How To Unlock Scale In A Plateaued Meta Ads Account transcript

[Music] you see the light of the Beauty and the power of manual bids in your ad account you switch over everything goes great at first or or maybe doesn't go great at first I don't know um but then you hit this slowdown period and and this happens all the time like I said because manual bidding gets you really far at first like the media buying really really does matter okay um I just want to be really clear about this and and if you're newer to this podcast if you haven't listened to this watched it before I have huge amounts of content going through how to set up uh and how to think about manual bids in your ad account probably the closest PL the best places to go look if you want kind of an intro to this um I have an episode called seven reasons for cost controls or something like that it'll be linked in the show notes but then probably especially um check out my opening the books episodes especially with beard brand and pretty boy those episodes go through like how to really build an ad account with cost controls so uh argu the argument for cost controls episode and then be brand and pretty boy episodes I'll link those in the show notes I just made the note right now so you can get those so if you want some background on what I'm talking about this is this is uh that that'll get you started okay but a lot of people now at this point are doing this I've noticed this actually like increasingly more and more Brands still probably not the majority are are running on vidcaps cost Caps or Target Rass or some combo thereof as I've said a lot of times before I prefer vidc caps and I'm also layering that on with Target roas bidding I've running both in most accounts that I'm working on um and and uh and and that's my preferred way of doing it but to be frank it's not the biggest deal to me if you actually uh if you actually choose cost caps over bid Caps or whatever as long as you're doing that basic basic setup but what will happen inevitably is as you do that you typically will see some kind of performance increase right away um and that's because the media buying really does matter the one of the pieces of advice you sometimes hear is there's there's a way of framing this which is like like listen people talk so much about Med media buying but they need to talk more about marketing they need to talk about more about you know creative strategy or whatever and that framing is wrong it is unhelpful because you should actually be trying to optimize everything you can within reason in your business and and your meta ad spend is very likely the biggest or second biggest line item in your entire business and so managing that with carefulness and efficiency is super important for the bottom line that you're trying to create so don't listen to anybody who says media buying doesn't matter it does matter it does matter it makes a real big difference and you can do that well and focus on other marketing I'm going to explain some more of that in a second you can actually write great ads and run manual bids at the same time okay it's not it's not that hard uh you you just do both okay so uh so the reason that I pound the media buying thing all the time is because it really makes a big difference in your ad account but again a lot of you if you're listening to or watching this you're already convinced you've already made the switch and you're going okay now what now especially if you see big forward steps in your ad account and then steps backwards okay I can think of three examples recently one client who actually fired me after we saw some some big big steps forward and there's going to be more to that story later um in their account things went great for manual bids for a while and then they stopped going so great I have another couple folks one of them is a client that I'm still working with where we we again saw really good steps forward run the build the whole account on manual bids and then just hit a total Plateau so it wasn't like a big step backwards so much but just like couldn't break through a certain Plateau I've worked with a coaching client so I'm G have four examples actually a coaching client that same thing they they saw um big steps forward then steps back then steps forward then steps back and now are kind of in between right now uh so manual bids worked for a little while or whatever and then another one who reached out to me and said manual bids worked awesome for us we sell way more profit Etc um and this is not a client of mine but said but said like look this is this is like a huge um huge problem now because now we're you know we we can't seem to get any spend through and here's one of the things that many of those people will do when that happens okay because they have thought a lot about manual bids they've heard me talk about it they've they've it's like it's a sort of topof Mind change that they've made in the ad account they will attribute the lack of success when you hit those plateaus or even backward steps they will attribute the lack of success in their ad account to the manual bids and therefore for the way they will solve the problem is by going back away from manual bids and that is uh a mistake and that's the mistake I want you to avoid right now if you have a major step backwards after switching to manual bids in this this is like the kind of the whole point of this episode it is extremely likely that the problem is not with the manual bids let's actually break that down a little bit okay let's say we'll just we'll make a super simplified account here hypothetical super simplified account okay for the sake of of of ease right let's say all your manual bids are Bid caps set at $100 on s-day click and you're spending $2,000 a day okay uh so well let's actually make it even easier $100,000 a month okay $100,000 a month $100 bid caps 7-Day click that's the setup okay everything is the same maybe it's one product it's just that okay what will happen is that uh is that you will suddenly the spend will go backwards or plau you'll hit $100,000 you'll stay there all the time or maybe the spend goes back to $75,000 now you're running bid caps so that $75,000 25% reduction in your spend uh okay that $75,000 also still runs at a $100 CAC okay on 7-Day click because or or a little less because it's a bid cap right somewhere basically right around Target so say the target doesn't change the efficiency doesn't change but the spend goes backwards okay and now suddenly you're going like oh no our spend is going backwards then the next month it goes down to 50,000 and so after two months now you're going like something is really wrong here okay and here is the the the change that many people will make right away something is wrong with our media buying we got to switch it meta was giving me you know a $100 50 $100,000 a month of of this spend now it's only giving me 50 and essentially the logic subtly people don't say this but subtly they say they point at meta and say meta is Doing It Wrong meta is the problem and specifically the bidc Caps are the problem you know it'll it it's like the bidc Caps are choking the spend too much and Sh I should be getting more spend through but the bidc Caps won't let me and so what I need to do is switch over to Auto bids because bid caps aren't working and they'll say meta as the problem in a lot of other ways sometimes actually is more explicit you know something Chang with the algorithm something whatever and that is the fundamental mistake the fundamental mistake is to believe that something is wrong with meta and with the bid caps when actually the problem is almost certainly with you and over and over I see this the problem is not the bids it's not the bids the problem really isn't the pro the manual bids are almost always doing exactly what you've asked them to do which is to only give you as much spend as you actually can get based on the Target that you have set and when when meta goes backwards in your spend it is very very likely that the reason it has gone backwards in your spend is because uh it's because you actually are you don't have the performance needed in your creative in your product and your offers whatever right in some section of that you you it is not is unlikely you're going to get the performance at the scale that you are trying to get it to and so the problem isn't with meta it is with you meta is feeding back accurate information about that okay and so that is so crucial to understand because inevitably what people will do is they will switch things back over from manual bids over to Auto bids and I'm actually to a point now where I sort of don't begrudge this to people because I understand the Instinct so much and and basically like if you never scratch that itch you probably will will somewhere in the back of your mind believe that's that problem forever you'll just you'll just keep believing that that like if I just switch back to Auto bids it would work if I just switch back to ASC it will work whatever and uh and so sometimes I kind of like people to do this because nothing will really reinforce the idea for that that this is the problem um until they actually see that because they'll switch over and set it at you know three grand a day whatever to get back to their $100,000 month spend um and when they do that they they they they switch back over and then yes they get through $100,000 in the month but they get it at a06 rows instead of the one row that they wanted before the 1.5 R whatever you know you know what I'm saying right or they bid for a $100 CA on their bid caps and they end up getting $150 C at $100,000 in spend and so yes they do get more spend through but it turns out it it was it was not at the efficiency that they wanted and again the frustration like why won't Facebook give me the conversions I want and instead you have to turn around and say the problem is with me so if you are to that point where you are there and you're frustrated and you're stuck I understand that you might go and switch now I don't think you should do that I don't think you should switch back to Auto bids but I understand the instinct to do it and sometimes I actually think you will never believe me unless you actually go do it yourself like I can sit here and try and convince you all day but you'll just go like nah don't I just don't whatever okay so so that's what people will do but this but that is the outcome that happens over and over and over again I see it people switch to Auto bids and you get worse performance now there are a number of ways that this can go wrong okay that are there's like a lot of different ways you can break it is what I'm saying um and and so you know the I'm gonna list some of them in a second for you but it is not easy to solve and I understand that so manual bidding you know I'm very comfortable with it I've been doing it for a long time now I I sort of know where to look for the problems and and uh and normally can find some some issues in the bidding and and all that right but a lot of times it's really hard to see where where you are screwing it up okay um and it can be in a few different places uh and also by the way the other thing can happen which is that manual bids overspend so it's not that it's underspending at your target it'll spend your full budget but it'll spend above Target or you know below Target as the case may be right under your row Target above your te Target uh and that's another frustration and people go oh manual bids don't work um when again inevitably a lot of times it's actually not manual bids that don't work it's actually that you've set something up wrong so let me now with that having been said if we come in with a fundamental assumption at the Baseline that we are the problem and not the machine okay then we have to say okay what do you do next and I I just I want to just repeat that assumption one more time this isn't it is possible that meta is the problem okay so I'm will not rule that out I've certainly come across accounts where meta makes the wrong decision uh quote unquote quote unquote wrong decision about what add to promote at least for some amount of time sometimes with a lot of spend sometimes a little bit of spend but uh but while while I think it can make the wrong decision uh I think that's most likely not what's happening and it should be as a baseline assumption when you come into to troubleshoot your problems you should probably assume it's that's not what's going on you may uncover some things that say Okay I I now finally believe yes that this is the problem this particular ad got way too much spend for whatever reason um you know got not enough spend for whatever for whatever reason it's not like it doesn't happen at all it's just that it's unlikely to be the problem it's not where you should start your analysis you should start from the assumption that you in some way are the problem and only when you rule out that you have um any of the problems that it could have been you that's when you should switch over to say okay I think something is actually wrong on the meta side here the system is not perfect and it's broken in some way there you go you've heard me talk about my friends at more Staffing and how I've staffed my business with them the truth is I've actually done the bulk of that with a sort of subsidiary of more staffing called behind the scenes and behind the scenes is specifically uh contract creative Staffing so that you can uh scale up your creative output so I have designers and video editors through behind the scenes and behind the scenes is the same model as more Staffing it's uh find incredible talent in the Philippines who are have deep experience with design and edit and all those all those kinds of things I have a graphic designer who worked on a major magazine in the Philippines now working with me and my clients and my businesses so it's really good quality work I've loved working with behind the scenes and so if you are listening to watching the show you've heard me talk about offshoring talent in the Philippines you want to do that specifically in the design and video editing part of your business and maybe even think about it more as an agency service than as actual members of your team there can be kind of a mix here go to behindth scenes.

Studio behindth scenes. Studio to start exploring that opportunity for you it has worked great for me and for my clients I have loved working with them incredible people and great Partners in my business they can be the same for you so behind the scenes do studio if you're trying to staff up your design and edit team for ads and really across your business in e-commerce behindth scenes. Studio go tell them that I sent you okay so what should you do if you've hit that PL Plateau if you've gone backwards how should you go about solving the problem now of course I can't speak to your specific account so I'm going to give you a list of things to run through that might be the problem that I want you to consider okay so number one on let's start with the media buying side of things okay what not to do first is already we've said switch back to Auto bit I don't think you should do that again I understand the Instinct I understand that you might do it just to scratch the itch and that it maybe in the long run it'll save you from doing it over and over again and it'll reinforce your uh by doing it and seeing the worst performance it will reinforce your confidence in manual bids and make it so that takes that idea off the T okay but I don't think you should do that what you should do instead is troubleshoot it okay you should troubleshoot it you should dig in and try to understand whether you've got an overspend or an underspend relative to your hopes and relative to your goals right uh you should try to understand what the problem is as best as you can and as few as many places as you can okay so number one one place you should look right away very obviously is actually in your um conversion settings and uh and you know making sure that you're pick is actually tracking data correctly there's a simple way to do this which is to see the number of purchases meta is attributing in your dashboard versus the number of purchases that are actually happening on your website I saw this happen the other day somebody took my advice worked with my sponsor Billy they they installed the Billy pixel on their website and it started double counting purchases with another pixel install that they had uh I think they had sort of an incorrect installation the way they had done it and and so when they did that um suddenly they were double reporting purchases and every and and it sort of created this big giant mess right so you got to go clear off those kinds of things first you might be under reporting I've also seen another situation where somebody added a third-party um sort of sales channel in Shopify and that messed up their pixel tracking and um and so then they had to go and figure that out it didn't get rid of all their purchases but some of them and so that's the first thing you should do just like go check the technical details make sure everything is okay there um and and see what you can figure out if you have a third- party pixel provider go talk with them make sure it's working pull on a a Dev that you trust something like that to go do that but the simple Sol but the simple thing to is go check particularly um you know uh your new customer Revenue uh against your ad spend depending on how good of a job you're doing with exclusions and some of those things and make sure that that's all working as correctly as possible okay so um so that's the first thing to go go do check your check all that okay meta cannot optimize off of bad data that's because it can only optimize off the data you feed it so you need to give it good data all right so there's number one okay I won't go too deep there hopefully you understand some steps to take oh by the way I will say one thing about that um this is where good Google analytics tags really helps you um if if historically a05 Google analytics last click Rass gets you to the number that you want and you keep getting a0 five and you keep getting a 0.5 but suddenly have twice the revenue something is probably wrong there right right at 0.5 Google analysts last look Revenue if you've done a good job with your UTM parameters and some of those things uh you know that stuff will uh or that can be a nice historical like pulse check on your current performance because while Google Analytics Ras doesn't tell you the uh whole truth it uh doesn't lie to you it only the the little bit of Truth it tells you is really consistent and so you can check that okay so um so if you don't know what I'm talking about there don't worry about it but it can be one way to to look at it at some at some point maybe I'll create these content about this but it's one one of the things I'll check okay so there's that okay um number two check your optimization settings okay this is another thing that goes wrong people optimize for sday click one day View and then they don't get the performance that they want or it's not nting out on the revenue they want it's because there's way too many view purchases for example in their data set and you know their multi- Channel and they're they're way over attributing purchases to to meta or something because there's too many few purchases okay so there that could be it now that's probably not the problem given the incrementality studies I've seen but it could be another simpler version of this is that you optimize for one day click or you optimize for s-day click but then you judge the performance on a different time window so you optimize for seven-day click and you're like I need a $100 C on seven days and you get a 20% lift in your customers from day one to day seven and so you start getting on day one of your ads or day two of your ads you've got $130 CAC $120 CAC and you've optimized for $100 CAC on seven days and you're like why is my CAC too high you know you're looking at it I'm supposed to have cost Caps or bid caps are supposed to be working for me correctly um and actually your CAC is going to be fine it's just that you haven't reached the full seven days of the of the window on which you optimized and so you got to make sure that your optimization settings are in line line with uh your uh measurement settings with with with how you're actually measuring your spend um I call this the delayed purchase multiplier and I actually have this built into my unit economics sheet uh in um which is which is free on my website the unit economics sheet uh is um shows you like you know it's a simple way of handling your unit economics at the ad level to figure out your targets but there's this delayed purchase multiplier section of the sheet so that you can actually see what kind of CAC you need on 7day click or one day click relative to the performance um that you actually want on a longer window which is like 28 day click uh 28 day click is the way I measure all of my ads it's more consistent um and it it's real like if somebody clicked and they bought within 28 days uh that's a real purchase that metad drove some people just wait longer they just wait longer than a day or seven days to go make a purchase and so you should count all of those and you should build that into your targets that unit economics sheet that I just showed is uh free on my website if you if you enter your email address at a.com into the email capture e in the footer or on the popup that comes it's one of the four free essential e-commerce resources that you'll get delivered to you so go check that out if you want to use that you just duplicate it and have your own version of it go from there uh so uh so check that optimization settings is a place where this goes wrong all the time I see it constantly people are measuring the performance on a different window than they're optimizing for and view conversions are are throwing them off and so they have problems there okay so there's that um number uh oh from here uh there could be some other issues that are happening related to your specific specific ad account and related to some just weird stuff that happens uh I have recently started to put together some videos uh diagnosing people's bid and cost cap problems basically right because this kind of question comes to me all the time like how come cost caps didn't work for me how come bid caps didn't work for me um and the answer varies all over the place and so I'll just go look at somebody's ad account and make a video and I my agreement is I'll do it for free as long as I can share it publicly and start to create a playlist of videos where people can just go look at this and see the way that I'm thinking through this I've gotten incredibly good feedback on these videos by the way it's a good reason to subscribe to my channel because I'm going to post them every time on my channel if you're watching this on YouTube in particular if you're listening to this for the reg through regular podcast feeds I probably won't post them all there because they're too video intense so um subscribe on YouTube and and make sure that you you get those and there's a specific playlist that I'm going to be putting these into if you want to subscribe to that as well but you can go watch those and learn how I'm thinking about this and try to diagnose any of the media buying specific issues one person I worked with is an apparel brand and um and was uh CAC range really widely relative to Target on their DPA another person just had this weird Spike all of a sudden and I think it actually was probably a meta problem and I showed him why I thought that it was a small one and it self-corrected really really fast but I think there was an issue there and so got more of those coming so go check those out and you can do that but there's actually even a better way to do this which is to get help with your uh with your ad account specifically through admission and this is the last thing you should do to troubleshoot this like I talk about admission from CTC all the time and I just want you to know how serious I am about this resource if you are trying to get better at media buying and you need a little bit of help with that admission is an unparalleled resource I we do things very slightly differently um that you know admission CTC runs more cost caps I run more bid caps but I don't care it's going to take you so far uh because uh because the information quality is so extremely high in in pre-recorded coures content you can go get a whole bunch of stuff it's going to W guide you by the hand through how to do this stuff but then crucially CTC is Staff with media buyers who buy like 100% of their Facebook ads media it's probably 95% or something but the vast majority eight figureure nine figureure Brands spending millions of millions tens of millions of dollars on bid caps and cost caps and tros they have seen it all those media buyers are available to you for like $1 an hour to look at your account specifically with you diagnose what's happening instead of you just revers to I'm going to switch back to ASC and for 150 bucks uh additional to you know the the the very reasonable charge that admission already is you will end up um saving yourself like thousands and thousands of dollars on Blown ad spend by making a catastrophic mistake in switching your media buying thing and have somebody just look at it with you diagnose the problem with you and dig in with you has really good experience and training on how to do this actually by the way my link because I have an affiliate relationship with admission my link actually gets your first one of those Consulting calls for free or if you sign up for a year you get four of them for free um and so it's like a killer deal admission is already extremely reasonably priced but if you're running media yourself like go use that resource get better through the tools they have from pre-recorded content and then take coaching calls and diagnose your account so this is this is like one of those things that I just don't understand why people don't absolutely flock to it if you are serious about getting better as a media buyer it is it really is an unparalleled resource um go check the link in the show notes of this make make sure you do that click through that you will get that that one call for free again or you can even get four calls for free if you book it year in advance and uh it's just a really really good deal so um incredibly expens I mean like when I charge for my time I charge way more than what $150 an hour is right because there's just only so much time in the day and so uh so yeah it's it's it's a really really good deal go get that and go solve the media buying things learn the fundamentals yourself through the courses and then go and get the call yourself okay so there's that you need better Facebook ads event tracking and you can do it with Billy make sure that your website is passing the most amount of data and information possible back to your Facebook ads dashboard your meta ads dashboard you can do that by increasing your event match quality score with 100% serers side tracking through the conversions API with my friends at Billy that's b. a billy is who I use with my clients uh to handle the Facebook pict pixel install on websites it is so incredibly easy it is like a couple of clicks and you've got the pixel install done no developers required you can also use it as a One-Stop shop replacement for Google tag manager so that you can do the same with G4 Google ads again like like one click and you've got enhanced conversions set up ready to go snap ads Twitter ads like everything it's all right there in Billy b. the main thing I'm using it for though is better tracking of my Facebook ads and if you are still using the native Shopify integration to do your Facebook ads tracking you really need to upgrade to Billy you can do it right away for just $1 for the first month and the ongoing cost of Billy is meaningfully more affordable than all of the other big players in the space they have priced competitively on purpose because they want your business and they trust their service a lot to to get it and so they're giving you a great rate to do it so b. a b. a get 100% serverid tracking at a much better price than the other options there's so much to it go check it out test it for $1 for one month okay now let's say youve all that and what you discover is that your media buying is actually right everything checks out okay so the media buying side check check and check okay you're like nope my bid caps are right my cost caps are right my tis is right my optimization is right I'm tracking data the right ways I've got Billy I'm like whatever right you're doing all the things everything checks out and now you're set at this place where it's like I wanted to spend 100 I can only spend 50 and the media buying is not the problem everything is firing and going great now what do I do outside of media buying okay meta is correct I am wrong and now I have to go solve the problem okay so there's a lot you can do here and I'm going to resist the temptation to tell you to go hammer away your unit economics so that you can exist on a lower OS Target though I think you should do that too I'm going to resist the idea to tell you to change which product you're advertising so that you focus on higher LTV products instead of lower LTV products or higher Tam products instead of lower Tam products like those are the things that you should consider doing of course you should always be chipping away at in your business but maybe you're IM media buyer and agency side and you're listening to this and you're watching this and you don't actually have control of those things so I want to focus instead on the creative and marketing things that you can do next okay so number one okay number one I want you to step back for a second we're GNA talk about um uh calendar here um and in sort of a different way uh yeah well let's just let's just start on calendar actually okay this is underrated uh because so much of the time when you hear advice like mine and and you think about the idea of sort of constant Improvement in the ad account itself as if the main way you push your brand forward or your client forward is with sort of like Evergreen improvements you just make your funnel a little better you make your creative a little better I want to come back to that in a second okay we that is something that I think makes a real difference and for some subsets of customers that's something you should be doing right if you have extremely high LTV if you're a subscription based brand you really don't want to run a lot of promotional moments you sort of are subject to seasonality uh as much as anything else because you want to make sure the subscription is well incentivized if people don't have a reason to cancel their subscription and all that stuff right so um providing all the values to subscriber all the value to subscribers and just hammering away those funnels can be the whole thing but outside of that um you should consider the marketing calendar next you should consider how your brand makes a meaningful impact on its customers and how you um message that in in particular moments and so let's start by thinking about the calendar the first thing I want you to consider is seasonality so this was definitely part of what was happening for one client that I worked with that hit a plateau and then actually s backward steps we didn't realize it at the time but we were but when we were crushing everything was going great we were writing a massive seasonality wave at the same time as we've launched really good performing ads when that happened everything went awesome for a long time and then it started to tail off part of that was maybe ad fatigue or something like that part of that was maybe some other things going on in the business but for sure huge part of that is seasonality okay and again I did a whole episode about this uh because it struck me um as a bigger deal than people normally realize and and uh I think the episode is called again I'll link it um called seasonality is a bigger Factor than you realize but that that it is true one of the things to watch out for is the possibility that seasonality is playing into your performance and youve just forecasted that wrong your younger business your meta ads are growing sort of for the first time you're investing more deeply things are going great and you just don't realize how much the seasonal moment is affecting your category that can happen and you need to pay attention to that okay and secondly now that's sort of the marketing calendar happening to you but now you need to take that and go another step and you need to happen to the marketing calendar okay so you need to go exert some influence on the marketing calendar and I think about that in two primary ways so let's actually start with a foundational comment before we get to those two primary ways one of them is the foundational comment is uh is try to go with the Tailwinds of seasonality rather than uh rather than try to fighting the headwinds so what I mean is if you want to make your business bigger it is much easier to use seasonal Tailwinds to make big moments bigger than it is to make to create big moments during seasonal slowdowns right during seasonal headwinds so as a general as a general principle to plan your marketing calendar go and try to figure out how to make it so that your seasonal moments can get as big as possible if you're a Father's Day brand don't go try to make Mother's Day a bigger moment because it's out there go try to make Father's Day a bigger moment okay now this creates cash planning challenges and all those kinds of things but it will make your moments bigger in general and so that's what you should do okay so there's that so at the Baseline within that framework you ought to do two things you should think about product development one of the reasons your brand may be slowing down is because you first introduced a bunch of new products to people and they went great and you got some spend off of them Etc and now you need to keep introducing new and compelling products to people both to your audience and to reopen up new audiences one of the things I see happen is that Brands get a little lazy they like they launch and they expect to keep growing forever off of the same five products they launched with and in fact every new product is a chance to open up new customers to reach new audiences and to reactivate your past customers which makes your whole business more efficient okay so think about your product development like for example if you are in a PA uh this is really obvious to you one of the questions I would be asking is how many new products can I release how fast how good can I get at this I've used this example before but the all-time example of this in my view that I've ever seen was colourpop makeup brand who could like go from I forget what the exact thing as but it was like from product idea to released in front of their audience in like seven days so they could just test products so fast so quickly that they could they could just uh they could just get so many products in the marketplace they built a supply chain to do that that's the kind of thinking that I think is right for many many businesses that are multiple products right so this is not your cpg consumable type product so much so it may be that that as well but to think about that marketing calendar and that product calendar um and how those two things go together how do you open release new products and then of course sale moments promotional moments how do you create very big sales in your calendar that will be easier it will be much easier to create a lot of margin by generating big moments like that and and you know the better you can really make your product and your brand resonate deeply with your customer in those moments the the more effective this will be okay so the cooler of the thing you can do the more exciting of the thing you can do the thing your customer will love more that's going to be the uh the difference that's going to make a huge difference in your ability to uh in in in your ability to make those moments really really big U and the more often you can do those things the better it's going to work as well and the less susceptible you're going to be to plateaus and slowdowns and back W steps okay so product and promotion are two of the big big ways to fight this um it will also make every customer more valuable to you if you can do a good job of those things which probably allows you to either acquire customers at more scale or or uh or even to pay more to do it if it if it comes to it okay so there's that all right now let's go to the other thing that you are probably thinking of when you think about this problem look if your meta out account performance has slowed down the problem's not with meta the problem is not with the channel and the answer is almost certainly not to go to another channel the time to go to another channel is when your meta ad performance is crushing okay because you're not going to go find a more efficient channel in the vast majority of cases at least at scale you might find some you know I don't know there's some some interesting stuff happening on Tik Tok shops I don't really know anybody who's doing it bigger than meta but like maybe there's something there uh YouTube creators I talked about that with Nate Legos a couple couple weeks ago like again Link in the show notes uh for that uh really good Nate's getting an adex Roi but it's not at the scale of meta and and so the time to go open up new channels is not when your per performance is going badly instead that's when it is time to double down on Creative I want you to think about the checklist of creative like do are you really reaching customers at the creative level is your messaging hitting customers in a way that is speaking deeply to them are you is the angle right is the hook right are you invoking curiosity from the right customer with your hook are you like are you creating enough creative are you generating variable types of creative are you speaking to multiple subsets of your customers uh you know how good of a job are you doing on the creative side and can you actually uh make that make that create more value for you just by generating more and better creative so much of the time especially in earlier stages of business that is a bigger problem Than People realize it just is it's a bigger problem Than People realize iiz and uh and when you get frustrated because you launch a 100 pieces of creative and none of them make a big difference the Temptation is to go something is wrong with meta it's probably not wrong with meta it's probably because your creative still isn't good enough and you need to go back to the well and think again am I actually reaching my customers where they are at with value that exceeds the cost to them in their minds am I making their lives better in some way that is tangible to them with this product in a way that is worth them spending their money on am I talking am I am I attracting the attention of that person with my hook with my with my uh headline and my still image ad whatever am I actually doing that it is about words it is about ideas it is about messaging it is about how you communicate those things and it is hard work now you may be able to sort of AI scale this so fast and build an awesome operational process to where you're just generating so much creative against so much product that you just sort of eventually have to win right I don't know I I as I've said in a couple recent episodes I'm not really sure if I seen that work quite yet uh it seems to me that continuing to push deeply into um creative and messaging and think more and more and and for one of my clients that's plateaued right now this is what I'm spending all my time on how do I make sure that I just communicate value better how do I just make sure I communicate value better okay that's that's basically what I'm trying to do I I apparently haven't done a good enough job for plateaued at communicating that value and then I'm going to try and scale up from there I'm GNA try and scale up from there okay so there's number one number two Landers uh landing pages are a funny thing I think sometimes people overuse landing pages they they basically recreate their product page on a landing page and I don't really know what the point of that is like your PDP already has a bunch of information on it and probably converts fine I've seen plenty and plenty of AD accounts that are running landing pages that uh that don't actually add anything like they're running landing pages because they're supposed to run landing pages right the place where I think landing pages probably could help you more is your ability to communicate a specific angle to a specific customer and then to also bring bring a specific offer to that customer so if you have a if you have one product and it communic and it has two different applications to two different customers building separate funnels separate landing pages where you can communicate that same product uh with the different angles different imagery different copy different benefits right then you can probably at that point um take some forward steps and landing page development is a really good use of your time and effort and money because it allows you to go from Crea all the way through the funnel in a way that is more direct and speaks more to um to the specific needs of your customer and resonates more deeply with them instead of just doing a more General PDP which by definition your PDP or collection page has to appeal to a wider group of people uh because it has to speak to sort of everybody who ends up there right so uh so that's the place I think for landing pages and then also like I said for specific offers uh sometimes landing page development is good because it's a really easy way to test offers right landing page a versus landing page B same exact content different offers which one of these make a bigger impact you know what happens if I do a larger discount here or there what happens if I whatever you know all of those kinds of things so um so that's where I think landing pages can be really helpful and I think some Brands ought to really invest in those as a way to unlock more scale I've seen this happen in a few places it's something I'm certainly doing with one of my clients again that's plateaued we're putting in a lot of time and money and effort into developing Landers we're going to test those against each other really clearly um yeah I think it's I think it's a really big deal uh as long as you're using it the right way if you're just using it as a general message about the brand it's probably not helping you very much instead use it to speak to specific customers all the way down through the funnel that's the value of it okay and then offers I mentioned it as well this is another thing you should be considering playing with if you haven't before offers can make a tremendous difference what happens if you go gift with purchase what happens if you go 30% off your first purchase what happens if you go subscription only versus no subscription option versus uh either option is there what happens if you bundle differently play with all those things there are all kinds of ways in which unit economics change based on those things LTV changes based on those things and the customer perception of the value of the of the of the product changes based on those things okay so offer is uh in my view two things it's product and price okay that's what I mean by the offer the combination of the product and the price and so uh so start playing with that what other the products is bundling versus not right what's the price um uh that would be subscription versus not right that's that's uh something like yeah I guess subscription is probably sort of a middle ground between product and offer or product and price but you get the idea um right uh price obviously is clear in some other ways you can offer different discounts you can um again bundling you can push the price up all those things so the uh that's the basic idea uh think about your offer if you haven't tested that much and if you can use a Lander to do it that can be something could be a really big Difference Maker really fast and I'll tell you another sort of subset of that if you've really listened carefully to me and you're running a mix of bidc cap and Target Rass you're actually you're you in that case your ad account has a mix of lowest cost bidding and highest uh value bidding so you're actually with your highest value bidding bidding specifically for customers who spend more money uh if you're doing that mix okay then uh then it's possible that what you want to do is create large aov bundles for your highest value customers because you're actually trying to get higher value customers and then for your lowest cost customers you want to think more about like okay can I just do like my straight ahead regular off or maybe a discount whatever and then find unit economics that work for both and try to get both that can open up some additional scale for you so okay so that's what I would do right uh to just walk that pack assume that meta is not the problem assume that I am the problem okay and then from there troubleshoot my media buying troubleshoot my pixel setup all the kind of basic stuff make sure everything is working correctly attribution Windows those kinds of things I would probably join admission to really button those kinds of things up and then from there uh go through the list seasonality marketing calendar how's my brand resonating and then all the way down to creative Lander offer look that is basic advice in some ways right what I'm telling you you've heard before but that's part of the point that is the fundamental challenge of marketing it's to communicate the value of your product to the customer in a way that resonates with them meta machine learning uh manual bids just all they're doing is putting a governor on how much you will spend to do that that's it with a probabilistic forecasting engine it's going to tell you whether or not it thinks you can do this at scale and and so but the challenge is fundamentally the same as any other bidding method and if the bidding method is right all it's doing is feeding back to you whether or not you've accomplished that at the scale that you want to accomplish it not if you haven't the problem is there for you to solve and that's that that's that that's what you have to do you have to put your head down and solve the problem that's actually the hardest problem building a business that sells products that people actually love at scale that's the fundamentally hard problem it will present itself to you at different times in your journey in unique ways you have to go get ready strap in and solve it there's a bunch of resources I mentioned including admission my sponsors on this uh some past episodes that I think can help you playlist like all of that stuff is in the show notes go check it out uh and of course like I said if you want that unit economic sheet go to AJF gr. comom give me your email address there it will get kicked over to you automatically it will also enter you into my newsletter which is something I'm working on trying to scale up a little bit more all right that's it for this episode I hope you enjoyed it again not withstanding the audio problems everything I'm doing can be found at AJF growth.com and again the show notes have all the other stuff that you want I will talk to you make sure to subscribe whever you're watching where wherever you're listening and uh that's it I'll talk to you next time thank you [Music]