Meta is looking to reboot its advertising business after Apple’s rollout of iOS 14 with two new advertising tools for retailers and eCommerce advertisers that promise to deliver enhanced performance. 

The social media giant’s Managed Partner Ads Lite (MPA) is one of the advertising tools the company is testing with partners such as Walgreens and Dollar General, enabling them to leverage retail media networks to create more personalized advertisements. 

With MPA, retailers can expand their media networks and generate ads on Meta’s platforms, increasing sales for specific brand partners or product SKUs. 

In addition, Meta has introduced local inventory ads to enhance its ad products with omnichannel capabilities, which drive online purchases and promote in-store sales and local inventory movement. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of local inventory ads should take into account users’ sensitivity to location data sharing. Therefore, compared to search engines like Google or Bing, social networking sites like Meta may not be as appropriate for local inventory ads.

The effectiveness of the MPA feature relies on the availability of first-party data, and it could hold considerable importance for more extensive retail media networks. Meanwhile, the recently introduced local inventory ad product has been modeled after Google’s approach and is recognized as a popular choice among brands and retailers.

According to Meta, the initial outcomes from Managed Partner Ads Lite’s experimentation demonstrate that the advertising unit promotes “incremental, omnichannel performance for brands.” As a case study, Meta collaborated with Walgreens’ retail media network and a major national CPG brand to create a campaign customized for online sales of 75 SKUs. According to the company, this led to a 3.9% rise in health remedy sales and a 2.5% increase in skin care product sales.

Dollar General stated that the MPA trial has enabled brands to engage with its customers through Meta’s ad placements, encompassing Facebook and Instagram News Feeds, Stories, and Reels.

MPA will enable advertisers to “connect with retail networks using the retailers’ CRM data to increase volume and utilize their first-party data more efficiently. This is going to be extremely crucial in the next few years, particularly with the phasing out of cookies,” stated Alan Carroll, who holds the position of director of paid media at digital marketing agency Acadia.

Meta’s efforts follow Apple’s move to ban ad tracking on iPhone devices and Google’s announcement that it intends to discontinue third-party cookie tracking over time – which tracks users’ activity when they visit various websites and enables retailers to employ this data to determine which ads to present to different user segments.