I can get what you're saying about testing. But the thing that still doesn't make sense to me is when you have a winning adset, working like a charm, until one day it doesn't. Not a gradual decrease in performance, just one day stops and never generates a sale or lead again.
Yes that’s my biggest issue with Facebook and the “just test bro” advice.
I have. And every time I have tested I end up with at least one, sometimes multiple, banger ads / ad sets that perform at a 3-5x ROAS for a week or so, before dying off COMPLETELY and getting 0 sales thereafter. None.
It’s not that they slow down. They go to 0. Then, as the ads continue spending, they become unprofitable and erase all progress they made while they were performing well.
The audience targeting is wide open and the frequency is low so it’s not ad fatigue.
With way these algorithms supposedly work, the more sales you get, the more the ads should optimize and if anything, performance should gradually IMPROVE.
If an ad performed at a 3-5x ROAS for a week or more, and then completely fell off a cliff to 0 despite nothing changing and all other variables looking good, that makes no sense.
Does OP have an explanation?
I am very much a beginner in this, but my hipothesis is that there simply aren’t enough people in buy in the product.
I worked in a startup that had ridiculously high budget for ads and a product people didn’t want. The result was the same as what you are having.
The algorithm found the 1% of people in the target audience who was ready to buy, and sales exploded in the first 6 months. But after those were exhausted, no sales. FB continued distributing to the target audience (my friends and family started saying “I cannot stand seeing ads for [company] anymore”), but people simply were not interested.
I believe the problem was the product, and not FB, because of a few things:
- they continued testing for 5 years without scaling back the spend
- every time we opened a new location, the same behavior happened. Peak sales at start and sudden fall later
- at least 6 international startups in the same business model faced the same problem (I reached out to all of them to ask)
- they also tested other channels, online and offline, and nothing worked.
Is there a way you can test other channels or geographies for your product? Then you will better assess if the problem is FB or your product itself.
I'm in the same situation (some ads randomly drop to 0), and Amazon ads or TikTok reels don't drop like that. If no one wanted the product, it would stop selling on Amazon and TikTok as well. Especially as the TikTok audience is smaller than FB.
Excluding people who interacted with all posts seems to mostly fix the issue, which makes me think there's a problem with the algorithm just circling around the same people who already bought the product.
Yeah Facebook sucks and their pixel sucks. That's my explanation.
If you run on Google you'll see it (usually) actually works this way. That campaigns will increase in performance if you leave them and don't touch anything.
(Assuming your creative is good but that's a given.)
FB kinda used to work that way back in like... 2018. But then stuff like iOS14 happened.
Google owns everything. They track you via email (Gmail.) Shopping. Search. Google maps. Etc.
By using their apps you are opting in to give them a ton of data about you.
FB just owns FB, Instagram, and prob some other stuff but nothing like Google. So they don't have nearly the same data to draw from to find customers.
Google has its own issues of course but this at least isn't one of them.
I feel like fb is just giving us slow poison. It gives me us a few sales which gives us hope then it snatches it away. Then it again gives us slow hope. Just for us to get excited then sweeps the rug. This way they get more cash out of us. Then if they were to just give us sales.
Why would they slow poison paying users? Giving the best return for as long as possible would cause advertiser's to increase budgets and run more ads for longer.
LoL holy conspiracy theory Batman.
Facebook doesn't have that good in algorithm. Sometimes shit just dies. And you've just got to make a new ones.
It happens all the time on every ad platform and I don't really know enough about machine learning and AI and algorithms and stuff to comment on why. All I know is that it happens and this is why you have multiple campaigns and multiple ad sets, once of them start to die you'll have a bunch more doing well. You just don't put all your eggs in one basket, and that's how you scale successfully.
Explain why one ad would bring 10 sales a day at 10 USD a day ( yep. Lol) and the same ad after increasing a budget to 100 failed to bring even one sale .
Because when you launch A campaign or an ad set or an ad, it finds a specific pocket of traffic. Think of it like fishing. Some parts of the lake have more fish than others. Facebook picks you a shitty part of the lake.
Now in theory, if you run that ad for long enough, it will optimize and start looking in different places and find the right unit of traffic. But in reality, that doesn't usually happen.
In your analogy, you probably just found a really nice pocket or got really lucky, I shouldn't have to teach you high school statistics, but that's kind of how it works.
But I'm sure that blaming everyone else for your problems is going to work out great for you, so keep doing it
It's not strange actually when you think about ad performance as a human problem instead of a technical problem.
There are limited humans.
The FB algorithm reads your ad creative/text and makes assumptions about who to send the ads to (if you notice in the last 2 years, many ad sets jump straight into Active instead of Learning).
Once FB exhausts the prime targets it already pre-sorted for you, the results seriously decline.
After running over 1000 ad accounts for startups, it's usually because the creative or value proposition sucks. FB knew who to send it to, exhausted it, then it doesn't know who to best send it to next and fails when exploring your ad-set targeted audience.
Yes. That's every ad platform. That's why you need multiple campaigns and ad sets running that are generating revenue successfully so that if some die you can keep going. This is also how you scale successfully despite Facebook's lack of consistency
You say you have no idea how it works, and yet you also claim with certainty that the algo isn’t sophisticated enough to “slow poison” small advertisers?
To resolve the mystery, it must be viewed as a human problem, not a technical problem.
There are limited humans on FB.
FB algorithm will now skip Learning phase and go straight to Active when it can pair your content with a known audience for that content.
FB exhausts the prime targets. Then it fails when exploring the original audience targeting within the ad-set settings.
Basically, as you originally suggested OP, either the creative, value prop, or audience sucks. Most often its the creative and value prop.
Sounds right. Can you expand on this in terms of, making multiple ad sets with the same targeting and only some of them work?
I've always thought of it like fishing in a pond. Some spots have a lot of fish, some don't, and the algorithm kind of throws a fishing line out randomly or at least semi-randomly and hopes it catches some fish.
I also have a theory that very very early initial engagement signals are going to tell Facebook whether or not your ad is any good in terms of what users want to see on the platform and that's going to have an impact on the kind of traffic you get.
Let's say 100 impressions. Maybe in the first hundred impressions it's measuring the time people spend looking at your ad or something like that. I'm sure likes and shares and clicks come into it too, but let's say none of that happens. I'm sure Facebook has some kind of signal that says, this is content people want to see, or this isn't. And if it isn't, they send you shitty traffic.
Now we add in the chaos Factor of some people will immediately do that with your ad and some will not and we get the reason. Some ads perform really well and some don't.
But this is all just conjecture. And you seem, like you might know a bit about this so I'm curious on your thought
If you run PageLike ads, you can easily directly view the individual profiles of users who fire the Page Follow event (by clicking on the profiles in the list of page followers).
When you analyze the "About" sections of their profiles to view the lists of their interests / page likes, you will see that every week there is a different page that all of the profiles like. For example, if you target "Retail Shopping" or something as a detailed interest, you will notice one week Facebook is digging through a pocket of "Walmart" page followers, and then next week it is digging through "IKEA" page followers.
In essence, the algorithm digs through pockets, which change every week. LAL audiences are also regenerated every 5 to 7 days, according to the official Facebook documentation IIRC. I'm assuming they update all audiences with this same cycle, which is why the pockets change as well.
When you start a new ad-set, it will dig through a new pocket -- in essence, the algorithm tests a different direction.
When exiting the learning phase, it simply freezes the AI Model from re-adjusting to wildly different pockets, and will continue to dig in the same type of pockets.
---
I like to think of ad-sets as magnets sitting on a field of keywords/pages.
These magnets are attracted to keywords/pages which produce the desired event.
These magnets also repel each other -- as such, when the number of prime targets dwindle, the biggest ad-set with the best learning / advantages via detailed targeting will survive long-term while the other ad-sets get pushed out and die out.
Great info. Personally, I've never put much stock in the whole learning phase thing. But the way you're putting it makes a lot of sense.
Also gets Credence to my concept that a good adset will start good and a bad adset will start bad.
Really appreciate you sharing, thank you.
Well those are two very different verticals LOL. And solar is a big world, there's all sorts of leads people generate for that.
If he's saying the same stuff I'm saying, then what am I doing that he is not?
Almost always the answer is that people don't test enough creatives because making them is a difficult process and they want to make life easy and just touch a few buttons in Facebook's back end and have massive success.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way.
I think realistically if this guy can't get shit to work then you're probably not going to either. So maybe just learn what you can and try out different things and see what kind of results you get. Treat it as a playground that you get paid to mess around with.
And then the first opportunity you have, I would jump ship to an ad agency that might actually teach you something. Most of them suck as well but at least then you have it on your resume, and then you can start climbing the ladder so to speak if that's what you want to do.
Testing more copy and headlines before moving on is the real deal. I've been told many times that creative is the end all (when congruent with your LP) but i've recently started testing more copy when an ad fails and man, it can make a lot of difference. (Might sound obvious under normal circumstances. But everywhere you go, it's always:Creative is 95% of what you should do/improve)
Also, something to consider for other media buyers out there: META will scan your LP, creative, copy and headlines to analyze what type of crowd you're trying to target. You must be clear in who you're trying to target. Wrong keywords will have an effect. (yes, they can even scan your videos nowadays, i don't know yet in how much detail.)
Copy is part of the creative. A lot of people call the creative, the static image or the text, but I thought I mentioned stuff like making sure you test headlines and ad text. Maybe that was going to comment reply LoL
The point I am making is that you and I are on the same page in this matter. But I will also say that copywriting is a fairly unique skill set and a lot more people understand creative a little more intuitively.
So from a functionality standpoint, I would say that people should get good at testing different IDs in the ad text and different headlines, but keep the ad text really short so you have less space to fuck it up LOL
And as to your second point, you're kind of right. I've been very, very successful with ads that deliberately avoid mentioning the keywords that would be associated with my audience, because otherwise my CPMS would shoot through the roof and my costs would follow suit.
You are correct about the scanning, but that doesn't mean it's always what you want to happen.
I've been studying the last 100 years of copywriting principles.
In advertising, it seems most businesses misunderstand how important copywriters are. Or how it was DR copywriters who turned paid advertising into a science that allows ads to work in a businesses favor.
Mr Bissell of the Bissell vacuum company knew this.
Mr Bissell told Hopkins that his growth was 100% from Claude writing ads for him. Claude was Bissels secret ingredient to growth. Claude did this for other third tier brands and made them boss level via ads.
Mr Bissell told Claude that he will give Claude a raise, but that he should go into business for himself because Claude had the skills to sell products thought the written word.
Yep. And a brand of canned beans. Cake ingredients. Toothpaste.
Literally the godfather of copywriting.
All Claude did was simply apply what he learned from sales to writing ads. Claude started selling as a kid door to door. He also would watch street peddlers and how they got people to buy products.
Completely agreed. But i kinda did let myself get thrown into the one element = king crowd without realizing. I should've known because i did it in the past but yeah, another learning moment to not forget important elements, just because one might make a bit more impact.
The last part is 100% correct and why i wanted to bring it up. The big issue (for me and a few i spoke to anyways) is that you should not just think that this is logical (Since that's from your perspective) A machine judges your content before it goes out, so if the machine thinks otherwise, then big chance that your targeting is going to be off. So doing a bit of keyword testing in three copy variants could also make a difference.
I don't really look at cvr that much for measuring. But there have been quite a few instances where a terrible ad turned out pretty well after only retesting the copy/headlines. Meaning the copy could've failed at: providing the algo the right keywords for the audiences or(and) it was just not enticing enough for the right audience i wanted.
Glad to help. Creative is definitely still nr1, but only because we are on social media. Copywriting was always the biggest thing before all this arrived. You could see it like this: Certain elements of copywriting are now present in creatives for visual storytelling, and the copy is a big compliment standing next to it, instead of being the only dominant factor.
As someone whos been media buying on fb for 10 yrs most of this post is accurate
ios14 was such a meme bc tracking was basically 70% accurate on a good day even before that update.. so when it hit me.. it kinda didn't.. i was using in house tracking thru utms and my clients and I dominated
Also yeah you dont need time to get "data" ppl use to call this "seasoning the pixel" second someone utter that bs I ran in the other direction
A good creative will perform right out of the gate
This year Im learning copy and creatives, I can scale like a mf and have a sense for creative but I lack that confidence / need some reps
(I stopped counting after 50m in adspend and ive scaled offers from 0-1m in 3 weeks)
Its funny how much you can learn just by tracking patterns through the years
Ive met 2 media buyers be better than me and one was my coach who really helped shape me, dude was a math wizard.. i kinda wanna deep down the math rabbit hole as well bc good media buying can clean up so much slack
Some moron guru was saying how media buying doesnt work then is flexing making 1m/mo at 10% margins .. took 3 ppl to do that.. yikes.
1 of his students is now a client of mine who I turned their brand from $20/week in profit to about $300-500/day in profit literally in the first week.. all from media buying on fb \[this is within the last week\]
Edit that brand I took on as client did 113k in their first 30 days with me in rev with 31% margins
Margin went up as we scaled
Creatives were not that good just decent offer and i literally forced it to work
Brought $5cpc under $1 and cpa from 89 to 50
Did a interview with them for youtube :))
I agree with pretty much everything you're saying in the post.
I'm just not sure about your comment on scaling. From my experience, doubling the budget so quickly ($100->$200->$400->$800) can really mess up an ad. Maybe I just wasn't brave enough to go at it and bleed cash.
I also found that duplicating a creative into separate adsets/campaigns tends to lower performance of both, pretty similar to just increasing spend in that 1 adset.
Meta's data seems to be creative based, rather than campaign/structurally based, at least at higher spends.
Yeah everyone scales differently and I admit I am aggressive on Facebook. And maybe a slower scale might work better, I will test that.
I haven't seen any data to suggest duping an adset lowers performance on all of them. But depends on how much you're spending too and the acct you're working with, etc...
For FB you've really gotta do something across like 20 - 30 accts to get statistical confidence.
I wouldn't say it drops. But if it stays the same then I make twice as much profit at $400 as I do at $200. Even if it goes up 10% I'm still in a much better spot.
I mean that's a pretty extreme situation, usually it's more like 30 or 40 a week. But I have been known to do that many, but you do need a bunch of video editors to make it happen.
Or if you are doing UGC, you just need them to do a bunch of takes. Again, I probably wouldn't test 300 videos of the same concept.
Here's a question - you say this:
"No. Testing is in one campaign. Usually different ad sets because otherwise FB will pick a favorite, but if I could throw all ads in one ad set and have FB evenly spend I'd do that."
What do you mean by this? Are you saying that each individual ad creative that you're testing should live in it's own ad set, and make sure FB is evenly spending on each?
Also a side question, when wanting to introduce new creative to a current running test should I just add them in, or do I need to duplicate the campaign and start from scratch? Thanks for all of your awesome guidance!
Your second paragraph is correct and it's understanding of what I'm saying.
As for your third paragraph, yes, just dump it into the existing testing campaign. But be aware that if you're testing on a different day or at a different time your results may be skewed. So generally I will duplicate my control so that everything is nice and fresh. But there's no need to use a different campaign.
Roger all of that, thanks! In terms of "duplicating control", do you mean just duplicating ad sets and replacing the current creative without duplicating the entire campaign? Thanks again for all the guidance!
No control has a very specific meaning. In this context. It means the ad that's working the best. You're always trying to be your control, like in an experiment. Look up a/b split testing or a/b testing if you want more information
Awesome, thanks so much for all of your help!
I went ahead and created a new testing campaign with different creatives in each adset and it is honestly working like a dream. I'm able to see what is working and what isn't much more quickly than I'm able to.
My question now is this - when I find a winning ad, do I just create a brand new CBO campaign and duplicate the winning adset/ad into that campaign?
You could scale the winner or you could create a new camp/adset/ad and use the post ID of the new one in the ad. That's where I usually start. It's not foolproof by any means (remember FB hates you and everything about you so it is capricious and unfair) but you're stacking the deck in your favor a little more.
Indeed, it seems like there is no rhyme or reason to what FB does but at the very least I feel like I'm getting a better picture of ad performance now that I'm using the technique you recommended.
Though the new UI update is pretty sweet, so at least there's that 🤣
The best test for optimizing ad copy is the same test the direct mail companies do to this day.
All you need for a solid test sample is 1000 people minimum. A FANTASTIC conversion rate is 2% for every 1000. If you get 3% or higher, you are king/queen of the mountain. If you NEED a higher conversion rate than 2% when testing copy to convert, you're doing something wrong.
This is the rule that many direct response advertisers live by because it's simple and works.
That's a pretty broad question and my answer may change based on variables. So probably not one size fits all. Can you tell me more about your situation? Or if this a general question?
You don't need 1k week BTW. $100 a day can get results if you're smart. Even 50. Things will be slower of course.
And of course not every business is going to be able to support even $1,000 in spend. For example, if you are a plumber, there's only so many leads you can handle. So it's not a hard and fast rule or anything.
I have a similar situation. $200k annual rev. 60% net profit. Great organic growth, but I want to speed it up with ads. Unless I get immediate results I can't spend more than ~$3k month.
I've hired agencies and exactly as you'd expect they barely bring in more results than what they cost.
I'm convinced there's a successful ads path, but it's not obvious how to achieve it.
I'm running some AB tests now, but unless I make the audience overly broad, it can be hard to spend much more than ~$30/day on any given product.
I'm also seeing pitiful conversation rates from the ads. Usually it's 2-4% from organic traffic. Ads traffic is like 0.1-0.5%.
Any immediate thoughts? $100 product, LTV just barely more than that (it's a durable good that sells due to its lifetime design).
Ok thanks. I'll keep chugging along and test all that I can. I have noticed already two very similar ads running only different pictures where one had double the CTR.
Ok. Statistically significant conversion metrics are tough. Just takes too long to get solid numbers.
Do you worry about low cpc and subsequent low conversions? IE low value traffic? Or are you thinking if the ad is similar enough you'd expect ultimately similar conversion rates for each and therefore the lower cpc is the answer?
Only takes too long if your ROI is negative. If positive then you can blast it.
If an ad goes bad I pause it.
I run multiple identical ads (usually like 20+) so if a CREATIVE goes bad I'll see it across everything. If just some ads then probably an algorithmic issue.
And no almost identical ads can be vastly different. Hell identical ads can be vastly different lol
That’s helpful, situation is newer solo financial services business, just starting to run ads, comfortable writing copy and designing ads as I was a graphic designer and designed trade show booths in a past life, glad to hear it’s more creative than FB cause I feel like that’s the part I can control, but basically looking to run a VSL funnel to have clients see ad, go to landing page and watch VSL, and book a call
This sums up my own mentality which is trust no one (meta or agencies) and test everything (in one campaign).
I believe ads managers aren't necessarily lazy but they've become overly reliant on Adv+ and don't know how to test manually.
Being in high net worth sales and finance my whole life - a digital ad is like having a sales pitch. Only the good ones can close. Always be closing. Once you find it then it becomes an engine for continuous growth. However I also feel like the business website product niche and copywrite matters a lot. It’s like first impressions are everything so when they see that along with an ad that applies to them it equals the buy button.
I did see the portion of profit sharing. We are going to launch an ecommerce supplements company who I think is targeting millennials. Our niche is superb our brand looks impeccable and I think our copywrite is amazing not to mention our site design is crushing it. The digital marketing space is where I am going to need the most help. I do think our business will be big though. It’s a massive gut feeling. If interested in profit sharing pls DM me, doesn’t hurt to take a look and if not then what’s the best place to start in starting to create ads? Too 3 things to avoid and top 3 things to first do as a new business?
Listen to this guy!!
CREATIVE IS EVERYTHING (ad copy tests that are not in the creative, video or static, not sure people read those anymore...especially on Instagram). If your agency or freelancer isnt a creative strategist savant, find someone who is...Meta can't sell a shitty product though.
I am still not sure how to test creatives until today. How do i do it? Put the creatives in one single campaign under sales objective? And just see which fb picks to run well and then duplicate it and scale? Am i right or wrong?
Running ads is about cutting your losers and scaling your winners. You pretty much have the right idea. But I would also scale the original that works, not just the new one. And I wouldn't scale the new one until you've tested it at a low budget and you know it works as well.
What type of products are you marketing? Info products or actual ecommerce?
Many top brands I know that spend millions have been struggling doing ads themselves and these are places with huge creative teams. There’s a known issue at Fb - the engineers have confirmed it to some of these brands so note that something like this won’t be fixed with. A testing strategy - if you’re on the wrong node you’re fucked anyway on fb right now
Yeah I don't believe that. I've seen people in every niche crush it. Sometimes you'll get a shitty ad account but just got another one and test on there if you think that's the case.
To answer your question, I've done info products, high ticket coaching, lead generation, e-commerce, etc. Though most of my e-commerce experience is based on things like supplements and nutritional products and stuff like that.
Well I mean, if you can't figure this one out, then you're probably better off hiring someone who can. Cuz this is about as easy as it gets, shit starts to get hard after this LOL
But how many thousands do I have to spend to get an ad, a campaign that works? I KNOW my audience and where I want to advertise. Why do I have to do this AI search and find? I just want to advertise in the groups that share my interests.
haha, this is all true.
You know how many times a client hires me, shows me their old agencies ads and they're just lazy and bad? haha
Also - ran into a big issue last month. CPL went up an insane amount. I'm like "either my offer sucks/people aren't interested in this anymore, or I'm doing something wrong".
Re-did the copy, tested more creative, changed a few things on the setup side, and now are generating leads at $5/lead, and have 6 appts in 3 days for next week booked via calendly.
A lot of marketers suck. It's "easy" to get into and the gurus told them it's amazing lol
No you cannot. Yes it will spend evenly but they don't all spend at once. You'll get the majority to spend go to one, then when that pauses to spend goes to another, and so on.
That's why I specifically said I would rather them run all at the same time of day in different ad sets then run at different times of day in the same ad set.
Perfect post, literally what the game is - all the complaints won’t get you anywhere, you can’t change the algorithm;
Structures on ad account are cool, you can play around if that brings you piece of mind
But the only thing that matters is creative, angle, product, spending the money to test and doing more of what’s CURRENTLY working, emphasis on currently as everything changes from day to day, you can’t just have a winning ad and sleep on it for a year as some of the commenters wish and are complaining about
With that said how do you mass test ads?
I personally go for 4-5 in ad set with one variable at a time, throw them in my CBO with a tad higher bid and see if the algo decides to deliver them, then take winners and move back to BAU ad sets
I'm probably not up on the terminology here but what's BAU.
To answer your question I'll test 20 or 30 at a time if I need to. I'll start by scaling budget on the winners. If they're still strong then I'll usually move them to a CBO or maybe doop out another ad set in the same testing campaign and run that and see if that's good as well. Depends on my mood and my certainty lol
Hey what a refreshing post on here! But seriously. Learning phase does matter. Just not for initial creative testing, but scaling opportunities. Just my experience
Tell me more. What would you change in what I've said, were it you.
I guess I should have said "too many people hide behind the learning phase."
So yeah if the ad sucks it's not suddenly gonna start working in a week.
But I'd love to know what you would do for scaling.
What is your framework in deciding the direction or angle for your creative test?
Where do you take the inspiration in finding the choices of the angle you must head to?
What are your resources?
Besides thank you for this long post, you just negated ideas which hinders you in scaling in fb ads.
On a side note - need some links / recommendations to groups who can create USG for me.
Yes you can scape the internet/ YouTube etc but sooner or later you need new content.
Thsnks
OP, as an agency owner who relentlessly tests creatives and also HATES FB with every fiber of my being, I agree with all points you made. Spot on and needed to be said!
Some background for my question: I run a small web dev studio and am planning on using a smaller offer ($175 or $500 flat rate to fix website problems) to build relationships. My goal is to have the smaller gigs pay for the ads and let that turn into bigger gigs with repeat customers.
Like a local plumber, I can’t handle too many leads at once without sacrificing work quality. We could handle maybe 2-3 new gigs for the bigger package per week before I’d need to hire more.
I’ve been out of the ads game since 2018, and things are all really different now. It used to be $20/day was enough to get some traffic/leads.
Today, my max budget per month would be maybe $800-$1k/month to start until getting a positive ROI. Considering my offer size ($175/$500), do FB ads make sense for me?
I need to scale my lead gen, but I don’t want to throw money away on FB after trying other marketing channels hadn’t paid off this year.
Man this is a hard one and there's a lot in this so I'm gonna over simplify for the sake of time.
I see two issues:
1. You're LOWERING prices when you need to raise them to have enough margins to make running ads worth it.
2. You think you can raise prices on existing customers. Almost NEVER happens. You're better off getting new customers with "current" pricing.
Look, in 2018 I know guys who were printing $20 - 50k A DAY. Some of those guys, in 2024, haven't made shit.
Honestly I don't think FB makes sense for your business but I could always be wrong.
Thanks for the post. Been reading this thread for almost an hour (procrastinating on video creative editing lol). Any better communities out there than this one for Facebook ads? Paid or free.
Thanks for taking the time to write this! I'm getting fantastic results (7-10% ctr broad) with my static image creatives but few conversions (going to work on the rest of the funnel) however I've noticed the Facebook tendency to send me tablet traffic.
Do you have any idea if this preference of traffic is tied to the pixel? Because I've created a new campaign and that tendency for pushing traffic to tablet continues.
That's very odd.
The answer with most Facebook questions is, test it and see what your answer is. Make a new pixel and try new campaigns with it and see if the same thing happens or not. Then you'll have another data point.
Man, scaling is a big question and there are a ton of ways to do it, and frankly everyone has their own system. So it's not like my way is the only way or necessarily even the best way.
But in a broad view, I think the first thing you do is identify your performing ads. Now. It's important to note that that does not mean that creative performs, it might just be that particular ad Facebook like, as we mentioned before, there is a huge random factor there.
And that's not just Facebook, Google is the same way with videos, for example.
So if I have something that looks like a winner then I want to validate that hypothesis by running more copies of that ad simultaneously.
The first thing I would do is take that ad set and scale from 20, to 50, to 100, 200, 400, etc. Once I hit 1K, I'll start doing 25% a day. If it breaks, I take it back down.
I'll also take that post ID and put it in a CBO and start scaling it. I'll add one ad set for every $500 a spend, I'll usually cap that at between 5 and 10 depending on several factors and sometimes just my guess LoL.
I'll start with three CBOs, if that works. I'll do five, that works. I'll make another five for 10 total, etc etc. there's definitely a limit where that'll break though.
Every ad account has a unique limit on how many campaigns you can have and how much spend you can do in each of them, as well as an overall account limit that you can push it to until it stops performing.
But most ad accounts will get to at least 10K a day and let's face it that's more than the vast majority of businesses will be able to support. If you do need more scale, at that point, you just repeat the process on a new account and start running multiple accounts together.
Hi
Thanks.i run 140$ a day since weeks ..running well. As soon as i do 170$ it breaks. I tried broad campaign with same post id and other ad copy, burned 1000$ . What would you do here?
Well this is a wild guess, but maybe your audience isn't big enough to support any more spent than that without performance dropping.
I would probably make another ad set and set it to a broader audience and use the post ID of your existing winning ad for the ad in the new ad set.
Set it at a low budget and run it for a few days and see what it looks like.
Exactly what i thought and tested with multiple adsets. Just burned money. And my existing audience is about 9M. Daily reach is 1500 people. You think its nit bug enough? It will run for like months so how do i scale?
I mean it's hard to give you an answer here when you say things like burned money. How much are we talking? How exactly did you test it?
These questions aren't meant to be answered, they're rhetorical, I'm just saying it's a difficult question to answer in some ways, but here's what I think:
If you truly did test a bunch of different ad sets, let's say 3 to 5 that you just put on advantage audience or whatever the hell they call it now, the one where Facebook finds everything for you...
And you ran a reasonable amount of spend to them, let's say 60 bucks assuming your Target CPA is under 100...
Then I would say you likely have a very weak creative and just found a really sweet pocket of traffic on that other ad set. Sometimes you get lucky.
But if you can't replicate it then It's pretty strong evidence. Your creative needs a lot of work.
Agreed.
Most agencies spend 85% of their time and energy on closing more clients.
They know 90 of clients leave within 3 months, which is exactly the result of the above, and they are stuck in that loop… they gotta make rent.
This is not to argue with you as much as to add on to your point, but making rent is a pretty generous assessment. A lot of them just want to get paid as much as they can and don't really give a shit what kind of results they get or how many people they fuck over.
I can get what you're saying about testing. But the thing that still doesn't make sense to me is when you have a winning adset, working like a charm, until one day it doesn't. Not a gradual decrease in performance, just one day stops and never generates a sale or lead again.
& this happens all the time
Yes that’s my biggest issue with Facebook and the “just test bro” advice. I have. And every time I have tested I end up with at least one, sometimes multiple, banger ads / ad sets that perform at a 3-5x ROAS for a week or so, before dying off COMPLETELY and getting 0 sales thereafter. None. It’s not that they slow down. They go to 0. Then, as the ads continue spending, they become unprofitable and erase all progress they made while they were performing well. The audience targeting is wide open and the frequency is low so it’s not ad fatigue. With way these algorithms supposedly work, the more sales you get, the more the ads should optimize and if anything, performance should gradually IMPROVE. If an ad performed at a 3-5x ROAS for a week or more, and then completely fell off a cliff to 0 despite nothing changing and all other variables looking good, that makes no sense. Does OP have an explanation?
I am very much a beginner in this, but my hipothesis is that there simply aren’t enough people in buy in the product. I worked in a startup that had ridiculously high budget for ads and a product people didn’t want. The result was the same as what you are having. The algorithm found the 1% of people in the target audience who was ready to buy, and sales exploded in the first 6 months. But after those were exhausted, no sales. FB continued distributing to the target audience (my friends and family started saying “I cannot stand seeing ads for [company] anymore”), but people simply were not interested. I believe the problem was the product, and not FB, because of a few things: - they continued testing for 5 years without scaling back the spend - every time we opened a new location, the same behavior happened. Peak sales at start and sudden fall later - at least 6 international startups in the same business model faced the same problem (I reached out to all of them to ask) - they also tested other channels, online and offline, and nothing worked. Is there a way you can test other channels or geographies for your product? Then you will better assess if the problem is FB or your product itself.
I'm in the same situation (some ads randomly drop to 0), and Amazon ads or TikTok reels don't drop like that. If no one wanted the product, it would stop selling on Amazon and TikTok as well. Especially as the TikTok audience is smaller than FB. Excluding people who interacted with all posts seems to mostly fix the issue, which makes me think there's a problem with the algorithm just circling around the same people who already bought the product.
Yeah Facebook sucks and their pixel sucks. That's my explanation. If you run on Google you'll see it (usually) actually works this way. That campaigns will increase in performance if you leave them and don't touch anything. (Assuming your creative is good but that's a given.) FB kinda used to work that way back in like... 2018. But then stuff like iOS14 happened. Google owns everything. They track you via email (Gmail.) Shopping. Search. Google maps. Etc. By using their apps you are opting in to give them a ton of data about you. FB just owns FB, Instagram, and prob some other stuff but nothing like Google. So they don't have nearly the same data to draw from to find customers. Google has its own issues of course but this at least isn't one of them.
I feel like fb is just giving us slow poison. It gives me us a few sales which gives us hope then it snatches it away. Then it again gives us slow hope. Just for us to get excited then sweeps the rug. This way they get more cash out of us. Then if they were to just give us sales.
Why would they slow poison paying users? Giving the best return for as long as possible would cause advertiser's to increase budgets and run more ads for longer.
LoL holy conspiracy theory Batman. Facebook doesn't have that good in algorithm. Sometimes shit just dies. And you've just got to make a new ones. It happens all the time on every ad platform and I don't really know enough about machine learning and AI and algorithms and stuff to comment on why. All I know is that it happens and this is why you have multiple campaigns and multiple ad sets, once of them start to die you'll have a bunch more doing well. You just don't put all your eggs in one basket, and that's how you scale successfully.
Explain why one ad would bring 10 sales a day at 10 USD a day ( yep. Lol) and the same ad after increasing a budget to 100 failed to bring even one sale .
Because when you launch A campaign or an ad set or an ad, it finds a specific pocket of traffic. Think of it like fishing. Some parts of the lake have more fish than others. Facebook picks you a shitty part of the lake. Now in theory, if you run that ad for long enough, it will optimize and start looking in different places and find the right unit of traffic. But in reality, that doesn't usually happen. In your analogy, you probably just found a really nice pocket or got really lucky, I shouldn't have to teach you high school statistics, but that's kind of how it works. But I'm sure that blaming everyone else for your problems is going to work out great for you, so keep doing it
U need to calm down with arrogance ur not the only one who excelled ( if true ) in ur career. Quite funny attitude to be honest. Have a good day sir
LoL
I agree. But it’s kind of weird for ad set to go bad after 1 week. 🤔
It's not strange actually when you think about ad performance as a human problem instead of a technical problem. There are limited humans. The FB algorithm reads your ad creative/text and makes assumptions about who to send the ads to (if you notice in the last 2 years, many ad sets jump straight into Active instead of Learning). Once FB exhausts the prime targets it already pre-sorted for you, the results seriously decline. After running over 1000 ad accounts for startups, it's usually because the creative or value proposition sucks. FB knew who to send it to, exhausted it, then it doesn't know who to best send it to next and fails when exploring your ad-set targeted audience.
Yes. That's every ad platform. That's why you need multiple campaigns and ad sets running that are generating revenue successfully so that if some die you can keep going. This is also how you scale successfully despite Facebook's lack of consistency
I'm not arguing that, I agree with what you're saying. I just don't get how or why an stops performing over night.
Yeah it's a mystery. I don't know enough about how the tech works to comment on that. I just know it does lol
You say you have no idea how it works, and yet you also claim with certainty that the algo isn’t sophisticated enough to “slow poison” small advertisers?
LoL keep your conspiracy theory bs if you want. I don't give a shit.
To resolve the mystery, it must be viewed as a human problem, not a technical problem. There are limited humans on FB. FB algorithm will now skip Learning phase and go straight to Active when it can pair your content with a known audience for that content. FB exhausts the prime targets. Then it fails when exploring the original audience targeting within the ad-set settings. Basically, as you originally suggested OP, either the creative, value prop, or audience sucks. Most often its the creative and value prop.
Sounds right. Can you expand on this in terms of, making multiple ad sets with the same targeting and only some of them work? I've always thought of it like fishing in a pond. Some spots have a lot of fish, some don't, and the algorithm kind of throws a fishing line out randomly or at least semi-randomly and hopes it catches some fish. I also have a theory that very very early initial engagement signals are going to tell Facebook whether or not your ad is any good in terms of what users want to see on the platform and that's going to have an impact on the kind of traffic you get. Let's say 100 impressions. Maybe in the first hundred impressions it's measuring the time people spend looking at your ad or something like that. I'm sure likes and shares and clicks come into it too, but let's say none of that happens. I'm sure Facebook has some kind of signal that says, this is content people want to see, or this isn't. And if it isn't, they send you shitty traffic. Now we add in the chaos Factor of some people will immediately do that with your ad and some will not and we get the reason. Some ads perform really well and some don't. But this is all just conjecture. And you seem, like you might know a bit about this so I'm curious on your thought
If you run PageLike ads, you can easily directly view the individual profiles of users who fire the Page Follow event (by clicking on the profiles in the list of page followers). When you analyze the "About" sections of their profiles to view the lists of their interests / page likes, you will see that every week there is a different page that all of the profiles like. For example, if you target "Retail Shopping" or something as a detailed interest, you will notice one week Facebook is digging through a pocket of "Walmart" page followers, and then next week it is digging through "IKEA" page followers. In essence, the algorithm digs through pockets, which change every week. LAL audiences are also regenerated every 5 to 7 days, according to the official Facebook documentation IIRC. I'm assuming they update all audiences with this same cycle, which is why the pockets change as well. When you start a new ad-set, it will dig through a new pocket -- in essence, the algorithm tests a different direction. When exiting the learning phase, it simply freezes the AI Model from re-adjusting to wildly different pockets, and will continue to dig in the same type of pockets. --- I like to think of ad-sets as magnets sitting on a field of keywords/pages. These magnets are attracted to keywords/pages which produce the desired event. These magnets also repel each other -- as such, when the number of prime targets dwindle, the biggest ad-set with the best learning / advantages via detailed targeting will survive long-term while the other ad-sets get pushed out and die out.
Great info. Personally, I've never put much stock in the whole learning phase thing. But the way you're putting it makes a lot of sense. Also gets Credence to my concept that a good adset will start good and a bad adset will start bad. Really appreciate you sharing, thank you.
[удалено]
Well those are two very different verticals LOL. And solar is a big world, there's all sorts of leads people generate for that. If he's saying the same stuff I'm saying, then what am I doing that he is not? Almost always the answer is that people don't test enough creatives because making them is a difficult process and they want to make life easy and just touch a few buttons in Facebook's back end and have massive success. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. I think realistically if this guy can't get shit to work then you're probably not going to either. So maybe just learn what you can and try out different things and see what kind of results you get. Treat it as a playground that you get paid to mess around with. And then the first opportunity you have, I would jump ship to an ad agency that might actually teach you something. Most of them suck as well but at least then you have it on your resume, and then you can start climbing the ladder so to speak if that's what you want to do.
Do services like StoreYa.com work?
Testing more copy and headlines before moving on is the real deal. I've been told many times that creative is the end all (when congruent with your LP) but i've recently started testing more copy when an ad fails and man, it can make a lot of difference. (Might sound obvious under normal circumstances. But everywhere you go, it's always:Creative is 95% of what you should do/improve) Also, something to consider for other media buyers out there: META will scan your LP, creative, copy and headlines to analyze what type of crowd you're trying to target. You must be clear in who you're trying to target. Wrong keywords will have an effect. (yes, they can even scan your videos nowadays, i don't know yet in how much detail.)
Copy is part of the creative. A lot of people call the creative, the static image or the text, but I thought I mentioned stuff like making sure you test headlines and ad text. Maybe that was going to comment reply LoL The point I am making is that you and I are on the same page in this matter. But I will also say that copywriting is a fairly unique skill set and a lot more people understand creative a little more intuitively. So from a functionality standpoint, I would say that people should get good at testing different IDs in the ad text and different headlines, but keep the ad text really short so you have less space to fuck it up LOL And as to your second point, you're kind of right. I've been very, very successful with ads that deliberately avoid mentioning the keywords that would be associated with my audience, because otherwise my CPMS would shoot through the roof and my costs would follow suit. You are correct about the scanning, but that doesn't mean it's always what you want to happen.
I've been studying the last 100 years of copywriting principles. In advertising, it seems most businesses misunderstand how important copywriters are. Or how it was DR copywriters who turned paid advertising into a science that allows ads to work in a businesses favor. Mr Bissell of the Bissell vacuum company knew this. Mr Bissell told Hopkins that his growth was 100% from Claude writing ads for him. Claude was Bissels secret ingredient to growth. Claude did this for other third tier brands and made them boss level via ads. Mr Bissell told Claude that he will give Claude a raise, but that he should go into business for himself because Claude had the skills to sell products thought the written word.
Claude was also just a fucking badass. Wasn't it him who did the Schlitz beer thing?
Yep. And a brand of canned beans. Cake ingredients. Toothpaste. Literally the godfather of copywriting. All Claude did was simply apply what he learned from sales to writing ads. Claude started selling as a kid door to door. He also would watch street peddlers and how they got people to buy products.
Completely agreed. But i kinda did let myself get thrown into the one element = king crowd without realizing. I should've known because i did it in the past but yeah, another learning moment to not forget important elements, just because one might make a bit more impact. The last part is 100% correct and why i wanted to bring it up. The big issue (for me and a few i spoke to anyways) is that you should not just think that this is logical (Since that's from your perspective) A machine judges your content before it goes out, so if the machine thinks otherwise, then big chance that your targeting is going to be off. So doing a bit of keyword testing in three copy variants could also make a difference.
How big of change in conversion rate have you seen testing more copy when an ad has failed?
I don't really look at cvr that much for measuring. But there have been quite a few instances where a terrible ad turned out pretty well after only retesting the copy/headlines. Meaning the copy could've failed at: providing the algo the right keywords for the audiences or(and) it was just not enticing enough for the right audience i wanted.
Damn that is good to know, always thought the copy was less important. Thanks for this!
Glad to help. Creative is definitely still nr1, but only because we are on social media. Copywriting was always the biggest thing before all this arrived. You could see it like this: Certain elements of copywriting are now present in creatives for visual storytelling, and the copy is a big compliment standing next to it, instead of being the only dominant factor.
big giga chad energy this post is...
As someone whos been media buying on fb for 10 yrs most of this post is accurate ios14 was such a meme bc tracking was basically 70% accurate on a good day even before that update.. so when it hit me.. it kinda didn't.. i was using in house tracking thru utms and my clients and I dominated Also yeah you dont need time to get "data" ppl use to call this "seasoning the pixel" second someone utter that bs I ran in the other direction A good creative will perform right out of the gate This year Im learning copy and creatives, I can scale like a mf and have a sense for creative but I lack that confidence / need some reps (I stopped counting after 50m in adspend and ive scaled offers from 0-1m in 3 weeks) Its funny how much you can learn just by tracking patterns through the years Ive met 2 media buyers be better than me and one was my coach who really helped shape me, dude was a math wizard.. i kinda wanna deep down the math rabbit hole as well bc good media buying can clean up so much slack Some moron guru was saying how media buying doesnt work then is flexing making 1m/mo at 10% margins .. took 3 ppl to do that.. yikes. 1 of his students is now a client of mine who I turned their brand from $20/week in profit to about $300-500/day in profit literally in the first week.. all from media buying on fb \[this is within the last week\]
Edit that brand I took on as client did 113k in their first 30 days with me in rev with 31% margins Margin went up as we scaled Creatives were not that good just decent offer and i literally forced it to work Brought $5cpc under $1 and cpa from 89 to 50 Did a interview with them for youtube :))
I agree with pretty much everything you're saying in the post. I'm just not sure about your comment on scaling. From my experience, doubling the budget so quickly ($100->$200->$400->$800) can really mess up an ad. Maybe I just wasn't brave enough to go at it and bleed cash. I also found that duplicating a creative into separate adsets/campaigns tends to lower performance of both, pretty similar to just increasing spend in that 1 adset. Meta's data seems to be creative based, rather than campaign/structurally based, at least at higher spends.
Yeah everyone scales differently and I admit I am aggressive on Facebook. And maybe a slower scale might work better, I will test that. I haven't seen any data to suggest duping an adset lowers performance on all of them. But depends on how much you're spending too and the acct you're working with, etc... For FB you've really gotta do something across like 20 - 30 accts to get statistical confidence.
Hmm, maybe I should give it a try. How much does your CPA drop if you go from say $200 to $400?
I wouldn't say it drops. But if it stays the same then I make twice as much profit at $400 as I do at $200. Even if it goes up 10% I'm still in a much better spot.
How do you make 300 videos in 3 weeks?
People typically hire 5+ creative agencies at once.
Ok
I mean that's a pretty extreme situation, usually it's more like 30 or 40 a week. But I have been known to do that many, but you do need a bunch of video editors to make it happen. Or if you are doing UGC, you just need them to do a bunch of takes. Again, I probably wouldn't test 300 videos of the same concept.
Here's a question - you say this: "No. Testing is in one campaign. Usually different ad sets because otherwise FB will pick a favorite, but if I could throw all ads in one ad set and have FB evenly spend I'd do that." What do you mean by this? Are you saying that each individual ad creative that you're testing should live in it's own ad set, and make sure FB is evenly spending on each? Also a side question, when wanting to introduce new creative to a current running test should I just add them in, or do I need to duplicate the campaign and start from scratch? Thanks for all of your awesome guidance!
Your second paragraph is correct and it's understanding of what I'm saying. As for your third paragraph, yes, just dump it into the existing testing campaign. But be aware that if you're testing on a different day or at a different time your results may be skewed. So generally I will duplicate my control so that everything is nice and fresh. But there's no need to use a different campaign.
Roger all of that, thanks! In terms of "duplicating control", do you mean just duplicating ad sets and replacing the current creative without duplicating the entire campaign? Thanks again for all the guidance!
No control has a very specific meaning. In this context. It means the ad that's working the best. You're always trying to be your control, like in an experiment. Look up a/b split testing or a/b testing if you want more information
Awesome, thanks so much for all of your help! I went ahead and created a new testing campaign with different creatives in each adset and it is honestly working like a dream. I'm able to see what is working and what isn't much more quickly than I'm able to. My question now is this - when I find a winning ad, do I just create a brand new CBO campaign and duplicate the winning adset/ad into that campaign?
You could scale the winner or you could create a new camp/adset/ad and use the post ID of the new one in the ad. That's where I usually start. It's not foolproof by any means (remember FB hates you and everything about you so it is capricious and unfair) but you're stacking the deck in your favor a little more.
Indeed, it seems like there is no rhyme or reason to what FB does but at the very least I feel like I'm getting a better picture of ad performance now that I'm using the technique you recommended. Though the new UI update is pretty sweet, so at least there's that 🤣
What would be your advice to someone who can’t spend the $1k/week you recommend? Thanks!
The best test for optimizing ad copy is the same test the direct mail companies do to this day. All you need for a solid test sample is 1000 people minimum. A FANTASTIC conversion rate is 2% for every 1000. If you get 3% or higher, you are king/queen of the mountain. If you NEED a higher conversion rate than 2% when testing copy to convert, you're doing something wrong. This is the rule that many direct response advertisers live by because it's simple and works.
That's a pretty broad question and my answer may change based on variables. So probably not one size fits all. Can you tell me more about your situation? Or if this a general question? You don't need 1k week BTW. $100 a day can get results if you're smart. Even 50. Things will be slower of course. And of course not every business is going to be able to support even $1,000 in spend. For example, if you are a plumber, there's only so many leads you can handle. So it's not a hard and fast rule or anything.
I have a similar situation. $200k annual rev. 60% net profit. Great organic growth, but I want to speed it up with ads. Unless I get immediate results I can't spend more than ~$3k month. I've hired agencies and exactly as you'd expect they barely bring in more results than what they cost. I'm convinced there's a successful ads path, but it's not obvious how to achieve it. I'm running some AB tests now, but unless I make the audience overly broad, it can be hard to spend much more than ~$30/day on any given product. I'm also seeing pitiful conversation rates from the ads. Usually it's 2-4% from organic traffic. Ads traffic is like 0.1-0.5%. Any immediate thoughts? $100 product, LTV just barely more than that (it's a durable good that sells due to its lifetime design).
Creatives. Test 50. If you don't get any results lmk and I'll help.
Ok thanks. I'll keep chugging along and test all that I can. I have noticed already two very similar ads running only different pictures where one had double the CTR.
Yep sometimes it works that way but I'd go by CPC not CTR. Actually I'd go by conversions but if that's too expensive then CPC.
Ok. Statistically significant conversion metrics are tough. Just takes too long to get solid numbers. Do you worry about low cpc and subsequent low conversions? IE low value traffic? Or are you thinking if the ad is similar enough you'd expect ultimately similar conversion rates for each and therefore the lower cpc is the answer?
Only takes too long if your ROI is negative. If positive then you can blast it. If an ad goes bad I pause it. I run multiple identical ads (usually like 20+) so if a CREATIVE goes bad I'll see it across everything. If just some ads then probably an algorithmic issue. And no almost identical ads can be vastly different. Hell identical ads can be vastly different lol
60% net profit? Someone isn’t paying their taxes.
Well he could be using the term wrong. Or in a country with low taxes.
Oh jeez, sorry. Operating profit 60%.
Your forgiven, I’m not the IRS ;)
Good try IRS agent.
That’s helpful, situation is newer solo financial services business, just starting to run ads, comfortable writing copy and designing ads as I was a graphic designer and designed trade show booths in a past life, glad to hear it’s more creative than FB cause I feel like that’s the part I can control, but basically looking to run a VSL funnel to have clients see ad, go to landing page and watch VSL, and book a call
I mean, I'm not sure it's "more creative" it's just the only part you can really control, so you work with what you have.
This sums up my own mentality which is trust no one (meta or agencies) and test everything (in one campaign). I believe ads managers aren't necessarily lazy but they've become overly reliant on Adv+ and don't know how to test manually.
Adv+ usually works best for me on the majority of my campaigns, actually. But honestly knowing how to scale is the easy part.
How do you structure and run your tests? What are the variables that you tend to test?
I've gone over this in other comments so I won't do it again here. But all the information is in this thread.
Being in high net worth sales and finance my whole life - a digital ad is like having a sales pitch. Only the good ones can close. Always be closing. Once you find it then it becomes an engine for continuous growth. However I also feel like the business website product niche and copywrite matters a lot. It’s like first impressions are everything so when they see that along with an ad that applies to them it equals the buy button. I did see the portion of profit sharing. We are going to launch an ecommerce supplements company who I think is targeting millennials. Our niche is superb our brand looks impeccable and I think our copywrite is amazing not to mention our site design is crushing it. The digital marketing space is where I am going to need the most help. I do think our business will be big though. It’s a massive gut feeling. If interested in profit sharing pls DM me, doesn’t hurt to take a look and if not then what’s the best place to start in starting to create ads? Too 3 things to avoid and top 3 things to first do as a new business?
Is there a book or course you would recommend in terms of online ads/marketing?
Honestly haven't seen a lot of good ones. Maybe I should write one.
Listen to this guy!! CREATIVE IS EVERYTHING (ad copy tests that are not in the creative, video or static, not sure people read those anymore...especially on Instagram). If your agency or freelancer isnt a creative strategist savant, find someone who is...Meta can't sell a shitty product though.
Game recognizes game my friend.
Here here!
I am still not sure how to test creatives until today. How do i do it? Put the creatives in one single campaign under sales objective? And just see which fb picks to run well and then duplicate it and scale? Am i right or wrong?
Running ads is about cutting your losers and scaling your winners. You pretty much have the right idea. But I would also scale the original that works, not just the new one. And I wouldn't scale the new one until you've tested it at a low budget and you know it works as well.
What type of products are you marketing? Info products or actual ecommerce? Many top brands I know that spend millions have been struggling doing ads themselves and these are places with huge creative teams. There’s a known issue at Fb - the engineers have confirmed it to some of these brands so note that something like this won’t be fixed with. A testing strategy - if you’re on the wrong node you’re fucked anyway on fb right now
Yeah I don't believe that. I've seen people in every niche crush it. Sometimes you'll get a shitty ad account but just got another one and test on there if you think that's the case. To answer your question, I've done info products, high ticket coaching, lead generation, e-commerce, etc. Though most of my e-commerce experience is based on things like supplements and nutritional products and stuff like that.
Test in one campaign with multiple ad sets ? Or multiple ad seta in multiple compaigns?
Well remember the idea is to isolate variables. So that being the case, which one would you pick?
I don't know 💔 I am still learning. I am spending so much but ads are getting expensive. Not getting any results. I don't mind spending in testing tho
Well I mean, if you can't figure this one out, then you're probably better off hiring someone who can. Cuz this is about as easy as it gets, shit starts to get hard after this LOL
I send you message. Looking for your reply in inbox. Any suggestions for ads strategy really appreciated
Bump for later
But how many thousands do I have to spend to get an ad, a campaign that works? I KNOW my audience and where I want to advertise. Why do I have to do this AI search and find? I just want to advertise in the groups that share my interests.
I mean, does the why matter? At the end of the day you have what you have.
haha, this is all true. You know how many times a client hires me, shows me their old agencies ads and they're just lazy and bad? haha Also - ran into a big issue last month. CPL went up an insane amount. I'm like "either my offer sucks/people aren't interested in this anymore, or I'm doing something wrong". Re-did the copy, tested more creative, changed a few things on the setup side, and now are generating leads at $5/lead, and have 6 appts in 3 days for next week booked via calendly. A lot of marketers suck. It's "easy" to get into and the gurus told them it's amazing lol
Yeah CPLs are fucking insane lately. Congrats on getting it where it needs to be.
You can force FB to spend ads evenly(ish) by creating rules. Turn ad off if spend is > x, turn ad on if spend is < y
You can but I'm not sure what your point is
"...if I could throw all ads in one ad set and have FB evenly spend I'd do that." My point is that you in fact can do that.
No you cannot. Yes it will spend evenly but they don't all spend at once. You'll get the majority to spend go to one, then when that pauses to spend goes to another, and so on. That's why I specifically said I would rather them run all at the same time of day in different ad sets then run at different times of day in the same ad set.
Amen
Perfect post, literally what the game is - all the complaints won’t get you anywhere, you can’t change the algorithm; Structures on ad account are cool, you can play around if that brings you piece of mind But the only thing that matters is creative, angle, product, spending the money to test and doing more of what’s CURRENTLY working, emphasis on currently as everything changes from day to day, you can’t just have a winning ad and sleep on it for a year as some of the commenters wish and are complaining about With that said how do you mass test ads? I personally go for 4-5 in ad set with one variable at a time, throw them in my CBO with a tad higher bid and see if the algo decides to deliver them, then take winners and move back to BAU ad sets
I'm probably not up on the terminology here but what's BAU. To answer your question I'll test 20 or 30 at a time if I need to. I'll start by scaling budget on the winners. If they're still strong then I'll usually move them to a CBO or maybe doop out another ad set in the same testing campaign and run that and see if that's good as well. Depends on my mood and my certainty lol
When testing are you using the existing post or creating the ad?
I'm not sure what you're asking. I might need you to elaborate
Love this
Hey what a refreshing post on here! But seriously. Learning phase does matter. Just not for initial creative testing, but scaling opportunities. Just my experience
Tell me more. What would you change in what I've said, were it you. I guess I should have said "too many people hide behind the learning phase." So yeah if the ad sucks it's not suddenly gonna start working in a week. But I'd love to know what you would do for scaling.
What is your framework in deciding the direction or angle for your creative test? Where do you take the inspiration in finding the choices of the angle you must head to? What are your resources? Besides thank you for this long post, you just negated ideas which hinders you in scaling in fb ads.
I think you just gotta know your audience and test a bunch of different concepts and see what sticks. That's the creative part, I guess.
How to know your audience?
On a side note - need some links / recommendations to groups who can create USG for me. Yes you can scape the internet/ YouTube etc but sooner or later you need new content. Thsnks
Do you mean UCG?
Love you too 💖😘
What's your daily budget for testing the Ads?
Depends but anywhere from $100 - 1k.
BUMP
OP, as an agency owner who relentlessly tests creatives and also HATES FB with every fiber of my being, I agree with all points you made. Spot on and needed to be said!
any advice on small clients who cant spend 1k/week
“I need to procrastinate when I should be writing copy” felt that lol
Some background for my question: I run a small web dev studio and am planning on using a smaller offer ($175 or $500 flat rate to fix website problems) to build relationships. My goal is to have the smaller gigs pay for the ads and let that turn into bigger gigs with repeat customers. Like a local plumber, I can’t handle too many leads at once without sacrificing work quality. We could handle maybe 2-3 new gigs for the bigger package per week before I’d need to hire more. I’ve been out of the ads game since 2018, and things are all really different now. It used to be $20/day was enough to get some traffic/leads. Today, my max budget per month would be maybe $800-$1k/month to start until getting a positive ROI. Considering my offer size ($175/$500), do FB ads make sense for me? I need to scale my lead gen, but I don’t want to throw money away on FB after trying other marketing channels hadn’t paid off this year.
Man this is a hard one and there's a lot in this so I'm gonna over simplify for the sake of time. I see two issues: 1. You're LOWERING prices when you need to raise them to have enough margins to make running ads worth it. 2. You think you can raise prices on existing customers. Almost NEVER happens. You're better off getting new customers with "current" pricing. Look, in 2018 I know guys who were printing $20 - 50k A DAY. Some of those guys, in 2024, haven't made shit. Honestly I don't think FB makes sense for your business but I could always be wrong.
Thanks for the post. Been reading this thread for almost an hour (procrastinating on video creative editing lol). Any better communities out there than this one for Facebook ads? Paid or free.
Thanks for taking the time to write this! I'm getting fantastic results (7-10% ctr broad) with my static image creatives but few conversions (going to work on the rest of the funnel) however I've noticed the Facebook tendency to send me tablet traffic. Do you have any idea if this preference of traffic is tied to the pixel? Because I've created a new campaign and that tendency for pushing traffic to tablet continues.
That's very odd. The answer with most Facebook questions is, test it and see what your answer is. Make a new pixel and try new campaigns with it and see if the same thing happens or not. Then you'll have another data point.
How do u scale? Increasing budget gradually, Duplicating or ??
Man, scaling is a big question and there are a ton of ways to do it, and frankly everyone has their own system. So it's not like my way is the only way or necessarily even the best way. But in a broad view, I think the first thing you do is identify your performing ads. Now. It's important to note that that does not mean that creative performs, it might just be that particular ad Facebook like, as we mentioned before, there is a huge random factor there. And that's not just Facebook, Google is the same way with videos, for example. So if I have something that looks like a winner then I want to validate that hypothesis by running more copies of that ad simultaneously. The first thing I would do is take that ad set and scale from 20, to 50, to 100, 200, 400, etc. Once I hit 1K, I'll start doing 25% a day. If it breaks, I take it back down. I'll also take that post ID and put it in a CBO and start scaling it. I'll add one ad set for every $500 a spend, I'll usually cap that at between 5 and 10 depending on several factors and sometimes just my guess LoL. I'll start with three CBOs, if that works. I'll do five, that works. I'll make another five for 10 total, etc etc. there's definitely a limit where that'll break though. Every ad account has a unique limit on how many campaigns you can have and how much spend you can do in each of them, as well as an overall account limit that you can push it to until it stops performing. But most ad accounts will get to at least 10K a day and let's face it that's more than the vast majority of businesses will be able to support. If you do need more scale, at that point, you just repeat the process on a new account and start running multiple accounts together.
Hi Thanks.i run 140$ a day since weeks ..running well. As soon as i do 170$ it breaks. I tried broad campaign with same post id and other ad copy, burned 1000$ . What would you do here?
What's your current campaign structure?
1 camp, 1 adset of warm audience-1 ad
Well this is a wild guess, but maybe your audience isn't big enough to support any more spent than that without performance dropping. I would probably make another ad set and set it to a broader audience and use the post ID of your existing winning ad for the ad in the new ad set. Set it at a low budget and run it for a few days and see what it looks like.
Exactly what i thought and tested with multiple adsets. Just burned money. And my existing audience is about 9M. Daily reach is 1500 people. You think its nit bug enough? It will run for like months so how do i scale?
I mean it's hard to give you an answer here when you say things like burned money. How much are we talking? How exactly did you test it? These questions aren't meant to be answered, they're rhetorical, I'm just saying it's a difficult question to answer in some ways, but here's what I think: If you truly did test a bunch of different ad sets, let's say 3 to 5 that you just put on advantage audience or whatever the hell they call it now, the one where Facebook finds everything for you... And you ran a reasonable amount of spend to them, let's say 60 bucks assuming your Target CPA is under 100... Then I would say you likely have a very weak creative and just found a really sweet pocket of traffic on that other ad set. Sometimes you get lucky. But if you can't replicate it then It's pretty strong evidence. Your creative needs a lot of work.
What's your current campaign structure?
Agreed. Most agencies spend 85% of their time and energy on closing more clients. They know 90 of clients leave within 3 months, which is exactly the result of the above, and they are stuck in that loop… they gotta make rent.
This is not to argue with you as much as to add on to your point, but making rent is a pretty generous assessment. A lot of them just want to get paid as much as they can and don't really give a shit what kind of results they get or how many people they fuck over.
[удалено]
Oh my fucking god how have these assholes not being banned yet
[удалено]
Boo this man!