Spending most of your ad budget on Meta and wondering how to make every cent count?
We know you’re familiar with the concept of platforms that enhance your Meta advertising, but being a modern marketer taught you to question shiny new solutions that claim to make your job easier. And there’s always the question: do we need to invest in something that is ‘only’ an extension of what the native platform has to offer?
We get the skepticism. Budgets are tight and each investment counts.
That’s why we created an ultimate go-to guide to how Hunch extends the capabilities of the native platform, and how you can leverage it for advanced campaigns. This is not about Meta vs Hunch, this is about Meta with Hunch.
What is Hunch and who is it for?
Let’s go through the basic intro, so you can understand with whom you compare Meta.
Hunch is a platform that automates creative production and media buying. Our platform is ideal for brands and agencies with most of their budget going to Meta and Catalog Ads (DPAs), that are looking for ways to execute more innovative campaigns and stay operationally efficient.
The best way to describe our workflow, and how our platform extends Meta is by introducing the Hunch 4-step framework: Connect, Create, Publish, Learn.
The framework is similar to the flow you have when setting up a campaign on Meta, and we’ll go through each step and give you a comparison of what would be different if you were to publish your campaigns through Hunch.
#1 Connect: Go beyond predefined numbers of fields
In the Connect step, we turn your data sources into your most useful weapon.
We’ll obtain your data and prepare them for creative work while maintaining feeds Meta compliant. The frequency and timing of feed syncing on Hunch is the same as it is on Meta.
Here’s the first difference to note.
While Meta has a predefined set of required and optional fields, Hunch allows you to further enrich the products with additional information and add as many fields as you want.
These fields can be used for creative production while still having the Meta-compliant feed.
You can create product sets the same way you’re doing it on Meta, or you can use 3rd party data which Hunch will translate into Meta product sets.
#2 Create: Personalize your templates however you like
In step two, your creative output through Hunch has notable differences.
A major part of the Hunch platform is our Creative Studio, where creative scalability is priority no.1.
The process typically begins with our AI background removal, which strips away the white backgrounds from product images. To further streamline the workflow, you can upload your .psd files and make any layer dynamic - for example connecting the “price” layer with the price column from the product feed.
Moreover, the Multi Artboard feature makes it possible to scale creatives to all required formats, which enables easy adjustment for all Meta’s placements both for videos and images.
Compared to Meta, where you can use a single catalog info label, add a frame, or generate a background, with Hunch Creative Studio you can personalize your template however you like.
To add more to personalization you can use Hunch’s Conditional Visibility feature, which allows you to decide which elements to show or hide based on specific conditions.
For example, if a product is on sale, the ad will display the original price, the new sale price, and the discount percentage. You can also play with this, and highlight the amount shoppers save by purchasing your product on sale.
As Meta relisted one of their hottest updates so far, Catalog Product Video, we enable you to build and scale product-centric videos in our Creative Studio, and connect it to the catalog the same way you’d do with regular DPAs.
Hunch supports PLV and adaptive placements for Catalog Ads while supporting up to 20 templates per catalog, providing an excellent opportunity for creative testing and minimizing ad fatigue.
#3 Publish: The moment where you discover Hunch’s secret sauce - Hunch Autopilot
Let’s go through the basics first:
- All campaign objectives available on Meta, are available on Hunch too.
- The standard campaign setup options on Hunch are identical to those on Meta.
- Hunch supports Dynamic Media, which allows Meta to display either images or videos of the catalog items based on what each viewer is likely to engage with.
Here’s where we’re adding a flair.
For any advertisers with complex workflows or just huge workloads, we have developed a Hunch Autopilot as a way to unlock the full power of advertising on Meta.
Hunch Autopilot is designed for use cases not covered by dynamic ads. In essence, Hunch Autopilot enables the management of large campaigns or a number of campaigns with minimal effort.
Example of how Hunch Autopilot help Ruokaboksi
Ruokaboksi is a Finnish meal kit service that delivers recipes and ingredients to their clients. Ruokaboksi needed well-defined growth strategies, resource allocations, and their CPMs down, for which they needed to get more granular.
Targeting and optimizing on a city level allows for better frequency and impression control than relying on campaign budget optimization.
Also, personalized creative outperforms generic ones, but then you’re faced with production costs and time requirements which often make this impossible to do.
By using Hunch Autopilot, Ruokaboksi was able to build dynamic templates and campaigns, effectively turning the task of creation 700 ads and 230 ad sets into the creation of a single ad template, and one dynamic ad set in a campaign.
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Here’s what Ruokaboksi did with Hunch:
- Launched 4 campaigns
- Made 400 ad sets
- Produced more than 1500 Facebook creatives
- Lowered CPL by 82%
- Lowered CAC by 62%
#4 Learn: Enrich your campaigns’ data with multiple data sources
While Meta's campaign dashboard gives you in-depth insights and customizable reports, Hunch goes a step further with integrations like Google Analytics 4, Adjust, and Appsflyer to enhance your campaign data. You can also automate tasks like increasing budgets, pausing, or cloning ad sets, just like Meta's rules.
Plus, set up alerts for specific conditions and get notified via email or Slack.
It’s never just about the platform. The service is what makes the difference
Instead of wrapping up this article by summarizing everything we’ve covered, let's add an extra layer: the service.
Big advertisers and huge Meta spenders usually have a Meta rep to help them spot opportunities for success, try out new features, and execute complex creative testing.
But what if you’re not a heavy Meta spender? Does that mean you can’t have a similar experience?
It doesn’t.
Hunch bridges this gap. Every one of our customers gets a Blueprint-certified expert who provides proactive support.
Beyond assisting with your everyday advertising on Meta, we can help execute complex creative testing - not just by producing a bunch of creatives, but by crafting a strategy.
Let’s put these words into examples. Here’s what we do for one of our customers.
Meta's marketing science team ran a 4-week Conversion Lift Study to measure the increase in ROAS for one of our customers. Using Hunch's AI-powered tools, the customer removed backgrounds from 350,000 product images to create enriched DPAs.
The test results showed that Hunch outperformed both competitor overlay and no-overlay templates, driving a 2.3x increase in ROAS. Partnering with Hunch is estimated to save you 64% in annual costs.
