My New #1 Creative Metric For Making Meta Ads That Scale transcript

I am going to tell you today about a creative metric that you are not tracking. In fact, you've never even heard of it. But it is now honestly my very favorite metric for ad creative in existence. It's FPAR. FP A. I'm going to tell you all about it right now and why I think it is one of the keys to your creative performance. [music] I think this will really help. All right. All right, in a second I'm going to show you a set of data that absolutely blew my mind when I saw it.

I was in a meeting recently with um AC Gardner, the CEO at Behind the Scenes Studio. Behind the scenes is the creative production team that I work with closely at AJF Growth. So Behind the Scenes, BTS, they they are my team like so my team, but they also have a service that goes way beyond just AJF Growth to do design and editing for a lot of people. And this is their internal metric that they have been tracking for how they um measure the performance of their designers and editors and and it fits into something really important that I've been thinking so much about for how you generate good quality creative at scale.

So I'm going to show you I'm going to show you the metric right or the uh the report right now because it I mean I lost my mind when uh when I when I saw this. Okay. Absolutely lost my mind. So here it is. Okay. Okay, if you're if you're listening and not watching, um you know, you you may want to pull this up somewhere where you can see it, but I'm going to try and talk through it. Okay, so it's called the video team performance dashboard.

And this dashboard has a whole bunch of metrics on it, uh including FPAR, which I which I teased in the intro. Okay. Um but what this is is a dashboard of creative metrics except all of the creative metrics. Every one of them is not actually about the performance of the met of the ad in the ad account. It is all about the performance of the design and editing team in the process of creating ads that they send off to um clients.

Right? So internally at AF Growth, this is my team versus um versus uh they would have the same thing for any report for any client that they're working with. And and it's worth noting here btsstudio.co. Uh they're a sponsor of this podcast. So this is not a sponsored episode. This is just literally came out of our out of our work. Um btsstudio.co if you want this kind of work done for you. So go go check them out. uh link is in the show notes.

Uh okay, so anyway, um this this thing has so much to it that I absolutely loved. Okay, the first thing you'll see is these giant percentages, team hit rate, throughput, and utilization. Okay, hit rate here is is actually a little bit confusing because hit rate normally people mean that by like ads that got spent in the ad account, but in this case the metric and probably the metric should change the name actually because because of the confusion, but the metric actually is like a number of ads that got approved.

Okay. Um so so in this case it's 78%. Now of course that goes up over time with revisions etc but but there you go. Throughput is like number of ads um uh sorry the hit rate is number of ads that got approved per revision request right so if you send through an ad and it's one round of revisions. Okay so the ad would go through um uh you know a round of revisions and then and then get sent out to the clients that would be a 50% hit rate.

Um so there you go. Okay. So um because it's one ad and it went through uh two edits, one first initial edit and then a second edit. Okay. But then throughput is like 100%. Did we did we actually make the ads that were given to us? Concepts received versus concept completed. And then utilization which is the uh in this case 102% that utilization is a reference to how much of the editor's time actually got used total on average in terms of the allotted time versus the actual time. and and like so that's like the the just the baseline, right?

So it's all metrics about like how much of the editor's time was used, what was their total throughput and what was the team hit rate and then and then there are actual raw numbers in here too, like how many ads got made, etc. On top of that, you go a layer down and it's all complexity weighted and this is so awesome, okay? Because you know, people come to me all the time and say like, well, how many ads do I need to make um for my account to work? or people will say in in our sales process like how many ads will you deliver to us?

And I never know how to answer the question. In fact, I often resist answering the question because uh making a 4-minute long form explainer video is very different than making a socially native still image where you sort of slap an Instagram caption on on a on a phone quality image, right? Both of them have a place in your marketing mix, but they take very different time, very different amounts of time to produce. And so if I say I'm going to make you two ads, but one one of those is extremely simple and one of those is extremely complex.

Um then I you didn't really learn anything from the number two. Okay. Uh so so what the team is doing is uh is looking at the um the complexity weighted hit rate. So you can see actually what percentage of ads what was our hit rate on various levels of complexity um and and how many ads or are uh you know there's going to be raw numbers of of number of ads by complexity etc. This is a critical thing if you want to understand how to utilize your team's time and over time of course what you you can do all kinds of other things with that.

I'm going to resist saying more about that because I'm going to talk more about it in a second. And then we get to FPAR which is like I said my favorite thing. So um FPAR on the bottom of this is first pass approval rate. It is the number the percentage of ads that were approved with zero edit requests from uh from the from the uh client or from from you know the AF growth internal growth strategist or creative strategist.

Okay. And what you see here is that at April uh only 17% of ads were were approved on for the first pass. By September that number is up to 71%. And it's pretty slow and steady up and to the right. like consistently it goes from 17% to 30% to 41 to 37 to 61 to 71. So increasing number of ads are approved on the first pass. That is awesome. The reason I love this metric so much is because re-edits every time you have to re-edit an ad, even if the edits are small, it requires it requires the round of revisions.

It requires a download and an upload and somebody has to edit and somebody has to use the time to re-edit an ad instead of to go and make a new ad. And so it slows down your ad creation process. And and this is the thing. Forget any one of these metrics, okay? And by the way, for a long time, I've sort of fetishized first pass approval rate, but I've never been able to measure it. Um, and and I love it because I I hate the idea of revision slowing us down.

It almost always suggests to me some kind of a break in the briefing process. If if the F-P is too low, it means somebody's doing a bad job communicating. And so, you have to solve the process, communication level. Um, at some point, designers and editors should work with teams for a long time, know what they want. There's a natural way in which you'll get more ads approved on first pass, the F-Par will go up. If um uh if if an editor is working with a team for longer because you get used to what the client likes and what the what the brand standards are and all those kinds of things.

So, there's sort of a natural part of that that I think is is there's really no way to um short circuit that, but uh or to work around that, but but it's still important. If you are running ads, you know about the annoyance, whether you're a brand or an agency, the annoyance of dealing with customer comments on your ads. you know, the customers are commenting on Facebook and Instagram on your ads. They're saying good, bad, and everything in between.

They're asking questions uh to you and to your team. And yet, it's so hard to stay up on top, stay on top of them because basically no system I've ever seen really helps you moderate those things effectively. And so, you should check out Rich Panel. Rich Panel is full customer service help desk software. So, it goes way beyond what I'm telling you about right now. But one of the things I love, one of the features I love about Rich Panel is they have an AI agent who will go on your behalf and interact with customers on your Facebook and Instagram comments.

And like large [music] brands are using this tool. It is so good and so reliable and and it answers so effectively that uh that like like sizable brands that I know of, nine figure brands are using this tool to handle their customer comment moderation, answer questions, etc. You should check it out as well. It's just one of many things that make AI first uh customer service software like a really obvious thing to do.

That's what Rich Panel is. Uh it's AI first built from the ground up. AI first customer service software. I mean on top of that uh Rich Panel promises 30% savings on your bill if you switch from Gorgeous or Zenesk. They see an average of a 30% ticket reduction. They can get you set up and firing in 2 weeks. They will hold your hand through it to make sure that you are using everything that you can as well as possible.

So, it is really high quality software. It's really affordable. It handles really annoying things for you. It reduces your cost of um of hiring as well. Keeps your opex lean, not only at the level of software, but of the number of agents you have to have hired. Just a really great piece of software, which is why multiple of my clients use Rich Panel and why you should [music] too. Richpanel.com is the place to go to check it out.

Richpanel.com. Get a call going. Check out if it's right for you. Just just take the call, right? It's very simple. You don't have to commit to anything. Just take the call, see if it's right for you. really big brands, really small brands, and everybody in between are using it with success, you should too. So, that going up over time to me is like an incredible thing because it it's a massive um it's a massive potential output increase for our team if our teams just have to take less time re-editing ads.

And you know, you can go through a bunch of other metrics on this sheet um and and look at all kinds of things. But the thing that I the thing that I'm really trying to get at here is I this was like a really eye- openening moment in our business because of how much you can learn from this data. The complexity waiting tracking tracking the number of revisions per edit. All of this stuff first of all among my reflections is what an agency should be doing.

Okay? It is the reason why an agency like if you come and tell me uh hey I'm gonna just in-house my team and my team is going to just outperform you because we're going to work we're going to my my team is going to outperform your creative at your agency uh because they're going to work on my stuff 100% of the time all the time uh and so it'll be a cheaper solution and it'll work faster and all those kinds of things.

What I will say to you is like I bet you especially given more time now that we are tracking more and more of these metrics etc. I bet you that's not true. You will not go faster. You will not produce more. Um, and the reason why is that you don't have an infrastructure to track this kind of stuff. But the beauty of agency work theoretically should be that because this kind of work is being done. Okay. And by the way, I didn't even request this work to be done.

This is another thing that's amazing about Behind the Scenes Studio. It's like argument number 5,000 that like any notion that Filipino employees like are only low-level employees is just ridiculous. The gal who made this is like a is like a mid20s uh uh video editor with a finance background who took those skills together and not only is a killer video editor but like went out of her way to go track and compile all these metrics.

She's just a killer, just a star. Okay. Um and she went out and did that. She's amazing. Her name is Aubrey. Shout out Aubrey. She's incredible. Um and hilarious and a great time. Um but uh but anyway, Aubrey um put these metrics together and and the thing I I would say here is like you don't have an Aubrey. Like that's the problem. You don't have the person who is this good doing this working on your process the way that I do.

And what is the thing is right now whether or not I can outperform your some individual team in terms of volume of ads or quality of ads or whatever it is. What I can just guarantee you is that if you give us more time to keep building on this foundation, we're going to just crush internal teams, unless you have a whole bunch of budget for extremely good process people or whatever it is. And and so this is why I think like when teams tell me they're going to in-house their spend and they're going to produce more creative just with more effort and all this, I'm like, you know, you're not like I'm going to beat you and I'm going to beat you on volume and quality because I am I am building a system to track these things.

And that's good. That's what an agency is supposed to do. An agency is supposed to operationalize knowledge and I come to the table I think the main thing that I bring to the table in our agency is knowledge. Okay. And and we will have continued resources towards finding and discovering knowledge about what works on on our ads not only on meta but on app you know eventually Google ads things like that as well right but secondly um what we are going to bring to the table is oper operationalization.

And right now, in fact, in my organization with me and Patrick, Patrick is a COO. In a lot of ways, Patrick functions like a CTO for us. Uh he does a lot of operational stuff too. So, it's sort of CTO COO together. But a core part of it is he's building software tooling to help empower this kind of work along the way. So, the script writing and script production and stuff like that happens fast and easy according to the best knowledge that we possibly can.

And then AC from BTS who I mentioned a second ago is the CEO and her team are or COO CEO of of BTS and her team she's kind of functioning like the COO of the production and editing team. And when you put those together to where you're investing in process in tools and in ideas at this top level way in this narrow band of out outputs of creative you build something incredible. And um and I and this is why I like my I went crazy when I saw this in a meeting because um because what's happening over here is somebody's saying we are going to hammer this process and increase our output and make our turnarounds faster etc.

Okay. Secondly though there's there's of course a lot of other stuff that you could talk about here. One of them is this complexity waiting issue. One of the questions that I have that's sort of most live to me and I think a lot of people talk about is like is it even worth investing in long- form videos if we can make 10 more short form videos much faster, right? Well, that's very hard to answer wi with the current setups um for a whole number of reasons.

It doesn't really matter what ad creative analysis tool you use or whatever. But by tracking this kind of metric al um along along the way, the very clear and obvious next step at some point and by having good naming conventions and things like that is to start turning some of this this sort of foundational data tracking into data insights to where we could say like okay actually you know uh who knows right but a long form video that takes three or four minutes to edit like or that's three or four minutes long or whatever is it takes us 10 times longer than this short still image over here.

And yet it performs on average 15 times better or or whatever, you know, I don't know, you know, whatever the metric is that you need to do that. Um, and and so so ultimately we could uh over time start tracking this kind of stuff. And now you have the combination of things that you need to really hammer away big creative problems in significant ways to where to where first of all you've got the creative supply chain here.

This is that this is Taylor Holiday's phrase that I really love where you're saying, "Okay, uh uh you need to treat your creative production like a supply chain and go um understand where it's working, where it's breaking, and how to hammer it." Well, this is the beginning of that work, right? In a really significant way because now you can see the points where there are problems and where things are going good. So, complexity weighted hit rate, uh F-par versus revision rate, these are the kind of things that you look at.

These are the breaks in the supply chain. And so seeing these metrics in certain ways is really is really critical. Okay. Utilization rate of different designers and different editors etc. These are all the things that you you need to know. Um but then secondly and and of course by the way at some point you could tie performance to different editors and um and different growth strategists and creative strategists and and there's all kinds of problems with those metrics but you you could sort of figure them out.

Okay. So um so there's there's a lot of other stuff but the creative supply chain bases are here but then secondly you can actually go and build into sort of a datadriven approach to creative where at some point and this is a bunch of work in front of us still right because it's not an easy problem to solve at some point you could tie these creative production and even creative briefing metrics which is now all in notion for us is all exportable as well uh to actual performance metrics and so for me it just makes me bullish on the long term of the process that we're building and of course you can reinforce all those things at the technical with um AI tools and all that kind of stuff so that you could actually build a process where you're getting really good feedback about what creative is working and what is not and then let that help you actually guide all kinds of creative efforts across the organization.

So, so for me like this is like extremely exciting because it potentially builds this foundation for everything else that a creative team can actually be doing. uh because because it's just it goes so far beyond uh just sort of like I don't know we think this ad might work well um how else does it work should it work let me tell you but my friends at workspace 6 if you are building a brand you should get into a community of other brand builders like you because there is so much knowledge to be had by uh by just sharing knowledge freely with other people who are in the trenches who are seeing what they're seeing or in your similar revenue stage who have executives at your same level of teams at your same level who are trying to figure out should we offshore should we not should we use this piece of software should we not if so who should we work with should we work with this agency should we not all those kinds of things and that is the kind of camaraderie that is available to you with uh [music] Workspace 6 workspace 6 is a slack-based community that costs only $1 for your first month and there's no monthly commitment um and allows you and top executives from your team to interact [music] with other brands at similar revenue levels slightly above you etc so that you can get a bunch of information and wonderfully People like me are not allowed in.

Uh and by people like me, I mean agency owners who are trying to sell you stuff. Um because uh what they know at Workspace 6 is that you need private closed places to have not only sort of regular mastermind style conversations and to have regular information shares which are just so valuable on their own. But to do those in places where people can really be honest and transparent about the kind of level [music] of work that they are getting from their teams who are not also in those works in those slacks from their vendors from their um software partners all those kinds of things.

So, uh, it's just a really valuable thing. Communities like this, I think there's just no way for them to really go that wrong. As long as they are well moderated and all those kinds of things. And from everything I've ever heard and seen from Workspace 6, that's the case. People are making great connections. You should do it. It is easily easily worth the cost of joining Workspace 6. Uh, uh, especially because you can cancel anytime.

So, go to workspace 6.io. I'm a huge fan of these guys. Have been for a long time. Sam Mendlesson's been on the podcast. Just been a huge support. I've mentioned before I love their newsletter. um all that stuff. So, workspace 6.io, check it out today. Join the community today. Get connected to other brand operators. Solve your problems by knowing that somebody else has solved them first so you don't have to solve them from scratch.

Uh yeah, workspace 6.io. Go check it out. Another thing that we do is we break all of our creative um into two categories. Well, three categories, but the the main two are explore and expand. Explore is find new messages. Expand is find additional messages off of new messages. We could again start to track. We could sort of actually do this now. Start to track like which ones of these take longer in the creative production process first of all and secondly which one of these um not only takes longer but which one of them is more likely to produce more incremental spend and so where should we be putting our efforts over time and you get all this stuff together and you have the basics now of a process that's really really repeatable.

Um, and I, you know, for me it just reinforces so much of the thing that that I have thought for a long time in the the sort of agency side of things, which is that an agency can only really work if we have some actual insights, some actual knowledge that uh, our access to data gives us, okay, by working across a lot of things and actual knowledge that we refine by narrowing the focus. If you're on a brand, you have a lot of things to worry about. you have product development and supply chain and operations and um and customer service to figure out and you've got um you know so organic social and influencer all of these different things, right?

But for us as an agency, we should have a narrower set of things to focus on which should allow us to develop better muscles in those specific areas. It's not unlike physical training where it's like if you go train to be a powerlifter, you probably are going to be able to out bench press or uh you know or out deadlift uh or out back squat u you know most other athletes. But if you go train all-purpose, more generalized uh fitness, you probably are going to get outbed over here, but you might be able to outrun the powerlifter.

You might be able to do a bunch of other things as well. And that's sort of the relationship that you want. And if you're putting together a team of people to do uh a bunch of jobs, maybe you want a powerlifter, and maybe you want a sprinter, and then maybe you want some allpurpose people in the middle. And the sprinters and the powerlters here are like are like the agency parts of your team where it's like you want people who are very good at these really narrow types of things.

Uh you know, yeah, maybe that's the right analogy, right? The brand is a decathlete or something. Okay. and uh agencies are more like these specialized folks who can do this thing. Well, then the goal is figure out how to do the specialized thing as well as you possibly can. And so much of that, and this is the thing that everybody misses, so much of that is actually at the level of operations and process. It's not just at the level of having good ideas.

And this is the thing you want to get away from when thinking about yourself or agencies or anyone else. If you are stuck just sort of waiting for some person's good idea and you have no process with which to expand on that or to create the next good idea or to create an editing process to have turnaround be quick or anything like that, then you're always going to be kind of playing this game with a fly swatter where you're just one little thing at a time, right?

Or whack-a-ole or whatever with whatever problem. But instead, you want to think about much more like this. A creative process is replicable where you're looking at where the problems are in the supply chain. You're trying to handle them. You're trying to build for them. you're trying to reinforce tools and people and processes to get them all. If you can do all of those things and you can build on this, then I think you can really be somewhere.

So, um, anyway, I just was blown away by this. I think it represents so much of what is critical in the creative process right now. It's really, really underrated. Um, as tools become easier to use, as offshoring becomes more and more of a thing for for lots of different people, getting this stuff right is extremely difficult, but it's going to separate great creative work from average creative work, if not bad creative work.

Man, this is just the beginning uh at AF Growth and and at Behind Scen Studio of sort of what is happening here. I'm so excited about this because of the potential here to really build an incredible creative process. Do go check out behind the scenes studio at btsstudio.co if you want to see this work applied to your brand. Anybody who's ever run a creative process knows that it's a pain. So, um, so seeing this work has been incredible to me.

Uh, btsstudio.co is the place to do that. Also, Workspace 6, workspace 6.io and Rich Panel. Go to richpanel.com. Uh, both great partners as well to check both of those out. As I mentioned before, you should subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to this podcast uh, so that you don't miss any future episodes. and uh and email me podcastfgrowth.com if you have questions, thoughts, if you're going to start tracking FPAR, I'd love to hear about it.

Uh and and you do that and go to afgrowth.com and see everything I'm doing, including looking into working with less in the new year. Thanks so much for watching, for listening. I'll see you next time. Talk to you soon.