In a rapidly changing marketing environment, the role of an agency is more important than ever. Businesses are looking to their agency partners to guide them through this new era of digital driven by AI, and ensure they are set to capitalize on all of the new ways they can drive advertising performance.

While agencies help their clients in a wide range of ways, we wanted to spotlight three specific areas where agencies are leaning in and helping their clients drive results.

Navigating the Creator Landscape

Creators consistently improve results for advertisers. For example, tests show when businesses add partnership ads to always-on ad strategies, they see a 19 percent decrease in CPA1, and a 71 percent increase in intent brand lift2.

However, many brands may not know which types of creators would be the best fit to partner with. This is where agencies can play an important role, and many are doing so through the use of Instagram’s creator marketplace. To further support these efforts, we’ve added “agency access” to Instagram’s creator marketplace, a new feature directly driven by agency feedback, where an agency can use their own account to help find creators that will be a match for their clients and drive results. Agencies know their clients best, so they are uniquely suited to help find relevant and performant creators.

Agencies are also using thePartnership Ads Hub, and in particular, the Recommended tab. The Recommended tab allows agencies to identify existing organic branded content from their clients that would be a good fit to turn into a paid campaign with partnership ads, maximizing content impact and efficiency.

Kevin Blazatis, US President of OMG Creo said, “As we have been partnering with Meta to simplify the consumer experience and more effectively connect brands to high performing creator content, we are seeing rapid adoption of these solutions into our clients’ integrated planning processes. We’re working with our clients to humanize brand communications through creators as people, not pixels, and this has been a winning combination.”

Unlocking Growth with Opportunity Score

Opportunity score is a tool that can help agencies get the most out of their ad campaigns. It provides experimentally proven recommendations, which – when coupled with an agency’s own knowledge and expertise – can lead to significant performance improvements.

Opportunity score is built to support agencies working across multiple types of clients as all recommendations are personalized, with points assigned to a recommendation based on how much they are expected to improve campaign performance. This is tailored based on factors such as a client’s business profile (e.g., advertiser size, product vs. service), campaign characteristics (e.g., brand vs. conversion, budget allocation) and performance improvements seen for that recommendation in our experiments.

We’re seeing opportunity score help agencies easily identify and prioritize growth opportunities across their client portfolio and serve as an excellent starting point for client conversations around proven recommendations that may not have previously been adopted. It can also help new agency team members learn Meta recommendations directly in Ads Manager, as well as assist an agency in quickly getting up to speed on a new client’s account.

Ashley Thomson, VP, Social Media at Assembly said, “Opportunity Score has been a useful tool in client conversations, helping us clearly visualize and quantify the potential impact of our recommendations. It provides directional confidence when scaling campaigns, and when paired with incrementality studies, it helps determine whether growth is truly net-new versus recycled demand.Think of it as a diagnostic compass for campaigns: not a KPI in itself, but a directional signal to guide optimizations and unlock quick wins.”

Finding the Most Valuable Conversions for Clients

Finally, we are seeing agencies use Meta’s suite of value-focused products to help personalize campaigns for clients and drive conversations that will uniquely deliver the results a business is looking for.

For example, an agency can use value rules to bid up or down based on criteria such as age, gender, location, or conversion location (e.g., website, app, in-store, instant form). Given the depth of audience insight agencies have about their clients, they are perfectly positioned to use this tool to drive better performance for businesses.

Brelle Pittard, Head of Retail Social at PMG, said, “Value Rules allows us to maximize efficiency, drive profitability, and even uncover areas of incrementality. With the latest additions, we’re also able to take more customized approaches to ensure creative relevance across demographics and genders, as well as optimize placements that we know perform more profitably during key seasonal moments.”

Agencies are also using tools like Incremental Attribution, the only solution in the market that makes it possible to optimize in real time for conversions that wouldn’t have happened without your ad. For example, Bark, a performance marketing agency based in London, recently shared how they use Incremental Attribution to increase incremental ROAS by 94 percent for their retail client Pom Pom London.

No matter what individual tool an agency may want to use, we recognize that all of their clients measure success differently. That’s why Meta is focused on giving agencies the ability to guide our AI ads system in a way that will work to fit the unique needs for each of their clients, empowering them to drive unparalleled value in a changing digital advertising landscape.