Chidi Erike explains why ad fatigue happens and why blaming the platform misses the point. Facebook video ads need a hook in the first three seconds, while TV allows longer exposure. Run ads on both Facebook and Instagram together under one auction system instead of manually limiting where your budget goes.
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And if I have to put anything else out there, I would say there's such a thing called ad fatigue, which essentially, which happens to a lot of people. Many people just get lazy. They leave one ad in there, the ad is doing absolutely amazing, it's driving really good results early on, but then all of a sudden it just tanks, right? First thing you do is you say, well, it might be TV. However, I'm sorry, it might be Facebook. However, when it's a TV ad, right, once people invest in— this is how familiar people are with TV. Typically when somebody invests in TV and they don't get no Sales, they say I'm doing something wrong, right? When it's Facebook, they say, okay, well maybe it's something that Facebook is doing, like someone's eating up my money. To Sequoia's point during her amazing introduction about Facebook, like someone's eating my money, right? That may not be true. There's other things John mentioned earlier. You have to test everything, right? Testing is extremely important because you might have a video ad. That you use from TV. That will not work. You can't just take a TV ad and put it on our platform and say, okay, this is amazing, right? Because it was driving results on TV. The reason why it's not going to work is because on Facebook's platform, you have to be able to capture a user in about 3 seconds. TV, you don't have to do that. TV, for the most part, somebody's either checked in or checked out for the duration of that commercial. Facebook, you got 3 seconds. You got 3 seconds to show them something, right? To keep them engaged, keep them watching, etc. Remember earlier, if you do that 3 seconds above, we'll give you a subsidy and you'll actually be paying less money to reach any given audience.
Now that Facebook owns Instagram, do you have any insights or learnings or case studies that talk about how they work together? I did an ad as a test, and my goal was to get awareness for my Instagram site, and I did it through a contest. And what my learning was that, yeah, I got a lot more folks following me because they wanted this particular giveaway. However, they were not the kind of folks that I wanted over time. They just wanted this item, and then after that, they really weren't engaged, or they just kind of checked out. So it doesn't have to be specifically around acquisition, but just any insight or learnings into how those two work together now that you're kind of one.
That's a great question. So I think on the individual user side, we all have— most of us have Facebook platforms, some of us have Instagram platforms. We consider those things two different things. For advertisers, they don't. At least they shouldn't. Those things are very much the same. They work the same in our auction, right? So for example, if you do a marketing campaign and you're willing to show people both on Facebook and on Instagram your actual creatives, then you should literally click on both. Facebook will decide who's likely to convert at what time between the 2 platforms, right? So let's just say that you're selling something for a slightly younger audience, right? Maybe Facebook says, well, we're going to show 90% of the ads since you gave us free will. We'll show 90% on Facebook and 10% on Instagram.
That's not fair.
Set on Instagram, right? Let's say you're selling something else, then we will reverse it. We'll find that person who we should be showing the ads to, right? So, so to answer your question, think of those things as the same, right? When you start thinking of them differently, you start to overemphasize things like followers and clicks and stuff like that. But that's not why you're in the business, right? You're in the business to drive conversions. You don't care where the conversions are coming from. So anytime you say, well, I just want Facebook, I just want Instagram, I just want Chicago or Miami or Florida, etc., these are all constraints. Right? They're literally all constraints. Most people, especially small businesses, are already budget constrained, right? So you don't want to be budget constrained and target constrained, right? So you want to make sure you're opening it up. There's a whole bunch of examples where people say, well, I'm just going to appeal to people with iOS devices and not Android. It's like, why would you pay more to limit a part of the population, right? Like, let Facebook decide, okay, who to show your ads to if we're trying to drive revenue for you.
