Learnings from top-performing advertisers for 2023

It’s no secret that the best advertisers are constantly ahead of the competition.

So as we head into 2023, there is much to learn from the top performers of 2022 if we want to be the best.

For the following analysis, we divided Meta advertisers into three categories based on their overall performance.

And we found a ton of valuable information you can put to work starting today.

So let’s take a few pages out of their books and delve into their strategies to see how you can improve your advertising campaigns for 2023.

Top performers created 51% more new content per month

When we looked at our data, we first noticed that top-performing advertisers generate significantly more new content than their peers.

Top performers were found to create 51% more new content per month than mid-range performers.

And although creating more ad content requires more time and effort, the benefits can be well worth it!

For instance, when you run various ads, you’ll avoid repeatedly showing your viewers the same ads.

This is important because if you keep running the same ads for too long, audiences become desensitized or “ad fatigued.”

And as you might expect, this can seriously harm your ads’ performance.

Secondly, running more ad variations allows you to see what works and what doesn’t.

When you run ads on Meta platforms, their algorithm does its best to optimize targeting and performance.

Therefore, when you give the algorithm more options to test out, it will naturally work to find your best-performing ads and show them to more of your viewers.

The key takeaway is that top performers create more unique and diverse content each month, ultimately allowing them to fine-tune their campaigns over time.

Top performers had 55% more unique design recipes

Another exciting data point we found is that Meta’s top-performing advertisers generate about 55% more unique ad designs than middle performers.

This is vital because if you’re mainly running similar ads with only minor variations in text or color, you’re more or less only testing out a single design template.

Therefore, creating a wider variety of ad designs or templates is a much better idea because it gives Meta’s algorithm more options to try out and see what works best.

Think about it this way:

If you wanted to learn what your best friend’s favorite song of all time was, you wouldn’t just play them a few songs from Rihanna and ask which one they liked best.

Instead, the best way to do this is to ask them about different genres, then artists, and then individual songs.

This is a much more logical and systematic way of finding out what they like.

And that’s precisely why top performers created 55% more unique ad designs than mid-performers.

They want to know the best ad templates to use, so they create and test far more design variations.

Top performers' content was live for a 40% shorter time

Earlier, we mentioned the concept of “ad fatigue,” which can seriously harm the performance of your campaigns.

When viewers see the same ads repeatedly, they lose interest and become desensitized to them.

This is why top performers display content for about 40% less time than mid-range performers.

Top performers are well-aware of ad fatigue and want to avoid over-using the same custom ad designs.

Again, this goes back to why top performers generate more unique and diverse templates monthly.

Diverse content means they get to see what works and what doesn’t. And they also avoid desensitizing their audience to their ads.

In other words, continually pushing out new ad designs and keeping them fresh and exciting is one of the ways top performers set themselves apart from the rest.

Ad fatigue can destroy your performance

By now, it’s easy to see why it’s essential to create new ad content steadily.

But how badly can ad fatigue impact your next campaign?

After only one week of being live, we found that ad performance dropped significantly. And then, week after week, performance continues to decline.

On average, we found that the best advertisers stopped displaying content after about five weeks, which saw a 38% decrease in performance.

On the other hand, mid and bottom performers typically ran their ads for about eight weeks.

And sadly, after this much time had passed, ads performance had decreased by about 53%, meaning they cut the effectiveness of their ads in half by displaying the same content for longer!

Learning from the best Meta advertisers of 2022

In conclusion, there are many lessons we can take away from successful advertisers that will help us stay ahead in digital marketing come 2023 (and beyond).

Top performers know how important it is to create unique and diverse content regularly and understand when it's time for a refreshment.

We've learned it's best to create new content whenever possible and switch up your ad designs more often.

This ensures that Meta's algorithm can do its job correctly and help you find the best ad designs and templates for your target audience.

Adopting these practices as part of your digital marketing plan will help ensure your success this year and next!

Data section

The dataset from this article is based on 7.1B impressions and 59.1K pieces of individual content on Meta (Facebook) platforms. It takes into account data from all countries and industries, with the campaign objective of Conversions. The period is from 1. September 2021 - 16. September 2022.

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.