5 Meta Ads Features You SHOULD Be Using (And 3 You Should Be Testing) transcript

If you run Meta Ads, you know that Meta is constantly releasing new features that purport to help your ads work better. And those are at every level of the Meta Ads experience, from creative to copy to attribution methods to all kinds of different things. And it's really hard to know which ones you should and should not use and which ones are most important at any given time. I'm going to tell you what we opt into by default for our 8 figureure clients, really for all of our clients, but for our 8 figureure clients especially, and what I think you should be using.

There's a lot of chatter all the time about whether or not meta features are helping or hurting. I'm going to tell you what we're using all the time and what I don't have a strong opinion on yet, but where I have a leaning and what I think you should be at the very least actively testing that I'm hearing good things about. So, I'm going to tell you today five features that you should be turning on when you run your meta ads and then a couple that I think you should at the very least be testing and very possibly even probably be turning on.

Let's get into it right now. All right, feature number one, partnership ads. If you have not done this already, you're definitely behind. Partnership ads, uh, is a feature in Meta Ads where you can run your ads, of course, through somebody else's page, not just your brand's page. And there's a lot of different ways to do this. Um, but that idea is simple enough. Uh, for a long time, Meta has allowed you to whitelist by having multiple pages that you have access to and just sort of making that the default option of what you run your ads through is just sort of which page you select.

But partnership ads are a slightly different version of that feature. I won't go into a ton of explanation because I think they're pretty clear to most people at this point. But they basically allow you to select the partner with whom your brand is running ads. And you can decide, do you want to run the ads through the partners' page, through your brand's page, or through some combination of both. And I remember at the Meta Performance Summit, I think it was earlier this year, they were talking about partnership ads a whole bunch as a way of handling this.

I've seen all kinds of different suggestions around why partnership ads work as well as they do, but they definitely do work and they work in a a few ways. Here's the thing I have found that doesn't work necessarily that well with partnership ads that people talk about. Creating fake pages for yourself and then using that as like a whitelisted page essentially to try to like trick the customer into believing that the ads that you are running are through some page besides the brand page.

And I've tested that repeatedly. run it as whitelisted ads, run it as partnership ads, and just really never seen it add a whole lot of benefit so far as I can tell. I'm sure other people have different types of things here and and and my testing there could have been a little more scientific, but that's not the thing that is most interesting to me. The most interesting thing to me instead is running real partnership ads with real creator partners, content partners of different kinds, or if you are the kind of brand that has internal access to creators with even if they're not huge followings, but whether it's like a founder with some kind of a following or something else, running ads through those pages.

So, so what I'm saying is you should run real partnership ads, right? Not just sort of like fake trickery partnership ads as a baseline version of this tool. We have one client where we just sort of set up the same ads. One of them with partnership ads turned on, one of them without partnership turns ads turned on. Again, these kinds of partnership ads, we saw 50% more spend at the same target with partnership ads. That was a true split test in meta, like a true AV test.

That was a good indication that this is everything that people say it is going to be. And what a lot of people point out here is that what partnership ads seem to allow you to do is expand your reach. So, if you are working particularly with higher level influencers and creators, setting them up as a partner tends to reach into their audience, especially if they have a decent sized audience, better than trying to just whitelist the ad or run the ad with that content creator, but through your own page, etc.

I think there's a much broader point here, though, that is sort of more interesting to me than any notion of sort of the mechanisms of how the machine learning plays out or something like that. The thing that's more interesting to me is that in a world of AI everything, I was so amazed earlier this year and I've said this before at the Meta Performance Marketing Summit at how much talk they gave, not to AI generated creative, including their own tools.

They like talked about that a little, but much more about how much they were pushing you to get real creator partners and run ads alongside them as ways to win and getting real creators, real human beings. And I just continue to think that as the preponderance of AI tools continue to flow, as they get better and better and better, particularly at the level of like essentially AI creative itself, that the people who are going to win are going to be people who use AI to do things that are genuinely creative.

Okay? Not just to like fake out. Like one way of thinking about AI creative is AI creative as a way to make your creative production cheaper. You just sort of use AI to sort of create fake scenes or or videos or whatever. and that maybe is, you know, whatever value it provides. And I've seen some brands have some success with that. It's not like it doesn't work at all or anything. But what's more interesting to me about is using AI for genuinely creative things.

Okay, first of all, and then secondly, finding places where AI is not the best solution at the level of creative. And this is where partnership ads get really interesting to me is finding creators who do a great job at scale, being really human, having really human moments and being humans and interacting in human ways with your brand, with your product where there's a real fit there. And just like with anything else with influencer marketing or creator marketing, you know, finding the right overlap between the right kind of creator or influencer and your brand and the audiences and all those things, they all still matter.

Partnership ads is the mechanism with which you should do it. One more thing here. You've probably seen if you've run these before that you are able to either pick one brand or pick both brands together so that an ad will show up through one account or through both accounts. If you pick with either of those, you get to choose which account you run it through the partnership ad or which order you put the two accounts through.

Unless you select Meta's dynamic identity feature, which actually will do this for you. So, if you sort of put your brand in, imagine I had an a creator account, right? and I had one of my brands. Let's say I was doing something with, I don't know, my FC Goods, my old baseball glove wallet brand. Okay, so you could do FC Goods and me and let's say I had an account together. Let's say we did those two things and FC Goods is the brand and I'm the partner account, right?

You could run it through either one. But what dynamic identity allows you to do is give meta both of them and then meta determines, are we going to run the ads through one page, through both pages? If we run it through one page, which one? If we run through both pages, which order do you display them in? And it'll just learn in real time. And it's just one of those little simple small decisions that's annoying to make in an ad account.

And where I'd much rather have machine learning just figure out which one performs best for each customer. And of course, one might perform best for one customer, one might perform best for another. I'm just assuming there's some math under the hood there that allows that tool to broadly work and certainly better than I do it. And that's the way that we are generally opting in wherever we can is using dynamic identity for partnership ads.

So be running partnership ads. That's number one. Number two, flexible ads. This is one that you must use. You must must must use flexible ads. I love flexible ads. Flexible ads very simply allow you to take a bunch of different assets and put them into one ad so that at the ad unit level at the ad level in meta you can see you can actually run multiple pieces of creative multiple pieces of copy and then meta just sorts out how to pair up different ads with different copy etc all in one ad unit and it will sort of constantly optimize based on that.

Let me tell you where we don't like to use these. If we are actually testing something where we really need to see the individual asset level results because we are trying to learn something from those results for future message expansion or something like that, right? If it's going to inform future creative and the reason you we don't like to use flexible ads for this is very simple, which is that you cannot see the ad level reporting or the asset level reporting like the old dynamic creative tool that used to exist in meta ads.

Flexible ads will not show you which asset it is spending on. It won't show you. Okay, I'm sure there's workaround ways to figure this out, including which ads are getting comments and some of that kind of stuff, but like like it won't show you. So, if if you've got five videos in one flexible ad, okay, and one of them is getting all the spend, you can't see it. You don't know which video it is. Now, I think that's fine because we believe, first of all, I want Meta to optimize for me and I am not going to go try and mess with it.

I actually know for certain that the reason, at least one of the reasons that Meta will not show you this data is because Meta does not want you to go turn off some of them and keep the other ones on. They think that's probably going to harm performance and even though you think you're going to help performance and I agree with Meta here. I think almost certainly human media buyers are going to get in the way of Meta just finding the right ad for the right person and they're going to screw it up.

Okay, so I am completely fine with the idea that I can't see asset level data. In fact, the way we like to use flexible ads a lot is when we have multiple ads where we know for sure that we are going to produce similar messaging as those ads in the future or similar formats in the future. It's like styles or messages or whatever that are just sort of validated in the ad account. And all we're trying to do is expand our reach of those ads in the ad account.

If I'm going to expand that either way, I don't really care which individual ad unit gets spend or which individual line of copy gets spent because I'm going to go repeat that message anyway. I'm going to go find more ads like that anyway. And so for me, I just want the best possible performance on those ad units. Further, I like the idea that it condenses all of my assets into one ad, which means I take up less spots in a given ad set because assuming that the best performing or sort of the ideal number of ads in an ad set is probably about 15 to 20.

That's the thing I've heard in a few different places. It's a soft recommendation. It's not something that's super validated, but it's what we do. Assuming that's the case. I mean, even if you run 50 ads in an adset, at some point, if you produce a lot of creative, you're going to run out of space in an ad set, etc. That means you're going to have to put learning in multiple adsets, you're going to put conversions in multiple adsets, all those kinds of things.

So, for me, what I am trying to do all the time is find ways to condense and consolidate in the ad account without turning ads off. And so, flexible ads are a really great tool for allowing you to do this. You can take multiple ads and do this. The other thing some people have pointed out is that flexible ads seem to perform better than the sum of their parts. I'm sure that's in part because Meta also is taking some other creative enhancement liberty that a lot of people turn off in their ad accounts, but basically flexible ads seem to Yeah, I really don't know why.

I'm not gonna speculate too much about why, but and and I have not also tested this particular thing. It would be an interesting test to go take, you know, 10 ads and run a split test where it's like run them all as one flexible ad versus all of them individually as as solo ads. Somebody should run that test and tell me about it. In fact, if you run that test or you want to go commit to running that test, comment to me in the comments here. let me know or or just in general if you have thoughts on this episode.

Comment, subscribe, do all those things. You know what to do with a YouTube video. But anyway, I've heard some people suggest that a flexible ad performs better than some sum of its parts if that makes sense. And so it works well. I love them. I actually love not seeing the asset level reporting. It gets my brain out of the way. Trust machine learning, etc. If you are a meta advertiser and you need design and video editing support, creative strategy support, all of those things, you should be considering doing it through Behindthescenes Studio at btsstudio.co.

Oh, Behind the Scenes Studio is a design and edit company agency that I use at AJF Growth as an extension of my team and they are so good at working through the creative process so that you can generate a high volume of high performing creative at scale. Um, this is literally the team that we use in my business. I would suggest it for yours as well. Here's the ideal way I think to be working with behind the scenes CEO is that when you have creative ideas internally for you and your team and you want to work with people who can help shape those ideas with you at the creative strategy side along all the things they are seeing working across all of their clients and then actually deliver on the production of your design and video assets.

BTS Studio is just a really really good agency to be working with. I'm a huge fan of it. I will continue to be scaling up AF Growth alongside AC Gardner and her team at BTS. They are based in the Philippines and so they are affordable and on top of that they just do great work. I I just can't tell you enough like how good of a job we are working on them with again our eight figureure clients. Just a huge fan. If you're looking to extend your design and edit resources, if you're an agency looking to extend your design and edit resources as well, you should be considering doing that through Behind the Scenes Studio.

Get on a call with them if that's what you need. If you are committing to more and better creative in the next year to grow your business, you should be doing Behind the Scenes Studio. Go to btsstudio.co. Get on a call with them. Tell them I sent them btsstudio.co. Number three, creative enhancements. Here's one that everybody's going to get mad at me about because everybody loves to say, "Oh, Meta screws up my creative when they run creative enhancements and they put the wrong music on the thing because you got served a version of your ad that's bad, whatever it is." And here's the thing, you are probably wrong.

You just probably are. You know why? Because machine learning is so much smarter than you. We opt into creative enhancements wherever we can and machine learning will have things wrong here and there, but over time it will figure out what the best version of your ad is. And I want all the time to get the best version of my ad in front of the right person and even if it doesn't look like the thing that I want. I am not that good at predicting what is actually going to be best for every single customer.

Now, if I was running a very very large brand, okay, where I had very strong brand standards about what is on brand or off-brand and the brand was, you know, super precious to me, I would not run creative enhancements and I would understand why a brand like that would not run creative enhancements. But here's the thing, you are not running that brand and neither am I. Your preciousness about your brand and about what looks and feels good for you is probably counterproductive for your brand and you ought to give that up and instead say meta put the copy on screen in a different place if you want to overlay a CTA if you want to add a little music to my reel if you want to.

If it's going to make it perform better give me the best performance and reach possible because that's by far the most important thing for my brand at this stage of my business. turn on the creative enhancements and if somebody is going to tell me that these don't work then they're they're going to need to show me the split tests to prove it because I just don't believe you otherwise. And I and I mean that. And in fact, I'll just say more broadly, I am confident that when Meta is rolling these things out, Meta's best incentive like like they have all the users already, right?

They already accomplished a thing of having the most users. The biggest incentive Meta has now is to maximize how much spend they can get from all their advertisers relative to those users. That is a really important thing. The more meta can get value out of a roughly fixed amount of sort of inventory that is available on customers feeds, okay? The more meta can get value out of that space, then the more money Meta makes.

Is in a strong financial interest, okay, to figure out how to most efficiently distribute your ad dollars amongst its users, give its users the best experience possible, and get you to win as much as possible so that you will spend more money on the platform. The more efficiency they generate, the more money you and I will spend because they can take the same amount of reach and they can turn the cost of that reach up by providing more purchases back.

Right? I'm willing to pay a higher CPM for the same number of people if it performs better. That's really clear. So in this respect, Meta I think with most of these features is strongly incentivized to actually roll things out that produce more efficiency for advertisers. People get this wrong all the time. They think somehow Meta is trying to screw you. I just don't think it's true in general. And look, it's a big tech company. some suspicion is warranted.

I don't think that they're altruistic or anything like that either. I don't think they're perfect at this. I just think probabilistically speaking in the aggregate your default option ought to be to opt into Meta's machine learning things, not opt out of it because it's in your best interest and their best interest both. And that you can test this, but before you opt out of it and saying Meta doesn't know what's going, I want to see an actual split test or multiple of them that prove this wrong.

Turn on the creative enhancements. Number four, account spend limits. This is a great feature. If you know me, you know I love to run manual bids where your your ad account, your campaigns are never hitting their actual budget. You put a $10,000 a day budget on a campaign, you only spend five. That's great because your manual bid, your bid cap, your cost cap, or your target rows are suppressing the spend relative to the performance.

That's fantastic. Great tool, great feature. I use it all the time. Tested this repeatedly. We've talked about it endlessly. I make content about all the time because I just think it's an incredible feature that you can only get customers basically within a target cost for your business. But there is one problem, okay, which is that sometimes if your budget is higher than your actual spend level, either there's a meta bug or an ad that kind of goes crazy that doesn't quite work right because you know, I've never said manual biz are perfect.

A bunch of different things happen. You blow through a bunch of budget really really fast. Well, there's a great safeguard out of this and shout out to my friend Dr. Andre Lunv, who is the one who really first pushed me to doing this that we've really adopted it at AJF Growth to set an account spend limit every day to where you know if this much money gets spent, it's not because your ads ripped, it's because something went wrong, right?

So, for example, I've got an account spending $10,000 a day, you know, roughly. And that might mean it's 8,000 on Tuesday and 12,000 or 13,000 on Saturday or whatever it is, right? I'm going to set an account spend limit at like $20,000, something like that. So that way I have a daily number. It's actually at the monthly level that you set this, but I just go and update it every single day. So, I just reset it every single day or add $20,000 or whatever.

I just constantly keep it so that my account spend limit is roughly, and this, by the way, is in your building and notification section in Meta, but your account spend limit is roughly like is some amount well ahead of your spend. And that way if something goes wrong, you know, if suddenly again there's a metab bug or something and your ad account blows through a bunch of money really fast and you've got a budget where you're like, you know, say you've spent $1,000 and you've got a $10,000 budget and so Meta doesn't just blow through nine grand super fast, the account spend limit will cut it off before the damage gets too bad.

Okay? And that's that's what you want. So it's just sort of a safeguard stop gap. One thing to know about account spend limits is that they are not a pacing mechanism. So they will not pace your ads any differently. All they are is a stop gap so that when you hit the exact dollar amount your ad account just stops spending. You can also do this by the way on individual campaigns. I think individual adsets like there's you can set them at a few different places if you really want to create safeguards.

We just use an account spend limit. Make sure that that's the case. Uh there's especially a lot of people talking right now about inflated budget strategy where it's like they'll set a bid cap and they'll have like a million dollar a day uh ad budget. There's some talk about maybe that helping your performance. I've not seen this validated. Something I'm sort of putting aside, but that's something people talk about a lot.

If you're doing that and you do not have an account spend limit on your ad account, you are just begging for trouble. So, make sure you do that. In fact, even if you're not running manual bids, it may be useful to have that anyway just in case something goes crazy or weird with Meta. It's just a way to stop Meta from spending more money than you want them to. Great. Just a stop gap, but it's really useful. Little help to sleep at night.

There's only one sponsor I've ever had on this podcast whose product I have not personally used, and that is the one I'm going to tell you about right now, Workspace [music] 6. And there's a really good reason I haven't used them. It's because I'm not allowed to. Workspace 6 is a private closed Slack community specifically for operators and executives of e-commerce brands so that you can get access to the help you need from other operators, other executives like you trying to sort out how to grow e-commerce businesses, get more profitable, figure out how to operate more smoothly, do all the things that uh work out your supply chains, like do all the things that are day-to-day experiences for e-commerce operators, but that are sort of lonely. you don't know where to go even though you know some of these are solved problems.

Like for example, if you got a vendor negotiation you're working with on your supply chain and you can't figure out like are they charging me too much? Are they charging me too little? Should I be negotiating my payment terms? How do I do that? How do I sort through a bill of materials? Go to your Workspace 6 team and talk to other e-commerce operators about it in the Slack community. Are you thinking about meta ads and how you can scale and what's working, what's not working right now in this moment.

Like don't just listen to what's out there in the ether from people like me on Twitter or whatever it is. go to other operators you can get to know and trust in Workspace 6 in a private closed community where you can get answers to that. And the reason that I am not allowed in there is because it's also a place where operators can talk really [music] freely about the vendors and the software and agencies and people like that that they are using without those same people being in the mix in the conversation.

So they can talk really openly and honestly about that and so they gate it from people like me and I love that. I'm really happy to support that. I think it's awesome. People need places to do those things on top of the fact that it's a great place to just make community because sometimes sitting in your own office in your athletic leisure, whatever you're wearing to work, [music] quote unquote, wearing to work each day is lonely.

Go and get involved in uh in a community where other people understand the exact situation that you are in. Uh so go to workspace. Workspace.io is really affordable. $1 for the first month. No long commitment. Cancel anytime. I just love these guys. They're awesome. They've been really supportive of me over a very long period of time. I was very happy to talk about why I think this is a great thing. Uh I it's one of the only newsletters, I think maybe the only one that I really read super consistently in e-commerce.

Just a big fan of the whole team. I've had Sam Anderson on the podcast. Workspace 6.io. Get involved in the community. Get answers to your questions. Do those things for yourself or executives on your team today. Number five, highest value bidding. I have talked about this endlessly, but I still know a lot of people are just not using it. And it's crazy. Highest value bidding is your way of optimizing for customers that are worth more than highest volume bidding.

And there's all kinds of reasons you want to use this. The baseline is because it provides incremental reach. Here is a pen from Modern Fuel, a great brand that I used to work with. Okay, this Modern Fuel pen represents every customer available who is conversion optimizable on Meta. Okay, over here are the customers who are likely to spend the least amount of money. Over here are the customers who are likely to spend the most amount of money on your order.

I mean, AOV, right? Okay, something like that. Every customer exists somewhere along this spectrum defined by everything from their shopping addiction to their credit card addiction to their just wealth and happiness to spend products on consumer goods to their love for your product to whatever else. But for any number of reasons, customers exist on this range of likely to spend more, likely to spend less. If you run only highest volume bidding, what used to be called lowest cost, you are going to disproportionately target people on this side of the spectrum, people who are likely to spend less per order.

Okay? So there there's just a reach issue here. Like you're just there's just some people you're not going to reach. Highest value is going to help reach over here. So if you're only running highest volume, as many people are, whether that's with a auto bid, a bid cap, or a cost cap, in any of those cases, you're only reaching these people. Okay? If that happens, then you're going to leave volume on the table that you could be converting with the exact same ads.

So, it's just it's just straight up incremental reach at your target cost based on having those people there. Okay? So, there's that. But secondly, uh and by the way, if you wonder, uh the way we do this, we run these campaigns side by side. Highest volume, highest value, exact same ads in both, side by side. We run them with the bid cap on the on the volume side. We run them with a target rorowass on the value side, but we're running both all the time.

Exact same ads in both campaigns. Okay? So, there's that. So people are worried that there's going to be overlap. There is some overlap like right here in the middle. Okay, some overlap is happening right there in the middle. That said, it's not very much and customers probably do move between the two groups depending on any number of features and number of factors, all that kind of stuff. But the the overlap both at the auction level and the reach level and your reporting is not very much.

And so it is worth running both of those along at the same time. There's another reason for this though that a lot of people really don't pay attention to which is the reality of differing AOVs for different customers and the way that affects CAC. So there's a math thing here. Okay, it's very simple, but like imagine two customers. One of them, let's say you are running an apparel brand, okay? And you're running apparel brands where, you know, apparel customers don't just click on your one product and then immediately go buy that product.

They shop around. They look at a bunch of different products. They add stuff to their bag, whatever it is. So, different customers are likely to spend different amounts of money. Then, if you're always cack optimizing those customers, what you're going to do is leave customers on the table who are going to spend more because of the mechanism of a rorowass target not factoring in AOV. ROAS is a ratio metric. So like if you have a a million dollar average order value, okay?

Like you you're selling homes, a million dollar average order value, right? A $500,000 CAC is a 2 to1 rorowass. And your 2 to1 rorowass looks exactly the same at the level of uh rorowass. It is measured exactly the same at a 2:1 as somebody selling this hat, this daughter's hat, which probably cost 50 bucks. Okay, something like that. So a two to one rass is $25 on the hat. It's a $50 hat. I don't know. I don't I don't remember how much it cost.

My kid got it for me. Uh thanks uh to my son. Uh so the the $25 CAC for a $50 hat and a $500,000 CAC on a million dollar house is both expressed as a two to one row. So if you imagine you were selling both of those things at the same time for the sake of silly hypotheticals here, if you were doing that, okay, and you were selling both at the same time and you put those two products into the same adset and you targeted it for highest volume, i.e. lowest CAC, you would never sell a house because Meta would know that it can get the lowest CAC possible on the hat at $25.

Okay? $25 CAC over and over and over again. It would prefer your ads getting a $25 CAC because it doesn't care what your rorowass is. It only cares what your CAC is. That's what a highest volume optimization is. Okay? Now, a target rorowass bid is actually going to say, imagine now imagine the margin profile in both these is the same. It's going to actually go target whatever the highest value customer is while aiming at if you run a target rorowass, right?

If you're running a highest value with a target rorowass, it's going to do that while also trying to hold your rorowass constant at whatever number you set. Now, and so the point is doing both of those at the same time is important. So to take my apparel brand, right? If you are running multiple products, okay, and you get signed some customers who are going to put three things in their bag and one uh three things in their cart and one who are going to get and some customers are going to get one or some customers who are going to buy your $50 hat versus others who are going to buy your $200 jacket or whatever, then it's going to be really hard to actually get both of those customers with the CAC optimization.

This actually gets even crazier if you get to something like supplements where you're running like different products in the same ad set or something like that or in the same CBO campaign because now you're going to prefer if they have different AOVs or different unit economics. Now you're going to if you're not paying attention, you're going to prefer whatever your lower AOV product is just by definition if you're running highest volume.

So both of those things are really important. There's a customers you're leaving on the table aside from anything else. And secondly, the reality of differing AOVs and being willing to go up market. Okay, to use my hat and jacket example, if the unit economics are the same, I want the $50 hat customer and I want the $200 jacket customer, I don't want to prefer one or the other. So, value optimization allows me to go and get the jacket customer and not just get too many of the hat customers.

Now, of course, adset level optimizations can also make a difference there um with highest volume. There's some ways to work around this, but you're just never going to reach as many customers as you can without buy optimization. You should be using it. One little note, if you're running target rorowass ads, set your target rorowass above your true target rorowass. For whatever reason, and I have some theories about why, your target rorowass will almost always actually be higher than your actual rorowass.

So, start conservative on your target rorowass, and then kind of figure out where it's coming in at. End up at a number that you feel good about. All right, that's the five that I think you should be using. Partnership ads, flex ads, creative enhancements, account spend limits, highest value bidding. Let me give you three bonus ones. I think I said two in the intro. I'm going to give you three. These are things that I think you should be testing, though I'm not ready to say you definitely should be doing it, but I've heard some whispers from some people.

And one of them in particular that I want to tell you about in a second. Number one, website optimization. This is where Meta will you put in the URL that you the landing page, whatever that you're going to send traffic to. This is should not be a landing page that you're actively split testing or something like that where you're really trying to get learnings on it. But again, imagine you're an apparel brand. You just never know.

I've had this conversation a million times. Should you send the customer to the homepage, to the collection page, to the product page? Like, I don't know. I don't know the answer. I have like some theories but I don't really know. Check on that little website optimization destination optimization button which you can do with the level of creative and meta will theoretically over time start testing where it should send traffic to you on your website and find the winners.

That's something I would definitely be testing particularly if I was in the right category for it. At some point I will actually run that split test myself because I think it's interesting. So there's number one. Number two, incremental attribution. This is actually something I have tested and and seen it not perform especially well. But here's why I'm telling you to test this. First of all, again, Meta released the feature and they are trying to get you incremental conversion optimization.

And I have heard mixed things about what incrementality tests have said about this in the early stages. But just recently, I talked to somebody whose name I cannot mention on this podcast who told me that multiple clients that he is working with have uh recently tested incremental attribution. Again, standard attribution where you're optimizing for any purchase as measured in Facebook. Incremental optimization is theoretically trying to optimize your spend for incremental purchases.

Okay, for truly incremental purchases. This person had it on good authority and I trust him that uh incremental attribution was working really well across his clients and more and more of them were moving them as measured by actual thirdparty incrementality tests or conversion lift studies in Facebook that the incremental attribution tool was doing what it was supposed to be doing. I was sitting with him and a couple other people and he was saying, "Hey, have you guys tested this?" I said, "No, I played with it a little bit in the beginning when it was first released.

Didn't see much that excited me. wasn't excited about some of the third-party tests. It's something that I probably will be testing again in the near future and I think you probably ought to try out because if it actually works, it's an awesome tool. The idea that it would specifically get incremental conversions and sort of bring more clarity to your measurement as well as target the right people, that would be really good.

Number three, AI enhancements. This is one of those things that again people are really scared of. I'm not sitting here ready to tell you the AI creative enhancements definitely work and then they're not going to give you any crazy AI slop or anything like that. What I am telling you is that it's worth testing that I think probably in the aggregate given enough data it works. If you're willing to deal with some insane looking ads here and there, test it.

Just give it a shot. I would be testing it. What you will hear throughout this episode of what I'm talking about is that I have a very trust the machine learning, trust the AI mentality. And this is definitely true of the way I think about this kind of stuff in general. What you are asking Meta to do at any given time, the moment you place a single dollar into Zuck's hands, okay, and run a single ad, you are asking Meta to sort through its billions of users or hundreds of millions if you're in the US only, okay? using their tools across multiple platforms for countless hours, multiple placements, stories, reels, threads, Facebook, desktop, everything that you can find all these placements and find the right person in your right demographic to convert on your product.

It is a machine learning miracle that this works. It is incredible that this works at all. It is a giant future prediction machine and it is an impossible puzzle for any human brain to sort out. So the idea that you would go and say I am going to give Meta my money and put a whole bunch of time into getting good at this tool and then trust my own brain to optimize for the future better than Meta's is crazy talk. It's crazy talk.

You have already pot committed to the idea that machine learning and algorithms are going to optimize your ad spend. Lean into it. Don't lean against it. It is already better than you at it. It is the reason why Meta is so effective. It's the reason why you are placing your ads among others on Meta and not on the Google Display Network and not on Tik Tok, which is not as good at this yet, not on Snapchat, which doesn't have the volume and isn't as good at this yet, etc.

It is the reason why you love this tool because it's so good at conversion optimization. It's the reason why it's where all the money goes, and it's the reason why you should keep doing it. You should have a trust the machine learning first mentality, and the burden of proof should be on the idea that it doesn't work, not that it does work. When you see new features come into meta, that's the way I'm approaching it. That's the way I think you should do.

That's what will guide you beyond any of these individual features into how you should think about this going forward. All right, thanks so much for watching or listening. I would love your comments on this. I'd love to hear about how your Black Friday Cyber Monday went. This should release soon after that. I would love to hear any thoughts you have on this episode. Am I just crazy for being so pro meta? Am I just drinking the Kool-Aid here?

I know most many people are much more skeptical of meta than I am. So tell me, tell me why I'm wrong. I'd love to hear about it. And again, subscribe so you don't ever miss an episode of my podcast. Got a couple really good ones coming up that I think you're going to like a lot as we round out the year. Got some really good media buying stuff as well as some interviews sort of broader about life and e-commerce and everything in between.

So, it's going to be really good. Don't miss any of the episodes. Email me podcastfgrowth.com. Ajfgrowth.com is where you can go to see everything that I'm doing. It's my website, including signing up to work with AF Growth at some point in the future. Big thanks [music] to my sponsors for this episode. That's Workspace 6, who I'm a big fan of, as I have mentioned before, [music] as well as Behind the Scenes Studio, who I work with every day in my own business, and you should work with them, too.

Thanks so much for watching or for listening. I will see you next time.