How are top-performing e-commerce advertisers winning with content

October 25, 2022

What do you think sets apart the best from the worst-performing e-commerce advertisers?

You might think it is because they have incredible reach, precise targeting, or an impeccable brand. These are all important factors, but they’re not the biggest driver of performance.

According to a study by Nielsen, the creative drives 47% of a campaign’s effectiveness. And Google reports that this is as high as 70%.

So, all your ad settings are secondary to the true king of performance - CONTENT.

And let me tell you… Top-performing advertisers know how to work with their creatives.

Let’s learn more about exactly what they’re doing.

We divided e-commerce advertisers into three categories based on their ad effectiveness; Top, Middle, and Bottom performers. 

Bottom performers had the lowest conversion rates, and Top performers were among the most effective at turning an impression into a purchase. 

The main differences between the best and worst-performing advertisers were:

  • Top e-commerce companies launch more content

  • Top e-commerce companies turn off their content faster

  • Top e-commerce companies minimize ad fatigue

There were of course many more differences that we will look into in other articles. 

But overall… How are Top performing e-commerce advertisers working with content?

Top ecommerce companies launch more content

Top performers keep feeding the algorithms with new, fresh content.

Meta has automated a lot with Advantage+ and Dynamic Creatives algorithms. They now use machine learning to test, optimize and prioritize content.

That means that your job as an advertiser is to simply keep giving it more content. A lot of the technical, grind-work has been eliminated.

The algorithms also have another great advantage. They can serve the right content to the right person to reach optimal results.

By giving the algorithm more content to try from, it will learn more and optimize the performance for you.

And this is exactly what the best-in-class are doing. 

On average, Top e-commerce advertisers launch 20% more new content per month than Bottom performers.

So, launching more content is a good practice to implement.

Feeding the algorithm, and giving it more options to try, will allow it to optimize your performance faster and deliver the right content to the right audience.

Additionally, by creating more new content, you can avoid running the same creative for weeks and weeks on end. 

That brings us to the next difference…

Top eCommerce companies turn off their content faster

Top-performing advertisers have way shorter content cycles and kill their content faster.

Let’s imagine a scenario…

You are scrolling through Facebook and are seeing the same ad you have been seeing for the entire month. Does that make you stop scrolling?

Novelty, recency, and urgency all play an essential role in advertising. New content naturally draws curiosity and interest, while repetitive content gets subconsciously ignored. 

If your potential buyers have seen your ad 5 times already, chances are they won’t even notice it on the 6th.

Not noticing the ad means they probably won’t click. And well… no clicks mean no conversions.

All that put together, it makes sense that Top performers’ content is live for a 40% shorter time.

On average, Top performers’ content is live for about 4-5 weeks, compared to up to 8 weeks for the worst-performing e-commerce companies.

And there’s a simple reason behind this.

The longer your ad runs, the more ad fatigue from your target audience, and the lower the performance gets.

Ad fatigue

Generally, most marketers we talk to are scared of the Facebook Learning Phase.

But our data shows that you shouldn’t be afraid of your content being “too young”, rather, the content being “too old” is a bigger problem.

Ad fatigue is real, and it is impacting performance in a major way.

That is why Top-performing e-commerce advertisers turn off their content much faster than Middle and Bottom performers.

After being live for just 2 weeks, your ad performance, on average, already drops by 20%.

After 2 months, content performance falls by a staggering 51%.

Only Bottom performers keep such old and underperforming content live. Top performers know better.

From this, we can see that Top performers focus on keeping it fresh and exciting.

And the data supports this. 

You will not be able to join the “Top advertisers club” with old and repetitive content.

Want to become a Top performing advertiser?

Content really is king. And the best place to start with optimizing your ad performance.

People quickly get bored of seeing the same ad over and over again.

And this is heavily correlated with performance. The older the content, the lower performance.

That is why Top performers make more new content to give the algorithms a lot of high-quality options to choose from.

Also, top performers are aware of ad fatigue. They turn off their content way faster than Bottom performers to avoid running outdated and repetitive ads.

Remember that some things may differ for your market. A/B tests will always be more reliable than broad research. 

You can analyze your specific content data with Confect.io.

And, if you're looking for an easy way to design custom products ads for Facebook, try a free demo of Confect today to learn how you can design and edit ads that stand out from your competition!

More to read

To learn how to optimize your ads further, read these blogs:

Data section

The dataset from this article is based on 5.6B+ impressions and 6k+ pieces of individual content on Meta (Facebook) platforms. It takes into account data from all countries and only e-commerce brands, with the campaign objective of Conversions. The period is from 1st of September 2021 - 16th of September 2021.  Numbers are looking at correlation only, not causation. Remember to check your own data: numbers for different brands, industries, and contexts will vary. If you were intrigued about a specific insight, you can go in-depth into the various dimensions and how data can be segmented in Confect,  here.