How Data Powers Meta Ads and Impacts Campaign Performance — Brad Redding | Why More Data means Better Ad Performance, Key Data Meta Needs For Better Campaign Results, Server-side Tracking For Shopify, AI Creative Testing In 2025 (#351)

In this podcast episode, we dive deep into the world of tracking and explore how data powers Meta Ads and impacts campaign performance. 

Our featured guest is Brad Redding, Founder of GetElevar.com, who shares insights on navigating privacy changes, optimizing ad strategies, and leveraging data to improve e-commerce marketing performance.
 
Topics discussed in this episode: 

• Why Meta still dominates ecommerce advertising with 80% of customer acquisition spend 
• What specific data points Meta wants from advertisers for optimal campaign performance 
• How server-side tracking solves modern data collection challenges for Shopify stores 
• What custom conversion tracking strategies boost performance for different product lines 
• Why separating purchase events matters more than parameter optimization in Meta 
• How offline conversions and retail store data can enhance Meta advertising performance 
• What AI-powered creative testing capabilities are coming to Meta's platform in 2025 
  
  

Links & Resources

Website: https://www.getelevar.com/
Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/gtm-datalayer-by-elevar
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/getelevar
X/Twitter: https://x.com/getelevar

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://t.ly/wTibu 
 

MORE RESOURCES

Download the Ecommerce Conversion Handbook for store optimization tips at https://tinyurl.com/CRO-ebook

Best Apps to Grow Your eCommerce Store: https://ecommercecoffeebreak.com/best-shopify-marketing-tools-recommendations/

Become a smarter online seller in just 7 minutes
Our free newsletter is your shortcut to ecommerce success. Every Thursday. 100% free. Unsubscribe anytime. Sign up at https://newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com

Rate, Review & Follow
Enjoying this episode? Help others like you by rating and reviewing my show on Apple Podcasts. Rate here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ecommerce-coffee-break-digital-marketing-podcast-for/id1567749422

And if you haven’t yet, follow the podcast to catch all the bonus episodes I’m adding. Don’t miss out—hit that follow button now!

Transcript

Welcome to the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today we talk about how data powers meta ads and how that impacts your ad performance. Joining me on the show is Brad Redding, founder at GetElevar.com.. So let's dive right into it. 

This is the e commerce coffee break, a top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores, learn how to survive in the fast changing.

E-Commerce World with your host Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome. Welcome to the show. 

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we wanna talk about the power of. Meta ads, Facebook, Instagram, and so on. And what kind of data impacts the performance of your ad campaign.

So really diving deep into the world of tracking. And with me on the show, I have Brett Redding. He's the founder of Elevar. Elevar powers server side conversion tracking for fast growing e commerce brands. Brand brings 17 years of experience in e commerce, having built analytics foundations for brands like Rothes, Rebecca Minkoff, and others.

At Elevar, he focuses on automating data collection, enhancing conversion tracking for thousands of Shopify brands. So, the right person to talk to, I would like to welcome to the show. Hi, Brett. How are you today? 

Doing great. Thanks for having me on. 

But let's talk about tracking. Let's talk about how meta ads have changed over the couple of years.

Um, there were a lot of privacy changes there. Um, talking about cookies and so on so forth. So what kind of data actually does Meta want from you as a advertiser? Everything, 

everything you can give meta they, they want, uh, I think, you know, the easy example is her reference. Everyone knows. And it's probably sick of talking about this point is iOS 14, five that rolled out, I don't know how many years ago, it seems like 10 years ago at this point, but there there's continued headwinds that every six months, especially with Apple's rollout and, and a web kit, which is really the.

Power behind the browsers like Safari and others, which powers for most brands, more than 50 percent of their traffic is coming from, you know, one of these and an iPhone or Safari browser on a Mac book or a combination. Um, so that's why there's so much focus and intensity and clickbaity headlines out there with Apple's doing this or Safari's making this change, which reduces this ability to track and cookies and all the other lingo that goes out there with meta.

But really all that is, is just. It's more friction, more headwinds that brands and businesses are facing on just dropping a pixel onto their site and then just letting meta, letting that pixel, whether it's meta or others, in this case, we'll just talk meta, grab all the information that it can from within the browser.

And this is where it gets a little bit more technical and more jargony in the tech world, but things like IP addresses and your. Uh, your dimensions of your browser, your, your language settings, your geographic, you know, where are you? Is your IP able to match to an address? Are you in an office? Are there other, uh, machines hooked up?

So all of that, there's hundreds and hundreds of data points that ultimately can come together to help meta identify and basically connect who is this user? And is it the same? Can they match it to that user within the meta ad or the meta app? Excuse me. Okay. To ultimately tie it back to an ad that that user viewed or clicks.

And then once they have that connection and it just makes the ability to report conversions back to activity, but also allow meta to go find other people like that person. Uh, so that's just a little macro overview on the friction that we're all facing. And there's a lot of changes that meta has been introducing over the last few years on data collection and what data they want.

So I'll pause there before getting into, you know, the answering the question of what data does, what does meta want? And I can share some more context around that. 

Yeah, I think that's a very good start. Um, obviously merchants are in different points in their journey. You have starters, you have side hustlers, you want to get into e commerce, you have smaller medium enterprises, you have e commerce managers with a good background, but all have to deal with the, the growth of the ad platform.

And that has changed quite a bit over the years. Um, the good old, tracking cookie sort of is gone. There is no other things there. Talk me through the initial setup. Um, I think that's where people struggle the most bit with, um, to get it up and running. How does that work? 

We work with mostly Shopify brands and that, again, it seems like most of the e com world, especially if you are just getting started, they're just Shopify makes it super simple.

But then you have the enterprise brands that are also moving over to Shopify just because the. Your cost of ownership is so much more affordable and with the macro factors of e com brands need to be profitable and it's obviously much more expensive to acquire new customers and all that goes into that.

Um, so that's where I'll answer in the context of Shopify. Facebook has a native app. It's free. You can just connect, uh, wire up the native Facebook app and that's going to send the base event. So your page view event, your product view event, add to cart event, purchase event, etc. And some basic customer information, customer parameters.

That's, I don't know how many stores are on Shopify today, 2 million plus or so. Majority are likely using that. Then you have the, the world that Elovar lives in, which is a bit more sophisticated where, okay, maybe you want, you do want to send more data to Meta. You want to send, you want to customize the data that you're sending to Meta.

You want to send more customer data. Maybe you have offline conversions, you have retail stores, you have wholesale locations, uh, where you, you. If you're just tracking the base, the base app, which is tracking your thank you page, essentially this, this, all these other options, like an L of R or others, they allow you to just go a little bit deeper.

Those are basically, I mean, there's a myriad of options. You know, L of R is not the only player. We have plenty of competition, but it's really, it's those two. And then you have, if you go outside of Shopify and you are. Either WooCommerce or Salesforce Commerce Cloud or I'll stay away from Adobe because they're kind of like their own Shopify world.

But in the world of custom, like a custom e com platform, a lot of times we'll see people at a home grown and build their own through Google Tag Manager Server Side Container, which we lived in that world for years. We still live in the world of GTM Web Container, but GTM Server Side Container is another very widely used, widely adopted.

Uh, tool to send data server side to Facebook and do some of that manipulation of customer data or custom conversions that I mentioned as well. 

You mentioned before that conversions are getting more and more expensive, and obviously you can sort of steer against that with better tracking data, with better, Better data overall, what kind of data and what kind of KPIs do you need to look at to influence your conversions or your campaigns in a positive way?

Yeah, I'll use a few examples just to give specifics versus broad strokes. Uh, maybe I'll, I'll set the stage before giving an example of a coffee brand back in the day. If you were advertising in meta, this is how I used to do it as well. You would go and create your audiences and you'd create your funnel.

Okay. And it could be top of the funnel could be prospecting could be remarketing could be people who viewed these collection pages or did this thing and that's who you want to serve your ads to and you do that through audiences. So you tie your audiences to your ad sets in your campaigns. However, because of the headwinds and the friction that I mentioned previously, where it's not as easy to do that, in some cases, impossible to do what used to do.

What we've been seeing lately is a bigger focus on conversions. And so what I, I look at a lot of what we're doing with meta and some of our customers with custom conversions is essentially the same thing as audience lists of non purchasers. So instead of just sending, if you have a hundred thousand people that purchase your products in a month or 10, 000 or a thousand, all of those people are not the same persona, you likely sell to multiple personas and different people.

And they're going to have different needs in the future and different spending habits and household income and everything that goes into that. So, so now starting to customize conversions, purchase conversions that you were sending to Metta. to fit their business manager, their campaign strategy, where you can assign a conversion to a campaign and have meta optimized against that.

So now getting into the coffee brand. So we, this is just one example of again, hundreds that I've seen our customers work through is they're like, Hey, we, we just rolled out a new product. So they had cold, let's just say cold brew coffee and they're getting into protein coffee and both around subscription.

And they're struggling with driving demand for their product. Protein coffee, which is new, their cold brew coffee was doing great, different purchasers, different personas, different needs. So they, they came with that specific challenge of how can we tell Metta to go find more protein purchasers? And we had to create a custom conversion for protein.

Purchased coffee, like protein purchase, it's a little bit of a tongue twister, protein purchasers and let medic optimize off of that. Now, the common question again, this is a little bit in the weeds. You might say, well, the purchase events we're sending has the protein category in there. Why can't manage just use that?

If you're an advantage, plus if you're doing advantage plus campaigns, which is majority are doing and putting out significant amount of spend towards. You can't optimize towards a parameter on the main purchase event. It has to be a separate purchase event. So that's what I mean by the separation of the purchase event going back to the audience funnels and how we were doing things back in the day.

We're seeing a little bit, a little bit of that same behavior, but now it's manifesting through your, your events, whether it's a purchase event or a subscription event. That's what we're seeing today. And I see that becoming a bigger and bigger move as we get into 2025. Yeah. We're doing things like, uh, uh, profits and now sending a profit, profit conversion, different products.

You're going to have different margin on. So same thing you want to inform meta, go after more of these high margin products and stay away from these low margin products, things of that nature. So that's, that's what we're seeing today. And we're seeing more and more brands, especially the sophisticated ones, pick up on this.

I think it was a very good example because coffee, everyone is drinking coffee. You said there is different pockets in the audiences and you want to address them with the right product was in the main product. And then on top of that, you not only have your conversions in your store, but you have a ton of different other apps and software solutions around that might be, I don't know, Klaviyo for email on other, other parts.

So there's tons of different data points Sources where data is coming from now doing this manually, almost impossible. You're helping with that. Tell me how Elevar works in the background to optimize all of that. 

Really everything we just said is we do all of that. We work very closely with Shopify and we have tight connections with what I'll call like the Shopify server, different APIs and make available.

But that that's we have two jobs to do at Elevar. Number one, send 100 percent of events. To every platform in this case meta to the destination connected. So a conversion event can be a purchase, but it can be an add to cart. It can be an email sign up or a page view, but that's our job is to send 100 percent of those events to each channel.

Job number two is to ensure each one of those events has a maximum amount of customer data, session data, attribution data, product data, order data. So the platform can connect that event to the user within their app. Because if we only, if we only did job number one, it would be 100 percent direct none to use a Google Analytics reference.

So they wouldn't be able to attribute to anyone because there's no identifiable information. So that's really where those two for us, that those are the two main jobs. And that's really what we, we focus on maniacally just to get those two, right? Because. Those are very two, two difficult problems because that number two example is all those headwinds that we're facing and now having to integrate with all these consent providers and there's thousands of those and the new laws coming out with different states in the U.

S. and the lawsuits that are coming out with CCPA noncompliance. So it really is, uh, it's a rat's nest for a lot of our customers and they don't want to be dealing with this stuff. They want to be strategizing and building, you know, creating more products and selling more. So that's. All that junk, that's kind of, that's the world that we live in.

Yeah, no, that makes 

perfect sense. Now, in the past, always a problem was with tracking and attribution is like, um, everyone wanted to claim the attribution. Facebook wanted to have it. Google wanted to have it. And as a merchant, it's like, I don't really know where it's coming from. Talk to me a little bit about, about the platform and the day to day work.

What do I see? How does the dashboard work? Um, what kind of data do I need to look up every day? 

Yeah. Great question. A common one. We're like a foundation in the house. And a lot of regards where once you set us up, you don't really, when you walk in your front door, you're not looking at your foundation.

That's very similar to our, you're not logging in on a daily basis. We do most of our reporting on a daily basis is just monitoring the health of your tracking. So if you are. Our promise is we're sending a hundred percent of conversions to meta and others. If that drops to 99% or 95%, then we alert you on that.

So really the, the day-to-Day dashboarding that we provide is the, the health and performance of your, your destination tracking as a brand, all the attribution and the analysis, and looking at what channels get what credit that isn't, that is in the same sandbox that we operate in, but a very different job to do, which is not one that we do.

And that's where. You know, all the different attribution companies come into play and will help with that day to day reporting and analysis. But a lot of the data they need to collect is the same data that we collect as well, but it's just it's two, uh, two different jobs. Yeah. Talk me through the onboarding.

Um, how do I get started? You can self serve, uh, so you can just sign up on your own, self serve. You can, if you want to run a split test, uh, running two pixels or Klaviyo accounts or Intensive accounts just to see the event difference or event quality. Okay. You can do that or you can just switch it out.

And then we also have paid onboarding as well. If you want our team to handle it and we just go through and set everything up, no matter the complexity that you have, then we, uh, we, it's called our done for you service and it's a, it's a 750. And if there was more complexity, like consent, it would go up from there.

Talk to me about who your perfect customer is. You mentioned, um, that there's different pockets too. Is there specific industries or verticals that you work more with than others? 

Not on the vertical side, not really. I mean, really for, for me, I look at if a brand is looking to accelerate growth and, you know, they want to grow two, three, four X in a year or a multi year period.

Those are the brands that they're going to need to be very Focused on their data collection and their performance of their marketing budget. And typically whether they're a million dollar brand or a hundred million dollar brand, if they still want to grow, the million wants to get to two and five and 10 and a hundred wants to get to two 50 and a billion, they both have the same wants of, okay, we need to be.

We need to nail our data strategy. We need to nail our marketing strategy. We need to hit our ROI numbers or ROAS numbers or, you know, marketing efficiency ratio numbers. So all of those, that's the brand that usually is going to look at, okay, we, we don't just want to use the native, You know, email tool or review tool at Shopify offers because there is a native email tool that Klaviyo has 80 percent of the market share in Shopify because Klaviyo is just a stronger, better product for email and SMS performance than the native app that Shopify provides.

So that's the same context of LLR is yes, you can use native Facebook channel that Facebook owns and manages. But again, if you're looking to really grow and accelerate, that's typically where some, uh, someone like us or others would come into play. 

No, you're working in a very dynamic market segment. Um, tell me a little bit, what do you think is going to happen with meta ads, uh, in the next year?

Uh, what's, what's happening there? You have good insights. Uh, let us know. 

Yeah. The custom conversions. I think just customizing the data that you're sending to meta, just to help them understand more about who, what's going on. Who you're looking for to help them connect to go find more people like them.

Uh, so that's definitely a big one. We're seeing more offline. So as brands, whether it's pop up shops or even selling through wholesale or different markets, or maybe you have one or two retail stores. Most of the time, Meta is not getting that information. They're not getting those customers that are coming in store.

That's also a big push that we are seeing and powering through updates and enhancements to our platform. And again, that's, it's more just, even though that some might look at, well, Meta's, you know, taking all of our customer information or that we're giving them too much data. At the end of the day, You want you want to tell meta who your customer who your personas are so they can help drive them online or drive them in store or combination of both or retain help them help you retain customers and then obviously with AI and everything that's happening there.

Who knows what will happen a year, where we'll be a year from now with how fast AI is moving with creative. I see meta getting much more into cutting down on that time to test new creative. I see them moving more into helping you just automate a lot of that. They might automate a lot of that creative testing for you.

You give prompts. So that's an area we're not, we're indirectly involved in, not directly involved in. But I do see that as a big push next year as well. 

Yeah, no, I would agree. I think AI will be a bigger part on the platform than it is right now. I think the, the start they had was like so so was like coming up for ideas for headlines and was like, yeah, that's not really what I want to sell.

But definitely it's getting better. Now tell me, do I need to do any kind of homework before I get started with Eleva or? 

No, I mean, if, if you are, let's say you're a 20 million brand, you're likely you have some apps in your checkout. You might have, I mean, it could be a million dollar brand or five, it doesn't really matter.

But typically the. The larger the brand is, the more customizations and apps that they have. It could be post purchase upsells. It could be, they have custom landing pages. Maybe they have a semi headless site or they're using, uh, uh, hydrogen or some of these other new frameworks. That's where there's a little bit of like, Hey, just don't unplug everything right away.

If you know, if any of those ring a bell, That's where you can just reach out to our team and we can just do a quick check for you because the last thing we want to do is someone wants to try us out and then they unintentionally break something that we didn't know was set up and they didn't know was set up either and it impacts their, uh, their bottom line.

Yeah, I think the biggest stores who have lots of customization, they're aware of that and they probably have someone on their team who is, who is responsible to, to keep the 

thing running. You'd be surprised because there's, there's a lot of turnover. So you think about if folks come through and they, you know, their econ managers and they, they get promoted, they move to a different brand, but they were the one that installed all the apps and there wasn't a playbook written of why they did certain things.

So we actually see that quite common where people come in. They're like, we don't know what's set up. We don't, we don't actually know why we have L of R. What are you using us or what are, what are we using you for? So it's a, I think it's commonplace a little bit again, we're more than we use on a day to day basis, but yeah, I I'm surprised at how often that happens, but.

You know, it is, it is one of those things where people 

can relate to that if you have a fast growing, quickly scaling company and getting more people on board and no one really wants to write standard operating procedures, you might be in a situation where that happens. Tell me a little bit about your pricing structure.

How does that work? 

We have a free plan. So it's a free plan that's for the smaller stores then get started and then it starts our paid plans go up from 150 a month and up from there and it's just really just based on volume. So based on the server event volume that we're processing from the site. 

Okay.

Okay. Very straightforward. Cool. Before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? 

I can tell you a lot of, most of our customers, 80 percent of their spend is still going into meta and Instagram for prospecting acquisition.

I think that's all, that's always a question we'll get like, what are, what are you seeing from other brands? And what, you know, what are people doing? What should I be thinking about? Meta is just still, it's still the beast out there and still. Uh, you know, top of the pyramid in terms of finding new customers, the other, uh, the other apps are new players out there.

Yes, there's time and space to test those, but they can't drive the volume. They're just a mat. The sheer volume of opportunity that, uh, medic and today. 

No, obviously Meta is not only Facebook, it's not only Instagram, we're talking about, um, what's up, we're talking about threats, I saw they're going to start with ads now.

So basically they're trying to be on every platform and it makes perfect sense to be on Meta. Where can people go to find out more about you guys? 

Yeah, just get l of r dot com. That's G E T E L E V as in vector a r dot com. And yeah, you can work and contact me brad at get l of r dot com as well.

Excellent. I will put the links in the show notes and you just want to click away. Thanks so much, Brett. I think that was a very good overview on what's happening right now on the meta ads platform. And as most of our listeners are using them, I would think so. They should check you out and see if they can optimize their business with your solution.

Thanks so much for your time today. Thank you. Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast.

Simply like, comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. And finally, sign up for our free newsletter and become a Smarter Shopify merchant in just 7 minutes per week. We create content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you stay on top of your e commerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends.

Every Thursday in your inbox, 100 percent free. Join now at newsletter. ecommercecoffeebreak. com. That is newsletter. ecommercecoffeebreak. com. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.