect the audience that the algorithm targets and today, I am just bringing the perfect example to illustrate this but with a small tweak to the theory about age groups:

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞, 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫, 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐚𝐩𝐩.

The beauty of this industry is how things can change depending on the product that you work with. Nothing follows universal rules and that is why only the best professionals will stand out. Adapt or Die right?🙂

This client has an app which offers a really new solution for a bureaucratic process that has been always done manually. This means that most of old people are used to go physically to the office to do this.

We started to run two iOS campaigns through SKAN in Meta: One campaign only used UGC videos and the other only STATIC banners. Both campaigns were focused on acquiring installs (the main goal). We separated the creatives because we wanted to cover all Meta placements effectively and we knew that mixing all of them would cause that only UGC videos got impressions.

What you can see on the screenshots is the breakdown of age and placements for both campaigns ordered by cost (I just took the top 5 placements with the highest spend).

What can we conclude from these screenshots?

👉 Marcus is right! There is a huge difference in both age and placements when you go with one format or the other. UGC videos always tend to be shown to young people while statics are shown to older segments

👉We can also confirm that placement distribution really change depending on the format. As you can see, the campaign with UGC really pushed Instagram reels a lot more than the other placements while the static campaign was way more balanced between placements.

🔴 🗝 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐊𝐄𝐘 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: Although the static campaign was targeting an older audience, the youngest segment (18-24) was the one which has, not only the best CPI but also the best CPA (cost per purchase) in BOTH campaigns! And this is really connected to the product! Young people are used to use new technologies to save time/effort while old people are more reticent to take that step.

The MAIN learning from this experiment is how important is to know your audience to have success in your UA campaigns.

In my job, it is not about “Adapt or Die”,
It is about “Analyze or Die”.

Have a nice week ahead!