How To Build A HUGE Volume Of High Performing Meta Ads (For Cheap) transcript

There's a very strong incentive for you to create as many ads as possible for your meta accounts to thrive. If you want a meta ad account that is pumping volume at scale at a high ROAS, creating a high number of ads is a really really important part of the process. Nobody can do this truly limitlessly, and if you've paid attention to my content for a while, I've had a number of people reach out to me, say they've run into issues actually taking the strategy of a very high volume of ads so far that they're running into page limits where meta simply won't let you run any more ads cuz you run out of page space.

You know about launching them with manual bids. You know about the incentive to do that to eliminate creative testing campaigns so that you are able to take as many ads as possible, launch them with very little risk, and let meta amplify them well. I have heard many of you reach out to me and tell me about how that has worked well for you. I've seen it work well with my clients who are all eight-figure brands doing this exact same thing.

So, in everything I'm about to say, I'm not backing off of that for 1 second. In fact of anything, what you're seeing more and more with meta ads right now is more incentive to create a very high volume of ads. In fact, to create more variations that are um more tailored, more specifically in more ways to each individual user on the platform. There's a lot of talk around things like Andromeda right now, around meta's embrace of AI to make it so that there can be more specific variation of different ads for specific users, and make machine learning better and faster and all of those kinds of things.

And so, everything that meta is saying is moving towards this idea that a high volume of creative is how you win the game. If you're not there with me yet, you're probably behind on meta ads at this point. You should be thinking about, as Taylor Holiday has said, you should be thinking about your ad creation process as a supply chain, where you look through every part of it, and you think to yourself, "How do I make it so that each part of my supply chain of ads gets better and more efficient so that you get both a higher quality and quantity at the same time." And it's not a choice between either one of them.

Quality and quantity both matter. This episode right now, as I am talking, is about a way in which my team, which has built a serious supply chain of ads, uh we do a lot of volume right now, is attempting to go intervene in that supply chain and make the quality better in one spot, right? So, we're looking at the supply chain, we're saying, "Okay, what's a way that we could make it better?" And I'm going to tell you right now, there's a couple of There's a couple of episodes of mine that if you are watching listen to this episode, you like the way I'm thinking about ads, okay?

Then you ought to go back and check those ads out, okay? Those episodes are linked in the show notes. Um they are going to be One episode is called How I Turned One uh ad idea into 300 ads or one idea into 300 ads, something like that. You get it. One idea, 300 ads. Um another one is is the creative process I use to scale past 10 million. Both of those two will give you a good sense of how to think about this. You can also go to my channel, search the word creative testing, and you'll find a bunch of stuff about how to actually launch all of these ads.

Any of the Any of the episodes I've done with that in the title will all help you, okay? Um so, um so, I'm going to assume all of that that you have some sense that you're thinking the way that I am about this, which is, "How do I create a very high volume? How do I test at a very high uh amount without burning all of my money testing ads? What do I do?" Okay? So, um so, I'm going to tell you a couple ways that we are trying to to address that supply chain.

Um Now, my my approach to this in the past has been really crucially focused on one idea, which is that when you create an ad idea, a concept for an ad, an angle for an ad, and you and you have an idea for an ad, once you've done that, you've done the hardest part of the work. When you've created script one for concept one, that's like 80% of the work of making ads. It's a really large portion of it. The the idea phase because because what goes into that, right, is um customer research, understanding your product, understanding your margins, understanding total addressable market, understanding LTV.

Uh and you know, you may not have all of those details exactly worked out, but if you know that a high margin, high LTV, high TAM product is in your skew set, that's something you should be advertising. So, you've already done all that work of thinking about that. You've thought about how your product is priced, what kind of customer it reaches, all those things. All that work goes in on the front end. And then from there, there's a little bit more work that gets done, which is to think about a concept or an angle for an ad, right?

So, you have some idea for an ad, and you go like, "Ooh, um I I think I'm going to present my my ad, you know, with X concept, with X angle." Well, that idea of X concept or X angle is a a really important thing. I'll just use a a client who's been on my show, and so I can talk about them publicly to some degree. I'm just going to make this up. They're called Adaptive Natural, a supplement company founded by Chris Kresser, functional medicine clinician.

Let's just say I wanted to run an ad that was focused broadly. Let's say it's focused on um he's got an amazing gut health product called Biome Protect, okay? Biome Protect is uh is prebiotics, um probiotics, postbiotics, and polyphenols all in one product. If you are in the gut health world looking at trying to to care for your gut, you should go buy some. Seriously awesome, okay? Um so, Biome Protect is the product.

Well, you can imagine a concept where you take the idea of um let's say um this ad, I mean, actually this is one we've done, right? We've We've played with different stuff around this ad makes your bowel movements better, right? Poop ads, okay? So, you take that concept. A poop ad is actually a perfect example of this. If you take that, you could think about how to say like, "Make your pooping better," okay? In a whole bunch of different ad styles, okay?

You could make it um you could make still images about that. You could make um sort of uh low-fi still images, right? Socially native, text in context, those kinds of ads you've heard me talk about. You could make long-form explainers about the about sort of how all that stuff works. And you get you get a basic long script, um and you get a a basic concept there, and you've done a whole bunch of the work in thinking about how this product meets the customer in this particular way.

And so, what I have suggested in the past as a way that we do that is first, we try to take that that one concept, and we try to we try to do exactly what I just said, which is make it across a bunch of different ad formats, okay? So, in the prep process, when I'm briefing ads, I'm thinking about how do I generate a bunch of formats of this one ad? Okay, great. That's step one. Step two though is in the video creation process in particular, and sometimes in the still image creation process, what we'll do is we'll take one image and create, you know, let's take one image ad.

Take the same image and make it with like 10 different headlines, okay? And so, we we are able to especially with AI now, right? You can pump out headlines really fast, and you basically take the same image and do do different headlines, okay? Or with videos, what we'll do is we will um make one video, okay? One body, uh long-form explainer type ad, one body of an ad, and then after that, once you've got the one body, we'll we'll make three different hooks, okay?

Five different hooks, whatever it is. And that way you have the same ad multiple times, and you're sort of taking multiple shots with different hooks at finding a winner. Um and then you run those all on manual bids and see what works, okay? That's something we've done for a while. It has worked pretty well for us in a lot of different ways. And um and so, I'm I'm really happy with that. We've now built a process. We've done that with our friends from Behind the Scenes Studio, who staffed my um organization, actually built their business based off of the back of sort of this way of thinking about ads with me alongside, me and my strategy, and could staff that work in the Philippines.

We could do it at a really high volume. Could do it at an even higher volume um at a pretty low cost with AI. So, these are the kinds of supply chain improvements I'm talking about, right? If you if you have this idea for ads, and then you go, "All right, I'm going to try and make this work as fast and as high quality as possible." Going to the Philippines, getting incredibly good designers and video editors, people with really good resumes, helping them to build that is something that is now um doable at a price is affordable for me and for my clients um by by thinking about the supply chain.

It's something where it's like, "Okay, if I offshore this work, um I'm able to tap into really high quality talent at a lower cost to me, that's great. Um and at a at a good salary to them relative to local markets." That attracts really high quality talent. I now have got this thing built where I can go and say, "Okay, I can do a high volume there." And now you give them AI, and you know, their team is really forward with AI, and they're thinking about how to loop that in different processes.

I've been on multiple calls with them about how to integrate it more and more, and they're making it faster and easier to put out more ads. Okay, that's awesome, right? So, now you're again addressing the supply chain. I cannot say enough good things to you about my friends at Behind the Scenes Studio, the graphic design, video editing agency based in the Philippines that I use for my clients, and I'm so happy to be sending uh to you as well.

Behind the Scenes Studio was formed out of uh More Staffing, the Philippines-based staffing agency that you may have heard on this show before, my longest-tenured sponsor. They started working with me on the way that we do design uh graphic design and video editing for our meta ads for my clients. And um as part of that, I started expanding the service to other people besides me. It is a really awesome group of people, extremely talented designers and editors.

Um I can just tell you because this team does work on all of my clients who are eight-figure clients that the high the work is it comes in at a very high quality as well as a very high quantity because they have built their system for designing and editing on the back of the things I'm talking about in this episode. So, they've literally built the team to do the things I'm talking about here. So, if you like the way I'm thinking, then you should be talking to Behind the Scenes Studio about staffing your design and edit work uh as well for your clients or for your business.

Uh btsstudio.co is the place to go reach out to them. btsstudio.co. Tell them I sent you. They really are great. I was in the Philippines in January working with my teams there head like in person. They're like Another thing you need to know is they're just great quality people who really care about doing a good job um for your team, right? Sometimes you don't know if you're offshored, you don't see people or something like that.

Like, they're awesome. They care about the work. They do a really good job. They're really talented. BTS studio.co, go check it out today. Staff up your design and edit for your Meta Ads team with Behind the Scenes Studio. You will not regret it. And now, here's another part of it, okay? That variation uh style I just told you about, like one image, multiple headlines, or one body of a long-form explainer and and, you know, one offer guarantee section of the ad, one CTA, basically.

You know, if it's a 2-minute ad, 1 minute and 50 seconds of it that are exactly the same even if the first 10 seconds are different in three or five different variations, okay? If that happens, now, um this is the part that I'm going to try to improve next, okay? The variation portion of it. Because there's a problem. Which is that, as Meta has said publicly, very often, what they will do is if your multiple variations of ads look the same, okay?

Um then or look close to the same. If there if there's if there's too much similarity in the variations of your ads, Meta will sort of group them together and sort of randomly pick one of them. Now, there's some ways around this, and it doesn't always do this consistently. Sometimes, um at very low spends even, Meta will figure out that um you know, hook A is beating hook B and it will run one versus the other, etc. But I've seen this a lot of times in my ad account, and I bet you have too if you've listened to my advice before.

For some reason, some version of an ad just won't work very It just won't get any spend. And you can't figure out why. And it's frustrating, okay? Well, so what do you do? Okay, in that case, um the the So So, Meta has said this, by the way. So, it it happens sometimes. And I'll tell you with my clients, um I I think I probably haven't taken this quite seriously enough um as as an issue because there are definitely times when we launch a bunch of variations of ads and some of them get very little spend that I just probably didn't pay enough attention to what was happening in those situations.

Now, I think part of the reason some ads get very little spend is because they're not going to perform. Like, in fact, I think that's the number one reason ads outside of this variation situation um don't get that much don't get that much spend cuz even even in that situation, like it's cuz they're not going to perform. I I think Meta's still really good at reading early signals on ads and figuring out um probabilistically what's most likely to perform versus what's not.

But I do think I've also sort of fallen into this trap and maybe even had this wrong to some degree where where that kind of variation wasn't the most efficient use of the kind of time that you could uh put in to making variations on ads, okay? Um I've no problem admitting that if that was if that was the case. And in fact, I especially don't mind because tweaking this part of the process is extremely easy. Now that I have and hopefully you have built a process for creating a very high volume of ads, what we have to do is think, okay, the the the 80/20 rule, 20/80 rule, whatever, still applies. 80% of the concepting work is done at the level of concepting.

Or 80% of the ad work is done at the level of concepting, okay? If that's true and writing that first script, if that's true, what can I do to go and produce um variations of ads so that I can take that 80% work and push it as far as possible, get as much value out of that work as possible. And so, what I am beginning to do is two things to accomplish that. Now that the process is built, these are pretty easy to changes to make.

At the level of still images, what I'm beginning to do is say, instead of just changing a headline, okay? What we're going to do is even if I use a tool like Claude uh to help me uh you know, AI tool to help me write multiple headlines off of an idea so I can write 10 headlines really really fast, let's say. Instead of using those headlines across one image ad, what I'm going to do is take a bunch of image ads, some of them with phone uh uh some of them with phones, some of them with like high-quality creative, you know, high-quality production, whatever.

A bunch of different images. And for each image, while historically, you know, the way you sort of AB tester marketer thinks is same image, multiple headlines, that way you can see which headline works best. I am not a mark I'm not a scientist, I'm a marketer. I don't care about isolating which variables are working best as long as I have some sense that the message of the ad is working. And and therefore, I'm I don't really care if I like if I know exactly which thing moved the needle, whether it's the image or the copy.

So, what I could do instead is take those 10 headlines, still get a bunch of variation all within the same angle or concept, right? Um you know, to to use my poop example earlier, right? You could you can easily find 10 different ways to talk about having better poop or better bowel movements or whatever with uh with a gut health product. You you know, there's a plenty of ways to make that point. So, you've got the concept, now you make the point a bunch of different ways, and now go and create 10 different images with that.

Uh use 10 different images. If you want to use ChatGPT-4, the image generator, to do that, you can do it, right? You could probably do that really really fast, even just have it ask you ask it to make multiple variations. I haven't tried that, but I bet that would work. Um you you can do a bunch of different things there to where you can get different imagery, okay? And and pair the 10 headlines that you created within that one concept with 10 different images and launch them all, okay?

So, again, the the mental shift there is the kind of variations you're making are more variable, okay? More vary more variable to the variations. Um still trying to do that thing. Now, this requires a little more work than the work of pasting one headline on 10 different 10 headlines on one image the whole time and just launching them all, okay? It creates more work, for sure. All right? Um but not that much more work, frankly.

Like, a lot of this work is still pretty easy to do, especially once you've already done the hard work of design, and especially if you're using sort of socially native Instagram-style copy boxes and and that kind of thing in your ads, okay? Pretty easy to do. So, um so that's the way you do that on the image side. On the video side, what we're starting to do is now create variations um in in a couple different ways.

So, it's the same concept where you're trying to create sort of better, more varied variations, okay? Of each ad. And now, instead of one body, three hooks, five hooks, whatever it is, what we're doing is saying, we're going to change two things at the same time. The first is at the level of hook, I want to change both the copy and the first visual we see. So, if I'm going to write five hooks, all five of them are going to be um again, different um different uh visuals and different copy at the same time, okay?

So, try in different ways to do this. This is a a helpful thing too, by the way, because um what we know from eye-tracking software from eye-tracking uh studies that Meta's released is that the first place a a user looks when they look at your ad is the image, the video, like the the the actual graphic itself, okay? Um something like that. And then from there, it goes to the account uh that is running it, and then from there, finally, it goes to social proof, okay?

But social proof is the last thing and has a relatively small effect on it. So, um so, the the key is if you change the visual, then you're going to change the potential outcome, especially if you can show Meta these are actually different variations of the ad. So, you go and do that, okay? You create the different variations um and same time, not only does your hook changes, but what I also love to do, and this is another place where AI is really useful, is to take a longer script and create shorter versions.

So, let me give you an example. You can imagine, again, a 2-minute, 3-minute, 5-minute long-form explainer about um how Biome Protect gut health product helps give you make uh make your bowel movements better, okay? That could be that. Now, again, there's real science there. This is like This is a well-known thing in functional medicine. People have been thinking about this for a while, and and people who are not experiencing this have a real problems in here, right?

So, it's like it really matters for for people, and there's actual information to back this up. It's not just like a silly funny thing to say, it's like a real thing, okay? So, um so, you can imagine a 4-5 minute explainer where you do that, okay? If you wanted to go longer, which a lot of supplement brands, a lot of sort of science-y kind of brands do that sort of thing. From there, though, the the beauty of this is once you've written that script, which of course you can get plenty of help from AI writing that script, okay?

Now, here's something I've done. I'll go back to Claude after writing script number one, let's call it the 5-minute script, and I will say, okay, Claude, uh write me a 2-minute version of this instead, or just cut it down by 50%, and then quickly edit it, make sure everything still works. And now, you can do it again, you can go 50% of that, okay? And you can keep doing that until you have four or five variations ranging from a 10- to 15-second super quick hit video, okay?

Where the where that where video A is, you know, that very short version, which is like um you can be having better bowel movements, Biome Protect gut health is the best gut health uh probiotic, prebiotic, postbiotic, polyphenol formula in the world. Get it today for 30% off, okay? Boom, there's your whole ad, okay? That's off the top of my head. 15 seconds. You can go from there up to 5 minutes and everything in between.

And for each one of those, I would be trying to play to run a different hook and a different visual. If you like the way I'm thinking and talking in this episode, you need to know that so much of it came from my relationship, both in the past and ongoing, with Taylor Holiday and the team at Common Thread Collective. We think very similarly about how to grow e-commerce businesses in ways that are financially profit-focused, in ways that are focused on leveraging machine learning to grow um your brand with Meta Ads.

And that is why the best resource for you to go tap if you want a deep dive into how to really use this stuff for your brand is Admission from Common Thread Collective. Admission is Common Thread Collective's learning community for brands, and I mean, they say it's for like six- and seven-figure found brands, but really honestly, can be used by brands at a lot of stages of business because the material is just so good and so helpful.

It is this kind of thinking packaged in courses and in and in live webinars both, as well as with access to coaches from the CTC team who can help you implement this stuff in your ad account with their best practices, which are coming from like large funded studies from Meta Ads. They have awesome representation there, so they know what Meta's thinking all the time. Um and you can get coaches looking at your ad account.

I get DMs, emails all the time from people saying, "Hey Andrew, um, I like what you're saying. This is the way I set it up. Can you look at my ad account or can you tell me what I should do next?" And my answer is, "No, I can't tell you what you should do next cuz I can't see your ad account. As much as I'd love to, I can't look at every ad account uh that somebody presents me with. So, what you should do instead is work with Admission cuz Admission has coaching at uh $150 an hour with media buyers from CTC who can help you do exactly that thing, which is check your ad account.

And if you sign up for Admission just for the courses and for the content, you'll get the coaching, the first coaching call for free. Or if you sign up for a year of Admission, you get four coaching calls for free. So, you can get real help in your ad account um by looking at and by diving into Admission. It is basically D2C e-commerce university uh except that it is way cheaper than real college and will help you a whole bunch right away make a bunch of money.

There's a bunch of um great stuff right now. There's an Implementing Cost Caps Workshop if you're new to that and you want to know how to do that in your ad account. Taylor Holiday himself recently did a webinar there called the DTC Evolution. What's next for e-commerce in 2025 and beyond? That's exclusive to Admission members. Um, there's actually a monthly webinar with Taylor that's exclusive to Admission members so you get access to him and his thinking.

And then um Maximizing Efficiency with Limited Assets with the head of growth the head of strategy there, Luke Austin, a brilliant dude um that you should be following. So, there's all kinds of good stuff there. Go join Admission today. Uh get the help that you need to grow your ad account. If you're trying to grow your ad your uh business profitably with Meta Ads in 2025, you haven't joined Admission, you really need to do it.

It's going to help you a ton. Again, this is going to work against the sort of AB testing mentality of many marketers who think about trying to isolate a variable and think about it really scientifically. And what I'm saying is, again, you're a marketer not a scientist. As long as you get the angle right and test against angles and concepts, you should be fine. You don't need to actually isolate just sort of whatever the you know, most uh you don't need to isolate just like whichever one headline is doing all the work or whichever one visual hook is doing the work.

Um, from there, the way you should think about expanding the output of your ads against your best angles is again not by trying to isolate any particular headline or hook or something like that, right? But by taking the concepts that are working and if they're working, like let's say we launch those, okay? Now, I've just created 25 ads, let's just call it, right? It goes a bunch of different still images, bunch of variations there.

I've got um you know, again, same thing. You might do a posted note version of those stills. You might do um you might do the the the five different videos that I did. Uh take those five videos that I just did, right? Like uh this is really good for your bowel movements, right? That idea, okay? Now, create another reason or another version of it, which is like a negative hook version of it, right? Um, that you're going to hate this supplement because uh it's um going to ruin every other supplement for you, okay?

That's like the negative hook version of the ad. Go create a five reasons why version of it, five, you know, something like that, right? So, now you've got the same sort of basic angle that you're doing but with multiple sort of framing mechanisms for the information. And again, you can do those all at different lengths, okay? Same deal. You can do five reasons, three reasons, the number one reason. There's the the three versions of the ad right there.

That's going to take it and then each one of the different hook. You do that, now you've got 30, 40 ver- variations of an ad where you have one concept except crucially unlike the earlier version of this that I had I've put out there, right? Um, now Meta is going to see those all as different ads and it's going to take more swings at it, okay? So, that's the basic concept that you're trying to get to. Maintain the idea of that I've laid out in one idea 300 ads, which is how do you take your one idea and get as much juice of that one out of that one idea as possible and to build a real process for that.

But now, what we're trying to do is take those 300 ads out of the one idea and make the variations better. And then, as I was getting at a second ago, okay? Launch them all with manual bids, of course, again, like always, that nothing changes there. Again, as I was getting at a second ago, the way you then test uh test which is what is winning and scale winners is not by isolating individual parts of the ad in sort of the like measure the hook rate, measure the thumb stop, measure the CTR kind of way.

Again, I think some people can do that pretty well but most of us are actually not good at that. Those metrics can be misleading. Instead, what I would do is say, um "Look what angle is working." And whatever angle, whatever messaging is working, now make your next set of ads based off of um that angle where you just take the same idea and find a bunch of new ways to say it. And if you notice that um funny hooks are always working because you're talking about poop in this case, right?

Like, great, stick with funny hooks, right? If you notice some little subset of it, test that assumption as well by trying it again a whole bunch of different ways. Um, get influencers, get creators, get whatever, you know, as again, as as the only limitation here is going to be your creativity. And you can get help from AI to expand your creativity, right? But that's the basic idea. So, move towards that same idea, one idea 300 ads, um start with one concept, build it up.

That is the supply chain way of thinking about ads in general. You're going to have to be able to milk your concepts for all they are worth, right? Um, if you're going to be able to think think about your production um output, your creative production like it's a supply chain. You're going to have to think about that that way. Otherwise, I think you're never going to be able to get the supply chain method really down.

Um, but uh but beyond that, think about how to create better variations within that framework. If you can do that really well, you're going to be really well positioned to take advantage of all the things that Meta is talking about because of course, on the back end of all those on top of that, there's going to be all the little AI enhancements and um and you know, sort of other automated enhancements that Meta is putting down in the ad level allowing users to get access or allowing advertisers to get access to to expand the reach that they have.

If you can do that really well, you're going to be extremely well set up to win. If you like this episode, I promise you're going to like a lot of the rest of stuff that I do cuz it's the way I'm thinking and talking all the time. Subscribe wherever you are doing that right now so you don't miss out on not only future solo episodes like this one but all kinds of great interviews I have coming up including my forthcoming Profit Monsters series.

That's going to be so good. Got a bunch of guests lining up that I'm lining up right now who have um built highly profitable businesses, eight figures, mid, high eight figures and beyond um talking about exactly how they're doing it. Really trying to get as tactical as possible. So, I'm validating that these people are building seriously profitable businesses and then the whole point of the episode is going to be how to take it so that other people can learn from what they have done to generate profit in their own businesses in practical terms so that you can learn from it as well.

Again, subscribe. You're not going to want to miss that series. It's going to be really good. Um, don't forget to follow up with my friends at BTS find the BTS studio, btsstudio.co. Um, not the Korean pop band. They're great, too, but you know, different people. Um, they're not my sponsor. That would be amazing. Uh and Admission, go to your admission.co. Um, and there's a link in the show notes for that offer of free coaching calls by signing up through my link.

So, go to Admission and check that out. Of course, you can email me at podcast@ajfgrowth.com and sign up for my newsletter at ajfgrowth.com where I send out a weekly newsletter uh on something that's practical on top of my mind in not too long. Uh so, don't forget to uh go check that as well. And yeah, that's it. That's all the places. ajf.gro- ajfgrowth.com, that's the place for everything. I'll talk to you soon.