DON’T Use One Facebook Ads Campaign (Do This Instead) transcript

If you're running Facebook ads, then you've probably heard about the one campaign method, a method that claims to be so good that all you need to do is throw all your ads in one ad set inside just one campaign. Now, as with most things, this is in fact too good to be true, and I'm going to completely debunk this strategy as someone who has spent over half a billion dollars in ads across 80 accounts that we manage at The Moonlight Ers and has driven well north of a billion and a half dollars in revenue for the clients that we manage and throughout my 10-year marketing career.

In this video, I'm also going to show you exactly how you can set up your campaigns while using some of the methodology of the one campaign method, but not actually just using one campaign. So, I'll break down each of the campaigns that you need. I'll share exactly precisely why you need them, and we're going to debunk some of the issues right now because I don't want to see hundreds and hundreds of advertisers wasting cash at the wrong place at the wrong time, which you absolutely will do with a one campaign method.

First things first, let me show you the one campaign method and why it completely does not work. Okay, so this first account is using the one campaign method. Now, in this case, this brand is doing quite well with it, but they could be doing so much better, and that's the key thing we need to understand. When we look inside this account, we see a single campaign that's been active for this period. It spent $128,000, which is a lot of money.

It's driven 4,900 purchases at a $26 cost per acquisition to drive over half a million dollars in revenue at a ROAS of 4.39. So, really, really good metrics. However, the devil is in the details as it usually is because when we just do two breakdowns, we completely debunk this method 100%. So, first things first, what we need to look at is our audience segments. So, if you go to breakdowns and audience segments, we're now going to see the distinction between new audiences here, existing customers, and engaged customers.

Now, if you don't already know what these are, I highly recommend setting them up. This is going to show you, if set up correctly, where you're spending your money on new audiences versus existing customers versus engaged customers. And you can see in this case, around $55,000 is being spent on engaged and existing customers, where new audiences spends $73,000. And because this is just using one campaign, Facebook has the ability to freely shift your budget from new audiences to existing customers to engage customers.

You have absolutely no control over who specifically is receiving what ads, and way more important than that, you have no control over how much spend your existing versus your engaged versus your new audiences are spending. Now, on top of this being an issue, the more important question strategy work tremendously well for? If you're a brand spending $10,000 plus a day, even 20, 30, 40,000 dollars plus a day, this could actually work.

And the reason this could work is because as you spend more and more and more, Facebook can't just keep hitting your existing customers. They have to go find new customers. But if you're one of those businesses that's spending $500 a day, $1,000 a day, $2,000 a day, Facebook is going to overspend like crazy on your existing and your engaged customers. Imagine if you were this brand right here that I have on screen, and you thought for sure that when you're putting money into your prospecting campaign, you think you're spending on more new customers and new customers, but in actuality, you continue to spend on engaged and existing customers.

And I'm going to show you one more breakdown that proves this even further. When we go to our column set, we go to compare attribution settings, and we click incremental attribution. Now, what incremental attribution shows us is which conversions happened because of Facebook ads. This is not accounting for people who would have converted without these ads, and I think this is a very, very important distinction to make, especially in this campaign setup.

Reason being is very clear. So, if you look first at our return on ad spend new audiences right here, the first thing you would think is it's only at a 3.3 compared to existing at a six and engaged at a 5.4. Therefore, you should absolutely spend more on engaged and existing, right? Cuz that's where you're getting your highest ROI. Now, that's debatable in and of itself, but let's ignore that argument for a second. When we use incremental attribution, incrementally, our engaged audience only drives a two all the way down from a 5.4.

That's a 66% reduction. And our existing customers only drive a 1.3. That is a massive 80% plus reduction in return on ad spend, where our new audience, of course, it drops. It drops from 3.3 to 1.6, which is a 50% reduction, but it is the least reduced of them all. So, where do we actually want to spend our money? We actually want to spend our money on new audiences and engaged audiences. We are way overspending on existing customers.

And the final thing I'll show you to absolutely validate this is our reach to impressions ratio. Look at our existing customers and our engaged customers. They cap out at 165,000 and 155,000, which means our frequencies on these are really high, which we can see right here. Our frequency is eight on engaged customers and 14.8 on existing customers, where our new audiences are only getting hit on average five times, and we're able to reach an entire new market of 1.75 million people.

Okay, so what should you do? What is the actual best strategy that aligns with Andromeda, that aligns with some parts of the one campaign method, but ultimately doesn't ever put you in this situation where you're way overspending on existing customers, way overspending on engaged customers. Now, first thing I'll say is if you are one of those huge brands spending $20,000 a day, go ahead and try something like this because you will be able to outpace and spend a whole lot more on new customers.

It is the businesses that are spending $1,000 a day, $500 a day that are going to get wrecked by this strategy. They might get higher return on ad spends in a very short period of time and then get toasted because they're not acquiring new customers, which if you don't look at these breakdowns, you're never going to know. So, what would I suggest? What do we do here at The Moonlight Ers? I'm going to show you the inside of an account and exactly how we run it.

We run all of our accounts on a modular setup. We call this the M3 method. Now, the first part of the M3 method is structure, and that structure always has swim lanes. Swim lanes are so important. We have clear prospecting, clear retargeting, and clear retention. I don't want anyone to get this confused with top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel because it is very different. We are not curating creative to different parts of the funnel.

We are not saying that the user starts here and works their way down the funnel eventually purchasing all the way at the bottom of the funnel. What we are saying is that we want to treat new customer acquisition, engaged acquisition, and existing customer retention as three different swim lanes. So, how do we actually set this up? We're going to work backwards. We're going to start with our retention-based campaign setups, retargeting next, and then prospecting finally, which is the biggest, most important thing you need to focus on.

Starting at retention. Inside the retention campaign, you're generally only going to have a few different packs or a few different ad sets. In this case, we have one cuz we're not spending that much on retention. Now, the most important thing on retention is that we have all-time purchasers and 180-day purchasers mixed together. That's your Klaviyo audience combined with your pixel audience. I'll show you exactly what that looks like.

Inside the ad set, if we scroll down to our audience section, first things first, you're going to notice Advantage Plus is off. Next thing is we have our location set up properly, our ages are wide, our genders are all on, and we are including purchasers 180 days and our two lists from Klaviyo, which are our Klaviyo purchasers 180 and our Klaviyo purchasers all time. You'll notice also we do not select use as a suggestion, and that's it.

That is our entire setup of retention. We're just putting all of our creatives into this as long as they apply to existing customers. For example, we're not going to be putting in, you know, new customer offers within here, but we are going to put in new products, new arrivals, anything that's specifically curated to existing customers or just best sellers for them to keep coming back and buy again. The next campaign is retargeting.

Now, retargeting gets slightly more complex. We have three active campaigns that are recommended campaigns for retargeting. Again, you can go beyond this, but these are our initial recommendations. Every brand is slightly unique. In this case, we have add to cart 90 days, website visitors 30 days, and then Instagram plus Facebook engagers over the last 14 days. These are really, really important because they cover the base of who's engaged with our brand in a short period of time.

You have your add to carts, anyone who's actually gotten to the very bottom of the funnel and actually added a product to cart. You have your website visitors over the last 30 days, and then finally, you have anyone who's interacted on your Instagram posts and even your ads over the last two weeks. Now, I'll just show you one of these audiences so you have a better idea of what exclusions we set in place. You'll notice right off the bat, our audience definition is going to be narrow.

That's cuz we are strictly targeting a very small cohort. And if we go down to the audience, Advantage Plus is off. We have our custom audiences inclusions and exclusions. Our inclusions are our Klaviyo website visitors and our website visitors, so that's a hard list from your CRM plus your normal website pixel 30 days, and we are excluding purchasers 180 days, purchasers 180 from Klaviyo, and purchasers all time from Klaviyo.

And then finally, we are never using the use as a suggestion because that would take this audience and completely ignore all the exclusions, completely ignore all the targeting. We want to uncheck this box. And then finally, last but not least, the prospecting CBO. Now, we were just talking about that one campaign method. The one campaign method has a great philosophy behind it. It's a philosophy that you could just throw all your ads together and create a hyper competitive environment.

And if you've been watching my content for the last 2 years, I have been stressing the importance of a hyper competitive environment. It has never ever ever been more important, especially with Andromeda, to put all your creatives in a competitive place. And that's exactly what we do in our prospecting CBO. The prospecting CBO is set up in such a way where we have dozens of packs. And you could see this right here. This is someone's account on my team who's doing this perfectly perfectly well.

You could see one pack has spent the majority of the cash because those are the winners. And the cool thing about this is this is not the first pack we launched, right? In fact, there's dozens of other packs that we've tested. So, the way that we set this up is very simple. We have a primary prospecting CBO campaign. And every time we launch new creatives, those get launched into a new ad set, aka a new pack. Now, this whiteboard is something you may have seen before.

And I really really want to focus this on the prospecting campaign. If we scroll into this prospecting campaign, I want to explain why this is hyper competitive and why this actually does exactly what the one campaign method is supposed to do. In this environment, what you have are individual packs. And every time you launch new creative, you launch a new pack. The winning ads rise to the top naturally. And the losing ads get very very little spend.

And most of the time, we actually keep those ads active. That's your choice if you want to pause those ads that are only getting a few dollars in spend, or if you want to continue to keep them active. The great part about this setup and why I like it more is because the ads each have learnings. And every time you add a new ad to an existing ad set, you exchange the learnings. Meaning, we add a new ad up here. And then suddenly, the budget needs to be distributed to not only these four creatives, but an additional ad in the mix.

That's what happens in the one campaign method. The reason we always launch new ads in a new pack is because they don't interfere with any budget allocation only on the campaign level. So, we're not interfering with any audience learnings, which are happening on the ad set levels. We're only interfering with campaign budget optimization, which is literally the function of campaign budget optimization is to add more ads so that it could spend the cash in the appropriate best performing spot for you.

The other big key difference of this campaign structure is that it allows you to easily graduate winners to the top. So, in this setup, we graduate winners in two places. If you have a winning ad, a killer ad, you graduate that into the winners bucket, which goes into two spots. It goes into the scale campaign at the top of the account, and it goes into interest groups, single interest ad sets, which increases the efficiency of the broad ad sets because it actually finds new pockets of audiences that expand your total broad audience again and again and again.

Now, keep in mind, every single strategy can change. Every single strategy will change. I have changed my strategy on this channel right here over the last 2 years with a little tweaks and modifications based on the millions and millions and millions of dollars that we spend across our entire client portfolio here at The Moonlighters. So, look, if you want a real pro that's actually going to take the learnings across dozens and dozens of different ad accounts that we manage at The Moonlighters to make sure you never misstep, you never implement the wrong strategy, you never kill what's already working, and that you can get your hands off of ads management within your business, then click the link down below in the description.

And by the way, I also have a link to my entire M3 method, which breaks down this structure plus M2 plus M3, which you can get 100% for free, again, down in the description. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below, and I will see you all in the next one.