7 Unusual Meta Ads Strategies for Fashion and Lifestyle
Introduction
We've been running Meta Ads since 2011, building over a decade of hands-on experience in digital marketing, particularly in the fashion and lifestyle sector. Over the years, we've had the chance to test, experiment with and refine our strategies, identifying the techniques that actually work, beyond the usual advice you often read online.
In this article, we've decided to share 7 lesser-known strategies that are often overlooked, drawn from our hands-on experience. The goal is to go beyond the usual basic practices and offer concrete insights that can bring real value to your business.
Below you'll find these strategies, refined through our extensive experience on Meta.
How Square Images Improve Performance in Meta Ads Campaigns
Square images (1:1) are optimised for Meta platforms, ensuring they fit perfectly across the various ad placements. This format not only adapts better, but also tends to get more clicks since it takes up more screen space, making it more visible and appealing to the user.
In the fashion and lifestyle sector, the emotional element is essential. Product appeal needs to be conveyed visually, and the photo becomes the “salesperson” that communicates the product’s value and desirability. It’s essential that the photo is representative and emotionally engaging, immediately conveying the style and quality of the garment or accessory. A well-executed photo not only captures attention, but tells a visual story that draws the user in.
In our A/B tests, we’ve observed that a square photo, specifically curated for advertising and correctly added to the product feed with the right proportions, can have a significant impact on performance. Concrete results show that a well-executed photo can:
- Reduce cost per click by up to 57%
- Reduce cost per add-to-cart by 34%
- Reduce the cost of initiating checkout by 32%
- Reduce cart abandonment rate by 28%
All this simply by using square images. Choosing bespoke images, shot specifically for the advertising context, is therefore a powerful lever for improving campaign performance in the fashion and lifestyle sector.
The Ideal Structure for a Meta Ads Funnel
Over the years of running Meta Ads, we’ve developed an effective structure that often fits our partners’ needs perfectly, covering every stage of the checkout funnel. This structure is essential because each stage of the funnel represents a critical touchpoint with the user, and optimising the interaction at each one increases the likelihood of conversion and reduces the risk of drop-off.
Why is it important to cover every area of the funnel?
Every stage of the funnel, from the first interaction through to retargeting, plays a key role in taking the user from simple interest to purchase and beyond, encouraging loyalty. If you neglect one of these stages, you risk losing valuable users at various points along the purchase journey. Having a structured advertising strategy allows you to:
- Generate qualified traffic (top of funnel).
- Provide more information about products (exploration stage).
- Drive action (add to cart and purchase).
- Win back potential lost customers (retargeting).
Low Budgets, Maximum Return on Investment
On Meta Ads, you often don’t need to invest huge sums to achieve great results, especially in the fashion and lifestyle sector. With a modest budget, it’s possible to cover a brand’s or multi-brand’s entire potential audience, provided elements such as ad quality and precise targeting are carefully optimised.
One of the key aspects to consider is frequency, which represents the average number of times a user has seen your ad within a given period. If frequency is too high (for example, above 5), it means the same user is seeing your ad repeatedly, which can lead to saturation and a drop in effectiveness. It’s important to find the right balance: push campaigns up to a certain point without exceeding the audience’s saturation threshold.
It May Sound Obvious, But It’s Crucial
It might sound like an obvious piece of advice, but as an agency, we often find ourselves having to reduce the budgets our clients want to impose on us. That’s because, most of the time, spending more simply isn’t necessary. On an annual basis, it’s essential to invest just enough to keep the business sustainable and deliver results without waste. Overspending isn’t just pointless — it can also reduce long-term return on investment (ROI).
Real case studies
- Pier Abbigliamento: With a minimal budget, we achieved an average annual ROAS of 9.4x. By optimising campaigns for the right audience and keeping ad frequency under control, Pier Abbigliamento maximised returns without having to increase its budget.
- Engine: With Engine too, using a reduced budget, we achieved an average annual ROAS of 7x. This success was achieved through accurate audience segmentation and careful management of ad frequency.
In both cases, the key was the strategic management of resources, focusing on where it was truly necessary to push, while avoiding wasting extra budget on stages that wouldn’t have delivered further value.
Assess Ad Potential Through CPC and Cost per Add-to-Cart
Cost per click (CPC) and cost per add-to-cart are two of the key metrics for assessing the effectiveness and validity of a Meta Ads campaign. A CPC that’s too high can point to a problem with targeting or ad creative, while cost per add-to-cart measures how well an ad converts interest into a potential purchase.
Correctly assessing these two aspects is crucial for understanding whether an ad is delivering results and whether it’s worth continuing to invest in it. Here’s how you can measure and optimise these metrics:
- Cost per click (CPC): This metric represents how much you pay for each click on an ad. If CPC is too high, it means you’re spending too much to capture attention and should review your targeting or ad messaging. As a general rule, CPC should never exceed €0.35.
- Cost per add-to-cart: This indicator is crucial for understanding whether an ad is able to turn user interest into a concrete action. It’s important for the cost per add-to-cart to be proportionate to the brand’s or product’s Average Order Value (AOV).
Building an Optimal Product Feed
The quality and consistency of the product feed are key to the success of online marketing campaigns, especially when using dynamic ads. The feed is the hub of all the information about your products: images, descriptions, prices and every other piece of data later used in your advertising strategies and your eCommerce store. When this information is accurate, complete and up to date, it significantly improves the likelihood of conversion, creating a smooth user experience.
High-quality images
Images are the user’s first visual contact with your product. Studies have shown that using high-resolution, well-curated images can increase consumer trust and improve the perceived value of the product, boosting conversion probability by up to 40% .
Accurate, compelling descriptions
Product descriptions shouldn’t just be clear and concise, but also optimised with relevant keywords to improve visibility on search engines. A well-written description reduces buyer uncertainty, and according to research by eConsultancy, well-structured product descriptions have the potential to improve conversion rate by up to 78% .
Accurate, competitive pricing
Transparency and accuracy of pricing in the product feed are essential to avoid drop-offs during the purchase process. If the price shown in ads or on the eCommerce site doesn’t match the actual price, buyers may lose trust and abandon the site. A study by the Baymard Institute shows that around 69% of carts are abandoned, and one of the main reasons is confusion over pricing .
The power of dynamic ads
Using a well-curated product feed is essential to the effectiveness of dynamic ads, which show products directly to consumers based on their interests and behaviour. When the feed is well-structured and up to date, dynamic ads can quickly adapt to changes in stock and pricing, delivering a more relevant experience for the user. Facebook, for example, reports that businesses using dynamic ads have seen a 34% increase in conversion rate compared to traditional ads.
Studies and research on product feeds
Numerous studies confirm the importance of the technical build and ongoing maintenance of a well-organised product feed. According to research by Google, an optimal product feed can increase product visibility by 20% in Shopping search results, and improve dynamic ad relevance by up to 35% . Shopify has also found that merchants who regularly update their product feeds see an average sales increase of 24% .
In short, building an optimal product feed isn’t just about data entry, but a strategic element for improving the user experience, increasing conversions and staying competitive in the online market.
Sources
Intelligent Reach on Google Shopping
Confect.io on Facebook Dynamic Ads
Photos for Facebook, Videos for Instagram
Adapting ad format to each social platform is crucial to maximising the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Facebook and Instagram, although part of the same Meta family, differ significantly in the type of content that gets the most engagement from users.
Photos for Facebook
Static images tend to perform better on Facebook. Users on this platform show a greater preference for content that’s quick and easy to take in. Studies by Confect.io reveal that images generate a higher click-through rate (CTR) than videos and a 24% lower cost per acquisition, making them a more cost-effective choice for conversion-focused campaigns . This ties in with typical Facebook user behaviour, as people often scroll quickly through their feed, pausing more readily on images with clear calls-to-action .
Videos for Instagram
Instagram, being a primarily visual and dynamic platform, favours video. Videos not only capture attention more effectively, but also create a higher level of engagement. According to a study by WeVideo, videos on Instagram generate up to six times more interactions (likes and comments) than static images . Short-form videos, especially in formats like Stories and Reels, are also more effective at holding users’ attention, given that most videos on Instagram are watched without sound.
Conclusions
Using images on Facebook helps optimise ad budget, while videos on Instagram, although more expensive, offer greater potential to engage users and build emotional connections. This distinction is key to optimising campaigns across both platforms, making the most of each format’s potential depending on the platform used.
The agency’s approach
For an agency, it’s essential to understand the client’s context and audience before allocating budget. The choice of ad format and platform must reflect not only audience characteristics but also specific viewing and engagement preferences. A practical example of this approach is the case of Kunzi, where we shifted most of the budget on Meta towards photo collections. Kunzi’s target audience, being older, responds better to static visual content like photos, resulting in stronger performance. For Progetto Seta, on the other hand, our work showed that videos on Instagram were the best-suited channel, as the audience responded better to dynamic, visual content on that platform.
Sources:
Target Your Engagement Audience for Stronger Engagement
The engagement audience is a group of people who have already interacted with your content on Meta (Facebook and Instagram). These interactions include likes, comments, shares, video views or even ad clicks. This type of audience is valuable because it represents users who have already shown active interest in your brand.
Why is it so important?
With the evolution of privacy regulations and growing restrictions on external tracking (such as cookies and third-party data), it’s becoming increasingly difficult to track user behaviour outside the platform. Solutions like server-side tracking can fill some of the gaps, but not everyone agrees to be tracked. Against this backdrop, the engagement audience becomes even more important, because it tracks users directly within the Meta platform, where tracking restrictions are less strict.
This type of audience also allows you to build a solid, engaged fanbase, since users who interact are more likely to become customers. Investing in growing this audience leads to an improvement in engagement rate and conversions, while also strengthening your brand on Meta.
Key benefits:
- Effective tracking: even in an era of data restrictions, you can still monitor user activity within the platform.
- Fanbase building: grow the number of engaged followers and fans, creating a base of loyal users.
- Higher conversion: an audience that interacts with the brand is more inclined to complete an action, such as a purchase or newsletter sign-up.
In conclusion, focusing on growing your engagement audience is a fundamental strategy for keeping engagement levels high and maximising conversions in an increasingly complex advertising landscape.
A lack of effective tracking can lead to a significant loss of conversions, with estimates pointing to a reduction of up to 35% in sales among users who added items to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase. This is particularly problematic in the case of tracking restrictions from systems like iOS14, which prevent monitoring of user behaviour outside the platform.
In this context, the engagement audience becomes the “new retargeting”. Since these interactions happen within Meta, they aren’t subject to the same limitations as external tracking. By using engagement audiences, you can keep following up with people who’ve shown interest in your brand, converting users who would otherwise be lost.
Case Study: Saraghina
In the case of Saraghina, by using the engagement audience as a form of retargeting, we managed to recover 20% of conversions that would otherwise have been lost. These users, while not trackable through traditional methods, had interacted with posts and ad content. By showing them targeted ads again, we reignited their interest and closed the sales.
This strategy doesn’t just help recover lost sales — it also helps build a stronger, more direct connection with the audience.
