7 Meta Ads Tactics I've Changed My Mind About transcript

The world of meta ads is sometimes changing, always changing. Tactics change over time as the platform changes. And I've got updated opinions on some of the things that are most important to me as a media buyer based off of what I'm hearing and learning from a combination of reps, the performance marketing summit, and just what's happening in my own accounts. I'm going to give you seven things that I've sort of changed my mind about or that are the most updated parts of my media buying strategy for meta ads.

This is going to be an incredibly tactical, actionable episode. I'm going to tell you exactly how many ads you should be putting in an ads set right now, things like that. So, let's talk about it right now. All right. What I want to hit is like the the things that are sort of changes of mind, sort of updates to the platform, some combination of those things, but it's an it's a state of the union on what I think is the key way to handle metia buying right now.

And uh and so the the first thing I want to actually do is tell you what's not changing for me. Okay? What's not changing for me is uh the basic assumption that machines are better at making decisions about the future than I am. That is to say, machine learning is a better probabilistic forecaster of the future than I am. And my baseline strategy as a media buyer is to get my mind out of the way for decisionmaking about how best to distribute my ads. instead let Meta's machine learning make those kinds of decisions for me and instead put my focus on how products and creative generate value for my business and giving Meta the tools it needs to go in return distribute uh my ads in a way that generates that value back for my business.

So that's that's the basic approach here. Okay. So I am trying as always to run everything that I possibly can through the lens of how do I get Meta to make more of the decisions about optimization for me and get myself out of the way. Right? That's the baseline principle because on average meta is going to win at that. It only increases the reality of that more all the time as there are more placements as you add in you know the increasing adoption of reels as all of these different tools come out AI gen creative all of these different things are all coming out.

So I'm going to give you seven things though within that framework that I think help leverage meta ads within that you know while standing on that basic principle even better than before. This is going to be really really tactical like I said. Okay. Number one, 15 to 20 ads per ad set. Okay, 15 to 20 ads per ad set. Um, for a long time, I have run uh nonASC campaigns. Okay, and I've run them with four to six ads per ad set.

And that's based off of uh old meta documentation. It's actually something I was never that certain of and never, you know, it's not something you've probably seen me make a lot of content about. People ask me about it all the time, how many ads in an ad set? I've never really known exactly what to say about this, but there's some old meta documentation saying four to six and then it became five to seven and uh and you know in ASC it was many many more.

Well, I I tested ASC against my setup. My BAU setup was basically the same as ASC running CBO campaigns uh where uh you're letting uh you're doing you know campaign budget optimization. So you give the campaign the budget let the adsets um get distributed as meta sees fit. And that ended up you know with broad targeting that ended up mimicking ASC. I tested them headto head, found that um my my setup performed about the same as ASC.

Um and so there was no reason really to switch over to ASC, which I also find clunky and annoying to build with. That said, there's a major change that is happening in the platform, which is that ASC and uh and the older style BAU, we'll call it campaigns have um have are are are melding. Okay, they there's no longer a distinction between them. In fact, in most accounts, I think in all of my accounts now, that's already the case.

There is no such thing as an ASC campaign anymore. There's no such thing as a BAU campaign. There's just a campaign. And in this new setup uh where ASC has sort of taken over everything, but with some distinctions that look a bit little bit more like the BAU setup. Uh there there is now a question about sort of like how do you live within this framework and I'm perfectly fine with that. I was never opposed to ASC. In fact, I like ASC.

Um so I'm not bothered by this setup by this change at all. Um, and but in the midst of that, one of the things that has become clear from a number of conversations I've had in a lot of different places is that it looks like the optimal number of ads per adset at this point is somewhere between 15 and 20. And so um I've seen a few different ways in which Meta has signaled this um from various conversations with people.

We have begun running everything this way and I've seen a meaningful increase in um in the or really I should say decrease in volatility increase in stability in terms of daily spend. Um and it seems to me that uh that in that new world okay um where you are running 15 to 20 ads per ad set you can still run CBO with multiple ad sets 15 to 20 ads per ads set that works just fine um that you end up getting a good amount of learning occurring to each ad set.

And I'm going to talk more about learning in a second, okay? Um, but because it's another big big issue for me, but uh but you you're able to see this go really well. I love this. 15 to 20 ads per adsets is easier to build with. It's much easier to manage. Less adsets um all the way around. I so I'm I'm grateful for it. Like I think it's it's a great change. I'm I'm quite happy with the melding of ASC and BAU in an easier to build with environment.

I think it just makes it a lot easier as an advertiser to again sort of have less things to manage and again get yourself out of the way and acrew more um purchases more conversions to each adset which makes it easier to analyze as well. So yeah, so I like this 15 to 20 ads per ad set. Still I run campaigns separated by product so it's not one monster campaign necessarily though I'm actually fine with that if you can.

Um but typically separated out campaigns by product uh which makes it easier to manage and easier to see what's going on if you need to make any specific changes at the product level as inventory changes, things like that. That's all normal for me. That's been the same for a while. 15 to 20 ads per ad set is um is a big part of that. Again, all reflecting the combining of ASC and BAU um into this new environment. Okay, so there's that.

Number two, very much related to this is I have begun to care a lot about getting adsets out of the learning phase. This is something I used to not care about actually at all. I would actively say I don't care about the learning phase. And even meta's documentation about this was not so much about um the learning phase having volatile performance. Uh you know meta's machine learning is really quick at um establishing baselines of conversion optimization and there's just the basic problem of human behavior being fundamentally unpredictable in such a way that um that like you know small amounts of spends are just going to show a wide range of potential results because you're constantly dealing with small samples.

So um so in the learning phase what a lot of people thought of as volatility and performance I just think of as like volatility of small samples and small behaviors um and uh and and and in any case uh I I didn't really think it mattered that much especially relative to the trade-off of launching everything with a manual bid which I'm still doing um you know bid caps and troas still doing that across the board. Um I've got you know boatloads of content about exactly this stuff.

You're just have to go through my past content and see how I'm approaching these kinds of things if you want to see those kinds of details. Uh uh but uh but the learning phase was something I just didn't really worry that much about. That's really changed for me. Again, that's uh from a few different places, including conversations with reps, including Meta's own documentation about this, Meta's push on this. I tend to think that if Meta is pushing on something, it's in your best interest to listen.

And this is one of those things that they have for a long time pushed on. Um and in multiple reps of mine have talked about it different times, you've got too many ads in the learning phase. And the way this has been explained to me and what I've seen reflected in my ad accounts is essentially the learning phase problem is actually just a problem of sort of machine learning giving up on adsets more than it is a problem of actual volatility of performance that if you get adsets out of learning, you're more likely to make it so that you um so that meta like sort of you know quote unquote feels more confident about the delivery of your ads.

And that's what you want. Um and and in order to again get more stability in the delivery of your ads and that um combined with the 15 to 20 ads per adset thing is really nice because now if I can get 15 to 20 ads per ad set I can get more purchases acred to less adsets. So this this works really really well um to combine that these two principles together because if I have let's just take uh 20 ads let's call it five ads per ad set.

I would have probably done four to you know up to six before but let's call it something like that. Right? So now I can put all 20 ads in one adset instead of spreading them across four adsets. And that means if the goal is 50 purchases per week to stay out of learning something like that, then this is much easier to do with one adset than with four. And so that you combine those principles and it gets a lot easier I think whether you're testing, scaling, whatever um to get all those together.

So I now care a lot about this. This also means that as I'm switching over old adsets that had, you know, five or six ads per ad set, if they're out of learning, I'm not touching them. If they're if they're just out of learning, I'm not going and updating them with a whole bunch more ads per adset. If they're out of learning, I'm just kind of leaving them there and just building on top of those now with adsets with more ads in them over more time.

And if they do kick back into learning at some point, then I might combine them. But otherwise, um I'm quite happy to get adsets out of learning, keep them out of learning and and let them run. Okay, so that's another element. I'm actually now at a point where I'm building more and more to do this, even sometimes turning off some ads, which has been anathema to me in the past, never because of performance. Okay. Um, I'm not turning off ads in order to uh like because an ad is spending and it's performing poorly.

I'm turning off an ad um if it's just not spending very much at all. If it has been in an account for weeks and it's gotten 10, $15, $20 in spend total and it's not showing any signs of picking up, I'll turn it off to get more ads into less ad sets just so that I get less of the ad account in learning. Of course, occasionally it might be a false negative. that if if it's an ad that I really really want to um to to like force Meta to try to respend on, there's a couple little uh things you can talk about.

Um I'm going to I think I'm going to talk about let go look at my notes here. Um yeah. Yeah, I'll talk more about one little trick for that later. That's actually really good. It's the last thing I'm going to talk about here. So um so make sure you hang on for that um part of it. And by the way, if you like this episode, you should subscribe right now wherever you're watching or listening because this is the highly tactical meta content that I'm trying to produce as often as I possibly can.

So, um, okay. So, there's that. So, uh, in any case, I care a lot about the learning phase at this point. Really trying to make it so that if I'm whether it's test ads or scale ads or whatever, okay, however you frame it, I'm going to, uh, really try to keep ads out of, uh, adsets out of learning, helps with stability, helps with, um, consistency of delivery. Okay. Number three, and you might have just heard me allude to something that you've never heard me say before.

In fact, you've seen me suggest is a very bad idea, and that is, I am starting to use creative testing campaigns. And this is like the biggest shift. It's going to sound like the biggest shift from my past strategy um that I have introduced in a long time. Um it's actually not a very big shift. Okay, here is my problem with creative testing campaigns. My problem with creative testing campaigns is that what most people and I say like 98% of people mean by that phrase is a campaign uh that you run on an automated budget and often uh at adset level budgets where you are launching new ads.

You're launching those ads without a manual bid, no cost cap, no bid cap, no TRS target, forcing spend to the new ads, okay? Analyzing the performance of that spend based on purchase behavior and uh and then uh and sort of accepting the fact that many of your ads are going to perform undertarget. Okay? And that's the way that a lot of people do this. And then they're scale they're taking ads from those test campaigns and moving them into scale campaigns from there.

Um, now the thing that I hate about that and that I'm absolutely not changing on at this point is the idea of forcing spend to to to test ads that and then and then secondarily analyzing the performance of those based on purchase behavior. There are countless problems with that among other things. The hundreds of thousands of dollars that brands are wasting all the time by doing this. If you're still using Gorgeous or Zenesk for your customer service help desk software for your e-commerce brand, what are you doing?

It's time to switch to Rich Panel. Rich Panel first off promises a 30% savings. Guarantees it if you switch over from one of those two pieces of software. If you go to Rich Panel, which means the only reason you should not switch to Rich Panel is if it is somehow worse or something like that. And it is not. Rich Panel is very well loved by everybody I have talked to who has switched. I've got another client who's in the process of very likely switching over as well.

And so um and so over and over people are saying the same thing which is that switching over has saved money and also been a better experience. In fact, Rich Panel says that on average uh brands see a 30% reduction in customer service tickets because of how good their self-service portal is driven by AI to help customers get the answers to the questions that they need without going through some big giant clunky help center uh with all these tabs and folders and forms and whatever it is.

Uh on top of that, Rich Panel is built AI first. It's a more recent entry into the customer service uh software space, which is a good thing because it came it was built from the ground up with an AI first mentality. And if you're listening to or watching this episode about meta ads tactics, you probably know the pain of moderating your comments on your ads uh like manually in some way, even with customer service help desk help.

I've just never seen anybody do this. Well, well, what Rich Panel offers is actually an AI assistant that can go and do the interactions for you and does an incredible job. You can do it fully automated. You can do it just with help either way. And of course, there's all kinds of built-in ways for uh Rich Panel to uh help you with your regular uh tickets and and making your reply your response time faster. That's why customers on average rate brands that use Rich Panel very high in terms of the um satisfaction with customer service levels.

There's just no indication that is anything other than the idea that Rich Panel is great customer service software built AI first built easy to use all with a um all while being cheaper more affordable than the other options in the space. It's just really really good. You should at least get on a call with them. And on top of all of that, Rich Panel promises to help you get transitioned to rich panel in 2 weeks time from your old software.

They know you don't have time to waste. They know you can't deal with a long slow install process. So, go check it out today. At least get on a call. Richpanel.comJF richpanel.com uhf. You can look in the show notes for that as well to get a link to that page. Uh, go check it out today. I'm launching a brand soon. I'm starting with Rich Panel. You should think about it, too. Brands are spending so much money, uh, wasting money on test ads that they could just launch with a manual bid.

And if they launch them with a manual bid, uh they they would they would have uh every chance of success. Meta can see what's happening for those ads. It will amplify the ads if there's signs of success. It will suppress them if there's not. And it will not waste money on ads that are performing under target. And for whatever reason, brands have it in mind that just by putting the word creative testing on a campaign, it's an excuse to blow a whole bunch of money on underperforming ads.

Um, on top of that, the idea of analyzing the performance of those ads based off of purchase behavior on extremely small sample sizes is terrible. People do not understand small sample size bias. They small sample size volatility, uh, small sample size noise, I should say. And therefore, they constantly turn off ads that could be winners and they and they try to like scale ads that um, very well could be losers. Uh, because they're looking and seeing an ad that spent for 3 days, got five purchases, and they're like, "Oh, it's a winner." And they scale it.

Okay. I just like that's happening all the time. It's a giant waste of time. It's hugely inefficient. There's countless problems with it. It's putting human decision-making in it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. It's wasting a bunch of money. One of the biggest cost centers in all of DDC still. So, none of my opinion about that has changed. Okay. Um, so I am still launching anytime I launch a creative testing campaign.

I am launching it with the same manual bid that I have a scaling campaign with. Okay. So, let's say I have product A, I'll have a product A scale campaign. In fact, usually I'll have two. I'll have a Tor version and a bidcap version. Okay. Same ads in both of those two campaigns. And then I'll have a test campaign often launched with a bid cap sometimes to s uh and and the test campaign uh has has new ads in it and the manual bid in each of those campaigns is the same.

Okay, so I'm aiming at the same target in all of them. So this has actually been how Kinship has bought media for a very long time. Uh they they do something similar where they'll launch new ads in new campaigns with the same manual bid. And I've talked to Taylor Agassay about this a bunch in the past and like I've always just said like I just don't that is not that doesn't bother me either way. You're still telling Meta to make the decision about suppressing or amplifying the ad based off of its performance.

Now like Kinship doesn't then move test ads into scale campaigns because every ad is a test and I agree with that principle. You just kind of let the campaign scale it. But because I'm trying to stay out of learning at the same time, if I see an ad in a test campaign with my manual bid that is spending money, um, then I may want to go move that into an ad set that is like a quote unquote scale adset or a scale campaign.

And that way it sits in an in a campaign that can get out of learning and stay that way and sort of again potentially reduce volatility over time in terms of uh in terms of daily spend particularly. Okay. Um, so, um, so I'm not picking winners, by the way, at all uh, from test campaigns. The way that I am determining when to move an ad from a test campaign to a scale campaign. It's just when the ad gets 50 purchases.

There is also some meta documentation that somebody pointed out to me on X might have been Jordan Manard. Thanks, Jordan, if you did that. Um, who's not a manual bids guy, which uh, is is, you know, fine, smart dude. But um but uh Jordan um I think Jordan had pointed out that that Meta had specifically recommended that you that you launch new ads in a new environment to avoid false negatives basically. I know my friend Miranda Akens has done this as well and that had helped her account also.

They've seen some success um at 365 Holdings where she works and as a smart really smart media buyer there. um you know some some evidence that maybe launching an ad in a fresh campaign and this is the logic of doing it gets Meta to not um suppress the ad too early and get a false negative. Now I've been me buying like this for a little while again same same manual bid in both and I think Miranda's doing same manual bid in both.

I'm not sure. But um but uh but the the point of it is just that maybe there is some evidence, maybe there is uh maybe there is some reality that u launching an ad against your past winners um even with the same manual bid uh suppresses some ads too early. Now I've worked with lots of brands that have scaled their spend fast doing this, right? So I think this is probably somewhat on the margins, but it's something that I've begun playing with more and more in my accounts.

And I'll also tell you I'm not 100% confident that it's actually doing anything. Uh it's not clear to me that launching ads this way is really helping at all. Uh it in fact I think it's possible that it's just creating more work. So I I'm not totally confident in this, but I'm saying it partly just to be honest with you about uh a about a thing that I've been vocal about that is maybe shifting around for me and also to give you some constraints within which to make this decision, which is like there's some met documentation pointing this way.

I'm willing to do it. What I'm not willing to bend on is the manual bid part of it because I would rather actually have some false negatives than um you know false negatives meaning ads that get suppressed too early when they could have possibly spent. I'd rather have that than the problem of blowing a whole bunch of money on on other ads because I don't think it's a very big problem. If false negatives happen, I don't think they happen very often.

And again, I'm going to give you in a second a way to try to avoid that problem if you're if there's an ad you're super excited about and you want to make sure it gets a fair shot. Okay. So, um, still running manual bids, not picking winners based off of purchase behavior, entirely picking winners based on spend, letting an ad get to 50 purchases before I move it. Sometimes I don't even move it, by the way. I just let it sit in that test campaign if it's out of learning because I don't like messing with learning.

Um, so yeah, and if I need to, I'll cycle out low spenders. If they're just not um if they're just not spending at all, I'll cycle those out. And so, I use a test campaign purely as a way to have a fresh environment to launch a new ad in case that helps Meta sort of get a fresh read on it. That's really the whole point of it. Um, again, I'm I'm like not totally confident it's helping. Um, but there's some evidence that it seems to have been decent for me.

Definitely not the kind of thing that has overhauled my media buying since I started doing this. When we we started doing this months ago, it has I've not seen all my accounts suddenly blow up a new creative just launching and performing much better all the time, etc. Nothing like that at all. Uh, but possibly helping. Okay, so there you go. If you want to try it, that's the way I would do it. If you are serious about meta ads and you're serious about building great funnels, offer testing, testing landing pages, adding upsells in cart, adding subscription options, doing all the things that make performance marketers do their job effectively with landing pages, you need to consider going to Vermont.

Go to formatcommerce.com/af to go check it out. But Vermont is the most robust landing page software I have ever seen and it's upgrading all the time. They just raised another giant round of funding to keep putting money into making this incredible piece of software that allows you to iterate on landing pages and on funnels faster and easier than ever before. The main core thing that Vermont is driving at all the time is trying to make it so that performance marketers can make very fast and easy changes to their postclick funnel experience for customers without getting in the way of the actual website, without going and switching things around. they're going to screw up your PDP and get somebody your director of e-commerce or your CEO or whatever it is mad because you keep wanting to run all these tests.

No, you do everything in this self-contained funnel environment. And you can match message on your landing page to messaging your ad faster and easier than with any tool I've ever seen. You can also test all of it in for software really quickly and easily. And one of my very favorite features uh is the ability to actually take one Vermont link, they call it a forever link, put it in your ad, run your test on the back of that link, and then automatically make the winning version of your test take over the link.

So you don't have to go and every time you have a new test that wins, go change all your ad links and, you know, put everything back into learning and whatever it is. So um for just incredibly robust landing page software. If you're serious about landing pages, if you're serious about offer testing, you should be considering trying for at least get on a call with them. Check it out for yourself. It's really awesome software.

Again, we use it for multiple clients. One of my clients added it and saw like a 50% spend increase really, really fast. You should check it out, too. Forcommerce.com/ AF. Formatcommerce.com/ AF is the place to do it. Link is in the show notes. Go check it out. Number four, um I am making much smaller bid and budget adjustments than I used to. So all of this in some ways goes back to this issue of the learning phase and really trying not to mess with ads that are actually spending.

That's the whole point of the creative testing campaign thing. Uh like uh or it's one of the big points of it is to is to launch an environment that's not going to mess with the learning of addition of uh already existing ads. Okay. But also um sub 20% budget and bid adjustments um steadily over time. I used to be pretty willing to go make gigantic budget and bid adjustments. Um, but now because that will often kick adsets back into learning, I'm much slower to that.

And in general, again, Meta has pointed this out in some places. They've had some documentation saying maybe it's a good idea to make smaller adjustments over time with both your bid and your budget again as a way of sort of decreasing the volatility of your delivery and helping Meta's machine learning perform at its best. For for most of my accounts now, I'm I'm doing this pretty consistently. If I'm gonna if I want to be more aggressive on an ad, um like I'll I'll launch it at a lower bid and then just tick that bid up 10% per day until it gets to the point that I want it to get to or something like that if if I'm trying to trying to launch and uh new ads more aggressively for whatever reason.

And there's times when you need to do that. Okay. Um so I'm not just going and like getting a bunch of learning on an ad set and then ripping the budget way up and ripping the bid way up. Uh at some point I have no problem with the idea. In fact, still I'm trying to get to a point all the time with my manual bids where my ads are not hitting budget. But if I have an ad that's hit or if my ads are hitting their budget, okay, all the way through, then I'm ticking up by no more than 20% in a day as opposed to going and like doubling the budget or something like that, which I might have used to do.

Again, all with the goal of staying in learning. So, making smaller adjustments um until I get the budget and bids to where it seems like they're going to sit steadily. um trying to stay uh out of learning, trying to keep those adsets active all the time while at the same time uh moving the account forward. Okay, number five, this is a a bigger one and that is that um that I am making almost no true iterative ad creative uh changes at all.

And what I mean by that is uh you know I I put out an episode a long time ago. This is this is something I think I was just wrong about. Okay, I'm happy to say that when this is the case. Um, I put out an episode called how I turn one ad into 300 or one idea into 300 ads. Okay? And the the logic was when you launch ads, test multiple hooks for the same ad. That way, you give yourself the best chance for um for your ad to hit.

If you're launching with multiple hooks, you've got more opportunities for your ad to hit. And uh and that way you don't sort of just like ruin your chances of having an ad hit because you wrote a crappy hook for what is otherwise a good concept. Okay. Um the problem is meta um very clearly at this point what what is the case and this is again meta is again very publicly said create real variation in your ad accounts.

This has been reinforced with me with reps at every level. Um and it's been something that I've definitely noticed has made a difference in ad accounts. Okay. Um what they have said basically about this is you need a wider amount of variation. I've seen other people point out the same thing. Cody Ploffer I know has been hot on this point as well. Um, and the idea is that uh if ads are too similar to one another, Meta will just read them as the same ad into the auction.

Cody Cody Whitick Taylor have said the same thing to me in the past as well. Um, again, the Kinship Guys, if the ads are too similar, Meta will will make no distinction between them as they enter into the auction. And in fact, if you just like have three or four ads that are all the same, uh, they will, uh, Meta will just sort of randomly pick one and then it will enter into the auction um, like that. And so it's you're just sort of just adding randomness to the decision.

It's not actually probabilistic decision. And I've definitely seen that where I'll launch four versions of an ad and one of them will get spend, the other three won't. Um and the other three will never really get any spend. And that appears to be because Meta is sort of blocking those ads together, treating them as one ad and only picking one. Over time, sometimes you'll see multiple of them spend a little bits here and there, but um that that's not really mostly what it will do.

In fact, instead you should be thinking at the baseline strategy level, how do I create more variation in my ads? Now, this creates a problem because at the same time as you're thinking that, okay, if that's really the goal, creating more variation and more volume at the same time, you have an operational and production level problem, which is that it's much easier for an uh an editor or an ad writer, somebody to iterate off of version one of an ad than it is to create a whole new ad. and I still want to maintain some efficiency in my workflow in my um creative supply chain.

Okay. And and so how do you sort of uh thread the needle here where you're where you're multiplying the output of your work without every single ad you make being a truly fresh start from the ground up? And at the same and at the same time, how do you like learn from past ads that are winning and create um variations with angles that you know work? Like how do you sort of do all that stuff together? And here's where I've landed on this.

We are still creating quote unquote iterative variations, but we are iterating more widely. So, let me give you a sense of what I mean. In the past, I would have said one ad concept, four different hooks, something like that. Okay, that's the way we would write it. And um I think there's still something right about that. I think it's still not a bad idea to write four different hooks. But instead of make taking that same, let's call it a one minute ad, okay, with four different hooks.

Instead of taking that that same thing and saying it's literally just four versions of a one minute out of the four hooks, what now we're doing is saying, "Okay, I'm going to take that one concept and turn it into a 2-minute, a 1 minute, a 30 secondond, and a 15-second. Each one's going to get a different hook with different intro B-roll, okay? A different visuals to start the ad and maybe some rearranged visuals throughout the ad, but it's going to be very similar.

And what that allows you to do is is actually still take the same principle, which is that perhaps different versions of the same concept would work better or worse than others. And it's not a true split test. It's not a true, you know, hook split test or something like that, which is fine. Meta is a really bad split testing machine unless you run a actual AB test with four spends. Meta isn't isn't an isn't an AB testing machine.

It's a probabilistic machine. It it's a probabilistic forecasting machine. It's basian, not randomized control trials, if that distinction makes any um uh sense to you. Okay? So, so don't treat Meta like uh like a split tester. Instead, what I'm trying to do is create multiple options while so multiplying my work and have them be different enough that Meta enters each one separately into the auction and gets separate ad reads, separate data reads on all of them.

And I have found this to work pretty well in terms of getting spend to more variations of the same ad because I'm now taking that sort of iterative idea and just making the iterations broader. Okay. Um again, meaningfully different hooks, meaningfully different um different uh intro uh visuals, okay? Hook visuals meaning uh and different lengths. All so there's more distinction in each of those ads. And yet it still allows me to multiply my work sum in the sense that it allows me to go and say like, you know, when an editor is working through B-roll for a product, it's really easy for them to go and shift some things around to make the especially if they start with the two-minute version.

They start with the two-minute version. They've already got all their B-roll selected. Now they can rearrange and play with it uh down for a one minute version, a 30-cond version, a 15-second version really fast. And it allows you to have some efficiency in that creative supply chain process while at the same time having real variation in it and still iterating off of one angle or message that you know works because at the end of the day what I believe works in advertising is messaging.

And so I do want to take multiple cracks at the message uh that I believe works. Especially if I'm expanding on a message that I already know works. If the um if if you know the message is this product is better than the competing products in the marketplace. Man, you can make a lot of different variations of an ad that has that basic framework. and maybe it's this product is better than the other products in the marketplace for X reason.

Okay, you can again go really really far on making a lot of variations of that basic message and still have widely different ads between creators and still images and post-it note ads if you want to, right? Um explainer ads and negative hook ads and myth versus truth ads and listical ads and all these different things. Now those are all really different from one another. So in that respect, one idea 300 ads is still true.

Okay? And that you are taking one core message and trying to multiply it across what you're doing. But in that variation process and we're certainly not taking one still image and changing it with five different headlines anymore or anything like that. Okay. Um now now again you can still take that same principle at the still image level but instead of making one image, five headlines, do five different images each with a different headline.

All the same message though. Now you've actually got something where again you're multiplying the output of your work um in uh in significant ways and uh and taking that one message and trying to take a lot of cracks and creating real variation in the way that you accomplished uh execute the delivery of that message but at the same time you don't run into this issue where meta reads the ads as the same. So that's a big change for us.

We're really trying to build that into our process more and more all the time. My friends at Behind the Scenes Studio are still my creative partner for that. they've helped rebuild their process to reflect this idea. I think it's a really good uh way to do it. Um and and I think you should be pursuing it that way as well. All right, number six. I am not technical, but one of the things that came out to me in the Meta Performance Marketing Summit was just a continued emphasis on data quality.

And I've um I've seen a bunch of issues with this. I used to work with one company that was um a pixel installation company. We had some trouble with that company for a while for a while and that made it so that we ended up going away with going away from them. Um later on this was uh mostly I think their their tool was actually mostly really really good. I don't I don't have any issues with that. Um but there were a few issues with with our interactions with them for for our agency and then some partners that they didn't integrate with as well.

So now I've just started using Elevar for more stuff. This is not a paid notice like they've just been great to work with um on a bunch of different things and and what I have now consider Elevar and I hear great things about Blotout by the way. Like I don't have a dog in that fight at all. I just knew Elvar had interacted with Brad a long time ago. trusted them. Um, and now we're just getting to a point where we're just kind of making it SOP that we're using Elevar as our pixel installation, Cappy installation partner on um, across our clients.

I really think of it as sort of an insurance policy for your ad account. You've now got somebody who is a technical partner if something breaks that you can talk to who just like does best-in-class pixel installation and um, integration and AC and you can do that of course across everything that you're doing with J4, Google Ads, all those things. It's not overly expensive at this point. In fact, um the prices have all kind of converging on each other so as far as I can tell across the different options.

And um and I've just found that's like a sort of a great thing to have on hand as a partner that um allows you to sort of take your mind out of the problem of uh is my data as good as possible? Is the data that I'm sending to meta as good as possible? even from meta side, I've heard extremely mixed things um in really ways I can't even really talk about sort of what the best setup is here. Um so it's just not super obvious um what that is.

And so again, it seemed to me that working with a company that is trusted, that's in the space that um people know and that allows you to sort of get that installation going pretty easy, really fast setup, um and is reliable. Like that's just the way that we've approached this. Like I said, sort of an insurance policy on the out account. Particularly, by the way, if you're in the health and wellness um space where you've gotten tagged as a health and wellness brand, and there's um challenges with um you know, lower funnel optimization, etc.

Um you know, those these technical partners can be especially helpful there because they can help you with the workaround solutions to those kinds of problems. They've certainly helped one of my supplement brands for that. Um and so yeah, so shout out to them. Again, that's not paid. I I make no money on this. um tell them I sent you if you get this because uh they'll be glad to know that in case I ever do want them to be a sponsor, but um but for now um yeah, just happy to um happy to represent them.

They've been great to work with so far. So uh that's something that has been important to us for a while is using the native Shopify integration. Um after that was using another partner and now we're using Elevar. Number seven, and this is kind of the the uh most interesting thing that I learned in a long time that there isn't very much public about though there is public data about this, which is that if you have an ad that you want to relaunch totally fresh and you want to make sure that Meta does not attach any past information to that ad.

Okay, there is a little trick you can do and that I've started to do sometimes and that is to duplicate the ad but change the thumbnail. Because what I have learned and this is again something that Meta has said publicly but that they haven't been very public about. What I've learned is that or they haven't pushed very hard on is that the ad ID in Meta's system is stored at the level of the thumbnail which is like shocking.

And so if you change the thumbnail you're essentially making Meta reid the ad and treat it as a fresh brand new ad. So, what I was saying earlier, if you have an ad that is a creative, a piece of new creative, and you're like, "Man, it's just not getting any spend, and I I really want to make sure that Meta gives us a real shot at winning." Here is the solution. Duplicate it. Change the thumbnail to a manual thumbnail.

Doesn't really matter which one. Just pick the manual thumbnail that you want and and see if um and and see what happens. because it's like a a good trick I think if you if you really have a piece of creative that you're just excited about, you want to make sure if you put real time and effort into it, you want to make sure it gets a fair shot in the auction. You're very concerned about a false negative situation. Again, this is not something I'm very concerned about in met ads.

I think every ad basically gets a fair shot, but there's volatility in the early stages of of signal or there is noise in the early stages of uh in in relation to signal um of any sort of small data set. And so, yeah, if maybe maybe meta um it's it's a probabilistic machine. And so that means it could be right about the probability but wrong in the individual application if that makes sense. And so if you really want to relaunch it, change duplicate it, change the thumbnail, see what happens.

Um, that's something that I've done a few times. I've taken some old ads also. At times it seems to have died out and I've relaunched them at times and I'm just like, I don't know why this ad died. Something is weird about this. So I want to sort of wipe the wipe meta sense of the idea and launch it truly fresh. I'll duplicate it and change the thumbnail. So a bunch of things like that. It's a great little trick. um can give you some peace of mind as you're running ads to make sure that again um you're not doing something wrong in terms of or or that an ad isn't sort of like inappropriately suppressed.

Again, I think this is a very small problem in the grand scheme of things for meta ads, but uh but there are times when it can be a useful little tool. So, there it is. I'm going to run back through all seven of them real fast just so you have them here. Number one, 15 to 20 ads per adset. Um number two, uh the learning phase matters to me a lot more than it used to. It should matter to you as well. Number three, creative testing campaigns maybe helpful. may be helpful only if you're using a manual bid still just like usual.

Um and really again partly a way to stay away from uh interrupting ads that are in the learning phase and um and also just getting ads launched in a fresh environment may be helpful maybe. Number four um much smaller bid and budget adjustments sub 20% per day. Uh number five iterative variations uh none at all except for or at least not the way that I used to do it. Number six I'm using Elvar uh in a third party pixel installation. that's been helpful.

Number seven, change the thumbnail if it uh if you want to reid an ad and and relaunch it. Stay tuned. Let's talk about a couple little things, we'll be done. All right, thanks for watching or listening. I have some really really good episodes coming up that you are not going to want to miss. Uh I believe by the time this is launched, I have not launched yet my uh Bill Alessandro episode um which really is good. Um Bill and I talked about the sale of natural dog.

So, if you want to hear about a really good win from um somebody who's built a you know limited 8 figureure e-commerce brand um I I don't even know what the final revenue number was but 8 figureure e-commerce brand that has done well gone to exit had a good moment listen to that Bill's great on this kind of subject Roman Khan coming on talking about supply chain actually which is going to be a really fascinating episode because he says Roman's building one of the most impressive aggregators like just e-commerce businesses I've been around incredibly smart dude great conversation there um got Jordan coming on creator relationships soon.

So, u and of course some individual episodes including I'm going to walk through the brand that I'm starting, the thesis that is behind the brand that I'm starting. I'm going to take you through all the economics that I'm thinking about for launching brand. So, if you're interested in that process and why I'm starting a brand and how I'm hoping it will work, um I'm going to walk through that whole thing. So, subscribe wherever you're watching or listening.

Um uh I think you will uh like a lot of what I have coming. Thanks again to Rich Panel and to Vermont, both great partners in this episode. Um, you can, uh, go check them out in the show notes. They are, um, partners I'm really glad to, to represent. I use both, uh, and I'm, I'm very happy to, um, endorse them to you. Um, and of course, afgrowth.com is the place to reach out to me. I'm just barely maybe beginning to think about taking on some more clients.

If you're interested in that, um, go on to afgrowth.com, submit your information there on the intake forms, and we can maybe get some conversation going. It's probably not going to happen right away, but if you want to get a little get out in front of the conversation, we can talk about it. Uh, of course, subscribe to my newsletter there as well to subscribe to my email list when you go to afgrowth.com. Follow me on xanderj ferris.

Email me podcastfgrowth.com. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon. [Music]