The ONLY 2 Ad Creative Formats You Need to Scale Facebook Ads transcript

Most brands and businesses try to scale their Facebook ads thinking that they need to create more creative again and again and again. And most of these businesses spend thousands of dollars on testing creative, AI creative, UGC, influencers, and they call this a test budget, ultimately burning thousands and thousands of dollars. Now, over the last 11 years, me and my agency have managed over $500 million in Facebook and Google spend, and in the last just year alone, over $100 million in the Andromeda era of Facebook ads.

So, I'm going to show you in this video the exact two formats that completely will transform your hit rate. I'm going to explain why winning creative is the only thing that matters, how you need to build for the top of funnel and the bottom of funnel, which is critical. I'll take you step by step through each part of this funnel, so you know exactly which ads to create. I'll show you real examples, and then, of course, we're going to implement this into an ad account, so you know exactly where this goes.

So, let me first start by showing you why creating thousands and thousands of ads is just killing your account. So, whenever you hear that you need to create thousands of ads, the first alarm bell that should go off in your head is just why you're creating these ads and who you're creating them for. So, I have here a pixel that drove 19,000 server-side events over the last 30 days, and it's not even to show you the volume here.

It's just to show you the consistency of these purchases that happen every single day. So, if you're on the wave right now of creating thousands and thousands of ads and overwhelming your account with so many ads cuz you've heard creative volume and creative diversity is critical. Well, I want to inform you about how the pixel works first. First thing we need to understand is that whatever you feed the pixel, this is what comes out of the pixel.

How the pixel works in a very simple way is the pixel fires, it then sends those signal events to Meta, the delivery gets smarter based specifically on the purchase event that comes in, and then you get more conversions, typically a lower CPA, because Facebook is able to find more people similar to who purchased before. Now, what happens unfortunately when you are injecting a whole lot of ads into the account is Facebook doesn't know where to shift or guide that budget.

And what that actually creates is it creates bad fires, bad pixels. So, just imagine this red event is a negative event. It is someone who goes to your website, doesn't convert, bounces around everywhere, and just is a total waste of your money. Well, unfortunately the pixel still gets trained off of negative events. And if too many negative events happen and some of these negative events do purchase, but at a very low rate, the pixel is still being negatively trained off of the negative events.

This is very, very bad for our account. And this is one of the problems that happens when you throw a bunch of sloppy creative at volume into your account is the pixel doesn't know what direction to properly go in. So, there's a very simple formula that basically solves this. And it is called your creative hit rate. Your creative hit rate, as we have here, is the number of high-performing ads, which we'll define in a second, divided by the total number of ads launched.

And we use this as a percentage, so we multiply it by 100. The easy way to think about this is your number of high-performing ads, this is just a definition that you need to create. Typically, we want to define this as spent more than 5% and hit my target. If the creative hit my target and spent more than 5% of the total campaign budget, it is a winner. It is a hit. Then we divide that by all the other ads. So, you might have a case where you launch say 100 ads and five of those ads dominate the ad account.

Your hit rate is 5%. This would be a really solid, fairly normal hit rate because volume negates luck, right? So, very simply put, when we are producing 100 ads, if we know we have a 5% hit rate, we understand that if we produce 1,000 ads, that our hit rate, if all things remain equal, will be 50 winning ads, and that can propel the account forward. So, while creative volume in and of itself doesn't matter, winning creative matters, and your path to winning creative is typically through high-quality creative volume.

The key takeaway here is the total number of ads literally means nothing, and the only thing that matters is the number of high-performing ads in your account. So, every time you think about, "Should I create more and more and more?" the answer is only if you believe those ads are high-quality and could be a home run and could be a hit. So, I promised you the templates, the outlines for the two formats that are crushing right now.

Now, we're going to build our ads in a very different way than how most people build their ads. Most people think of the funnel as top of funnel, middle funnel, and bottom funnel. So, when you think of your ad funnel like this, one of the problems that actually wind up happening is you start to build ads for the top of funnel, then you build more ads for the middle funnel, and then you build some ads for the bottom of funnel.

Now, the top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel idea is great in theory, but it's just not how Facebook ads work. So, the way that we've done it at The Moonlight Ads is we've kind of flipped this on its head. Now, first thing we need to understand here is what is happening at each stage. So, top of funnel, these are people who are not aware of your product, they are not aware of the problem, and they are not aware of the solution.

They are truly net new to whatever you are selling. Middle funnel are people who are likely problem or even solution aware, but don't know of your product, and bottom of funnel are people who are aware of the problem, aware of the solution, and they know of your product already. It is our job to convert everyone at all stages. However, the way that we do that and the ads that we produce need to change. And that's what brings us into our two formats that are working right now.

What we're going to be doing is we are going to be specifically building ads for the tippy, tippy, tippy top of the funnel and the very, very, very bottom of the funnel. We are not building anything for the middle funnel. We're not building anything for the top middle bridge. We're not building anything for the middle bottom bridge. And the reason we do this is because naturally, as producers of ads, we will make mistakes.

We will benefit through natural osmosis here where some ads that we think are truly top of funnel are going to naturally be here. And some ads that we think are bottom, bottom, bottom funnel are naturally going to be here. This is going to allow our creative production to actually be lower. We're going to focus on the quality of creatives that we're putting in. Not totally writing off volume, but we're focused on how can we build the best ads that will hit the true top of funnel and naturally middle top and then the best bottom funnel ads that will naturally go to middle bottom.

And real quick, by the way, if these raw kind of videos where I'm going through everything step-by-step, where I'm breaking everything out and then showing you everything in the ads manager as well, appeal to you, then I've put together this exact training in way more detail already, broken out inside of the Facebook Ads Blueprint. This is a community you can join. We have everything from the three ways to sell, which is some of the stuff I'm going through today, the difference between concepts and iterations, how to build your creative flywheel, how to create your avatars, examples of avatars, ad templates, ad building sheets, literally spreadsheets you can copy from my team.

Pretty much everything built into this classroom step-by-step, so you can literally just copy the things that I do with my team and implement them into your own ad account. We also do live Q&A's every single week and you can look at all of the past recordings that we've ever done. You can also ask any question anytime. You can see there's hundreds of questions that come in and I literally reply to these questions every single day on my own.

Okay, so let's talk about what's going on on the top of funnel. The top of funnel is where we're going to create the most value for our business. This is where we're going to attract new customers that are going to help us grow the business every single day. The way that we want to do this is we want to focus these ads in a problem and solution format. Now, the reason that problem and solution works so well is because it clearly addresses the main objections that the people at the top of the funnel actually have.

Think about it very simply like this. Whenever you're creating a top of funnel ad for your business, all you're trying to do is address the core problem that the user has and then position your product as the unique solution. So, you might hear this and you might think that your product or whatever you're selling, whatever service, business doesn't actually solve a specific problem. I get how that could be hard to see sometime, but we don't buy anything as consumers that does not solve a problem.

Your problem could be as functional and straightforward as my product solves back pain. Or it could be as mysterious as my product is a clothing brand and therefore it makes people feel good about themselves. It makes people feel cool. It makes people feel like they're part of something, right? So, every single person has a problem and you need to position your product as a solution. Now, just me saying problem and solution is too complicated or just too broad, I've created a framework that you can use to actually build your problems and solutions for your ad account.

We call this the avatar framework and it's very simple. Every single business speaks to a specific avatar. Your avatar has problems. If you're like, "What the heck is an avatar?" The avatar is the person that you're selling to. It is your ICP. It's your ideal client profile. So, what we do is we take our avatar and we list out all of the problems that this avatar has. It literally doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's completely irrelevant to our product, but we want to list out every single problem that the avatar has.

These problems become our ad angles. Our ad angles, when we mix it and talk to an avatar specifically, is what creates our concept or our package that is our ad. I hope that's very clear. We want to speak to an avatar. We want to call out their problems, and then we want to specifically use our product or service as the solution to those problems. And the great part about the Andromeda algorithm, as you can probably see from this line right here, whoever we talk about in the ad, that is actually who sees the ad automatically.

If you have an ad that says, "If you're X person," that ad will be shown more likely to X person. I'll show you an example of the brand Gruns doing this. We don't manage this account. I just thought it was really cool that they're actually doing exactly what I'm preaching right now. And you can go to their Facebook ads library and see all these ads right now if you want to. Uh basically, you could see they've taken two different avatars in this case, and they've pushed different angles.

So, you can see avatar number one is someone who is on some sort of weight loss medication. You could see Ozempic be called out. You could see lose weight, not your metabolism. And there's two different angles associated to this person. One is lose weight, not your metabolism. Lose weight, not your metabolism. And the other is Ozempic's new bestie, missing fiber on Ozempic, the perfect GLP-1 supplement, right? These are Ozempic, and then the other one is losing weight.

So, for Gruns, it actually doesn't end there. They're able to sell the same product to a different avatar for a different purpose. And you can see here, this angle is all about hair growth. Keep your hair full and thick. Your hair's new bestie. My hair is fuller. These ads are going to go specifically to people who are struggling with hair-related problems. While these ads up here are going to focus on people who are on Ozempic or on a GLP-1 or on a weight loss supplement.

And because we speak to the avatar, and we call out their problems, it matches automatically to that audience. That's how we're building our top of funnel ads. It's so incredibly important, whether it's image ads, video ads, it doesn't matter. I'm going to show you a few examples in just a minute. All right, let's get back to our marketing funnel here. So, we've cleared the top of funnel. And as I mentioned before, what's naturally going to happen every time this works is that when you create these problem and solution ads, some ads will be longer, they'll cover really strong hooks, really lengthy bodies of the ad, and good CTAs.

When these ads are a little bit lighter, or maybe just a little bit more simple, they're going to bleed into the middle and the top of funnel gap. Most of the time, when you hit problem and solution, they're going to take care of all of the top of funnel and a good chunk of the middle funnel. However, we need to focus on what are we doing down here at the bottom of funnel. Now, the bottom of funnel is literally a place where you just handle objections.

So, if you're like, what do I create for the bottom of funnel ads? I don't know what to do here. You do two things. First off, you turn on your catalog ads to retarget anyone who's visited similar products. That is a super simple, you should do that right now. The second thing you do is you focus all of your creative on objection-based ads. So, how do you figure out your objections? First off, you probably know a whole lot of them naturally.

Sit there with a piece of paper and write all the objections for your business and make specific ads for those objections. The second thing you do is you call customers who literally abandoned checkout. This sounds wild, but if you do this, you will find out very clearly why people are not purchasing from you. And then you go ahead and use that information and you make a bunch of bottom-of-funnel objection ads. Now, let me just show you an example of what we would do here, right?

So, if you got a bottom-of-funnel objection on a price, which is going to be one of the most common objections you get, someone sees a different product in the market that they can get cheaper. Your key here is to actually either show your product against a competitor, if that is the case, if you're very competitive, or you could just do something like calling out why your product is better. Show the value of the product.

Let me show you again a few examples. So, this ad here on the left-hand side by Joe Lee is very, very straightforward, right? It's just calling out one thing that this product does well, clinically proven to reduce hair shedding. Right, there's not like a 100 call outs here. They're not giving every single piece away of this information. This is only an ad you would see in the bottom of funnel. We're just simply calling out one thing that we are solving.

Or take for example this Hex Clad ad. This ad does nothing top of funnel, but what it does bottom of funnel is it crushes because it takes away the objection of any sort of expiration date or warranty. It kind of treats these other pans as they only have a one and three-year warranty because they actually do expire and they kind of break at some point where Hex Clad allows the lifetime warranty to be in place because they trust their product's going to last a long time and they'll replace it if it doesn't last a long time.

It basically puts in your head that they have a very high quality product and you've already seen their first, second, third, fourth, fifth ads. This is just truly the bottom of funnel to get you over that line to finally purchase. You actually see right next to it another ad here, built to last a lifetime, right? These are kind of like one and two, very different formats, but they're truly capturing that bottom of funnel objection.

By the way, if you want this board, I have around 200 ads on here, all top of funnel, middle funnel, and bottom of funnel ads. You could steal it. There's a link down below in the description. These are just all my top ads that I've liked over the last few months here. So at this point we understand how problem-solution ads fit into the top of funnel. We understand that objection ads are going to feed our bottom of funnel and we know that a hybrid of these is going to actually naturally build that middle of funnel.

But let me show you inside a real ad account how we're going to build this step by step. Now, normally we would build a prospecting, a retargeting, a retention, and potentially blend the prospecting and retargeting together and even potentially have a scale campaign. I break all of this out in my school community, like I've mentioned before. There's a lot of nuance here. For this video, I'm just going to show you the core prospecting campaign because that's what we're focused on.

We're focused on acquiring new customers at scale. All right, so we're just going to name our campaign ML_prospecting and that's just cuz that's what I name all my campaigns. We're going to choose the buying type auction, the sales objective as sales, and then we're going to go down to the budget section. Choose your daily budget based on, of course, what you're actually spending already. Do not use this as a lever to increase spend.

Just start with where you're comfortable. As a very rough idea, I'd like to at least spend one time my target CPA. In this case, I'm just going to leave it at 100 bucks. It doesn't really matter. My campaign bid strategy is going to be highest volume or value, and then we're going to keep budget scheduling at none. For my audience segment reporting, this is important. Make sure your engaged segments are anyone who's visited your site in the last 30 days and anyone who's added to cart in the last 90 days, and then your existing customers are your 180-day purchasers, not your all-time purchasers, your 180-day purchasers.

Scrolling down, that is all the campaign settings that we need to set. All right, so let's hit our naming convention really quick. This is going to help you stay very organized. I like to use what's called packs. So, how we name our packs is we're going to name them in order, so it's going to be pack number one, and then we're going to use our avatar {underscore} our angle. Now, just instead of writing avatar and angle, of course, write who your avatar is, write who your angle is or who your angle is for.

For our customer lifecycle strategy, we're going to be changing this to acquire new customers, and then we're going to choose our excluded audiences right here, and just like it actually did already for us, we are just excluding our existing customers, okay? That's all we're trying to exclude from here. We don't want to hit existing customers retention, as I would call it, into our prospecting campaign that's focused on new customers.

For our conversion, we're going to be choosing just website single conversion event for just website, and our performance goal, we have an option here. If we are a single product brand, we're choosing maximize number of conversions, or if all of our products are the same price, number of conversions. If our products vary in price, we're choosing value of conversions. Next, make sure we select our correct data set, choose our conversion event as the purchase event, never anything else.

And we're going to be using a standard attribution model where we are choosing 7-day click, 1-day engaged through, and 1-day view through. We're not selecting dynamic creative or live video ads. So, we're going to scroll down to our audience section, and there's actually nothing we need to do here because we've already set our audience at the top, which is just the exclusion for existing customers. Everything else can be left alone.

We're not excluding placements, we're leaving everything wide open. Now, in this pack, what we're generally going to do is we're going to focus on this avatar and this angle alone. This is going to be our top of funnel pack. This pack is all focused, just like we talked about, on problems and solutions. So, we would name this problem plus solution, and we would very much call out the avatar and the angle in every single one of these ads.

Now, you might ask, "Well, what about the bottom-of-funnel ads?" So, you can create as many packs as you want in a single campaign. I don't care. I don't care about having two ad sets or four ad sets. We have some accounts that literally have 30, 40, 50, 100 ad sets, and it's cuz it actually grants us control. So, we don't need to just pause ads down, we could use things like value rules, minimums, or maximums. The beauty of this is this is a top-of-funnel pack.

Let's say we were to go to create a new bottom-of-funnel pack. Well, all we're going to do is we're going to copy the exact same pack settings. We're still going to call this pack number two. We're going to call this avatar and angle, but because our angle is going to be different, right, bottom of funnel, we'll call out bottom of funnel here. We'll specifically say in our naming convention whatever and whomever we're talking to.

And then these ads right in here are just going to be loaded with objections instead. And as you start to build your ad account, what will naturally happen is you'll have a whole lot of top-of-funnel ads, which would be this right here. You'll have a whole lot of top-of-funnel packs. You'll continue to create packs, and every time you launch new ads, you launch them into a new pack, a new ad set. What this creates is naturally, you'll be able to see where are my bottom-of-funnel ads, where are my top-of-funnel ads.

You might be wrong on some of them, but most likely what will happen is your top-of-funnel ads will spend more money, they'll be way more scalable, they'll drive lower return on ad spend. Your bottom-of-funnel ads will convert better, but they won't scale as much. And this is exactly what you want. See, because over time, your prospecting campaign is going to start to look something like this. You're going to have your core CBO prospecting campaign with dozens of different packs, all with groups of creatives by avatar and concept, just like we talked about.

You might add interests with winner groups eventually, you might add a scale campaign eventually, but this is what we're focused on. This is going to be the engine of your business. Now, I know we just went through a lot. If you want to see more step-by-step how we implement everything into the ad account, click this video where I go through everything A to Z in terms of how we structure our baseline of our ad accounts.

That's all for today's video. As always, I hope you got a ton of value, and I will see you very, very soon.