"Media Buying Is Dead" Is The Biggest Lie In Ecommerce transcript

The biggest myth in e-commerce right now is that media buying is dead. I hear this kind of comment from people fairly often these days. The idea that sort of media buying, and I'm thinking of Meta specifically here, but it really does matter across ad platforms. Since most money is going to Meta, I'm I'm going to focus there. I I hear this this thing that comes up where it's sort of like, "Well, media buying is not as important anymore." And And people frame that argument a few different ways because they'll say, "Well, the brand is what matters a lot, or the creative is what matters a lot." And influencer, or or whatever, right?

People say all these different kinds of things. And look, all of those things matter a lot. People are right about that. The other thing people will say is like, "AI is coming and is now part of it, and and we're going to have agentic media buyers any second now, and so you really shouldn't even bother with good media buying anymore because it just doesn't matter very much." Um even some people will specifically talk about my approach to media buying, which I'm going to lay out here in a second, and they'll say, "You in particular don't matter.

Media buying is easy now because you just have this trust the machine mentality." There's all kinds of versions of this argument, but it's pretty pervasive right now, and I I see people say this kind of a lot, and I think it is really deeply wrong. I think it is it is one of the biggest myths in e-commerce right now because people have this idea that somehow the technical details of distributing your ad spend against your products and your creative, that is now has gotten easier enough that there's really [snorts] no alpha in it anymore.

There's no ability to sort of do something right or wrong. The potential mistakes are smaller and smaller all the time, and therefore you just don't need to worry so much about great media buying if you're growing a business, you need to put your attention in lots of other places. And the reason I think that's wrong, well, there's a lot of reasons for it. I'll I'll say two of them up front very broadly, and then I'm going to lay out for you areas that I think have a really big impact on brands' financials and their growth and their performance that are all media buying that I think people really need to get right.

So, the first reason I think this is wrong is the very simple thing that I repeat a lot, which is that it's very likely that in your business Meta ads is the largest single line item in your business. So, because of that, if you make your media buying 5 to 10% better than it was before, it actually has, like if it's 30% of your total revenue is going towards Meta ads, and that's not unreasonable for a lot of brands, for some brands it's 40, 50%.

A 10% improvement, which is not that big of an improvement, is actually a four percentage point kick to the bottom line potentially, right? Of your business. Because if it's 40% or 30% of your business, then a 10% improvement on that can be three to four points of net income on the bottom line of your business. Do you see what I'm saying? A relatively small impact on the largest line item in your books is going to make a very an outsized impact on the total performance of your business.

So, there's that first of all, okay? It just It matters because it's such a big cost, very simply. Just like your product matters because it's such a big cost, or your the core of your supply chain matters because it's such a big cost. So, that that that notion is wrong. But the second reason why is that when I look at brands that explode or that drastically underperform what's possible, or that go to the go to death's door, like so much of the time the problem is their media buying.

That is the reason why. It is that somebody somewhere has spent drastically too much money in a foolish way, either with making big mistakes, or just by like having bad planning as part of the media buying, and therefore have sunk their business because of that. And that is for the same reason that I said before. If it's the largest line item on your books, then a mistake there has an outsized impact on your financials.

And so, throwing away money on bad media buying ends up being a huge cost for for brands. And I've seen this with brands that have come to me specifically, come to AJF Growth looking for support. Sometimes it is not a planning problem at the core level of the, you know, executive offices or whatever. Sometimes it's just that like the media buying has missed details that are really important. And like I had one client come to me that had double reported conversions from like a major ad agency, a known commodity ad agency.

They had double reported conversions for like six months leading into this moment. I looked at the ad account, I was like, "Wait, they're getting like a five to one. Why aren't they spending more money?" And then you go look at their actual revenue, and you realize because they're not getting an actual five to one. There's just no possible way that's the case, which means that the agency didn't see that, they weren't tied in enough to the revenue to see what was going on, and it's it's sort of hard to unwind all those things.

If you If you look at it, I had another brand come to me have the exact same problem where there was double reported revenue. And when I look at those things, I said, "That's actually not primarily a financial mistake per se. That's because somebody's not attentive to what's really happening into the total business of the details." Not like somebody made a bad media buying plan and a bad spend allocation plan. It's that they really weren't clued in to how this line item in their business was impacting their revenue, and so they they couldn't make the connection.

Whereas like if you just sort of cross-reference the two, you could see it really really quickly. And that gets into the first of what I'm going to lay out now of a bunch of things that go into great media buying. I don't want to just sit here and tell you to do better at media buying without telling you what I mean by that. I want to tell you now what I think goes into making great media buying, and why it still matters so much in 2026, and why if you aren't confident that the things that I'm about to lay out are happening in your business and in your in your media buying, then you should at least take a close look at it.

You should at least try to understand why aren't people doing the things that you're doing. Is your organization built around these kinds of principles? Because when you do this stuff right, you not only create a bunch of upside in your business, but you drastically reduce your downside risk in this largest line item in your budget. So, let's talk about what goes into great media buying right now. And I'm going to talk not about every individual thing you can do because there's too many of them, but let's talk generally about it, and let's start with the point that great media buying is financially focused first.

It is tied to financial planning. It's the extension of the thing that I just brought up, which is that the reason that I was able to detect a double reporting pixel on like within a day or two of opening a new brand was because the very first thing that I do when I audit an ad account is I look and see what is the Meta ad spend that is has been happening over the last however many months, depending on how long old the business is.

What is the new customer revenue in this business? What is the existing customer revenue in this business? And you look at those three things, if you go tie that the reporting to a click, so you use like a click-based attribution, okay? And you you look at that, and you assume that Meta is basically accurate in what it tells you about the value that it produces in an ad account, and I think that's about right. If you're reporting on 28-day click revenue, then Meta's basically telling you the truth about the the revenue it's driving.

And you see a giant mismatch between the revenue in Shopify and the revenue being reported in Meta, then you know that either there is some other driver of revenue, or if it is that Meta's over-reporting what Shopify is reporting, or Meta Meta seems to be taking too much credit, you know it's probably because there is a pixel problem. What I mean by that is the way that you evaluate the performance of the spend is by looking at the bank account.

This is not really an attribution question per se. It's a saying, "The point of Meta ads is to drive financial value in the business." That's the whole point of it. It's It's to drive financial value. So, if you want to understand the performance of your Meta ads account, it's very simple. You go look and see what kind of financial value it's driving. This is before you look at anything in platform, before you talk about a single moment of campaign structure, or of creative testing strategy, or of attribution model, or anything like that.

You just go and look "How is it driving value in the business?" And great media buying starts there. And some people will complain and say, "You're expanding the definition of media buying beyond media buying. Now you're talking about being, you know, I don't know, a financial allocator in the business, which is really the CEO's job, or or whatever, right?" But I don't think that's true. If you are giving somebody the job of distributing a very large budget in the business, their job as the media buyer, the person who is making the decisions about how to distribute those dollars, their job is to then be responsible for, to be accountable to how those dollars are are creating value in the business.

And that means they have to be looking at the total business, okay? And look, there's maybe some accountability for the executive in the business who sort of is overseeing the agency, or whatever, you know, there's there's maybe multiple layers of accountability. Maybe the CEO at some point has some accountability. But the media buyer themselves, that media buyer needs to be tied into what's happening in the business.

When we look at our revenue reporting with our clients and our and our reporting, it's all based on the actual revenue in the business as the starting point, not just what's happening in Meta. We actually barely look at in-platform metrics when we report to clients. Almost all of our reporting ends up being about how's our new customer revenue, how's our returning customer revenue, how's that doing relative to forecast, how's that doing relative to our plan.

And for that matter, that gets into another element of why media buying is a financially focused exercise first, and that is because it should be tied to a financial plan in the business. Great media buying is aligned in clear ways to a financial plan for the business, which starts for us with the forecast, and saying, "How do we understand the the way customers create value in this business? How often do they come back?

What about the unit economics? All those kinds of things." And so we forecast the business based on that, we build a plan, and then we deploy ad dollars relative to that plan, and adjust the plan as we understand and as we learn and and as we get updated information, especially when there's major changes in the business, and the future is very very unlike the past, it becomes harder to forecast, but you just adjust as you learn more, etc.

So, that's the first thing. Great media buying is financially focused, and right there you can go really really far in understanding whether or not you are getting good media buying. Is your media buying tied into the financial focus of the business, or is it not? And if it is not, if they don't understand, if they're never pulling up a Shopify revenue report, if they're never seeing how their spend relates to that, it's very very likely that um that they're not doing a great job in the business.

It is not. You are a Meta ads advertiser, you need creative in your ad account, and you should consider doing that with my friends at Behind the Scenes Studio. Behind the Scenes Studio is a creative Meta ads shop built and based in the Philippines that gets you a high volume of highly diverse ads built very much off the back of a lot of things that I'm talking about on this show. I know that because they're the team that we use to staff our creative team at AJF Growth, but I am well aware that there are some people who are not quite ready to do the full service that AJF Growth has, but they do need some creative help or that's an extension of of your current team.

You got a copywriter or creative strategist who can write ads and brief ads, but you need designers and editors to do that or you actually need [music] some creative strategy help on your team as well. You want people who understand that creative diversity matters a lot, that creative volume matters a lot, and they can make a lot of ads at a price [music] that actually makes sense for your business is leveraging AI in the process and all kinds of ways.

And that's what Behind the Scenes Studio is. I couldn't be a bigger fan of them. I [music] had their CEO AC over for dinner at my house just a couple weeks ago, and she was just talking about all the great things they're doing, all the success they're seeing with clients. I'm just a huge fan. So, go to btsstudio.co. Like I said, it's literally the team that I am working with to use. They're constantly interacting with me.

So, if you like the principles that I talk about, you're going to get a lot of those downstream in their service as well. BTS studio.co. Get on a call, see if they have the right creative extension for you or if you're an agency and you need additional creative help on the design [music] and edit side as an agency business, whether that's actually as BTS or white label for your business. They can do a lot of different stuff.

So, btsstudio.co. Links in the show notes like I said, go check it out [music] right now. Number two, great media buying is financially focused in that it also applies Our financial focus also applies to the details of how you actually allocate those dollars. So, this gets down to the next layer of what financial focus looks like. If it starts with the forecast, if it starts with just a baseline position of I'm going to evaluate performance based on revenue and based on the actual value being driven in the business, then that also trickles into the details in the business, okay?

So, what I mean is great media buying is attentive to inventory, okay? If you're going to run out of inventory because you have an ad that hits that you didn't see coming, then you understand that you need to pull back your spend on that ad even if the ROAS is great because you know that if you're going to sell yourself out of the inventory, then you are ultimately wasting money by running a two-to-one ROAS when you could run a three-to-one ROAS and let the inventory last longer or whatever, right?

You You're You're having something like that. You're even planning creative. You're giving direction to creative people based off of what inventory is and is not available in the business. It's attentive to unit economics. Great media buying understands how the ROAS target in the ad account is tied to the unit economic profile of the business and in fact to the LTV of customers in that business. And that also means being attentive to the average order of different customers.

A really simple illustration of this is that we organize at AJF Growth our ad sets according to what we call economic unit or sometimes just simply offer. The basic idea is like you might have multiple products in one ad set as long as your inventory positions are are relatively similar. There's no weird weird sort of external circumstance like that. Assuming you have plenty of inventory on multiple products, if those products all produce, let's say a $50 AOV at a 70 points of landed margin, something like that, okay?

Then you can put those products in the same ad set. That's fine, okay? But, if one of those products generally produces a $65 AOV at a 70% margin and one of them produces a $50 AOV, if you put them into the same ad set and you run highest volume, then the same CAC on those two different products is creating a very different ROAS, right? A $25 CAC is creating a two-to-one ROAS on one and a little better than that on the other.

And that's because when the AOV changes, then the CAC has to change with it even if the gross margin percentage is the same because when the AOV changes, in that case, you've got a different margin profile and different contribution margin on each of those products. Now, I'm not even going to get into all the details of that. If you missed it, then you are exactly seeing the point that I'm getting to. Attentiveness to those details is sometimes annoying.

It is in the weeds of the business, but it is the reality of how you ought to do things because if you want to maximize the opportunities of the business, then you need to be attentive to each of those. If you're running manual bids like I suggest you do, you have to be attentive to things like average order value and unit economics and LTV if you want to understand what kind of dollars you should deploy against each product, okay?

Campaign building works the same way, ad set building, etc. All of those things are tuned into financial targets. And this is where my media buying is super complex in a way that people just don't really keep straight. I watched at one point somebody go and look and see that a product of theirs that they were running did not run as high of an LTV. It became very clear that the LTV was going to be lower on product A than it was on product B.

And then I watched them at the same time not change the ROAS targets, not change their CAC targets. And when that happened, I thought to myself, "Wait a minute, I don't understand. You were telling me that the LTV on this product over here is not as good as the LTV on this product over here. Why do you have the same ROAS target for both?" Just thinking that way through the business makes a tremendous difference in the performance of the business overall.

And you have to do that and therefore allocating media dollars towards the right places from a financial perspective is a really core part of what makes good media buying. And it's why media buyers for us are actually not just media buyers, they're growth strategists. The growth strategist in the business is controlling the media spend because the growth strategist is also the person who's tied into the total performance of the brand well beyond just the media spend, okay?

And they have assistants who are helping them with some of the details, but the growth strategist ultimately controls the media spend because it's beyond just allocating media dollars and campaign structures, though that's important, it's because those campaign structures are reflecting part of the economic realities of the business. And if those two are not tied together with clarity, you are leaving money on the table or you're wasting money, one of the two.

You're not growing as fast as you could or you're you're spending too much on in places and creating waste in the business and it's a problem. So, it really matters a lot. Those details are hard to see if you're managing somebody else because there's so many details, but they really matter, okay? Number three, great media buying trusts the machine. In the midst of all of this, when you have financial targets set, when you're attentive to what else is happening in your business, we are just past the point where it is still reasonable for media buyers to be in ad accounts and clicking on and off ads because they think that they are good or bad performing ads.

There is a very occasional circumstance in which that is something a media buyer ought to do, very, very occasional, okay? But, it is rare, okay? Very, very rare. You just you have to know that what Meta Ads is is a gigantic forecasting machine. And it is going to do a better job of forecasting the right allocation of your ad spend than it's going to do a better job of that than any human brain. And when a human goes into the ad account and starts clicking ads on and off and arranging and trying to make sort of like decisions about how to allocate things that are not based off of the the brand's particular needs like a different revenue target for a new versus existing customer or a different revenue target for an inventory or for an item that's low in stock or something like that, you know, or a different CAC target for for those different things, right?

Those are like realities of the business. Beyond that, there's just no argument anymore that it makes sense for media buyers to be in there themselves trying to find the best way to allocate ad dollars and making decisions in the ad account like that. Instead, they should be setting up, leveraging as much as possible the tools that Meta gives you to distribute your ads as efficiently as possible. I just think it doesn't make any sense anymore for anybody to to do this and it hasn't for a very long time.

When you think about what Meta Ads is, like there are 3 million advertisers or whatever it is on Meta, there are hundreds of millions of users. Meta is this insane machine that takes ads in real time and puts them in auctions for every individual person's feed or, you know, for you page or whatever, right? They're allocating ad space in this mass auction in real time, incredible complexity with all of this machine learning and all these things.

And then a human's going to get in there and be like, "Hmm, I think I know better than than that giant machine learning-based machine with incredible financial incentives to get it right. I know better than that. This ad that Meta thinks is good only got three conversions in the last day. I'm going to turn it off." It's just crazy. It doesn't make any sense at all. And if you are still seeing media buyers who are in your ad accounts trying to go and manipulate which ads are winners and losers and move ads from testing to scaling and all this like it's just it's just a it's just a nightmare.

Don't do it and instead have a baseline assumption that you should be leveraging the Bayesian machine learning that powers Meta Ads on your behalf. It will be more efficient in every possible way. I had a client for a while that was so frustrated because no matter what we did to exclude past customers from our ads, about 30% of our UTM last click reported purchases from that client and from that ad account were going to past customers.

They had a really big existing customer file and so getting all those exclusions right just seemed basically impossible no matter what we did. We did all the normal stuff, right? We used the pixel exclusion. We used Klaviyo's dynamic syncing exclusions. We used the Shopify exclusion for Shopify customers, but it didn't matter. We just kept getting all of this stuff. And then one day it changed all at once, very quickly and immediately, and it is like a very clear thing in the data.

It happened all at once. And that was when we used Waste Not. wastenot.io. Waste Not is a tool that is built to leverage AI to eliminate wasted ad dollars from your ad account. The most obvious place for this is in getting your ads to go reach new customers instead of existing customers when those exclusions just won't work right. And I'm telling you, it worked immediately. It got down to like sub 4% or something of our purchases came to on existing customers after we used Waste Not.

Really, really cool tool and they have all kinds of additional parts of the tool that help you eliminate other kinds of waste as well in your ad account. You can go check it out for yourself by going to wastenot.io. wastenot.io and tell them that I sent you. They'll give you a a free trial of the product so you can see its impact in your ad account. And if you tell them I'm the one who sent you, they'll actually extend the free trial for you so you have a little bit longer to test it out and that's >> [music] >> really awesome.

And And it's the kind of thing where you can see right away like I said if it's working or not. So, go check it out. Lots of big brands are using Waste Not. I first heard about them Cody Flom and Jones Road Beauty and the people Yeah, a bunch a bunch of huge huge brands. Cozy Earth is the brand I was thinking of are using it as well. Go to wastenot.io. Link is in the show notes. Check it out. See if it will help your brand eliminate wasted ad dollars, drive your CAC down, drive your reach up, all the things that are good for driving value in the business with your ad spend.

Number four, you should be refusing to waste money. This is another thing that media buying does really badly sometimes, and it can be a really big deal. So, part of this, right, is just that the first two points that I brought up, that financially focused media buying being tied to those things is really important both in the big picture and in the details of your ad account setup. But, there's another element of this, which is just like this assumption.

This kind of dovetails into the trust the machine point of view, okay? And it's things like creative testing campaigns, like I've mentioned before, where you're sort of saying, "We're going to spend money below target to see which ad works." instead of just giving the ad to Meta and saying, "Spend if it's a winner, don't spend if it's a loser." which is what you could do with manual bids, okay? Auto bidding in general is a big miss in this respect, because if you are just allocating ad dollars yourself with auto bids and pushing up budgets because you think there's a winner and pushing it down because there's a loser, it's partly the refusal to trust the machine, but it's also often a willingness to accept a whole bunch of wasted money.

Because what will happen is you'll keep spending on ads that are underperforming because you're like, "Oh, I have to deploy these ad dollars. I just have to. I have to do this according to the plan." Well, look, if your ad dollars are underperforming a target that makes financial sense for the business, stop spending the money. Stop it. Quit spending the money. One of the best ways to make money is to not lose money.

And a media buyer who just hates losing money, wasting money in the ad account, will have a bias towards trusting, building ad accounts in such a way that they trust the machine to allocate towards the best possible outcomes, and then they will set targets in the account, usually with manual bids, to allow Meta to spend only when Meta's forecast is it can reach that target. Now, there will still be times when reality is not quite the same as the forecast, when the manual bid doesn't work exactly correctly, etc.

There's all of these realities of getting all this stuff right, right? It's really complex, but the refusal to waste money is just a really, really big deal. Now, it's weird in some ways to say, on the one hand, I don't turn off ads, on the other hand, I refuse to waste money. But, that's that's actually part of the challenge here that also is part of what makes great media buying. If you are in an ad account and you see an ad that looks like it's performing poorly, maybe the reason it looks like it's performing poorly is just cuz of small sample size noise.

And you have to get really good at understanding that Meta is better at predicting that than you are, and therefore you let it run. Or maybe like it's a weird attribution setting or something like that, where the attribution of the ad, like an ad is living more at the top of the funnel, but it's producing value in the total campaign that is hard to see in the individual ad performance. So, there are ways in which this gets a little bit tricky.

But, the baseline position of saying, "I'm just not going to waste ad dollars in my ad account by doing things like creative testing, like auto bidding, where I'm sort of just spending money without the sort of like forecast of potential return." Shutting that down goes really, really far and makes it really hard. This is why one of the things we see really often when we take over ad accounts is we just see AMERs and MERs go up a bunch, typically, because we we have a really easy time eliminating waste.

And as much as that sounds like the easy thing to do, what we often see is that the baseline first step before you add value in an ad account is actually reducing wasted dollars first. So, so what we often see for ad accounts is spend comes down at first, unless it's a really new account, spend comes down at first as we sort of set manual bids and do things that sort of choke off bad spend in the ad account, and then soon thereafter spend starts coming back up as we see what's really winning in the ad account, what's really performing at target, and then building more creative to go meet that need.

That's the the usual process. All right, fifth, there are moments to manage. This is another thing that's really challenging about media buying and where media buyers need to be tied into the total brand performance. So, I've mentioned the financial element of this challenge, but there's actually another part of this, which is the marketing calendar. And how do you buy media in relation to the marketing calendar? Like a really simple example of this would be the willingness to spend uh or or the plan to spend into key marketing moments with the expectation that you're going to see a performance increase over time off the back of those, right?

So, you you spend a bunch more money leading into you know, at the end of October and early November as you're leading into a holiday or something like that, right? Hitting the Black Friday. These I think are actually some of the hardest things to do in media buying. Getting the financials right of this moment and getting the spend plan right is just really difficult, and you'll probably never get it perfectly. But, finding ways to think about, okay, how should we think about a CAC target in the two weeks leading up to a major moment while we recognize that the payoff of the ads that we're running is going to be delayed because we're going to get a lot of it when we launch that sale, you know, on November 28th or whatever it is, okay?

And so, this is a really, really big challenge. There's also day of week effects, and this is another thing that people miss all the time. One of the reasons I'm a huge fan of manual bids is that everybody understands there's time of day effects on your ads, right? Everybody understands that at midnight in the US, if you're if you're US advertiser, at midnight, your ad spend is going to be a lot lower than it's going to be at 7:00 a.m. or at 5:00 p.m. or whatever it is.

And that's because at midnight people are asleep or at 12:00 p.m. people are at work. And so, there's time of day effects, right? There's fluctuations in spend. But, there are similar time of week effects as well or day of week effects as well, right? Very consistently, there's more available inventory, more people on their phones, etc., on Saturday morning or on Sunday morning than there are again on Tuesday, because nobody is going to work on Saturday or Sunday or most people are not.

They are going to work on Tuesday, and therefore there's a day of week effect in in terms of the available spend. If you're not attentive to that, you're going to miss out on the opportunity on the weekends, and you're going to overspend the weekdays. And do that over the course of a year, and especially when you pile that on top of sale moments and product releases and promos and things like that, you know, it's going to have a really, really big impact on the performance of the business.

Another element of this that I see all the time is brands that have major seasonality to them and botch this. So, they'll have like, you know, a 1.5 ROAS with a bunch of spend on their off-season, right? Maybe it's a summer brand, okay? And so, they'll they'll spend sort of as aggressively as they can in February cuz they hate having low revenue in February, and so they have a 1.5 ROAS there. And then they'll get to July, in their peak season, and in July they'll have a 2.5 ROAS and a bunch more revenue.

And what I always want to say to them is like, "You didn't just blow it in in January or February where you spent at break even or worse or whatever, right?" And I I just made those numbers up, right? So, who knows, okay? You should have not only spent less in that moment, you actually should have spent more in July. Your business should be even more seasonal than it is, because ultimately your unit economics didn't change over that time period.

Your LTV of those cohorts probably didn't change that much, maybe it did. If it did, then go ahead and make the change. But, you know, having some awareness of those kinds of things in the details. So, spending at those moments, both in the day-to-day details of actually managing the spend and managing the budgets and and all that stuff on top of the the sort of weekly and monthly rhythms of seasonality, and then layer on the day of week effects on all those.

And there's a bunch of these things that are happening all the time. Now, manual bids help a bunch with all this stuff. They make it so that you end up capturing the biggest moments in larger ways and suppressing smaller moments a little bit more. They make the they do handle a lot of day of week effects for you. But, this is again where I would say if you're not actually thinking about these things, you often won't see the value of that tool in the way that it is useful.

And that's actually a really, really big problem for brands. They end up missing moments, and they end up allocating dollars. Again, you can get little 5% increases, 10% increases on some of these in a way that really, really helps over the course of it. And speaking of 5 and 10% increases, this brings up one other thing that I haven't even mentioned yet. And when you think about this one, it's going to be so obvious, which is there are a million decisions to make in the actual setup of your ads, ad sets, and campaigns, the details of the platform.

One of the things people say all the time is that Meta ads is constantly changing, you know? Oh, the platform's always changing, all these things, okay. Well, that's true, then a great media buyer is attentive to all of that stuff. And if a great media buyer is attentive to all of that stuff, it's because they know that their ability to use the tool to maximize value for the brand is partly about their ability to harness all of the available tools within the the larger tool of Meta ads, right?

So, I'll give you an example of what I mean. When you go to set up an ad right now, what decision do you make about what attribution, what conversion optimization you use, okay? Should it be incremental? Should it be value optimized? Should it be volume optimized? What's your attribution setting? Is it a one-day click or seven-day click? And are you pairing that with any view conversions, whether it's in one-day engage views or one-day regular views?

Should you be using both to get more signal, view and engage view, or not? Should you be using a manual bid, bid caps, cost caps? Target ROAS? If you're using a manual bid, which one should you use? Should it be bid cap or cost cap? Should it be bid cap or target ROAS? Or should it be multiple of them or or whatever? Um what about when there's a little box that says, "You can optimize website destination." Okay, check that box.

Optimize website destination. Meta then has the freedom to send traffic to different pages on your site. Should you be using shops at all? Should you be using collections at all? How should your DPAs be set up? Should they be designed at all? Like what are the options? Should you be using flexible ads? You can't see which ad is spending if you use flexible ads. Should you use it or should you not? Should you be uh limiting placements at all, etc.?

Now, there are guiding principles that you can use to help you make these decisions even if you can't test every single one of these. And the truth is you can't. You can't actually run a real legit split test on all of these. So, there are some principles you can use at the media buying level, at the sort of broader level, that can help you answer these questions probabilistically. But, Meta is going to tell you and it's going to nudge you towards Every time you duplicate or create a campaign, it's going to say, "Hey, do you want to use this feature, this feature, this feature, this feature?

You're not using them right now. What happens if you do all of these, okay?" And when it tells you those things, it often says, "Advertisers on average saw a 3% ROAS increase on this one or a 5% reduction in CPA on on that one." Right? And so, it's all these little three and five and six percent gains. But, you pile a bunch of those up by making the decision the right decision a lot of times, it actually again makes a really big impact on the total performance of the ad account.

Not the biggest, not the only impact, but it it matters. And so, understanding the details of the platform makes a big difference. At AJF Growth, our way of handling this recently as an agency has been to take this really seriously and say, "We're going to actually assign a person on our team to be sort of the leader on platform expertise every time a new tool comes out." So, they're just going to go look, and they're going to get on a call with Meta, and they're going to uh get testing dollars for our clients, and they're going to do that.

We have a test right now with some free money going to a client to test business AI. I don't know if business AI works from Meta, but we're going to test it. We're going to get free ad dollars to do it, and and so we'll find out, right? And so there's a bunch of things like that that you were making decisions with all the time. You put all that together, and I actually think that not only is it not the case that media buying is dead or whatever, but I actually echo more of what Taylor Holiday has said for a while, which is that it's probably never been harder to be a media media buyer.

I think he's right about that. There are so many things to think about. There have been so much of a proliferation of tools and including measurement tools and and all these things that now it's harder than ever to cut through all the noise because there are a bajillion more decisions to make about what things to use and what things not to use. And so having point of view to see through all that really matters. Different people are going to tell you all kinds of different things, and some of them are going to be right and some of them are going to be wrong.

And there is a real playbookingness to this where people are going to say, "Oh, every brand is different." And that's true in one part of of brands, but in this part of brands it's actually not, I think. In this part there actually are things that work better and worse on average and that you should assume basically work better and worse until you have very strong evidence that they work particularly better or particularly worse for your particular brand.

Until you have that very strong evidence, you should regress to the mean and assume that the the generalized thing is true for your particular brand. That's what we see over and over, right? We just don't really see major problems in our brands based off of media buying. We see all kinds of major problems in our brands, of course. They're regular brands. It's not like we get everything right all the time, but it's typically not a media buying problem when it's a problem.

It's typically something else. And so finding a perspective on how to navigate all of this stuff that's tied to financial outcomes and that's creating real value in the business is critical in the midst of all of it. Media buying is not dead. In fact, I think it's harder than ever. I think it's more important than ever, and I see brand after brand after brand struggle because they can't get it right. You can and should get it right.

Again, it's the largest line item in your business for many businesses listening to this. It is worth your time to get it and your money to understand it and to get it correct. >> [music] >> A whole bunch of fun episodes are coming up. Uh and uh I'm really excited about it, so you should subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. I have a really interesting take on influencers coming from a client of mine right now who like preview just went and had dinner with a bunch of influencers that she works with in Tennessee because that's the way she approaches these relationships, that level of high touch, buying them all dinner, spending an evening with them.

Really cool perspective, very different than the spray and pray approach that you hear from a lot of people. You're not going to want to miss that episode. And then amid the myth, the legend, Ezra Firestone coming back on the podcast in a number of weeks. I've got a crazy story of a brand that was on death's door and that now is seeing the best growth it's ever had. That story's coming very soon. Uh so a lot of really good stuff coming, and you're not going to miss it.

Subscribe wherever you're watching or listening, and and don't forget to, of course, leave a comment on anything that I've said in this episode because I do read all of those and would love to interact with you about any of them. Don't also forget to go follow up with my sponsors for this episode, the great people at Behind the Scenes Studio, uh btsstudio.co, and Waste Not, wastenot.io. Links for both of those on the show notes, and you'll want to uh go check both of those out.

Tell them that I sent you. Oh, otherwise, oh, if you want to get in contact with me, of course, podcast@ajfgrowth.com is the place to do that, or go to ajfgrowth.com. If you're interested in telling me a little bit about your business, you want me to look into it, ajfgrowth.com, fill out the form there. I will see it. Uh even if I am not the right person to work with you, I might have a referral for someone who is, so um tell me a little bit about it and maybe I could be some help.

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