It Took Me 1,000+ Hours to Figure Out Facebook Ads, But I'll Teach You in 14 Minutes transcript

If you're feeling completely stuck running Facebook ads, I'm going to show you how to break through and get real results. The truth is, if you're struggling to make your ads profitable, it's probably not because you made some [music] catastrophic mistake. It's most likely because you're missing the big picture on how Facebook ads works. So, by the end of this video, you'll learn exactly what took me thousands of hours to figure out on my own, and you'll see the exact systems that we've used to scale over a 100 e-commerce businesses, some of which were hardly breaking even and are now way into the green, extremely profitable, like this brand, Harvest Dental, that's driving over a 12x [music] return on ad spend in just the last 28 days alone.

Now, let's set some groundwork. If you don't know me already, I run a business called The Moonlighters. We're an ad agency that helps seven and eight figureure e-commerce businesses scale. And before running the Moonlighters, I started my career at Vayner Media. And after that, I went on to scale BarkBox, eventually bringing the company to a public New York stock exchange worth over $2.5 billion. And one of the things I've realized along the decade of doing this is that there's usually two scenarios that brand owners find themselves in.

First, they're either just starting out and can't get something to stick. They're not able to get over a hump and see enough sales volume to satisfy that itch. or they've hit a wall. You've hit that wall and you're trying to figure out what golden nugget do I need to get over that hump. Everything that I'm about to go through is for those two situations because I believe that covers 90% of issues that brand owners experience.

So, kicking off with the first pillar, goals. And I want to mention when it comes to this first pillar, I have an entire section dedicated within my school community on goals, including templates and sheets that you could steal for yourself. The link's down in the description. You could join. And if you don't want to join, I'm still going to go through everything in depth right now. So, when it comes to your goals, the very important thing that you need to focus on when it comes to Facebook ads is setting what I call a king goal.

This is the most important goal that overrides all other goals. Think about this as if this goal is achieved, nothing else matters. I don't care if my CPM is $50,000. If my return on ad spend or my profit is X, then I'm a happy person. And the reason I bring this up, I think this is so top of mind for me right now, is because we just had someone who works with us at the Moonlighters come to us with a flurry of questions essentially asking for us to measure on 20 different goals.

They want everything from cost per acquisitions, return on ad spend targets, cost perclick targets, CPM targets, everything including cohort analysis as well. And yes, those are important and you should still look at those, but you should not measure yourself on every single goal. So what I've built here is a very simple break even model. You could essentially copy this for yourself, but what you just need to know is that at break even, you're going to grow your business the quickest.

All you want to do is start and understand what your break even actually is and then stair step up to establish how much profit you want to take from your business. For example, if you do a million in revenue and you have a million in cost, you make $0. Let's say you want 10%. You drive a million in revenue, you should have $900,000 in total cost associated to the business. therefore paying yourself out or profiting on the business 10% or $100,000.

So, when it comes to your break even model, really all you're thinking about is what are my cost of goods? What are my fixed costs associated to my brand? What's my average order value? How many orders am I currently getting? And when I continue to scale, when I spend more money, when I acquire more customers, what economies of scale do I get? And what economies of scale are is as you grow, do things get cheaper. So whether you're working with a really expensive agency, whether you hired a contractor, or whether you're doing it yourself, give yourself the grace of giving yourself one goal, don't let all the minutia matter too much because it's just going to cloud your headsp space.

And just related to that measurement is attribution. People get really caught up in using things like triple whale, hyros, and just third party attribution methodologies. And while those are good in some cases, for the most part, just using standard default 7-dayclick, 1-day view attribution while looking and optimizing on incremental attribution in Facebook gets you about 90 plus% of the way there with a $0 price tag.

Having all of that data is literally the job of meta to make your ads more optimized. So before you try to optimize on a third-party attribution tool, even if it's the most expensive and the best, the best is the one you're already using, meta ads. Okay? And the last part about goals, and this one's pretty tactical. Your goals are going to have a direct correlation to how aggressively you can scale. Don't worry about your return on ad spend if your goal is profit.

What we care about the most is how much money our businesses make and what our bank accounts say. While it's great to optimize and look at things like rorow adors and CPAs and stuff like that, the most important metric is profit. So, the lower you set your target return on ad spend or your target CPA, the more you can actually spend to acquire an army of customers. There's one metric that is unmeasurable in all ad platforms.

It's word of mouth. The more customers you acquire, the more they tell their friends. The bigger your community is, the more they tell their friends. This word of mouth is the exponential X factor that every single growing brand actually uses to grow. All right, moving on to my second pillar frameworks. Now, the framework that we use is called the M3 method. This is a framework that I developed after my decade of doing marketing.

The framework essentially falls into three buckets. The first is campaign structure. We like to structure everything with proper swim lanes in our ad account. So, let me show you exactly what I mean. The M1 which is the campaign structure focuses on a modularbased system. Now within this system we have a testing campaign which is our prospecting CBO. We have a retargeting campaign and then we have a retention campaign for our existing customers.

What we really just like to do here is make sure we're spending as much as possible on new customers which is going to be test and retarget these two buckets here. And then only spend what we need on retaining our existing customers to get them to purchase again and again and again. And I like to think of these as swim lanes for the very reason that audiences could overlap a bit. Some people are going to actually be engaged and flow into new.

Some people are going to be existing and flow into engaged. Things happen. The pixels, the tracking. It's not perfect. And water could flow between the lanes, but the swimmer in the lane is going to stay straight in their lane. And we know we're the person who's directing the swimmers. We're going to decide, are we spending our money on new audiences, which would be here? Are we spending our money on engaged? Are we spending our money on existing?

Obviously, you want to spend most of your money on new customer acquisition when it comes to Facebook ads. And in case you don't know where to actually find how much you're spending already on new versus engaged versus existing, you can go into your ad account. You can click this little button up here, select audience segments, and then you can see your new engage and existing audiences very easily. And the next framework in this section is creative.

You need to have a constant creative flow to grow and scale any account. And the rule that I like to follow is a simple 8020 rule. And the best way to build your creatives is by using, yes, that 80/20 rule. 80% of your time should focus on new variations of existing winning creatives. Let's define a variation. A variation is not a tiny little tweak. It is not a name change at the top. It's not a color change. It's not a filter.

A variation is a major shift in an already functioning high-erforming ad. So, if you know the concept as a whole with one specific UGC influencer works well, then get that same influencer to make a similar video. Just do it on a different day. Wear a different outfit. That person could be the concept. That same idea might function in a little bit of a different way. Let's go broader. Let's say you have 10 different influencers that you work with and you realize after looking at the data that whenever that content creator is filming in their car, it works better.

I consider this to be a content pillar. Now a content pillar means you could repeat it with anyone. So now you have found a content pillar that you're spending most of your time on creating as many new variants of that as possible. The goal here is to beat your baseline week by week by week. The goal is not to try to quadruple your performance. The key of all of this is to compound your results to continue to win. Good ads today are going to fatigue 6 months from now.

And it's your job to make sure that creative flywheel is always in a solid cycle. And the last framework that over and over again I've seen be successful is a graduation system. All a graduation system is is a place to dedicate the most amount of spend in your ad account. This is a singular campaign. It's not magic. It doesn't do anything tactical or special. But what it does is it guarantees that a chunk of ad spend goes to your best performing ads.

So how this works is when you're looking at your prospecting CBO incremental attribution, you're taking your top ads and you're graduating them into a single scale campaign. This scale campaign is a single ad set. Usually, it has a bunch of top performing ads in it. Anywhere from five to even 20 plus ads. The key is that you're just spending as much as possible on your already proven ads. Now, when it comes to our frameworks, the important part is that you just stick to a system.

You need to understand this system like the back of your hand. You should really know your exact ad account structure and be able to write it out on a piece of paper without having to look at your ad account. You should generally know when I have new ads, this is what I do with them. every week I do this, this, and this at this, this, and this time. As long as you follow a system that's allowing you to focus on other things in your business and then focus on ads when it's most important, this is going to create massive operational efficiencies in your whole entire business.

And now our third pillar, the tactics. Now again, every single one of these tactics can be found in our advanced optimizations within our school community. This is super detailed 15 to 30 minute videos on every single one of these small tactics. It is so critical that you nail these down, especially as you start to scale. The first tactic that I have been obsessed with for years is the day of week analysis. Now, I'll tell you a story about this.

During my time at BarkBox, I would come into the office every single day, Monday morning, 9:00 a.m., and I would address my team. We'd all get into a conference room and I'd look around and I'd say, "Wow, great weekend, guys. We really did good." And then it clicked. The weekends are better, so we need to be spending more on the weekends. And while I can't disclose exact numbers, you should know that we spent so much more on the weekends when the days of the week were stronger than the week days.

And every business that I've ever seen follows some sort of pattern. So look at your days of the week, understand where you do more volume already, and make sure you orient that spend to the better performing days of the week. For example, your Mondays and Tuesdays might be pretty slow days and your Wednesdays through Fridays might be really strong. Now, don't worry about the learning phase. Just a little hint, it's not actually real.

Spend your money where you're most likely to make money back. Don't be a guinea pig for Facebook and spend the same amount of money every single day of the week. And now, we want to take this exact same philosophy and apply it to every available breakdown in Facebook. So, start with your platforms. Think about Facebook versus Instagram. Then go to placements. Think about Facebook reels versus Instagram reels versus Facebook feed verse Instagram feed vers stories verse WhatsApp.

Go down the list and evaluate everything. What you're going to find is that there are a few placements that drive the overwhelming majority of the results. And while you don't want to exclude everything, just look for outliers. Look for things that you should not be spending your money on. And if you could prove mostly through incremental attribution that there is a placement you need to X, then do it. After platform imp placement, the next thing I like to do is age.

Age is a longtime overspending issue in so many ad accounts. This was especially a problem in January of 2025. I'll tell you a fantastic story. Seemingly out of nowhere, a brand came to us and could not figure out how on earth their return on ad spend dropped from about a 2 to2. And what we uncovered after a very deep audit is that the account started spending massively on ages 65 plus. CPMs were very expensive. CPCs were very expensive.

And by literally just removing 65 plus from the equation, their entire account, I'm not kidding, instantly jumped right back up again up to that 1.5 to 2x return on ad spend. And I'll give you a pro tip here for sticking around for so long. If you see your youngest age groups working and you have an appropriate product, consider running to even younger age groups like 16 and 17 year olds. These markets are severely underutilized and they get ads for kind of crappy things.

So you might have the ability to position yourself to that age group as long as of course it is appropriate. And you would have guessed it, we want to do the same exact thing with gender. Make sure you're spending appropriately for male versus females. Make sure if you are a male oriented product and you have a lot of spend on females that you actually model those ads to females. For example, you might be gifting. You might have a gifted product, hence it going to a different audience.

You just need to make sure you're actually understanding this data because if you don't, you're really not understanding who your ads are even being served to, which is a huge, huge part of the creative process and every input that eventually goes into that output that we all look for, which is profit. Now, one last thing. The point of this video was to show you key pillars that are almost timeless and really relevant for 2026.

But if you want to stay on top of what's actually working right now, then join the over 100 plus people that have joined the school community for the doors that we just reopened and ask any question you want anytime and get all of the alpha from me and my team on a very regular basis. That's all for today. I hope everyone got a ton of value out of this video and I'll see you on the other