With over 3 billion monthly active users, Meta remains the leading social media platform for paid advertising. But despite Meta's impressive user base, its privacy-first policies have DTC brands struggling to drive value from their ads. 

While some have thrown in the towel (settling for lukewarm performance numbers from their Advantage + campaigns), others have taken their targeting methods partially or fully off-platform with incredible results. Obvi, the renowned 8-figure women's health and wellness label, was one of those brands. Their revitalized ads strategy yielded a +7.5% increase in New Customer ROAS while reducing New Customer CPA by 12.1%, all while scaling ad spend by +2.3x.

Here's what their Co-Founder and CMO, Ash Melwani, had to say about unlocking your brand's advertising potential on Meta. 

The greatest challenge facing DTC brands on Meta: Complacency

Ash says Meta's AI-powered Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns have their uses, but they are far from the silver bullet to advertising on the platform. Speaking from first-hand experience, he says relying on Meta's in-platform tools can limit your ads’ potential in three ways: 

❌ Broad targeting delivers limited results

Meta's broad targeting favors general demographic traits such as age, gender, and geolocation. Under this targeting model, brands are expected to rely on creative iteration as their primary method of driving clicks. While Ash views creative iteration as a powerful growth lever, he acknowledges that it's an expensive and time-consuming endeavor that heavily impacts Obvi's weekly workload.

As a result, brands that simply don't have the resources for weekly creative iteration will likely see lukewarm results from Meta's broad targeting as they will mostly reach low-intent shoppers.

❌ Lack of reach limits scaling opportunities 

While many DTC brands on Meta struggle with reach and attrition, this situation was especially troublesome for Ash and the Obvi team. With a monthly ad budget north of $500,000, Obvi would continuously encounter plateaus where scaling spend didn't correlate to improved ad performance (a trend most Meta advertisers are all too familiar with). 

Ash attributes this issue to the fact Meta tends to circulate ads to the same audience until they eventually convert. As Meta continues to pester these audiences, the opportunities to broaden your reach and drive efficient scale on the platform diminish.

"The problem with ASC campaigns is Meta's goals don't always align with your own. Meta provides just good enough performance by targeting the same audience until they convert, so you spend more on the platform. They're not going to help expand the reach of your ads." – Ash Melwani, Co-Founder and CMO at Obvi 

❌ Meta's machine learning model can create targeting mishaps 

Meta's AI-driven targeting model was another pain point that hit close to home for Ash. For context, Obvi ran an influencer marketing campaign in 2022 to diversify its marketing strategy. 

While the campaign was a success — increasing sales revenue by 300% — Meta's algorithm began to target users with similar attributes to the influencer's audience rather than Obvi's target demo. This led to Ash reaching out to Proxima to seed Obvi's account with the demographic traits of its ideal customers and get its targeting back on track.

Read the full case study to find out how Obvi increased ad spend +130% and improved New Customer ROAS +7.5% with Proxima.

Boost your Meta ads performance with these 3 methods

Despite its shortcomings, Ash maintains that Meta is a potent social platform and a pillar of any paid media strategy. Here are his top three recommendations for brands looking to increase the effectiveness of their Meta ads and the tools that will help them get there. 

1. Consider creative iteration

While potentially expensive and resource-heavy, creative iteration remains one of the most effective growth levers in paid advertising on Meta. Under Meta's broad and ASC models, there are very few customization options for targeting. Creative remains your most reliable form of differentiation and it helps get your ads in front of the right people. However, your team will need to continuously test and analyze creative performance to discover what resonates with your core audience.

To save your team's time exporting data from Meta and digging through spreadsheets to uncover creative insights, Ash recommends Motion for creative analytics. Motion’s platform condenses your creative data into visually simplified reports that help media buyers and creatives identify and iterate on assets that drive tangible results. 

"Diversified creative will hit different pieces of your audience. Everybody reacts differently to various creative formats, influencers, etc., so you need to test a little bit of everything to know what sticks."

2. Optimize your landing pages

Ash recommends optimizing your landing pages to ensure shoppers who land on your site have the highest chance of converting. Similar to creative iteration, landing page optimization requires significant testing to uncover how your audience reacts to different offers, formats, messaging, and imagery. 

To streamline landing page creation, testing, and iteration, Ash recommends Unbounce. Ash says Unbounce’s low-code approach makes it easy to build and automatically directs site visitors to optimized pages. 

"Ask yourself, is my offer truly incentivizing enough to get users to take action? Because if it's not, you've lost them — potentially for good."

3. Diversify your audiences 

The way Ash sees it, Meta's Achilles’ heel is the platform's tendency to limit the scale and diversity of your audiences. This makes audience iteration one of the most high-value growth levers your brand needs to be testing.

To supplement your existing Meta ads strategy, Ash recommends leveraging AI-based tools that can help you break through the inevitable diminishing returns as you scale spend when using in-platform targeting. More specifically, he recommends Proxima. 

Proxima has one of the strongest datasets in eCommerce, providing rich conversion insights from over 65 million unique, anonymized shoppers, which we combine with AI models to build enhanced audiences tailored to your brand. Our predictive algorithms and access to a vast data pool help brands scale paid media efficiently across advertising platforms and maximize marketing performance.

Proxima’s approach to audience building has proven invaluable in helping Obvi drive profitable marketing on Meta. Today, Obvi allocates over 57% of its total ad spend to Proxima's AI Audiences.

"Where Proxima comes in is that it gives you access to more audiences that Meta won't go after for you. This is key to expanding your audience with high-intent users and scaling your spend profitably."

Take your Meta ads strategy to the next level with Proxima

In today's highly competitive advertising environment, brands relying wholly on in-platform tools will struggle to stand out in the maddening crowd. 

Brands looking to gain an edge over the competition can no longer rely on Meta's in-platform targeting capabilities — there are simply too many alternative avenues to driving success. Are you ready to join 8-figure brands like Obvi, leveraging AI Audiences to drive profitable marketing on Meta?

Ready to get started? Book a demo.