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The Andrew Faris Podcast · @andrewfarispodcast
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The Meta Performance Marketing Summit was last week in San Jose, California. Over a thousand performance marketers ranging from the sort of e-com D2C people like you and me that you know all the way up to huge giant companies and their performance marketing teams and everybody in between. Over a thousand of them gathered in San Jose in the convention center with Meta leading and showing us where their product is right now, what's new, what's changing, what's coming down the pipe in the near future. I'm going to tell you my five biggest learnings [music] takeaways because if you weren't there, I've got the knowledge that you need to know what was said at
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The Meta Performance Marketing Summit was last week in San Jose, California. Over a thousand performance marketers ranging from the sort of e-com D2C people like you and me that you know all the way up to huge giant companies and their performance marketing teams and everybody in between. Over a thousand of them gathered in San Jose in the convention center with Meta leading and showing us where their product is right now, what's new, what's changing, what's coming down the pipe in the near future.
I'm going to tell you my five biggest learnings [music] takeaways because if you weren't there, I've got the knowledge that you need to know what was said at that gathering. I'm going to tell it to you right now. All right, number one from the Meta Performance Marketing Summit was the best explanation of Meta's ad ranking ad delivery retrieval system that I have yet seen from Meta. We've got We've got a VP of analytics, somebody core to their sort of engineering and ad retrieval team who was on stage talking about talking about how that whole system really works.
A breakdown of all the things that you've heard about, right? The ad ranking system, but also like lattice and gem and Andromeda. And I am not right now going to try to repeat every little detail of that presentation. What I'm going to do instead is tell you the big picture of what the takeaway was. And it's something that I think I've been seeing for a while, but just seeing more detail about how this works. And the simple idea here is that Meta is on an endless expensive quest to make it possible to match the right out of the right person at the right time more and more all the time.
And if you think about this, Meta has massive incentive to do this, right? The more efficient the delivery of their ads can be to customers, the the better they can predict which ad to deliver to the right customer at the right time, the more valuable they can make their inventory. And so this This is one of those areas where I really think Meta and your incentives are really aligned. You really want them to be doing this because the more they can do this, the more your ads can reach the right person at the right time, and the more value you can get out of their inventory.
And of course, for them, it also means they can charge more for your ads over more time. And so, they explained sort of where that system is at piece by piece. They've put out some different writing about this somewhere, but the long and the short of it is a lot of what I've been seeing and saying recently on this podcast, and I think it's worth reinforcing because this has been the thing that in the last couple of months, we've probably seen the most in our accounts and thought the hardest about in our accounts at the same time in terms of the way that creative gets delivered to customers.
And in the basic idea here is that what Meta is getting better at all the time, according to their metrics, according to what they're saying publicly, and again, according to what I'm seeing in our ad accounts, what they're getting better at all the time is using engagement-based signals, not just profiles of people, but engagement-based signals of who is engaging with your ads, with your content, to deliver the next piece of content.
And to do that while retrieving more and more of your best ads and getting them to people more often, particularly the more diverse your ads are. The more that Meta can get a real read on which of your ads are most likely to perform, Meta is seeing who is engaging with content and delivering them more content like this. And as I have said elsewhere, it's an analogy I got off Malcom Gladwell. Alex I'm I'm confident that I say your name wrong at least half the time.
Gladwell, Gladfield, I can never remember how to say it. But Alex pointed this out first, which is the analogy to Tik Tok organic content. The reason that people love Tik Tok organic content is because the engagement-based content delivery system is so good. You know, people say it's the perfect algorithm or whatever. It just delivers you the next piece of content you want all the time. And what you see is Meta adding massively more compute all the time and massive level of massively more AI.
One thing that they pointed out was sort of that they were they were investing in their compute ability so much that they were getting super real time AI-based ability to bring AI-level intelligence to their ad retrieval system and and again just sort of get more information faster to match the right ad to the right person all the time. And that's the long and the short of it. You don't need to understand all the juicy details of how that works and I'm certainly not techy enough to understand all of them.
But that was the big takeaway and they broke down how sort of all of these different tools work together to accomplish that between reading the ads in your ad library and your campaign, I should say your active campaign, and then reading the engagement signals on the ad to make it that the ads to make it so the ad system is more like TikTok organic or or Reels or whatever in that it in that it sort of has this ability to bring more uh content to the right person via their engagement signals.
So when they engage with content, they get more content like that. And that means that you have the ability, and this is the critical payoff, is to match hyper-specific ad content to hyper-specific niches. And I won't belabor this too much. Instead, what I'm going to do is link two episodes that I pulled out about creative diversity and reach and things like that in the notes here and you can go check for those. Go follow up with those because if you listen to those, I'll I'll tell you more about the brass tacks of how this pays off.
But it's just very clear that this is where Meta is going more and more all the time and they're touting, you know, large percentage engagement increases, large percentage conversion increases based on their ability to do this. Um this is one of those things where, you know, they get a speaker on stage or a panel on stage, walk through all of this and the point of it very clearly is to show advertisers, "Look, we're getting better all the time, more sophisticated all the time.
We're applying that power all the time to your ads. Keep making a high volume of highly high-quality, highly diverse creative. Do that and you are going to be able to take advantage of this system." We have seen this all the time right now. And the way that it looks on our ad accounts is that ads with really specific angles speaking to really specific people sometimes seem to take off really fast and the spend curve, like the spend progression in your ad account, often looks like a viral curve, where it's a huge boost in engagement and and delivery at your target price.
This is where manual bids are so helpful, because you can scale it really fast. It's a huge boost in that delivery for a short period of time, and then those ads kind of burn out and have a more steady and slow delivery over a longer period of time from there, but not nearly the big heights. So, we we like we've seen accounts go from $5,000 in spend to like $60,000 in spend in 2 days, you know, even in sort of off-season times, based on an ad or two, and then pick back up at like $6,000, $7,000 in spend, whatever, something like that.
And that stays for the long term. That's really powered by one or two ads. And that that's what I mean by saying it sort of looks like a viral curve. We've seen this repeatedly across different clients, across across different advertisers, where this kind of thing is happening, and it's really affecting our creative strategy to think how do we message more specifically. It's why at AJF Growth, we are so intentional about the idea of building the creative strategy off the message, because what we're really talking about here is the ability to get the right message to the right person.
That's the most important thing, and being able to speak in those specific ways, and then to do that in a compelling way, in a creative way, in an interesting and engaging way. That I mean, that's the whole magic of it. Do that over and over and over again, and that's how you're going to win. For us, that's why we're building a creative supply chain built on that foundation. We expect that to only get better over time, and I think that next year at the Performance Summit, they'll say the same thing.
Hey, look, here's how much better we made it this year, here's how much better these tools are working. And, you know, the critical thing here, too, is that like there's just so much creative being made and and put in ad accounts now that Meta has to have the ability to sort through all of that. It's I mean, that seems like a hard technological problem to me, but um but increasingly they they are touting their ability to look through a huge volume of ads that you are creating, especially powered by AI now, uh and doing that.
So, that was the big takeaway for me first, and that was the number one thing I thought about was just keep going down that road. This is a back-to-basics kind of thought. You just got to keep making great content. Or as As Firestone said on my podcast last week, and and go back and listen to that episode, too. It's a really good conversation. The The product doesn't always win in the marketplace, the promise does. So, get really good at communicating the promise to the right person at the right time.
All right, there's that. Before I get to number two, make sure you subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. It really helps me, first of all, I appreciate it a lot, but also if you like this content, deep dive onto meta content, what's happening in the world of meta right now, you will like my other content, the stuff I'm talking about all the time. Looking at my bunch of clients, you know, seven and eight-figure brands that are spending and growing and what we're seeing across those.
I'm just trying to tell you about what's happening there all the time, as well as what we're seeing about ads. If you like this, you're going to like it. Subscribe wherever you're watching or listening, and leave a comment. Ask any questions. Maybe I'll have some follow-up on this if there's something you want to know about that I didn't get to clear enough. Uh go ahead and leave a comment. I I read every one of those and try to engage with all of them.
So, do that while you're at it. There's one thing you can do in your business that will make everything easier, and that is having better pricing on your product. Like, better unit economics, more gross margin. [music] There's a really clear way to get there, too, and you probably know it, which is to source additional vendors besides the one that you're currently working with right now, and see if somebody else can make your product at a better price while maintaining the quality, or just improve the quality, or just have a backup supplier because you need redundancies in your supply chain, like Ezra Firestone talked about on my show recently.
And maybe there's other things, too, that you want to pursue, like >> [music] >> shorter lead times, lower MOQ's, better payment terms, that kind of stuff. I know why you are not doing that, even though it would like really, really, really help your business. And the answer is that you have too much to do. It's hard to know where to start. There's just a million vendors out there, and how do you know which one to pick?
You don't have to, because my friends at Move Supply Chain will do it for you, and they'll do it at a really reasonable price. Like, this is one of those things that, frankly, I don't know why it is is the case that like not every single one of my listeners who runs a brand doesn't immediately listen to this ad and go get on a call with Laura and her team at Move Supply Chain. Move is based in the Philippines, which means they're a very short flight from China and Vietnam.
They represent a whole bunch of clients, so they see all kinds of supply chains all the time. They have tons of experience in the space with years and years and years of supply chain experience in US-based e-commerce businesses. And because they're based in the Philippines, they're reasonably priced. So, they can be an extension of your team to help you go find additional value in your business by getting lower gross margins, by getting better terms, like I said, all the things that would make it so that your business cash flowed better, had more margin, generated more contribution margin at the end of the day.
You just need to get them involved, and you can do it at a reasonable price without it being a huge drain [music] on your time. That's the dream right there. Go to movesupplychain.com, get them involved. The sooner you get them going, the sooner you get the payoff on the gross margin side and the contribution margin side. [music] So, go get the call going today. Uh movesupplychain.com, get a call started. Get a call with them going today.
See if they can help you. Just ask Just get on a call. Ask them if they can help you. I bet they can. Number two, my favorite announcement of the whole summit, okay? My favorite announcement was that they are bringing a ROAS bidding option, a manual bid, where you can bid for ROAS to highest volume bidding. And uh I'll I mean I That is like music to my ears, okay? So, just let's back up a little bit and think about the two optimizations, purchase optimizations, you can make right now in Meta Ads, okay?
The two main ones. There There's incremental attribution, but let's leave that aside for a second. The two traditional ones have been highest volume optimization of your ads or highest value optimization of your ads. And highest value ads have had a have the ability to have a ROAS target on them forever because built into that tool is the idea that Meta can go target people who are going to spend more money. So, the AOV is a critical detail for Meta to target because that's what spend more money means.
It's It's an order value. And in, you know, I've talked about this for a long time, that tool works. When we run the same ads to customers with highest value bidding versus highest volume bidding, we see customers spend more money. We have to pay more for them. They're higher CPM, but they spend more money on average. The AOV is higher than our than the same ad running to highest volume optimization with all the other settings the same, okay?
So, you should be running highest value either way. Highest volume ads though, of course, you have to if, you know, what Meta is going to tell you is a CAC, a CPA. It's going to tell you a CPA answer because it's going to trying to get you the most purchases for your money. That's what highest volume means or what lowest cost means. It used to be called lowest cost, now it's called highest volume. Highest volume means highest volume of purchases and that you don't need the AOV for that.
You only need the cost per purchase for that. And so Meta optimizes towards the cost per purchase. But if you're like me and you run manual bids and even if you don't, there's one really big problem with this, which is that for a any brand that has any differences in their AOVs across their ad account and that's like basically every brand, okay? For any brand that does that, that means that sometimes you get uh a low cost conversion, but you get that on a a lower value customer than you realize.
So, just think about it. If you have two two products, right? And one of them is a $50 AOV and one of them is a a $100 AOV. A $25 CAC on those two ads means two really, really different things, okay? So, if you've been running $100 AOV ads for a long time, let's say a $50 CAC, okay? And you you're targeting a $50 CAC, okay? And so you've got a two-to-one ROAS, $100 AOV, $50 CAC. If that happens, but then suddenly you introduce a $50 product into your uh ad set, then first of all, you probably shouldn't put it in the same ad set, but let's say you do.
Now you might still get a $50 CAC or even a $40 CAC, but your ROAS has tanked in that process. And the inability to separate those out is a real challenge. So, what we do, right, is we run manual bids against both. We separate out products at the ad set level and that allows you to control the value of each, okay? So, now I've got my $100 product in ad set one, my $50 product in ad set two, maybe even different campaigns and I can set a bid cap in a different spot.
If I want a want a two-to-one ROAS, I got a $50 bid cap on one and a $25 bid cap on the other. Boom, nice and easy. There's just one problem, which is that AOVs change all the time. AOVs are not actually a static number, whether it's new products or sales or seasonality or just the reality of statistical noise, it's really hard to do this. So, when you're actually buying in an ad account, it's really hard to set a bid cap or a cost cap relative to an AOV, and it's one of the biggest adjustments we are making and sort of like tweaking little things in ad accounts all the time is trying to stay on top of the relationship between the CPA that we're that we're getting the optimization for and the AOV.
So, there's the context. Okay, that's a lot of context, but that's this is why you need to know it. What Meta is introducing is basically a a ROAS governor on that CAC. And I don't understand exactly the tool. I believe they've already started to roll it out to some, but the idea is that they are introducing a tool where you can tell Meta optimize for the lowest cost as long as you maintain certain ROAS. Okay? So, that way you the dynamic element of changing AOVs gets built right into the bidding mechanism, and so it will still optimize for the lowest cost customer, but it will also have a control for ROAS changes.
And that will be so helpful assuming it works, and I assume it will because most of these tools do work when Meta rolls them out. And I love that. It'll be really, really helpful. So, that's just a tool that I'm super excited about. It's a it's going to be something that we use all the time at Edge of Growth because we buy everything on on manual bids, and it's just it's just really, really going to be valuable so that you don't have to play this game.
Theoretically, you don't have to play this game of adjusting manual bid bid caps, cost caps relative to AOV all the time and trying to figure out when a sample size is normal and when that one customer makes a $2,000 order in the midst of otherwise $100 orders. How does that factor in? You know, all this kind of thing. So, uh really, really helpful uh that that tool will exist. Hopefully, I'm assuming it'll be powered by strong statistical modeling principles.
It'll regress AOVs in a way that probably is really hard for humans generally speaking, and uh and should be really helpful, okay? All right. Number three. This is a similar point to last year, but number three, there is there was a gigantic, overwhelming emphasis on creators and partnership ads. And clearly Meta is continuing to build out their ability to make it easier for you to contact creators and put them into partnership ads all the time.
So they roll out creator marketplace like, I don't know, within the last year, maybe a little longer than that, to where you can go and create generate creator relationships for your brand right there in the marketplace. They've tried to make it a lot simpler. We used to use a tool called Leadsy to make whitelisting partnership ads setups and sort of page sharing much easier. That now use that tool anymore cuz Meta's built that tool in.
We're also They're also talking about moving getting away from ad codes because they're making this easier with like one click. They're basically doing a bunch of stuff to make it so that you reduce all of the massive amount of friction involved with getting a creator plugged into your ad account because Meta wants you to use partnership ads and have partnership materials. I think this is dovetails with their announcement not too long ago before this that they were introducing sort of their answer for TikTok Shop and Instagram shopping that Meta just wants to keep connecting creators to advertisers across their entire ecosystem, however that works out.
One of the things about Meta Performance Summit that you never know, Performance Marketing Summit, is like there is a wide range of advertisers in there. And so sometimes I hear something like use creators and think who you're talking to here really is like the gigantic corporation that, as one friend of mine remarked sort of slightly like, maybe doesn't even have the pixel installed to like sort of low levels of sophistication even though they should be performance advertiser.
Like, you know, it's not quite true, but you get the idea. And so it's like, "Hey, start using creators." Maybe maybe large brands that have been concerned about using creators because of the freedom you have to give creators to make content and therefore the brand considerations and concerns around all of that and legal concerns and all of those things that make it harder for a very big company to do that. So when I when I saw this push, I thought, "Okay, maybe that's part of this here." Is that that's kind of who this is speaking to because let's be real, most of the DDC brands that I know of are using creators running partnership ads already.
Uh but I still think it's important to hear this and I still think it's right, which is that all of their data is saying partnership ads work. When you run partnership ads, it's you know, great brands are spending a whole bunch of money. Uh you know, they had some stat that was something like 30% of great great advertisers accounts were on partnership ads or something. You hear that and it's like, "Well, 70% is not then." Okay, so there's still a real place for performance marketing.
And for me what it reinforces is the same thing I've been saying for a while on reducing uh re- releasing content about for a while, which is that the more you can make a build a muscle of creator and partnership ads alongside your muscle of traditional performance advertising the better your account's going to look. Great accounts that I see right now have both. And whether you whether you build the creator muscle today or whether you do it later, actually I understand.
Like you might not have the operational capacity right now to build it. You might not have you might be easier for you to to you know, hire somebody like us and run your performance marketing your your sort of true performance DR ads like us faster and then build the creator stuff over time or maybe you're great at the creator stuff and and you know, you got to complement that later on and you just wait to do that. That's fine.
There's there's a couple ways to do it, but I just think great brands do both of these in the meta ads account. That's sort of the ideal ad account. A bunch of partnership ads, a bunch of DR performance ads. That creates a whole bunch of diversity and they've got different sources of content coming. And in point of fact, one account of ours right now that has had a really big moments has had one moment that came from in the last, you know, few months really really monster performance.
Had three big spikes. One of them came from a straight-up performance DR long-form explainer that we make. Another one came from a piece of content that was ported over from a TikTok creator into the ad account. You know, they're doing mass mass outreach to creators. Another one was a creator that we briefed, which we actually do as part of our service. We we can control the briefing for creators, sort of an ongoing creator relationship.
And that's a perfect picture of what great accounts look like. You know, there's a bunch of stuff spending all the time across all the creative they're doing, and then there's some really big moments It's punctuated by really big moments from each of those. So, just don't lose sight of this. And man, it's so great that Meta is making these tools easier to use. And I really think they are. The Creator Marketplace has gotten a lot better.
Faster increasing adoption of it. There's a real network effect here. The more creators are using that tool, the more useful it is for advertisers. Definitely a cool thing to see them continuing to invest in this. I also think, as I thought last year at this, that it was striking to me that there was a sort of lack of emphasis on AI-generated ads. For as much as you would expect with the with what I said in number one about the ad ranking system and their additional compute power, they really didn't say much about mass generating AI creative as a way of winning on Meta.
You know, they're sort of sort of quiet about that, even though it's all anybody wants to talk about on Twitter or whatever else in the e-com world. And I I think that probably says something as well about what they're what they are pushing people towards. Uh now, we're going to do both, right? But like just a striking striking thing to me that they didn't say very much about that. Uh maybe because they have less ability to impact it.
You know, I don't know. So, uh so, there's that. If you need a GA4 setup that actually works, so you don't have to pay for a super expensive third-party attribution software. If you need landing pages with a real attention to detail to speed, design quality, and actual CRO testing and process. If you need ongoing dev work for your brand, for your website, just the sort of ongoing CRO type testing and [music] and uh making the most out of your traffic, and just all the sort of custom building that needs to happen for an e-commerce website, I want to tell you about my friends at ECom Experts.
Just the other day, I had [music] a friend reach out to me and say, "Hey, do you know any landing page agencies?" And I said, man, I really struggle to find good partners in this space except for one. that's ECom Experts. ECom Experts is a dev agency landing page CRO. [music] They really want to be your sort of true partner across everything you're doing on your website with your customers. They are that kind of an agency founded by ex-Shopify people.
[music] They've worked with tons of brands including big brands like Jones Road Beauty, sort of been the right hand for Cody Flogger over there and in the website work that he's done. And they can do all of that stuff for you. And they'll actually give you 50% off that GA4 integration. So, if you're still stuck with an old GA4 that doesn't really work, go reach out to them and have them do the integration for you. It's a really simple first step to engaging with them and you'll see how good they are. >> [music] >> I'll tell you, the way that I started working with ECom Experts is that they were doing some work on landing pages for a brand that's a client of mine.
And my growth strategist Daniel said to me, "Hey Andrew, this is weird. This dev agency is great." And that was weird because so many dev agencies are unreliable, overpriced, they move slow, they're unstrategic a lot of times. It's just been a real frustration for me to find [music] partners like this. I've been so grateful for them to have a real partner that's really reliable so that my websites for my clients are not breaking.
And they're actually not only reliable sort of [music] fixers of problems and builders of solutions, but they're actually people who have a mind for design and for conversion. They're just a great all-in-one partner. Go check them out. ECom Experts.io. [music] The link's in the show notes. ECom Experts.io. Like I said, 50% off for GA4 integration. Just get that done. It'll save you a bunch of money like I said on sort of having third-party attribution software for a lot of stuff uh because it's a simple way to sort of cross-check what's going on in your business.
[music] ECom Experts.io. Go check it out right now. All right. Number four. Huge emphasis on measurement. Everything is going this way. Everybody's getting more sophisticated. Unless you've been living under a DTC rock, you've heard a lot about incrementality testing and maybe MMMs as critical things in your measurement stack. And Meta was pushing in the same way a bunch. They had panels with people from House, people from Measured, people from Common Thread Collective.
Taylor Holiday was on a panel talking about measurement specifically. That was what they asked Taylor to be on the panel about. You know, these are all the big incrementality firms talking about measurement stories for these brands. Now, again, I will say, when I hear that, some of that is all about trying to get very large companies thinking in a more sophisticated way about the measurement of Meta ads versus their other ad channels.
And they actually had one full session just on Meta's core tools, conversion lift studies, is the sort of built-in Meta incrementality study that you can do. We use CLSs, conversion lift studies, really regularly, and we're we're actually working on using them more. what I'll say about this. I think Meta is right to push a whole bunch of emphasis on incrementality studies because it is the gold standard of Meta ads management, and they want to do that.
But I also think you should notice something about this, which is that if the people from Meta are getting on stage and begging you to use their tools, but not just their tools, begging you to use third-party tools to measure the incremental return of their platform, that probably tells you something about their confidence that their platform really is generating results for you. Somewhere out there, there is still this big concern that platforms are taking too much credit for the value that they are driving.
And I just think with Meta, every possible indicator that I know of that is real and statistical, that is this this is meta-analysis from CTC, from House, this is CLSs from Meta, it's everything that's it's the actual revenue being driven in ad accounts that we can see with our clients when we spend on Meta, and all of these things, there is just a really, really clear signal, which is that Meta is super incremental, and that basically Meta's platform reporting has historically been roughly correct, if you're optimizing for a click at least.
If you're optimizing for view conversions, this this is different, but click-optimized purchases, especially before they changed the definition of a click a couple months ago, click-optimized purchases are basically an accurate measure of your performance. In fact, not only accurate, but on 7-day click, probably underselling the true value of the purchase. We are doing this now with retention ads, we're running CLSs, and we're seeing the same thing over and over again.
I think it's a good sign that Meta is saying, "Go ahead, grade us. Grade us with our internal tool. We're going to build a really robust one. Grade us with an external tool. We're going to bring on all the incrementality vendors. Do it." What you're going to find is it's super incremental. This one of the implications of this for smaller brands is that you can trust that measure reporting is basically right, and I think that's true.
We've We've had this position for a long time at AJF Growth working with brands that are sort of up to 50 million, you know, in the in sort of that stage with relatively simple media mixes. Like, there is just no reason for a brand sub 50 million with 80 plus percent of its budget on Meta for ads. There's no reason for that brands to have Northbeam, Triplewhale, or any external tool. I had dinner with Olivia Corey from from House Analytics, and I have heard her say repeatedly that you do not need to bring House into incrementality testing if you're 80% plus Meta under 50 million, even though she would make money from telling you to that you should do that, right?
And the reason why is because it's really simple and really clear, and Meta basically works when you're optimized for conversion. Um so, you know, it's just it's just that's the takeaway if you're sort of in that stage of business is you you really don't need to worry about that. What you can do instead is think about using Meta's tool, the conversion lift study, for testing individual different things. Like, for example, we want to start testing We We actually have a test right now going incremental attribution versus traditional 7-day click 1-day view attribution, okay?
There's that. We uh seeing which one of those we want to optimize for with prospecting. We're running some CLS's on our retention spend right now. Click optimized retention spend looks really good for a bunch of our clients. We want to figure out are we just cannibalizing our other revenue or what, you know? So, uh so we're trying to understand that. That CLS is a free tool built right into Meta. It's really reliable.
It's really good. Start getting good at using that. That's sort of the action item there, and and do it. But, Meta is pushing that way. They pushed it really hard at this event, and I I think you should hear that again as a really good sign about Meta's Meta's confidence that yeah, you're really getting value. Of Of everybody knows Meta's driving value in their business, but still a really good thing. By the way, one other thing here, uh similar to how they didn't say much about AI-generated ads, they also didn't say much about incremental attribution as a tool.
I think that was striking, too. Uh that that the incremental attribution tool did not come up a lot. I think if they had seen a whole bunch of results from their internal studies showing incremental attribution was much better performing than traditional conversion optimization or whatever, they probably would have told you a lot about it and said, "Go use this tool. Go use this tool." They're very comfortable doing that at these events.
They're constantly trying to tell you about those things. Uh but in this case, they didn't, and I think that's sort of striking as well. Our initial test suggests that the tool is not actually great yet, even though the incrementality adjustment factor on those is probably higher than other tools. It hasn't worked quite as well yet in terms of the actual optimization. So, I've heard mixed signal mixed things about this, by the way.
I know some people have seen really good success moving to incremental attribution. Uh we haven't necessarily seen that yet. I think if you're adopting our basic setup, manual bids, broad targeting, exclude past customers, put them in a separate campaign, you know, that that kind of stuff, you're probably in a a spot where where incremental attribution maybe doesn't, you know, uh click optimized, by the way. You're not You're not looking at a bunch of view attribution.
In those cases, I think you you probably don't need to use the tool quite yet. I don't know. I don't know for sure. I'm not ready to, you know, hear me there. I want to back that off just a little, but uh it was striking that they didn't say much about it after announcing it last year, okay? So, there's that. All right, number five. This is kind of the bonus one, and I I actually want to make this point pretty clear and strongly, which is that perhaps my actual biggest takeaway was my gratitude for the e-com and D2C Meta advertiser community.
It's just so easy to be mad about Meta. It's easy to be mad about whatever. I just had a great time with people that I have seen on Twitter for a long time. I mentioned Olivia Corey earlier. She's become a friend. We had never met in person, but she's been on my podcast twice. We got to have dinner with her and also a couple other people who I had not met before. You know, it's just like it's just great. And people I've seen I've met a few times, but don't get to see them that often.
Um shout out Yoni Levi from from Facebook. Great to see him from Meta. Great to see him and Sammy on his team. There's a bunch of people like that. I also saw the Common Thread Collective crew. I don't actually get to see them that much and so that was awesome. Went with my growth strategist Daniel who's a killer. It's great to spend time with him. The Operators nine opera or the Operators and Marketing Operators guys were there.
I met Max Rosewater for the first time. You might not know all these names and you don't have to. That's okay. But there's a bunch of people that I've interacted with for a long time. I actually found myself really grateful for how much a lot of those people really do feel like friends and people pulling for you in the space. And so that's my number five takeaway. Not really from Meta, but and some some of them are Meta employees actually.
Brian Lee, Chris like just great people who I'm just grateful to know, glad to see, glad to catch up with. People doing interesting things and telling me about their businesses and there's something about that that's really awesome. You know, we're all going to die. Yeah, it's something I bring up about in-person events a lot. We're all going to die at some point and one of the nice things about in-person events with people you get to know over a long period of time is that like you get friendship with people and you get to spend time with them and there's a real community element to it.
And like I said, there really is a sort of pulling for each other that happens. You hear about the wins people are having and it's awesome. And so that's my fifth takeaway is whether or not the event was particularly helpful it was sort of almost secondary to me because I had such a good time. I found myself on the sort of main first the main full day of the summit up at 8:30 or you know, out of the house I should say at 8:30 to get there.
It was a 9:45 start. Walking with Daniel and I from my team over there. We're chatting, we're catching up, we're talking about what's going on in our business and life. And then from from basically 8:30 to 11:30, 11:45 at night, I was with people all day every day and it was just it was it was great. I was really tired by the end of it, but it was great. Want to encourage you to get involved in the community. That's really my point.
Meet people there, start making connections. Do that over the long term. A lot of these people I've been talking with for, you know, the better part of 10 years. Maybe five to 10 years, something like that. And so you really do get to know people more over time. Find a way to get involved. Join the E-commerce Fuel, you know, join Foxwell Founders, like get on Twitter, get in the conversation, do all those things. It's awesome to get to do that and I was really grateful for it.
So, good summit, grateful to be there and those are the big takeaways for this year. Thanks so much for watching or listening to this episode of the podcast. I'm so grateful that you spent the time with me. Do subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. If you like this episode, you will like my other content, I promise you. So, go check that out. And and also reach out to me podcast@ajfgrowth.com or even better comment wherever you're watching or listening so that I can interact with you there.
I read and interact with every single comment and would love to do that with that. So, do that. And you can reach out to me at ajfgrowth.com as well if you want to work with us. Tell me a little bit about your business, about what you're seeing, what's going on, where you're at and if you fill out the form on our website, you can do that. Tell me about your business and I will get back to you with some thoughts about whether or not we're a great fit to work together or if I have another option for you even if it's not [music] quite the right fit for for me, for you.
So, but go fill out the website form ajfgrowth.com. You can everything I'm doing at ajfgrowth.com. [music] Do that. Then big shout out to my sponsors for this episode. That's Move Supply Chain and ECom Experts. Love both of those service businesses that I love to work with. I just sent somebody ECom Experts the other day. Move Supply Chain, I'm having a a dinner with like in a in a week with some of their team members.
They're just great. Both both real partners of mine and I'm really grateful for them. [music] So, go check both of those out. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks so much for watching, for listening. I will see you next time.
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