8 Steps To Fixing A Broken Meta Ads Account transcript

Everybody's ad account breaks. Everybody's business breaks at some point when everything goes wrong. Today on the show, I'm going to tell you about what I do to triage what is wrong, how to communicate about it with team members and clients, and ultimately how to fix it as fast as possible. All right, I'd be lying to you if I tried to tell you that this is not based on recent experience. Uh it's really strange thing right now.

I'm recording in the beginning of July. Uh, I've had some brands in June who had I have one brand who had its best month ever uh in a non-h holiday month. Uh, and I have another brand who just it was just like a month-long fire and disaster. And I'm just going to tell you upfront, the owner of that brand is very likely to listen to or watch this podcast. And I have no problem with that because I have spoken clearly about all of these these things to that business operator.

And I'm going to be really honest with you about what uh about how we have gone about fixing a broken ad account and returning some stability to that ad account and what we're kind of still doing about it because it's been a really interesting process. I mean this happens for everybody. At some point you are humming along working on your meta stuff and something changes. Your strategy overhauls because of some financial reason.

You you just find ads are just not working. Media buying goes haywire. you know, something happens and all of a sudden all the attention of the organization goes to Meta because no matter how much you're diversified from Meta, like it's probably driving a really significant portion of your revenue. For a lot of brands, it's driving overwhelmingly the top proportion uh uh proportion of their new customer acquisition and of their revenue.

And so, and so we had a situation recently where in the midst of a lot of changes and for a lot of reasons, our ad account was on fire. And it just was a huge amount of my effort in the last bunch of weeks. And I I thought it'd be a good time to reflect on how I approach problem solving that, especially now that I really do see ourselves as on the other side of that because um because while we're not quite yet to where we really want to get going, two, we are we are really stabilized and and no longer in sort of the true danger zone that we were in before.

So, okay. So, let's talk about this. I have, I think, seven, eight steps uh that are going to be a combination of what to do in a broken ad account, what to do when things are just not working well and also what to do interpersonally and relationally with team members. This is a crucial part of it. Um I'm coming at this from the side of an agency, but this would be true if you're a brand side as well. Um or uh maybe if you are an agency or freelance person, there's some stuff that be uniquely helpful to you here.

So, number one, okay, when your ad account breaks, and what I mean by that is like suddenly your performance just is way worse than it previously was or for whatever reason you realize you need to overhaul your strategy. Now, I've seen this happen a lot of times where people make financial assumptions about their businesses that turn out to not be true and then you have to make changes or you change your media buying approach and something isn't working or whatever.

So, there's a lot of reasons this happen happens, but for some reason or another, performance gets meaningfully worse than before. And the very first thing you have to do when you see this happen is eliminate technical issues. That is job number one. Um, and by technical issues, I mean a number of different things. The first is like a broken data set. Um, this, you know, I've seen this happen recently with with brands where like something happens with their pixel that breaks.

Um, and and you and either like it's a short-term problem where you can't really do much about it or it's a longer term problem where where it's it's like a fundamental change to the way meta does things. Think about like iOS 14.5, right? Um, when that happened, right, there was a fundamental pixel level issue and job number one was to solve that as best as you could. Now, in iOS 14.5, you couldn't do much about it immediately. it was really hard to figure out, but having awareness of that problem was a really important step to solving it.

Now, what I'm thinking of is like somebody sometimes will install something on your site like add an app to do something and it breaks all of your tracking and if that happens, you need to know about it. Or somebody overhauls, launches, goes live with a new site and it breaks all of your tracking. Like whatever it is, um the health and wellness uh the health and wellness designation right now is a big part of this conversation where people are saying like is this breaking things?

Whatever it is, that is the first thing you need to solve is if there is a technical issue, if there's a data issue, you've got to solve that first because if meta is not getting uh data back uh that it needs to optimize for purchase, it is not going to work. The whole thing breaks at that point if it cannot properly conversion optimize. And I'll tell you in in this process in for this particular client, this is an area where I am not sure whether or not we had had any broken pixel issues along this path.

Now, we're doing all kinds of things to solve that over the longer term and and um and and with the stabilization that we have now, I don't think we have like something deeply deeply fundamentally broken. Okay? But, uh you know, I am not technical. I'm just not. And and so these are the kinds of issues that I am too slow to um to be aggressive about. I need to be more aggressive about these kinds of things. And I realized about this myself because it's outside of my core knowledge base.

So, when I go to try to solve problems, I try to solve them within the things that I know best. And because I'm not very technical, that doesn't include data set issues and pixel issues, right? So, um, so that is like the first thing and and increasingly is like becoming SOP at AJF Growth where we're going, okay, if something if something looks really wrong, check the reporting, check the data set, make sure that that is fixed first.

Okay. Um, so uh and and and that has to be like a a an SOP style reminder to myself because it's not an instinct that I have. And for other people like me, I think you need to get serious about that as That's actually one of my biggest takeaways from this whole process is like do more work more aggressively to eliminate this. I'm going to talk more about that concept in a little bit but to make sure that is not the fundamental problem.

Okay. Um similarly a meta overspend is an issue like if you see suddenly that uh performance is getting meaningfully worse and spend is aggressive like you might be in a meta overspend moment. You need to go solve that right away. U that's just where you should just be really aggressive about killing campaigns etc. This that's like a very momentto moment thing. A broken website is very similar to this. This definitely happens where somebody makes a change on the website, somebody installs a a piece of software, it screws everything up and you you're like your ad account looks bad kind of for the day.

And my again my instinct is to be a little bit slow actually to to overreact because I because of some reasons I'm going to talk about later. But anytime you see performance that looks out of keeping with your historical norms, if that looks, you know, not like it's a just a small sample size thing, and again, I'm going to have more to say about that in a second. uh then you need to go eliminate that right away. You it may or may not be the problem, but you need to know for sure that it's not the problem.

You this is like a drop everything, everybody quit what they're doing, go try and buy something on the website and make sure it worked. Go check that the pixel is firing. Like if checkout is broken, that's like something you need to know. Those are the kind of things where you just need to rally everybody and make sure that if you have problems in your ad account that that is not the problem because if it is, it's a big one.

Another thing to watch out for, by the way, is manual mistakes um in your ad account. like somebody set the wrong optimization or attribution setting. You included view attribution when you normally don't or you don't include it when you normally do. Um you set the wrong budget. You set the wrong bid. Bid is a hidden one that's down at the adset level. Maybe you're looking at the campaign level. You need to go through and check all the manual things.

And so the point of all of those is that at the technical level, at the data level, at the website level, job number one, anytime you see your meta account is broken is eliminate those things first. Make sure that those are not the source of your troubles. If they are, you need to act quickly and solve them quickly. And in fact, these are the best kind of problems because they are if they can be solved. If it's not like iOS 14.5, if they can be solved, typically it means you don't have any core strategic problems.

You just have like a technical issue that needs to get worked on. Okay. U this is why recently uh we have moved to a new data set installation partner who I just trust a lot because um because I am not technical um and I don't mind saying it. I'm not being paid by them. In fact, I I said no to a referral deal for them because I want to pile up some more wins first and I just I want to be above board here. But we've started working with Elevar um because we uh especially because not only are they just sort of like known best-in-class um for data set installations and for good tracking for meta, but also because I need somebody who I can call when something breaks who I trust and because it's not me.

And especially if you're like me and you're not technical, having that person on hand. I've just found over and over and again, things come up. And so having somebody like that is really important. Okay, number two. Number two, in that case, you need to watch out for small sample volatility. Some of you think your ad account is broken and it's not. It is simply a matter of small sample size volatility and that is it.

Okay, I actually recorded a podcast episode recently called Meta Ads Are Not Volatile. You only think they are. And the basic point is that almost everybody overreacts to small sample size with meta. Especially the more campaigns and less purchases you have per campaign. Uh like listen, if you're spending less than $1,000 per day, uh you are, let's call it less than $2,000 per day, you are going to see a wide range of outcomes daily with your purchase behavior.

Like it is not because something is necessarily broken that your rorowass goes from one to one and a half to two to one and a half to two to two and a half to one and a half to one day over day over day over day. Right? I just made those numbers up, but you get the idea, right? That's that's not because something is broken. That's because the smaller the sample size you are working in, the more uh the the wider the range of potential outcomes.

Small sample size noise is something you must deeply understand if you are going to run ads on meta, especially if you're not spending that much money yet. This becomes less and less of a problem the more money you're spending because sample sizes get a lot bigger a lot faster. But uh but if you are not spending huge amounts of money on meta, you have just got to get comfortable with daily volatility. I've said before, I don't always I actually resisted doing daily um reporting for my clients sort of in Slack saying here's what yesterday's data was because you manage what you measure and if you measure daily outcomes you're going to respond to daily outcomes and sometimes that's really helpful again especially if you're if you're bigger and you're less volatile and and there's times and so we do do it right we we have done this but I just know there is this thing where people overreact to small sample sizes and small sets of data um and and it's you just have to keep reminding yourself and and I do this is a media buyer.

Like I'll I'll end up just everything in me wants to go raise a bid cap because something is working well or or because the AOV looks a little bigger that day or something like that. Like there just all of those things. It's really hard to resist the temptation to go you have a bias towards action. Uh and and so yeah, so that that is uh that is another part of this internalize the reality of small sample size volatility.

It's very possible that nothing is broken when you think everything is broken. You're just dealing with small sample sizes. And if you flip a coin a few enough times, the example I gave in the other podcast that somebody else came up with that I loved so much, if you roll a 20-sided die, uh you know, there's a 5% chance it lands on any given number. But the actual range of number outcomes when you do that is actually really really wide.

So you're not going to get 5% all the time. Okay. All right. Uh the more dice rolls you have, the more likely that that number is going to come in 5%. But but with not that many dice rolls, there's a wide range of outcomes. Okay. Number three, assuming you've eliminated technical issues, assuming that you have watched out for small sample volatility and that you really are struggling. Okay? Uh and by the way, problems are harder to see if you're in small sample sizes because it might you might just think it's volatility, but it's not.

Okay. Number three, next, and this is so important, assume you are the problem. Assume you are the problem. Just there with technical issues, broken websites, etc., and small sample size volatility, we have now eliminated most of the things that are outside of our control. And the act the behavior you must have the response you must have at some point in the process is to assume that your strategy your media buying your creative approach something like that is the problem.

Um generally the technical stuff is actually not the issue. Most times most times there are not technical problems. Okay. Most times in fact um the issue for most accounts most of the time is you there is mostly not a macroeconomic thing weighing you down. If it's happening, it happens slowly over time, not all at once. Um, if and so and and if there's a macroeconomic issue, guess what? You can't control it. So recognize it.

Contextualize your performance relative to that. But boy, it's really hard to know how much macroeconomics are affecting your business. I heard a lot of people talk about how bad June was for their brands. And like I told you, I had one brand that just had the best uh month they've ever had in their entire seven-year history or something like that. uh that was not in November or December. Okay. So, and they're extremely holiday brand.

So, like yeah, you you just you you yeah, macroeconomic factors are issues, but like for that brand, it wasn't last month. And so, now again, I'm not trying to uh to pretend that macroeconomic things are not real. They are real. They're very real, but you can't control them. And so, you have to just behave within the things you can control and manage your next dollar spent best. Okay? So, assume. If you assume that you are the problem, this actually has a a surprising effect which is it increases your agency and the ability to problem problem solve.

Okay, if you assume that you are the problem in some way or that you have to fix it, then now it allows you to put the ball back in your hands and say, "Okay, I my job as a media buyer internally at a brand, as a freelancer, as an agency, as an operator, whatever it is, my job is to generate the best possible outcomes I can for this brand." And so, how am I going to do that given the things that I know in front of me right now?

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Okay, I get that. I really do. Okay. But I just don't think that is the kind of thing you should be thinking about very much because you know if meta is the problem, what are you going to do about it? You're going to probably keep advertising on meta. So like don't don't sit here and say like ah meta is so bad right now. First of all, it's like a datalless comment, okay? Like you just what does it doesn't even mean anything to anybody?

Who knows what meta is so bad right now even means? But like you just you just can't do anything about it. And so instead do everything you can to assume that you're the problem because there are things that are outside of your control for sure, but think about the things that are in control. Once you go from that perspective, now you can start taking action. Okay? So this is like the triage order for me. Eliminate technical issues, eliminate small sample volatility.

And now assume you are the problem and that means you go to your next set of problems and solutions. Okay. So now let's talk about number four. Number four, and this is another great comment that somebody else involved in this business that I was working on last month said, which is don't spend bad money. Stop the bleeding. Okay, this is tricky because you have to spend to know if your solution is working. Okay, so you have to do that.

And I have a tendency to kind of let that linger a little on the assumption that I can get more conservative with my spend over time. But actually, a lot of times the best move is to suddenly like immediately spend much less because the worst thing you can do is just waste money. So don't waste money. spending more money makes the problem worse if it is bad dollars if the dollars are not creating more dollars for you.

So spend less money, be more conservative with your approach and then build back up over time. So this is going to look different in all kinds of different situations, but it really goes far in almost every business to just stop spending money. This won't work forever. Like at some point you have to move the inventory you have, etc. Maybe you have to run a sale, something like that, but like like that is really helpful when things are going really badly to just stop losing money.

Losing money is the worst thing. Okay, that's the worst part for business. It makes everything worse in your business if you have less money to play with. Everything is easier if you have more money. You have more of a cushion. You have more you have less challenges. So, losing money is bad. So, stop losing money. So, just act decisively to make sure that happens. Once you've recognized that things are in your control, stop losing money.

Okay? So, do that. Number five, okay, communicate clearly. This is crucial. Anytime when uh a an ad account breaks, this thing happens which is people start going all over the place and and all kinds of attention goes to the ad account. Everybody is going all over the place and and and the one of the most important things you can do, especially if you're agency side um for a brand, right? And is is that you can just start doing everything you can to communicate as clearly as possible.

Communicate about what the targets are, okay, in the account so everybody's clear. here's what success looks like. You got to have that to know if you are solving the problem or not. Okay? Communicate about the frustrations that you're having. Especially again, if you're in an agency relationship, I had in the midst of the thing that that I just talked about, I had a great conversation where my client in so many words yelled at me on a call.

Okay? They didn't yell because they're not that kind of person. They just spoke really forthrightly and really directly about their level of frustration and and even separately called and expressed deeper levels of frustration with the way I'd handle some things. And do you know how much of a gift that is to me as an agency partner? First of all, this client does not yell at me, right? So, so in we've worked together for a long time.

It's not the kind of client who who like overreacts to everything all the time. And by the way, this is one of the reasons that you if you have an anger problem as an operator and you're constantly blowing up at people. It actually becomes counteractive. Uh uh it works against you, right, for the thing that you're trying to accomplish with your anger because at some point people are just going to be like, "Ah, that's just who that person is. they're just pissed off all the time.

They either and first of all, it'll like push away really good talent. Um, you know, in in many many cases, but secondly, it'll also just make it so people don't take you seriously. In this case, the client communicated their frustration extremely clearly to me and I listened. I listened as carefully as I could to understand. I affirmed their frustration because as I thought about it from their perspective, I went, I would be frustrated, too.

Uh, both for the outcomes and some of the ways that we handled some of the process. Okay. um and and some of my mistakes along the way. And listen, you're going to make mistakes. So, you just got to own them and try and solve them. Okay? This is where actually having agency and and recognizing where you're the problem is really important because if then you can admit the mistakes that you've made and just say, "Okay, if I admit the mistake, then that means I've labeled it, identified it, and now I can go solve it." It's just you just got to know what the problem is.

But the the client and and if you're an operator listening to this um speaking directly and clearly with your agency partners and other vendor partners is it it's so much better for them and so much kinder to them actually than hedging what you are saying because you're trying to be nice. That is the worst thing you can do if you're really frustrated. Um what's better is to be really clear and and to communicate in a way that actually expresses the truth of the situation at hand.

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Okay. So, um so communicate clearly about next steps, communicate clearly about frustration levels, communicate respectfully but clearly about these things, communicate about targets. When you get that, now you've got two people working together, expressing whatever frustration needs to be expressed, being humans with one another, and creating a series of next steps. That really, really helps. Okay. Okay. As you do that about communicating next steps, this gets to number six, which is you need to eliminate options.

You need to eliminate problems. If if things have suddenly gotten worse or steadily gotten worse or something, right? The one of the most important things you can do even before you identify what the problem is is to identify what the problem isn't. If you can identify what the problem isn't, you can take some things off the list and direct your energies towards the best place. Because in this situation, people are going to put a lot of energy towards things and everybody has limited time, limited scope and it's possible the frustrations get high.

When that happens, the most important thing is that you put your energy towards the highest likelihood uh problems. Okay? The the highest likelihood the the things that are actually creating the impact on the situation. And so um so finding ways to eliminate with with careful rational decisions really helps. And here's what I have in mind, right? Like if you think the offer is the problem, you need to test that methodically.

The mistake to make is to launch a split test and then make a decision after 20 purchases come through because you're like, "Oh, it's it's 13 on one side, seven on the other. That result's probably going to hold." Now, you have not gotten far enough because you've been impatient. You need to actually know much better. If that's the case, if you think your bidding method is the problem, you need to be deter be ready to duplicate your campaign, change your bidding method, and uh and then have enough spend.

And I would predetermine a spend and amount of time at which you will make a yes or no decision on whether or not that is the issue. But the thing you don't want to do is spend 500 bucks, see the results look good or bad, and then make a decision. Now, that works a little bit against like stop the bleeding, stop the spending. But that's okay. In this case, you're spending money with a clear determination of an outcome, not just sort of slowly bleeding out dollars endlessly because that's what happens if you don't behave in a way that creates meticulous problem-solving outcomes.

What happens is that you you end up instead going like okay I don't know uh if this actually worked and now you're just spending and spending and spending etc. So whatever you think the problem is, you need to find a way to to think like a scientist here. Like generate a hypothesis, try to falsify your hypothesis, okay? In some way or design an experiment to do this. And as best as you can, granting that you're not actually a scientist and you're not going to control this in a lab, okay?

Find a way to either verify or falsify that. and actually falsifying it uh uh coming up with the the answer that this is not the problem is as important as coming up with what the problem is in a lot of case or what the solution is in a lot of cases because then you can move your energy to the next thing. Okay. You need to get meticulous and you need to know um what's happening. This requires keeping a cool head um uh as you do that.

Okay. Um speaking of number seven, remain calm. Okay. as you do these things. This go fits with communicate clearly but um uh like behaving reactively um uh and and indecisively and slowly. Okay. Um but or behaving indecisively and in with strong reactions but then just chasing a million things down really really hurts. Uh if irrational responses to this are like halfdoing tests like I said. Um another irrational response is to stop everything else you're doing in the business and focus only on this.

U depending on the scope of the problem. If it's if it's a smaller level of problem, then you really want to avoid this. Actually, something McCoy Mkeley talked about in in a interview I did with him a while back, the CMO at Portland Leatherg Goods 9 figure e-commerce business. Like McCoy said something that I thought was was really insightful. He said when accounts, you know, they're $100 million in revenue. Like they have seen accounts break over time, right?

Or like ad spend go poorly. It just is part of the journey of getting to that much revenue. It happens and it's going to happen again, etc. And McCoy said at some point he realized like everybody's attention goes to the ad account when that happens when in fact if they just continued to work on their retention they would actually solve the problem at a more fundamental level because retention is actually the highest margin revenue in the business and revenue or profit really solves every problem.

Okay. So so by by making sure to not divert their attention from those things if the problem wasn't a true fire. Okay, then that allowed them to do that. Now, in the situation that I was in most recently, it was a pretty true fire. And so, we really needed to put a lot of attention very fast into solving it. It was too important to the business. But, um, but over more time, what will slowly happen in this business, because we're already talking about it, so I can tell you is that attention will shift back towards, okay, how do we improve our retention?

How do we make this better so that um the value in the business is better? How do we keep developing products that are great, doing great product releases, etc. to make it so that we have a stabler business across the board? Okay. So, remain calm. You may need to launch a sale uh at some point. to help with your um business's issues, but like uh or or if you have like a real slowdown on the ad account like that that definitely happens.

Brands need cash at times, okay? But like don't don't do it thoughtlessly just because you are reacting. Okay. Um and another mistake I see people make is they overinterpret recent. They have recency bias in their forecasting. So they suddenly will think this is what it's going to be like forever. You could have years of data saying that the account behaves a certain way and suddenly you'll look past all of that because the last week or two is bad.

Okay? Like probably not. probably your business didn't just overnight get much much much much worse. Um probably your larger set of data says something about the future likelihood of the business and you should weigh all of that together. This is what how calmness looks in the business. Okay. In a lot of ways that's what a lot of this is about eliminating uh thing the problems that are not it aiming at the solutions with the belief that you can solve them and doing all of that in a way that is rational and determined and calm.

Again, especially if you're agency side, I'm just going to tell you this is what your clients are looking for for uh from you. Uh I remember Taylor Holidayiday said this to me a long time ago and and I don't even know if it started with him or with me saying something to him or what, but basically he said like a lot of times what clients are looking for is a steady hand on the wheel and you just have to show that you are that.

And that's totally right. Um just to make sure that when things are getting crazy, somebody knows, okay, somebody has the wheel and they're they have a pathway to getting through this. That is how agencies, in fact, it's one of the ways agencies can operationalize knowledge that's unique where they've been through so many client fires. Like I've been 11 years in the game, I've seen a lot of client fires at this point.

I'm just less flustered by them than I used to be. And again, that has at times actually caused me to cause me to underreact um to them. But it does make it does help me to just be able to stay calm. And I think that's that's one of the critical parts of this whole process. Okay. And lastly, one more thing, number eight, make more creative. If you're dealing with meta ads, more creative is almost always going to be helpful and will almost always solve some amount of problems.

It is very possible that the entire problem with your ad account right now is that your creative is not working anymore. Something is drained and you just need to get better at making more and better creative. Um it almost always helps. Uh this is also the time to try weirder stuff than you're comfortable with. If account if your account is performing really poorly, um get crazier. Try something with just more variation in general.

Like so it's more variable from what you're normally running. That's really important. But like yeah, try something crazy, make weirder stuff, make more stuff. Making more creative almost always helps. And one of the things I've seen in this particular account is that like a lot of the creative that's working for us right now is creative that was not even in the account like before this whole thing started. And as we uh did all that, like I think it's really helped us like a lot of new creative got in the account, including very different creative than we run before.

And it has really worked well. Shout out to my friends at Fire Team who have been working with me on this account and who can and who can speak to this because some of their creative has been really helpful in this time. So, um, so yeah, I uh I think making more creative is almost always going to be helpful in your ad account. Certainly is in this situation and that's one of the ways to do it. Quickly, let's run back through them.

Eliminate technical issues. Watch out for small sample volatility. Assume you are the problem. Stop the bleeding. Don't spend bad money. Communicate clearly. Eliminate what other problems there might be. Eliminate options. um remain calm and make more creative. Those are the eight ways that I see to triage and solve account problems. If you do that relatively meticulously, you should do uh or or relatively calmly and rationally, you should do well when inevitably problems come up in your ad account.

That is the reminders in the reflections that I've had on this particular situation for me and it's the reflections that I would pass along to you. Thanks so much for watching or listening to this episode. I hope you liked it. You should uh subscribe if you did like it. Subscribe if you're watching or listening to it. I think uh if you like this episode, you will like most of my content. It is along these lines all the time.

Making content about how to run ad accounts, how to run e-commerce businesses, grow them profitably. You should also subscribe to my email list, ajfgrowth.com, to get everything that I am doing, including the email list. Um and a big thanks to my uh friends at Rich Panel and Vermont. Uh great sponsors, both of them, whose products we my clients and I actually use. So go check those out. Uh thanks so much for watching, listening.

I will see you next time. [Music]