$100 vs $100,000 Facebook Ads Strategy transcript

If you're spending $100 a month on Meta ads, and you're running the same strategy as a business spending $100,000 a month, you're not being scrappy, you're setting money on fire. And if your $100,000 a month business is still treating your ad account like a small business owner would, you are leaving massive amounts of money on the table. I've managed both. I've run tiny accounts where every single dollar had to justify itself, and I've run accounts spending more in a month than most small businesses spend in 10 years.

So, let's break this down starting with campaign structure and account setup. So, with $100 a month, you're spending $3 a day. You cannot afford to make anything complicated. So, one campaign, one ad set, one offer, so one product or service. Keep it really simple. You want broad targeting, you want to be using Advantage Plus, and you want to put as much conversion volume through that one campaign, that one ad set, and one ad as possible.

That's the only chance it's really got for it to learn properly. Meta ideally wants you to have 50 plus conversions per week. The chances you're going to have that with $100 a month is very slim anyway. It's even harder to do that if you start fragmenting and you're going to advertise this and that and and spread your budget across those. So, keep things really, really simple. Whereas with $100,000 a month, you can do things completely differently.

That's over $3,000 per day. You can have multiple campaigns for different product ranges, for different offers, for different services, depending on your business. You could even have different campaigns for different funnel stages. Let's say you're advertising a lead magnet, that'd be your top-of-funnel campaign. You could then have a separate campaign retargeting people who have opted in for your lead magnet to book a call for your high-ticket program, for example.

That's going to vary, obviously, depending on your business. You can also break out and have separate testing campaigns. With smaller budgets, I really don't like that. Again, you're splitting your budget across too many variables. With larger budgets, it makes a ton of sense. Let's put the majority of our spend through winners that we know perform well, but let's carve out 10, 20, maybe 30% of that budget and spend them on separate testing campaigns where we can try on new creative, do so in a low-risk way, but know that if we do enough of that, we will find winners that we can then put more spend behind.

With those larger campaigns as well, larger budget campaigns, your ads are going to fatigue much faster. So, you're going to need to have those other creatives waiting in the wings, other options ready to go for when your current winners start to drop off in terms of performance, you've got others willing to go. And when you're managing an ad account at a higher budget level, like $100,000 a month or more, you almost need to see yourself as a risk manager, a portfolio manager, where you're allocating resource according to performance, and you need to be on top of that, because given the amount that's spending, if you don't check in for a couple of days, and a whole load of money is being spent on stuff that just isn't working, well, you've just wasted a bunch of money, right?

So, the requirement to be on top of it and then reallocating between different campaigns is that much more. Fortunately, when you're spending that much, often your campaigns are performing really well, and the returns justify the extra effort, but it's something to be aware of. So, the difference is that $100 is about protecting the algorithm's ability to learn, $100,000 is about controlling risk at scale, completely opposite strategies.

Next is targeting and audience strategy. So, if you're spending $100 a month, you need to keep things very simple. I would recommend just going broad, maybe adding in some interests as suggestions, some detail targeting options to give Meta some idea who you're going to target, but definitely no hard constraints. You're very unlikely to want to add in warm audiences. You kind of need to let Meta do its thing. Because that budget is small, Meta does not have much leeway to test.

So, if you end up with putting in some targeting audiences overly restrictive and it doesn't land, you're kind of never going to get out of that at that budget level. Spending $100,000 a month or more, you can do things quite differently. Now, I'm not a big fan of being restrictive in terms of targeting, and with a larger budget, you want to reach more people. So, in the targeting section at the ad set level, I'm not going to enter much in there.

Again, maybe some detail targeting options as suggestions. But, there are other things you absolutely you to make sure that you do that will impact your targeting. The first is going to be to make sure that in your ad account settings, you've got your audiences clearly defined. So, you want to make sure that you've got existing customers, get that list uploaded to your ad account, and then define that in ad account settings.

Meta knows who's an existing customer, who isn't. That's really valuable. And then also your engaged audiences. Meta's already going to know about those engaged audiences that are people who have engaged on the platform. So, watched videos of yours on Facebook or Instagram, something along those lines, follow you, etc., etc. But, they might not have visibility over external engaged audiences. Think people on your email list, but differentiate them from previous customers, potentially website visitors, and things like that, depending on the time frames, right?

So, you define your existing customers, you define your engaged audience, and then that leaves new audience, and then Meta can better apportion your budget between those three segments, and you can see those results as well, which is really useful to know how much of my budget's being spent on warm, on existing customers, and how much is being spent on new. The next thing that you may want to include at higher budget levels that can impact your targeting are value rules.

Value rules are a fantastic way to impact who Meta puts your ads in front of, but to do so in a way that isn't restrictive. So, if you're not familiar, value rules allow you to say to Meta, "This group of people is worth more to my business than this other group of people. I would like you to pay more to put ads in front of them." Now, Meta's already going to have an idea of who is most likely to convert if they are able to track your conversion action.

So, let's say for example, your business generates more sales from women aged 45 plus. Meta's just going to see that in their data, and they're already going to target predominantly people in that category. But, they might not have visibility over other data that you have that has a big impact on how valuable someone is to your business, like repeat purchase rate. You might see from your customer data that people under the age of 25 buy far more often, or people in this location buy far more often, or people on these devices buy more often.

There's all different ways that you can break down value rules, and you might say to Meta, "Look, these people on average are worth 60% more to my business. Please increase my bid by 60%." It's a really good way, if you have the conversion data, to improve the overall return on ad spend that your campaign generates. And if you're spending $100,000 a month, you have the data. You have the customer base. You just need to take some time and break it down and look to introduce this.

Another thing that value rules can be really helpful for is improving lead quality. So, I talked about repeat purchase rate being one of the things that you might know that Meta might not know. Another one would be this group of people converted at a much higher rate from phone call to paying client. You can factor that in and input that into value rules. So, you can become a much more sophisticated in terms of the information and the data signals that you provide to Meta at those higher budget levels.

Lower budget levels for now, hands-off. And it's not about restrictive targeting at the ad set level. It's about creating signals that almost operate above that, external to that, that impact your bidding and who Meta chooses to put your ads in front of. The $100 advertiser's job is to get out of the algorithm's way. The $100,000 advertiser's job is to feed the algorithm the best signal money can buy. If you made it this far, you're clearly serious about getting better Meta ad results, so you'll get a lot of value from my New School community.

We've got a brand new exclusive Meta ads course. Check out the link in the description below. Next is creative strategy and testing. At $100 per month, you're probably looking at one meaningful test per month. Any more than that, you just won't get enough data to know whether or not the test failed, succeeded, or get anything useful out of that. So, you want to pick one variable. That might be headline, it might be hook within a video ad, it might be different ad formats.

Test that, see which performs best, learn from it, move forward, and then test something the next month. With $100,000 a month, you want to be testing a lot more than that. You want to be testing basically everything that you can to find the best options. That's going to include hooks, so the opening line, opening scene in a video ad. It's going to include different angles, the main reason why someone should take the action that you want to take.

It's going to include headlines, primary text, different styles of ads, whether it's UGC, founder led, demonstration, partnership ads, all those various elements. You might test different sales funnel structures. You might test what you optimize for. Do we optimize for add to carts or purchases depending on our conversion volume? Do we send people through a messenger funnel first or do we go get them to book directly into a calendar?

There's all sorts of things you can test. You will also find that at those larger budget levels you get answers and results from tests much faster. Whereas a test for a small advertiser might take 2 weeks, a month, maybe longer to find out does this perform better than our previous best performer? In large budget ad accounts, it might take days, it might even take hours for you to know this is the better option. This is what I'm going to focus on.

So, you want to systematize it and set up a process that allows you on a regular cadence check in, assess the results, and then move forward. You also want to operationalize creative generation that's going to be required at that budget level. So, if for example, one of the ad types that you consistently run is client testimonials, well, you need a system for consistently generating client testimonials. It needs to be part of your email follow-up sequence after someone buys or part of the customer service process, you know, after someone's got the result that you're able to deliver for them.

It doesn't want to be sporadic where every now and then you just email out to your list or something like that asking for a for a bunch of testimonials. That's going to leave you without ad creative. With those higher budget levels, you always want to be ahead of the ad creative because depending on the size of your audience and your target market, it can fatigue really quickly. I work on some ad accounts that spend more than $100,000 a month where ads will fatigue within days.

And you might think, okay, well, better ads will last longer. No, that's just the nature of the beast. That's the market dynamic. It's niche, the target audience isn't that large, but it's a really good offer, so it converts really well, but we constantly need to be refreshing ad creative and putting new stuff in there. Some markets it's not going to be quite as extreme as that, but at those high budget levels, everyone runs into that problem.

So, you always want to be producing creative. I train my teams to create and stick to a regular cadence. And you can change that. So, it might be like, "Right, we're going to produce 12 new ad creative a week for this account. We've narrowed it down to client testimonial ads, influencer partnership ads, and simple statics. Okay, those are our three content types we regularly produce. We're going to make sure we produce three of each on average every week." That's going to constantly supply new creative.

We know not everything's going to land, but enough of it will, so we don't end up in that situation where all of a sudden your return on ad spend is a quarter of what it was 2 weeks ago, cuz everything's fatigued. At $100 a month, one good creative decision might be the difference between profitable and dead for that entire month. At $100,000 a month, creative isn't a decision anymore. It should be a factory. Next, we've got budget management, bidding, and scaling.

And depending on your budget level here is absolutely going to impact what you want to do. So, the $100 a month advertiser wants simple bidding strategy where you're going typically for the most conversions of whatever it is you're optimizing for. So, if you're optimizing for leads, go for the most leads. If you're optimizing for purchases, just go for the most purchases. There are absolutely more sophisticated things you can do, but you probably don't have the data at that budget level to feed the system for it to be able to learn enough to get you better results with those more sophisticated optimizations.

At $100,000 a month, I'd like it to change that. So, if you're optimizing for end purchase, let's say you're an e-commerce business, you can track at when people actually give you money online, I'd rather you optimize for value. Don't just optimize for as many conversions as possible. You want Meta to factor in some customers come through to your store and spend $200, some come through to your store and spend $20. Much better to get more of the $200 customers.

You will see a much better overall return on ad spend. By optimizing for highest value, that's what Meta is going to be able to do. So, factor that in. You can also do that on the lead side of things and become more sophisticated if that's the type of business that you have. So, you can hook up your CRM, integrate that with Meta, make sure that your sales people, whoever's dealing with your prospects and converting them into customers, keeps it up to date, and then feed back not just which leads become customers into your Meta ad account, but the values associated with those individual customers.

Cuz again, some are likely to be much more than others. You can feed that data back in if your CRM is up to date and properly integrated, and you can use that to get Meta to optimize for those people and optimize more value. So, you can optimize for conversion leads and other value-based optimizations, depending on your sales funnel structure. That can make a really big difference. Not all leads are created equal by any means, and we want to feed that data back in.

It's also important to know how your budget level impacts scaling and what you can and can't do. So, this rule of just increase your budget 20% every day or every few days, that's how you scale. That's not nuanced enough. It's not sophisticated enough. At lower budget levels, that doesn't really do anything for you. If you've got a campaign that's working, opportunity windows last forever, you're going to want to scale faster than that.

I have no problem with going from a $3 a day budget that's working well to a $10 a day budget, which would be more than a tripling, absolutely fine at those levels. But at higher budget levels, you absolutely cannot do that. You don't want to go from a $100,000 a month to $300,000 a month. I mean, that would be crazy. That's almost certainly going to kill the results of your campaign. I wouldn't even recommend in many cases going from a $100,000 a month to $120,000 a month in one go.

That's a reasonably large increase at that budget level, whereas it's tiny earlier on. So, I don't like to give fixed numbers or fixed percentages by which we increase, because we will absolutely increase in larger increments at lower budget levels, and then slow that down the more we spend. The higher your spend is, the more difficult it is for Meta to continue to find good prospects to put your ads in front of. If you're spending a small amount, you might be advertising to just a few thousand people.

If you're spending tons, you're going to be advertising to millions already. How many more good prospects are out there for you? So, definitely something to factor in when it comes to scaling as well. Budget management is about survival at $100, but it's about precision at $100,000 to allow you to get efficiency out of a system that will happily spend your money whether you're profitable or not. Next, we've got optimization reporting and decision-making.

You absolutely need to change how you read your data and how that impacts what you do about it depending on your budget level. So, if you're operating with $100 a month, maybe even more than that, it might literally take 3 months for you to know, does this work? Does this not work? Do I need to make any changes? And that might sound extreme, but just think through the the math on this, right? So, if you're spending $100 a month and your customers are worth $10,000 to you, and I've spoken to many businesses that are in that situation, it will take months and months and months to know if that's profitable.

Cuz you could spend $2,000, get one customer, be like, "Hey, this works." In many cases for those businesses, I recommend spending more if they can, particularly if they can sell them one client, they definitely have the budget to to go and do so, but you just have to be patient. And it can be really easy to dive into those secondary metrics and start looking at click-through rates and hook rates and things like that, but you only really want to do that if you already have conversion data and you're basing your decisions on that primarily.

It's like, did this work or did this not work? We're looking at cost per conversion or return on ad spend. Okay, we know this worked, we know this didn't work. Why? That's when you dig into secondary metrics. You don't want to do so ahead of time. So, in those sort of scenarios, you just have to be patient. At $100,000 a month, you can do things quite differently. So, you can make decisions almost in real-time that are data-backed because you can see we experimented with this offer, with this ad format, etc., etc., and we got enough data to be able to implement.

You don't have to wait anywhere near as long, you can make decisions. It also changes how you might want to approach measuring results. So, do you want to switch from standard attribution to incremental attribution and run proper tests around incrementality? What that means by the way is not just what results did our ad campaign produce, but what results did it produce that we would not have otherwise gotten if we weren't running the ad campaign.

Because the way attribution typically works say within your Meta Ads dashboard would be Meta will take credit if you have interacted with an ad and then gone on to convert, purchase, become a lead, etc. That doesn't necessarily mean the ad did the job. It might be that someone recommended it or that you were also on that company's email list and you received an email and you converted through that, but you have to be served an ad that same day.

So, you might want to know what have I gotten from the ads that I only have gotten because I'm running the ads and be able to measure that return on ad spend in comparison to to your cost. It's something that you might want to do at larger budget levels. Definitely don't do that at smaller budget levels, it becomes a lot more complicated. Businesses like that almost certainly want to use external tracking software so they can more accurately assess where their customers are coming from, from which platform, what they're costing them, and their true value.

The effort to get that set up and the cost incurred of doing so makes tons of sense at that budget level. With that in mind, one of the absolute keys to scaling ads is working with the right data. Meta Ads especially are driven by AI targeting. Bad data means not only bad ad decisions, but bad AI targeting. Meta tracking is consistently off by 20 to 30% and as much as 50% plus for long-term sales. This leads to that bad data.

That's why I wanted to tell you about Hyros and their new form of attribution called AI Swarm Data. It fixes this gap and A, allows you to make the correct decisions with your ads, B, sends the right data to Meta. This results in an almost immediate boost to ad ROI via better targeting and better decisions, which is why it's used by major players like Alex Hormozi, Tony Robbins, myself, Four Seasons, Playboy, What, and thousands of large-scale e-commerce stores.

Here's an example. Hyros helps point out gaps in tracking. If I couldn't see this data, I wouldn't be able to scale as More importantly, it feeds the ad platform the right data for better targeting, cutting your cost to acquire customers. That's why I'm comfortable recommending Hyros. They literally guarantee increased ad ROI or you don't pay. Their usual result is around a 10 to 15% increase in ad revenue. And if you're an agency, not only does it get your clients better results, Hyros pays up to 40% for lifetime commissions on each client you bring.

Even better, they will set it up for you, then help you optimize ad platform AI targeting with it. Use the link below, the first 15 people to do so will get a 30% discount. So with small budgets, patience really is key. That's the discipline, that's the important part. A larger budgets, you can have much more precision around your data and a healthy level of skepticism usually helps. Next, team, time, and operational reality.

So let's get practical for a second and think about what does the day-to-day look like when you're running an account spending $100 a month versus $100,000 a month. So at $100 a month, you want to be in that ad account not much at all, an hour or two probably a month making adjustments. Now, you might want to be spending more time producing ad creative outside of that account, but actually in the system itself fiddling with things, you want to do that so infrequently that if you're in there half an hour, 45 minutes every day, you're way overdoing it.

You're better off spending your time and efforts elsewhere, particularly on creative or to be perfectly honest, maybe on things like cold outreach to give you more budget to be able to scale and give your ad campaigns more of a chance to perform. At $100,000 a month, you need proper infrastructure in place. Rarely is a budget like that going to be completely managed by one person. Normally, there would be an account manager or media buyer, someone who's actually in the account making the adjustments, running tests, analyzing the data.

You might have someone else on creative. You might have someone else on partnership ads, like working with influencers to try and get extra creative along those lines. You're going to want to tie that in with other people, whether that's business owners or marketing directors or strategists around how is the overall strategy, what offers, how can we tie this in to the rest of of the business. And that's what a budget level, the added cost of getting more expertise involved is relatively low.

And if you could take an extra say 5% of your monthly budget and have much better people operating on that, it could be fractionally cuz it could be as part of an agency, not necessarily has to have all that in-house. It's nearly always going to improve the results by more than say 5% in order to to improve performance. It's a similar logic to why I often recommend working with creators to produce partnership ads cuz if you take say 10% of your budget to produce partnership ads where creators and influencers that are relevant to your target audience are promoting your products and services, is your return on ad spend likely to improve by more than 10% by doing so?

Absolutely. So, it pays for itself, saves you time on producing the assets. Many reasons to use creators, I've talked about that um enough elsewhere. That's what's going to happen with those sorts of businesses. So, if you think, okay, I'm a 1,000 a month, I'm going to be able to keep running this as I am at 100,000, the workload goes up significantly. It's also, by the way, why agencies charge significantly more to manage ad accounts with with that level of spend.

On a low budget, you're the strategist, the analyst, the creative team all at once in probably a few hours a month managing many other things going on at the same time. At 100,000 dollars a month, you're the strategist for the team four the strategists. Now, we've been through a number of things that are quite different depending on your budget level, you know, 100 versus 100,000 dollars a month. But there are things that remain true, that are consistent despite budget levels, and they're worth mentioning, right?

So, in either scenario, you need a clear, compelling offer. If your offer's not good, no one's going to buy, no one's going to take the action you want to take. That's true no matter your budget level. You need creative and audience that fit together. You need something that grabs whose attention, that is for them, that all makes sense. You need patience with learning. Even at the higher budget levels, where things are going to be accelerated, you don't want to rush the process of testing the different things.

What will often happen in larger budget levels is people find a winner and they'll get lazy and be like this can work and they won't go through the steps of okay, I need to test this but I need to remember to test this as well when you're testing angles and formats and video ad styles and hooks and call to actions. We're not just testing out one thing. And in either scenario you want to treat meta ads as a system that you are managing, that you are prepared for, that you are planned for, not a slot machine where you're just chucking money at it and hoping that you generate clients and leads and sales and whatever it is you want from it.

So whether you've got $100 a month or $100,000 a month, the platform doesn't care. It rewards the exact same fundamentals just expressed completely differently depending on your scale. If you get those fundamentals right whatever budget you're at right now, when you do eventually scale up you won't be relearning everything from zero.