With over 3 billion monthly active users, it’s no wonder Meta accounts for 75% of US social ad spend. Simply put, it's the top dog when it comes to paid social advertising, especially during the most important sales dates of the year. But while Meta’s extensive user base offers ample opportunity, driving profitable marketing on the platform today requires more expertise than ever.

To deploy successful campaigns when it matters most, you’ll need to embrace some savvy strategies and optimizations.

We sat down with media buying experts Tanner Duncan and Zach Nussbaumer of Hermann Digital to get their advice on how marketers can maximize advertising efficiency and crush their revenue goals during peak sales periods.

From the expert's desk: 10 strategies to boost your Meta ad performance during peak seasons

It’s no secret that competition on Meta is fiercest during major sales periods — whether that’s BFCM, Mother’s Day, or even the back-to-school season. Fortunately, with the right strategies, your brand can cut through the noise.

And with years of experience running successful campaigns for some of the world’s largest eCommerce brands, Tanner and Zach know a thing or two about which strategies work. Here are their 10 tips for maximizing your ad performance:

1. Feed the algorithm with enough budget

Ensure you’re allocating enough budget to power every single ad set. For example, if you have a $1,000/day budget, a $100 CPA, and 10 ad sets, then you’re probably not effectively spending your dollars. 

Increasingly high CPMs might have you feeling a little gun-shy about your budget. But don’t underestimate the power of scale during peak sales periods. “Adding an extra zero to your budget can be a mental blocker for a lot of marketers,” Tanner notes. “Yet people don’t always realize how much scale their accounts can sustain when consumers are higher-intent.”

Tanner and Zach caution against letting too much of your budget go to the learning phase. Performance is usually best when an ad account’s learning phase percentage is under 20%. Why? Although you can still meet your goals with a higher percentage of dollars in learning, keeping this amount south of 20% ensures more stable performance.

If you’re over 20%, don’t go and kill everything in your account right now. Especially if you just rebuilt things (that naturally spikes the % of dollars in learning). But, if you didn’t just do a rebuild, you should consider working on a path towards consolidation.

Generally speaking. You should aim to give each ad set enough budget to generate seven conversions per day (following Meta's learning phase rule of thumb).

Here’s a basic formula to follow when setting budgets:

→ For ASC, ABO, or single ad set CBO: Your average CPA x 7 

→ For CBO: Your average CPA x 7 x Number of Ad Sets

So if, for instance, you have an average CPA of $100, that would be $700/day. If you have three ad sets, a budget of $2,100/day ensures each ad set can exit the learning phase.

Note that the above formulas may not make sense for accounts with CPAs on the higher end ($150+). In these situations, Tanner and Zach aim to give the account at least 3x the CPA to generate consistency within the campaign/ad set. Keep in mind that the higher your CPA and the lower your budget, the more variable your performance will be.

2. Maximize your signal

To give Meta’s algorithm the nudge it needs to optimize efficiently, you should send it as much signal as possible. Tanner and Zach take a few precautions to ensure the best signal at game time. Before you run your campaigns, verify that:

1. Your CAPI is set up
2. Your EMQ scores are healthy (Purchase should be 9+)
3. There are no errors with your pixel firing

💡Tip: To ensure you get the best data possible (and up your Purchase event score), make sure all Auto Advanced Matching (AAM) toggles are on. To check, go to Events Manager > Select your pixel > Settings > Automatic Advanced Matching > toggle on all identifiers.

If you’re looking for even more guidance on this front, feel free to reach out to Dan Bartow at Interface Division. If you tell him Tanner sent you, he’ll roll out the red carpet. 

3. Schedule your ads in advance 

During peak sales periods, the standard approval time for ads tends to increase due to the sheer volume of advertisers on Meta. In fact, Tanner and Zach have heard of many ads getting stuck in review or rejected at the eleventh hour before big campaigns.

Thankfully, this problem is preventable. To that end, they recommend getting the final assets from your creative team at least two weeks before you plan to run your campaigns. After that, set aside time with your media buying team to build out all your ad sets a week in advance. That way, if an ad gets rejected or held up, you have plenty of time to follow through with a contingency plan.

4. Find wins with Reels

Reels can be a surprisingly powerful lever to pull when you want to reduce CPMs. Tanner and Zach have consistently found them to be cheaper Meta placements — even during peak sales periods.

If you’re not convinced, the proof is in the data. Take a look at these aggregated CPMs across five high-spending accounts over a 30-day period:

But Reels aren’t just cheaper than traditional formats like image or carousel ads; they’re also proven to drive conversions — especially among younger audiences. In a recent Meta survey, 79% of Gen Z respondents said they’ve purchased a product or service after viewing a Reel.

To make the most of your Reels, try experimenting with several different formats to see which ones drive the most engagement. Some of Tanner and Zach’s favorites include:

• Tutorials
• Behind-the-scenes (BTS) looks
• Street interviews
• Testimonial mashups
• Green screen talking heads
• Comment reply (a top performer of late)

Example of a winning reel from a Proxima customer

5. Remove unwanted UGC from your Shop

Shops may be Meta’s trendiest new sales channel, but properly leveraging it requires careful optimization. Specifically, ensure you’re taking control over what community content gets featured on your Shop. You can do this by going into your account and toggling off the “Auto-added UGC” feature. Otherwise, Tanner and Zach warn that you may find some unwanted UGC photobombing your Shop’s homepage and PDPs. Just go to Commerce Manager > UGC.

6. Prevent Meta from running unwanted discounts on your Shop

Tanner and Zach also suggest checking that Meta isn’t pulling any unwanted discounts from your Shopify account. In theory, you shouldn’t have any unintentional discounts enabled for the FB/IG sales channel, but sometimes things fall through the cracks. There’s at least a simple fix. Simply toggle off the following settings within your Commerce Manager (Commerce Manager > Overview > Shops (Manage) > Offers):

7. Don’t discount the power of catalog ads

If you’re a larger SKU storefront, don’t sleep on catalog ads during peak seasons. Unlike less targeted formats, catalog ads present a prime opportunity to showcase a broader range of products on a user-by-user level. Because they’re so personalized, Tanner and Zach recommend testing them on both prospecting and retargeting audiences. 

They specifically suggest experimenting with the following formats:

• Instant Experiences: Typically feature a single static image or video hero above a product set from your catalog.
• Product-Level Video (PLV): The video version of catalog ads, PLVs empower you to input video assets featuring specific SKUs directly into your feed to give Meta more creative delivery formats. If you want to know more, check out Maurice Rahmey’s insightful breakdown.
• Lifestyle imagery: Instead of relying on studio shots, consider mixing it up with lifestyle imagery.

While catalog ads make for great evergreen content, you can easily repurpose them for peak sales events by simply adding a banner overlay to any asset. To truly customize your catalog ad feed, Tanner and Zach suggest checking out DataFeedWatch and Feedonomics.

If you’re looking for inspiration, leading lifestyle brand Malbon Golf does a great job leveraging catalog ads to deliver an educational and truly bespoke user experience. By pairing headline copy about their mission and a hero image with a more curated product set, they manage to spread brand awareness and appeal to the user’s specific tastes in one fell swoop.

8. Dial into cost controls

There’s no silver bullet to controlling advertising costs (those don’t exist), but manual bidding is still a tried-and-true way to maximize efficiency and reclaim a sense of control as you scale into big campaigns.

To ensure you’re not fumbling around looking for the right balance between bid and budget in the thick of the season, Tanner and Zach recommend refining your strategy well in advance. 

There are countless ways to structure manual bidding campaigns, but here’s a suggested setup from our guests:

Campaign Type: ASC

Bid Type: Cost cap

Targeting: Broad

Ads: 7-10 top-performing Post Ids from L90

Bid: 25% over target CPA (to get some delivery going, we'll walk it down later)*

*Starting 25% above your desired CPA will help kickstart delivery and enable you to control your costs better in the long term. Keep in mind that there are multiple ways to do this. If you want to be more conservative, you can always tighten the bid from the jump, but be prepared for that campaign not to spend.

Their advice for navigating this setup? Let it run for 3 days and observe performance. If you’re not spending, try refreshing your ads or relaxing the bid. If you are spending but not efficiently, start walking the bid back. They suggest doing this in $2.50-$5 increments but don’t get too caught up in the formulas. “There's no perfect science,” Tanner stresses. “Manual bidding is all feel play.”

9. Fine-tune your audience segments 

Define what your business considers an engaged audience and an existing customer to understand how the algorithm is distributing your spend amongst prospecting, retargeting, and remarketing. You can adjust these settings by going to Advertising Settings > Audience Segments.

Tanner and Zach configure their engaged audiences around a window of time. However, the length of the window will depend on your consideration cycle: A brand with a shorter consideration cycle, for instance, will have a smaller engaged audience window of around 30 days. From there, they simply put all their relevant audience segments into the engaged audience bucket. 

Typically, they input three different engaged audience types: 

1. Website visitors 
2. Shops engagers 
3. Email subscribers

Setting clear parameters for your engaged audiences will enable you to get highly granular with your targeting and nurture relationships with the leads most likely to become loyalists.

10. Use Proxima’s AI Audiences to find high-intent users fast 

In the age of broad and ASC, it’s easy to fall for best practice bias and start questioning the viability of audiences. But Tanner and Zach strongly advise against putting your ad performance at the whims of Meta's flavor of the month targeting. That’s why they like to diversify their paid media strategy with Proxima’s data-enriched lookalikes.

In fact, they rely on Proxima to power many of their largest campaigns. While other audience tools stagnate after hitting a certain level of scale, Proxima has proven to scale and extract the maximum value from every ad dollar spent.

How? Proxima achieves this by combining your brand’s first-party data with its vast Shopper Universe (of 80M+ consumers and $20B+ in purchases across thousands of Shopify stores) to construct boosted seed audiences of users whose behaviors mimic your core shoppers. Our model zeroes in on shoppers who share a particular high-intent behavior — AOV, LTV, purchases from other brands, ads they engage with, or even their preference for a particular SKU.

Tanner and Zach agree that Proxima’s bespoke audiences enrich Meta’s signal at the start of every campaign, helping locate high-intent shoppers when they need them most.

“Proxima’s extensive Shopper Universe delivers the strongest lookalike audiences. With those audiences on hand, we’ve been able to constantly meet and exceed our conversion benchmarks.” — Tanner Duncan, General Manager at Herrmann Digital

But don’t just take their word for it. We let results speak for themselves — take a look at Proxima’s work with the luxury floral atelier Venus et Fleur. The brand turned to Proxima to fuel their Mother’s Day campaigns (aka the flower industry’s BFCM) and saw a 13.2% lift in NC-ROAS and a 28.6% reduction in CPAs on Meta. This win during a critical sales period gave Venus et Fleur the confidence to re-activate their TikTok ad spend — a channel which historically hadn't worked for the brand. Needless to say, it worked. And the Venus team was able to efficiently scale TikTok spend +73%. Proxima’s audiences are now a mainstay of their campaigns across Meta and TikTok.

Are you ready to unlock your advertising edge?

See why leading eCommerce brands trust Proxima to scale paid social efficiently.

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