Meta Partnership Ads Now Make Up 30 to 50% of the Ads on Our Biggest Accounts

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creator's handle with your brand tagged above the ad it'll show you know your brand with creators name. Our partnership ads more incremental than other ad formats on meta. Yeah, definitely in terms of delivery costs. Typically the CPMs are going to be a lot better on them.

“How much do you need to spend on one of these concepts or one of these creators before you can determine”

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It's all killer. No filler. I'm Eric. This is the D to C podcast, and I am here with Jacob from the pilot house team. Welcome, Jacob. Welcome to the all killer no filler podcast. What are we talking about today? Yeah, today we're going to talk about partnership ads. You know, more specifically, meta partnership ads. How it's handled. The wins you can find out of it. A few steps for those who are maybe not quite in the loop on some of the changes there and go through

the partnership ads hub, creator mark, place, and yeah, something you got to be leveraging at this

“point. Yeah, I think that is clear. We had Aves on recently. She talked about ads coming from the”

creator's handle, being about 70% more efficient. meta zone data is also shows that a lot of brands are going this way. Just to we've talked about so many different things on this podcast from white listing creatives to, you know, going out to find UGC and working with influencers, just to find exactly what the partnership ads are. Yeah, I mean, so partnership ads run directly through a creator's handle with your brand tagged. There's essentially two two partners to the post.

Above the ad it'll show, you know, your brand with creator's name. It combines the creator's audience engagement signals with your brand's audience engagement signals. So there's a mutual benefit

there and it ultimately does, you know, low lead to lower costs, like you said, and brands are

starting to lean heavier and heavier into those. And this is versus the traditional, you know, dark posting white listing setup where maybe you're, you have access to a creator's handle, but you're still building the ads and just running it under their handle. This is very much a co-branded thing where it shows both partners' names on the ad, which, you know, different benefits of both, but those are what we're going to talk about today. And also, it's also like a

network, right? So it's a discovery network where you, because it traditionally you'd have to find and seek out all these people on their own handles on Instagram necessarily to get them to be part of your army. This is all built into meta and you can actually do it through the meta platform.

Yeah. So they, they built out like the partnership ads hub where you can basically,

it's all integrated, right, with ad accounts. And you can seek out people, post in about you. You can chat through there. And when it comes time to actually connect it, you can just connect the creator posts to your account right through there. And obviously both sides need to authorize it. But yeah, it's a whole like network that's right on meta and the partnership ads hub. And there really is some lots of, you know, new features for it right now. It's a big

meta's trying to make that easy. It's pretty cool that they combine the signals from the creators.

“It, you know, audience engagement signals with the same ones from your account. See,”

there's a real opportunity for synergy there. Just hammer home the why from your perspective.

How critical are these ads in almost all of your accounts at this point? Pretty critical in most of them.

Terms of the why, like obviously, you know, a few benefits. We just mentioned one, the, the combining of audience engagement signals and stacking beyond a reach you've already hit. The opportunity to really work outside the box on, you know, the ad framing and the messaging. Maybe get a little bit creative utilizing that partner's presence in the ad. Not that that is a, you need. You could just take a few top ads. And if you run them as a

partnership ad, we're now, you know, both, both partners are promoting that posts. That also has benefits. But yeah, a third one is also just the the ad blindness. You know, a lot of clients are seeing senior brands ads. So much that eventually it does just become fog and people scroll right by it. But coming from that creators profile, leverage with yours. It really helps build that trust,

give them a fresh view. And yeah, ultimately help with like the frequency and people

interacting with your ads essentially. How often do these ads become like a mate like are they often in the mix for one of the main drivers of revenue in a campaign? And do you have any data on whether these because you're reaching your, you're leveraging the data from the creator are partnership ads more incremental than other ad formats in on meta. Yeah, definitely in terms of delivery costs like typically the CPMs are going to be a lot better on them. So they will deliver a lot

more efficiently in terms of, you know, conversion and return on ad spend it. It is just going to depend on the quality of those ads and, you know, your general book business. But yeah, in terms of being incremental to generate that new audience, that that prospecting audience definitely 100% and should be a core part of everyone's strategy. You don't necessarily need to like isolate them into their own campaign or anything. You can treat them as, you know, normal ad units and be testing them,

you know, consolidated with your other ads, let meta kind of use it say I to really deliver the ads. It thinks they're going to convert with different people, but definitely incremental. Yeah. Are the CPMs lower just because it's easier to get a human person's profile on someone's

“new feed versus a brand's page? Is that anything the reason the CPMs are lower?”

Partly that partly people kind of stops stops growl for it a bit more kind of like we mentioned just having the partnership handles show on on top of the ad. So if you're getting more or eyeballs, people are stopping engaged with it a bit more meta's going to kind of deliver it at a better, better pace to that audience and yeah, your cost per, you know, 1,000 people reach just going to go down and down and just like if you had a, you know, static image that's right in

your face like stop scrolling and meta would probably disable that, but that would probably have a super cheap CPM, right? It's just that the traffic of that quality might not be there. So you still kind of need to balance balance those metrics, but typically partnership, you know, video ads have the best sort of CPMs account wide from what we're seeing. The ad blindness is a good point and it probably just fits well with the overall philosophy of

and drama, where you want to show different looks and different sort of parts of the consumer journey and potentially different avatars that I'll fit into, you know, the the sequit the ad sequencing

that meta does. So I imagine these, it always reminds me of the the checkoff quote, which was

don't tell me about the moonlight, show me it glinting off of a broken bottle on the ground.

“And I think when you're in that conversion funnel, just seeing reflections and different takes”

on a product, you're just going to help move you down that funnel. 100% yeah, and yeah, they all kind of, you know, some of the USPs and messaging is going to overlap with what you're saying. And once they they're hooked, the hooks are still has important as ever. You kind of relate it back to your general strategy and people can piece that together, obviously nicely. So it's yeah, it's a good good ad format. And you know, like I said, different benefits and like dark posting, for example,

where you're just posting ads under creator handles or whitelist scene, where they're making a post about you, you're taking their ad account ID or their post ID and promoting it under their handle, combining the power of the the two handles and to the one ad essentially is just you can imagine that that benefit on the yeah, the viewership side. Talk to people creative formats. What is a why I switch video? And maybe walk me through an example of one that really worked.

more authentic feeling, organic feeling. We've had like given creators just literally talk about

the brand and like a first person, you know, with their iPhone, just a bit of a shaky cam,

just like your standard, you know, TikTok reel. And those have done well because it feels organic authentic. When you're going to have a creator partnership ad, you don't want it to be very like in your face by now, by now, by now, by now. So a few that have worked is like, you know, why I switched problem solution videos, why switch to, you know, this brand because here's the issues I was having and this is, you know, the solution, like I said, hooks being

“important to that holiday gift guides also seem to do pretty well, you know, you can kind of”

work outside the box with those little more work with a partner on on a gift guide that you guys are included on maybe, you know, obviously number one or whatever and they can kind of go through

that list and that's a good ad we've seen in a few accounts and then just raw, unedited, you know,

smart phone unboxings, things like that, that will typically be a good fit for partnership ads. I could really see it working well for gifting where you could just sort of present, you know, an avatar of someone who has to buy a gift for a mother or a father or sister and just have a different, you know, if your gift fits into those categories would be really cool to have, yeah, examples for for each creator, you know, using your product as a gift for a certain

person in their life, yeah, 100% in the partnership, you know, hub is going to have creators in in your vertical that it suggests to you and so their audiences are going to be overlapping as

“well in that regard, so you can use that hub to link up with these, you know, specific creators”

based on the demographics you're trying to hit, you know, your your brand identity and strategy and then from there, you brief them and that brief hits on that exact points and you're all a certain, you know, testing different user intent and hooks and all these things with, with your partners to lock that in. So how do you use this rights work? Do that does meta pay them off the back end or are you paying fees on top of what meta's charging for the

CPUs? Yeah, so it's, that's kind of the part where it just links you up with the creator in a chat. You can, there's like a connect account synchronization button that you press in it. It gives you like the post-site code, post code is called, and you can, you know, load that up into your campaigns, but in terms of like the rights and payments and things like that at the moment, it's mainly handled through that chat, so you kind of typically would take that part offline or whatever with the

the partner. And what does a deal typically look like? I guess you have all sorts of different ways that you run. What's your favorite way to to deal with the creator side of things? Yeah, there's, I mean, kind of two approaches. There's like the, the whole affiliate side where maybe you're sending them the products and giving them like a code in their link and tracking that and giving them like some, some type of commission, and that usually would have some, you know, period 60 days

unless we mutually agree to extend, but there's also just like the standard kind of set up where you're paying them per video and then potentially paying them for like partnership rights. But at the same time, there's tons of situations where there's no no payment needed because they're they're also looking for that exposure. It's going to be your, you know, had dollars, right? So it does kind of lean a couple different ways based on what your strategy is for the most part,

you know, the partners we're bringing on where we're paying them to do like the videos for us, and then we're negotiating the partnership ads as part of that, just kind of lumped to it, and then like I said, usually it has like a 60 day period or whatever. And we talk a lot and people in the industry talk a lot about the creative velocity that is required to run meta campaigns at scale

“these days. How do you think about partnership ad velocity at, you know, in terms of a scaling account?”

What sort of, or for instance, for one of your bigger or faster scaling accounts, what does a partnership ad campaign look like that you're kind of planning out for Q4?

Yeah, yeah, so it'll be like basically forecasting, you know, how much percent of our budget is

going to partnership ads, what's the, you know, benchmarks versus standard stuff, and I'm just kind of working that plan into your forecast, and then it's, you know, how many creators do we need versus the depth of each creator? How many videos per creator are we going to get? And usually at the start, you're going to kind of spread your net a little wider the first couple of months, you're going to test, you know, more types of creators, and then you're going

to kind of narrow them down to your, your brand's top performers, and eventually you will start working with more of a focused approach there. You still will probably want to be sending out general briefs

It's going to make sense to like focus on to a, a course set of them, and they kind of become like

“your brand, brand heroes in a way, and you know, pairing that to Q4, like you're just going to”

want to, yeah, make sure you kind of have like a focused approach you're getting a briefing creators, you know, three, four weeks ahead of a sale, so that they can actually call out the sale, a lot of the times you might want to use like generic sale language in, oh my god, this brand's

amazing, you know, I buy them every day. Oh, I also hear they have a sale on right now versus like,

you know, 20% off in the store for limited time this day to this day, because once that, that sale ends, the partnership ad doesn't make a lot of sense, and the, um, the partners, sometimes don't like the optics of that, you know, using their face promoting stuff that's, that's expired. So, and you want to just make that personal connection, right? You want to, you want to start with the, hey, this is a brand I love, they have built it into my life in the

“following ways, and there's a sale, right, rather than just blasting sale language to everyone,”

because it kind of misses the whole point of partnership ads potentially. Yeah, and then eventually,

as you, you know, have your, your ROI on these, these partnership ads in a, a broader outlook of it,

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get your brand on TV today. So on an account then, that like, give me the ranges for what partnerships are in terms of percent of meta-ad spend. I guess I know it varies, but on an account that's scaling and like has big goals in Q4, and is fairly aggressive, like what percent of the budget to partnership ads represent? Yeah, so if we're like the larger accounts that are invested more heavily into the partnership ads and like really having that allocated budget,

like we said, to build it up in the accounts, it's typically like 30 to 50% of the total ads are running under a partnership. It's still kind of like a 6040 video to static split on the account, but then from that 60% video usually it's like, yeah, you more than half of that is partnership ads. So it's growing for sure, like that's way more than it was six months ago, but there is a lot of opportunities to work it in beyond just the buy-and-out by now. Things like giveaways, for example,

challenges. There's all these things that you can start to utilize it for and just make and share your measuring. It is obviously important, but yeah, it's been interesting, kind of see it, see it grow. Very cool. What a big opportunity heading into into Q4 here. Any thoughts on

“test budgets for brands that maybe aren't as big into partnership ads? Like how much do you need to”

spend on one of these concepts or one of these creators before you can determine if you've got something that can scale? Yeah, I mean, like I said, there's still a ton of brands that aren't, you know, spending too heavily in this yet, and maybe it's 0% of their strategy and they're still doing really well, or maybe it's 10%, but it's an opportunity. So you don't need to dedicate a ton to it, you know, take 10, 15% of your budget for a month and, you know, work to get some partnership ads

live, you know, measure up those upfront costs. Typically, it's maybe 100, 200, 300 per creator for a few videos for, you know, 60 days usage, something like that. Like it's, it's not a ton. You can also focus on micro creators. And for a new smaller brand, this would make more sense. Don't necessarily go over like the mega, the mega influencers, you know, find niche creators that are also looking to grow that are going to be more passionate about promoting you, link up with them,

start to kind of work on a cadence where every month they're getting you two to three videos,

micro creators, and they do generate, you know, our experience, like very similar performance,

obviously you're losing out on some of the audience engagement signals and things like that, but you're, you're gaining like a closer work in relationship with them and moving faster on tests with them, and it's slightly, you know, less upfront costs with them too. So it's interesting because, you know, that is still going to push to your audience, that your pixels kind of work into words, and once you approach them with these micro creators, the benefits are still there.

So would you say generally, even at campaigns that we're scaling, we're using with mainly

“these smaller influencers, like why pay for the big boys if the smaller ones work just as well?”

Have we experimented with paying some of the fees of the bigger macro influencers?

There's a couple brands that, you know, typically we're not the ones doing that negotiation,

like it's, it's us working with the brands and we're kind of, you know, working the partnership had ads on, but once it goes offline, a lot of that kind of does go to the brand side, because they're going to need to, you know, figure out payment details and stuff like that, but we have tested it on a few brands where we're working with these really large mega influencers that wouldn't necessarily call them all all-a-list celebrities, but like people that have a following for sure, and

yeah, it works like you typically on those ones will have isolated campaigns and kind of run these whole full campaigns around it, maybe you're even like building a landing page with these, you know, these partners on them to kind of have that congruent messaging from ad-click to landing page.

“So that's like a more of a focused, you know, like I said, more of front cost, but more of a scale play,”

once you're at, you know, at a certain section or if you've identified a need to really

move quick on, on getting awareness out there, like that would make more sense. But, um, yeah, the micro creators probably is more like 80% of what we're working with, maybe even 90, versus like 10% kind of major, major influencers. And then you mentioned post-click there, is there anything you do different post-click? Stay for the 90% of, you know, micro or nano influencer or creatives that you work with, is there anything you change for the post-click experience? Or is it

would it be similar as if you were driving from your own handle? Yeah, on the micro influencer ones, it's, it's usually pretty similar, unless, you know, it is like a gift guide or something, it's nice to have a page that's like kind of matching that. But, yeah, typically for the evergreen stuff, you know, for all these micro creator videos, it is like you're just top, top sort of, you are all destinations that you're linking to. Um, but like, like I said, if it's a focus campaign

around certain partners, a lot of the time you're going to have like a dedicated landing page for that as well. Very cool. Is there any room in this, I know people that are running a TikTok shop and building affiliate that works there, they have to do a lot of sort of like competitions within their program or whatever, where you'll have, you know, a leaderboard for the top affiliates or anything. Is there any room to build anything like that in the Metapartner

ad environment? Yeah, so you can like definitely start little communities. Um,

“I think there's like a subsection on that as well. You could also, you know, get some of these”

creators into your like discord, things like that. If you have like an affiliate existing affiliate management structure where you have all your creators and things like that, a lot of brands will do it in like discord communities or agencies as well. So you can still kind of import them into there and things like that. But in terms of actually in Metapartner, it's mainly using that that communities section and I do think they're adding functionality to do things like that.

Super cool. Any other final advice on either create a forward to? We mentioned the one creator format. I think there was a few others maybe we glossed over. But anything else on the creative side or on the campaign set-up side like how to how to find the right people and test and scale. You know, if you're thinking about a traditional like UGC, there's going to be a lot of overlap there on the types of creators that you might want to also hit. I would say to try to

get in there and you know, secure permissions and get these things going earlier rather than later. Just so you're not fighting for access, for example, during like a November rush. The steps are pretty simple. Like it's all online. You just got to get permissions or an ad code from the creator and again in the partnership hub that can make it easier. You enable the partnership ad toggle at your ad level and then you just select that brand identity and it's going to

allow you to kind of upload the creatives or choose an existing approved post and you can build the ad out and there you go. So but there is a lot of little issues sometimes or creators aren't going to get back to you for a week or two. So you're going to want to get ahead of some of that stuff. And then yeah, in terms of like identifying what you want to be testing, I would say start kind of around what you know is going

partnership fit like a stronger hook that feels more organic. Like a partner would be saying it

“you know, very native feeling. Like we said some ideas like the YI switch to this brand or you know,”

smartphone on box scenes. Those are those are good starting points and from there you'll kind of start to take your winning signals and hey, you know, creators that are in this this vertical or this niche are how performing let's let's get more of them and you sort of self self learn your system

through that process. For a brand that hasn't done this and so say that we'll take a five million

dollar brand. They're spending somewhere from half a million to a million a year on meta. So that's working to 50k maybe 200k a month and they haven't done partnership ads. How many creators are they're going to are they going to want to have on staff essentially to take them through Q4? Is it an ongoing thing where you're trying to reach out to 20 and maybe you get 10 or what sort of scale at that that kind of ad spend are we talking about? Yeah, I'd say like I mean to start it be taking around

“you're going to want to like dedicate at least five grand a month to this to get any any”

noticeable signals if you're around 100k spend. So I would suggest closer to 10k like maybe 10% of your ad budget which is going to scale up for larger brands or lower but yeah, you know 10% and that's that's going to cover three to five creators typically with you know one to two videos from each creator. That definitely is enough to get you enough signals. You put you know when you factor in their content costs and stuff maybe from that 10k or spending 7k or a k on on ad spend

and you just need to yeah basically give yourself a two three week buffer. I'm going to actually

get the content edited you know whatever is needed figure out the ad codes and then you start launching it and yeah month two month three if you can get to 20% of your ad budget by bringing on a couple additional creators plus continuing the relationship with the winning ones. It slowly starts to build. It's not like you need a hundred creators to prove out the concept but you are reaching out to quite a few and not not all of them are going to work out. Maybe you're reaching out to like you said

20 and kind of selecting the five best well also ignoring the ones that just don't get back to you. So nice yeah there's also like strategies where you can you can send out briefs or whatever to tons of creators and then just be more selective but it's going to take more time to monitor all those conversations and everything as well. So we we say start focus you know four or five creators get get a few of your top concepts like testing and and you'll be able to start

scaling out yeah the partnership ads as you get into to November here December. I love that and then what are the metrics so say in that first month what are we really looking are we looking for you know within that first month that of a couple of these ads you know are going to be ROI positive

are they are they things that sort of stay in the account even if they don't have amazing

CPA number like what are we looking for in the metrics you know to to really scale that. Yeah unless you're doing like a dedicated like giveaway or some type of side initiative like that you're still going to be focused on your North Star metrics like purchase conversion rate return on ads spend you know those are still the main metrics you're looking at through partnership ads they don't have like longer buying windows versus a traditional ad you know or

release nothing notable in that side like they should still be producing you purchases versus your your standard benchmarks just as if you were launching a new creative test you know it's going to be similar metrics that you would look at for that to to decide if it's worth continuing we would just say you know be a bit softer at the start while you're testing because there is going to be a need to like dial in which which creators watch messaging is working

and everything but you're still looking at those same metrics and they all still live in in ads manager sure there's more secondary metrics you can look at like a viewership rate like how you know 50% of is when people are dropping off from this this ad but those are things you can already see on on all video ads as well so I'd say like there's no big big changes there on how you're benchmarking these ads versus versus other ads awesome well thanks for painting such

a clear picture of partnership ads I'm sure most of the people listening to this podcast are

“already running some partnership ads but of course if you want to talk shop with a pro you can always”

reach out to Jacob at pilothouse.co thanks for coming on the all killer no fillers show today Jacob will catch up with you again soon we got to get you on the the rundown format we're talking about where we can get some of your hot takes yeah I appreciate you having me on

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you're not a subscriber to our newsletter

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