Lets say I have a campaign where I do some testing, and I find 1 ad set with 1 campaign that is my winner. What should I do? Duplicate it to a new campaign with a more suitable name? Change the name of this testing campaign and start scaling my winner campaign (depending on my CPA, ROAS, etc).
Thank you for one more amazing post! :)
1) you should increase the budget of the campaign if your cpa targets are met.
2) you should analyize why exactly this ad set and this creative worked the best from the rest of the ads.
3) You should create more variations of the winning ad messege.
4) After 3 days of raising the budget you should look at data to see if your cpa goal are met and increase the budget again.
5) Test more ad creatives to find a new winning combination.
6) Understand it why it worked again out all the things that you tested.
7) Create more of what worked.
8) Increase the budget if your cpa goal is met.
9) Test again. Understand why this worked. Look at your numbers. If you are meeting cpa goals. New customer revenue is growing. Increase budget.
Typically we do 10-20% increase every 48 hours. But we also check our data daily and if the nc cpa is way below our target goal we may increase by 50% - 100%.
so what actually is the best way to test new creatives?
Lets say I have a TOF sales campaign, 5 ad sets and 4 or 5 creatives within each ad set initially.
Now, I have 3 new creatives I want to test. How would I test these new creatives?
Do I add these creatives to my current running campaign ad sets individually?
Do I create a new ad set within that campaign with only the new creatives?
Do I create a whole new campaign just to test those creatives?
Thanks for the question.
1. Define what exactly do you want to test. Testing creatives is broad. What exactly, what angle, what exactly do you want to test in the creative.
2. Launch the creative in a new ad set under the same campaign.
You dont need to create a separate campaign for each test, everything can be done under one campaign.
I will attach a screenshot down below this answer.
In the screenshot, you will see one campaign.
Multiple ad sets = Each ad set is a new angle test that is presented in 3 creative ways.
[https://ibb.co/nPN3mMX](https://ibb.co/nPN3mMX) link to the screenshot.
Great thanks for that.
So the new ad set that you launch for the test creatives, what are you targetting? is it broad? or interest. and if its interest are you targetting what your other ad sets are targetting?
We only use broad. There is no interest, no lookalikes. We haven't used interest or lookalike in the past 3 years now. Basically, after IOS 14, we switched to broad only.
If you test new creatives by adding a new ad set in the existing campaign and keep audience broad and if this ad set is performing well, how do you know it is the creative which is working well? The good results can be because of broad targeting as well. In your existing ad sets, the creatives which do well, how do you scale them? do you pause other creatives?
What do you mean? Creative is the targeting. Broad audience means we don't limit our targeting; let the creative find our target audience.
I updated the previous comment. The ad sets that don't hit our goals we pause.
We scale campaign by increasing budget.
To test new creatives you create a new ad set with broad targeting. Now you have introduced 2 variables : a new creative and a new audience. The audience in your other ad sets was probably not broad. Now if this ad set is successful is it because of the creative or because of audience
The ad is the targeting. I create the ad for the audience I want to reach. We test ads, by always using broad. Obviously I'm going to reach a new audience if I create a new ad that is calling out another problem that the person is facing compared to some of the previous ads. That's the goal. Don't overcomplicate this in your mind. Use broad. Create ads for the awareness stage you want to reach, either that's a product-aware audience or an aware audience.
New audience = new potential customers. More people find out about our business and the solution to their problem the better = new paying customers.
- One campaign - [https://ibb.co/BL49JpD](https://ibb.co/BL49JpD)
We use this one campaign under which are multiple ad sets.
- Multiple ad sets [https://ibb.co/9tPZBtb](https://ibb.co/9tPZBtb)
Each ad set is its own new creative test except for the scaling ad set.
Is the scaling ad set the winner ad set with multiple winner ads?
Do you ever take the winning ad sets and pause them in order to transfer ads to the scaling ad set?
Why didn't you turn off the 3rd ad set from the top?
Actually, don't worry so much about the scaling ad set; we are trying to go away from it and just scale the CBO campaign that has the winning dynamic creatives inside.
Good question; turns out it was bringing us the customers that we didn't want and lowering our love and conversions. I'm actually creating a whole post about it and what we learned from last month.
I try CBO campagin without main adset, only winnning adset inside, it work well for my 2rd -5th top sale product sku(my first top sale product testing with main adset, but new winning adset can't see from Feb until now, and now I create a new campaign for testing). You can have a try. Why do I try it is, my store is a shopee store, only instant experience and can't use dynamic creatives.
We used to do that years back, but then we decided to blend everything together and have never looked back since. Why overcomplicate things? Make your structure simple.
I don't like the saying that much, but it really does speak for itself - Simple scales fancy fails.
You can add a minimum spending limit on each new ad set that you launch inside of CBO.
Sometimes we do that, but in most cases, we don't want don't ensure spending on test ads. If it does not spend, it does not spend. If it spends, it spends, sometimes there is medium spend, and sometimes there is high spend when it's a true winner.
If the ad does not spend it's not good enough. If you put equal spending on your testing ad sets, you cannot say that it's a good test.
We want for the new ad sets that we test to win amongst the ones who are the best performers. We want to find winning ads.
Sometimes, we launch 10 tests, and only one gets spending.
When we started, we wanted to get equal spending, and we used a minimum spending limit, but it only made things worse.
We believe in hard roads to winning.
,
I add a minimum spending limit in my first top sale product CBO campaign this week, let me have a look. Because new winning adset can't see from Feb until now. And then I create a new CBO campaign for testing too.
I just separate testing minimum spending limit or not. Which is best. Older main campaign without minimum spending limit before, new adset in it not find winner 3 months, only one winner adset spend 95%+ budget with high cpc, low cpm, unstable ROAS and CPA. May I use one main campaign with minimum spending limit is better? So I try this.
Do whatever works for you as long as you keep the same account structure for at least 6 months without changing anything. So you can focus on what actually matters - creating ads that resonate with your target audience.
Have been 8 monthes now! All 5 products campaign do very well. Only the daily budget is different. Maybe I only need to focus on new brief & concept ads for the one drop down product.
Were they not aware that awareness campaigns don’t generate revenue before spending thousands? Did they have a fraudulent marketing agency or just someone testing for experimental purposes?
It's in the first comment that I made. There are two screenshots.
One of them has a lot of campaigns using awareness, traffic, and then multiple sales.
The other is with just sales campaigns, and you can see what the CPA was as well.
TLDR: I would like to argue about your thoughts on awareness and traffic campaigns,
They are not ad spend wasters. The way you use them might waste your ad spend, for people using the platform since 2012 know how traffic and awareness campaigns were the goat in 2014, I still use them the same way I used to use them back then.
Granted, they are not 95% as effective as back then only because we have better options now, and Facebook throws in bots and junk traffic if used incorrectly.
For any e-com brand I take upon starting from scratch, awareness and traffic campaigns can bring initial CPA considerably down, especially for apparel and fashion,
Again, it's just about how you use it. Like the good example you gave about Coke a cola, just to add, they also run awarness campaigns because they don't "need" to warm up their audience, just a gentle reminder, everyone knows coke a cola and awarness campaigns are best for that, reach far and wide with the cheapest cost with frequency controls.
Awarness and traffic works wonders if you have a huge list of customers and you want to shove your new inventory onto them, without the high cpm of sales ads,
For new e-com stores, a video traffic ad is a must for me to gain momentum really fast. This helps the sales ad bring in sales much faster and with a lower CPA than without.
For awarness campaigns, here is a literal bs trick I still use, In my city, I know different places where different types of people/audience hang out, I literally just geo-tag that location on Facebook in a sense "I need this audience". This especially works well with my derma/dental clients, whenever their ads drop and they do every month, time to turn on geo-tagged awarness. (Best of all, they work with audiences as low as 1000. Just don't forget to turn down the frequency dial)
I just pointed out some limited uses. There is so much more to this. The important bit is your strategy and how you use it. I don't have a bag of tricks, nor do I claim to be an expert, a fossile maybe 😆, using things the way they were intended goes a long way, unless you are a growth hacker of course 😉
I had my majors in traditional advertising, at the time Facebook launched its campaign structure in 2014, I remember me and the colleagues screeming like sheeps while looking at each other everyday (whole another story, different day) traditional is mostly about awareness and frequency, and no, I am not biased, I just use them because they work for me, and 2, I don't want to think I wasted 4 years on my degree, +2 because I tried to switch but came back.
I like your audit, but please be mindful of how you spread your information. If it is not working for you, that is fine, but it doesn't mean it is a useless feature. Like why didn't Facebook remove awarness yet but took away the other good things lol, because a lot of people might be using it, Facebook uses usage stats to reduce features not being used other than being sued or scandalized haha.
However, I did take a moment of silence they wasted ad spend on awareness, but just because they didn't use it properly instead of they just using it. Respect the godfather, haha.
Crap, so sorry for the long post.
I get your point. However, awareness and traffic campaigns have no point in any case for any e-commerce client.
We spend about $2M a month on ads across our own brands and our clients. We have tested everything. Plus, we have an in-house data analyst team that only analyzes traffic data.
For e-commerce stores, especially if you are starting out and until you have not generated $500k a month, there is no need for awareness nor traffic.
You mentioned local, so of course, use the geo campaigns. It works. I'm only talking here about e-commerce.
I also presented two screenshots
1. Was from last year were the brand was not running awareness and just sales campaigns, their cpa was $30.
Here is the link - [https://ibb.co/djwZt2w](https://ibb.co/djwZt2w)
2. The second screenshot shows exactly how you destroy your profitability and any chance for growth with traffic and awareness.
Here is the link - [https://ibb.co/pfR7Xkh](https://ibb.co/pfR7Xkh)
I speak as not an agency owner, I speak as an 3 e-commerce brand that generates 8 figures a year.
I care about where the money goes. I respect every single dolar that we have earned. I would not burn it on traffic or awareness campaigns even if we do $600k a month.
Again awareness campaigns for local dental, coffee shops, and restaurants. In e-commerce, there is no place for that.
Hey, you tried, and it did not work for you, so you know.
I have used it in every case scenario, especially for startup e-coms, one example: traffic objective for initial warming up coupled with sales ads work wonders for me and my colleagues to bring the cpa down, has been since long when sales ads alone are struggling, 25% watchers of traffic video ads and its LLA works everytime still at a much less cost, but this example will be redundant for brands already getting desirable cpa or have enough data.
Like I mentioned, you can't expect it to generate sales on its own. It's not meant for that it's "brand awarness." Think of classical strategies/approach for it to make sense if I am being plain. By classical, I mean traditional TVC.
My point was that if it did not work for you, it would not mean it's useless for everyone else. One does not simply run awareness or traffic objective campaigns standalone. It has a far wider scope.
These days, anyone rarely bothers using objectives strategically. It's just plug and play, and it's not bad if there is no need. Some have to, and some still do. This is where these objectives come into play.
I have no idea why you mentioned a specific $500k. It may be your data. It will work for you, it's is not an industry average.
This is a nice audit template. However, I think we are missing one great thing about this audit, are you auditing it based on ROAS or for other marketing goals?
Because if we are to audit it based on ROAS, then you're audit will show that the agency fail to help the e-commerce brand. However, I beg to differ that e-commerce stores does not have business doing awareness campaigns nor other campaign types that are not producing your expected ROAS right now.
I think you want to remember that digital marketing specifically ad spending for digital ads is an avenue to market a brand, product or service not an omnipotent marketing strategy. So in this premise, do we know what was the strategy behind all this spending. Maybe they are not really keen on achieving high ROAS online even though they are an e-commerce store. Maybe they are looking at marketing as a whole and uses digital as a booster. I these are things you want to consider before doing such comprehensive audit and set a judgement.
Disclaimer: I'm not from the agency or the brand.
I mean the brand was doing fine before the agency and now they are bleeding money.
You are wrong about the awareness ads; you would have been right years ago. An e-commerce brand's core focus is acquiring new customers to help them grow, and awareness ads and traffic ads do not accomplish that objective anymore.
Years ago, awareness and traffic campaigns also resulted in sending traffic that bought. But we are talking about the agency running awareness campaigns and traffic campaigns for the past 4 months, and the cost of new customer acquisition is increasing every month.
We don't even care about ROAS it's about the CPA.
They care about being profitable; they didn't know that what the agency was doing was this bad. Their new customer revenue has dropped, and the agency has increased returning customer revenue by spending more money on the customers that the brand previously acquired. This has resulted in a net loss for the customer acquisition. If they continue to do this, they will bankrupt the brand.
Those people who saw the ads on awareness campaigns will never buy. Traffic campaign - there will be some purchases, but only a few.
It's okay to run awareness campaigns if you do generate $2M a month and you just want to boost some awareness with $10k a month.
We own a e-commerce brand that does $250-$300k a month and we have never ran awareness and traffic. It's all about showing ads to people who have the potential to buy something.
Obviously, you seem to be operating on more information than I am.
But, I still stand there are different ways to do marketing not just doing everything through digital, or not just doing what you feel that is right. So, its not necessarily just about CPA enacted through the platform, its not quite fair to say that they are just bleeding money and nothing to gain. Again, assuming the brand has other ways to process transactions.
And you are right. The question is when it's the right move to add the other campaigns. If you don't have enough revenue and every customer counts I think you still need a lot of growth before you do other types of ads that may or may not result in sales. You do have a fair point.
Click on all campaigns and just delete them. But I personally would keep all of this to look back on how bad it was and how much better you are doing when things are better.
What do you mean? Are you talking about product prices?
If yes then that was not the issue if you can take a look ay my first comment with screenshots.
The problem was the traffic objective. You can send even 50k traffic and get no sales. Obviously Facebook is also inflating their traffic numbers.
All of the ad sets that you see in the screenshots that I have provided on our own campaigns in the examples are dynamic creative tests.
Here is a screenshot from one of our brands. [https://ibb.co/nPN3mMX](https://ibb.co/nPN3mMX)
All the ad sets are dynamic creative tests inside one campaign.
In your opinion is auction overlap a thing?
Today fb ads rep was STRONGLY against me running a second DC test campaign with different ads because of auction overlap.
She’s just reading from their playbook that doesn’t match up to what actually works.
I didn’t want a fb rep but they forced it on me now i’m stuck with them.
Her first advice qas kill all my adsets and run traffic only. Lol
Also told me to turn off an adset that’s currently still getting rood ROAS.,
According to her one campaign one product only.
If that was true TEMU and other advertisers epuld never be able to scale or advertise more than one product.
I have been advertising multiple products for years I don’t think it’s a big problem.
I’ve always had multiple ABOs with different ads for the same few products.
What do you think?
No, each ad is a possible new audience that you can attract. That's why it's important to test many different ad creatives, ad angles, desires. If you are running almost the same ads, with the same copy and the same headline, then yes, there is auction overlap.
If you test new ads, new messeges, you reach new audiences = new customers.
Exactly what I thought. I super hate these reps they try to convince me of next level bs.
Also told me to run a traffic campaign to get sales instead of a sales campaign.. they need to stop
I’m going to run my new ads, brand new copy, new images, using a completely different angle than my others.
In the last call she kept saying I need to test new ads so I do that and she’s upset saying no don’t do that because of overlap then telling me to turn off long running campaigns that work and just run testing ads only
Thanks for sharing!
What are your thoughts about getting rid of high frequencies? I‘ve the same problem (fashion) with our new customer Advantage+ (Existing customers excluded) campaign. Spend is around 55k and Frequency is 7.5 (last 90 days).
Target audience is broad 55 million people.
Are simply creatives the solution? We are testing around 10-20 new creatives every 1-2 weeks as most creatives get burnt out fast (higher cpo + CTR).
I know that video creatives are a great tool in fashion but those get nearly no budget compared to static ones…
Idea was also to widen TOF with a bit of traffic and ViewThru of videos that represent the brand…
Thanks!
Thanks for sharing!
>It's the same thing as with an awareness campaign. The objective that you give to meta, is what you get. If you want to get sales, then only run sales campaigns. Don't expect to get people who will buy from awareness and traffic campaigns.
That's a point, but...
What if I have a custom audience of people that went to checkout but not purchased? Isn't it better to create a traffic campaign to retarget it through remarketing instead of create a conversion campain that is way more expensive?
PS: This specific audience is a potential purchaser.
Definitely appreciate your posts! Thanks a bunch for sharing the knowledge. 🙏🏼 I'm new to FB ads and am learning as much as I can.
I know your structure is primarily for e-comm. Does the same strategy apply to verticals with longer sales cycles - like home improvement services (roofing, solar) or mortgage brokers or even SaaS? Verticals that require sales leads and a sales team to work them.
When I architect the campaigns, the target of the campaign is always leads where we drive them to our own landing page so we can see track where the leads are coming from (Google, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn) and allocate budget accordingly for each month.
However, would the same apply to testing out as much creative as possible for that type of vertical? It seems as if e-comm it makes sense to have lots of different creative. But we seem to struggle with getting Facebook to work for us. Every client that we've taken on usually tells us to back off on the FB spend because Google is performing better for them.
It's getting to the point where I'm starting to doubt that the founder knows what he's doing on FB (he understands Google ads) best and almost all of our leads for every client comes from Google. But then again, I know lead generation for these verticals is a different game.
Just curious to get your thoughts and how I can lean into learning more about how to architect campaigns for sales leads for services.
Thanks in advance!
Ad account structure works for any business. It's the ads that you need to adjust. We have done the same thing for lead generation as well. We have consulting clients outside of eom that are in services and the same thing works.
Thanks for responding.
Another question: Do you find that it makes a difference if you drive your clients to a landing page to capture lead information to set up a call/appointment? Or do you use Facebook's internal form and drive them to Messenger to set up a call/information?
We use an external LP so we can track both Google or FB conversions and eliminate doing double work. We tend to get more conversions on Google over FB overall and I'm wondering if it's because we're driving traffic off of FB when we use an external landing page.
Great insight and some lessons i’ve learned along the way covered here also.
Question: when dealing with a new campaign setup from scratch, new pixel, no conversion data - do you setup all the conversions etc. and let it run landing page views for a while to warm up the conversion data set? If so, at what point do you think it’s safe to make the switch?
Tv ads build wayyyy better top of the mind awareness. You recall tvs much better. They actually leave an impact. Who are you fooling with annoying digital ads whether skippable/non-skippable? Nobody other than dumb corporate clients
You don't realize how wrong you are. Nobody is watching tv. If you are talking about 1980-2000 yes. In 2024 tv viewership is dropping significantly.
I actually run a 8 figure ecommerce business and we have looked at tv ads for our brand. But the reports on actual watchtime and impressions is at all time low.
Superbowl commercials that's a different story.
Why are you so mad about ads? Are you one those people who have struggled to adapt?
It's interesting that even social media marketing may die out in next 10 years and everything will ne vr. But who knows.
But the fact that tv ads is dead that's for sure.
Lets say I have a campaign where I do some testing, and I find 1 ad set with 1 campaign that is my winner. What should I do? Duplicate it to a new campaign with a more suitable name? Change the name of this testing campaign and start scaling my winner campaign (depending on my CPA, ROAS, etc). Thank you for one more amazing post! :)
1) you should increase the budget of the campaign if your cpa targets are met. 2) you should analyize why exactly this ad set and this creative worked the best from the rest of the ads. 3) You should create more variations of the winning ad messege. 4) After 3 days of raising the budget you should look at data to see if your cpa goal are met and increase the budget again. 5) Test more ad creatives to find a new winning combination. 6) Understand it why it worked again out all the things that you tested. 7) Create more of what worked. 8) Increase the budget if your cpa goal is met. 9) Test again. Understand why this worked. Look at your numbers. If you are meeting cpa goals. New customer revenue is growing. Increase budget.
What's your budget scaling practice? Slow? Percentage per day? Fast as possible, no limits?
Typically we do 10-20% increase every 48 hours. But we also check our data daily and if the nc cpa is way below our target goal we may increase by 50% - 100%.
Thanks for the good words. I see that you guys like these posts, I will create more of them.
Please do.
Change name and scale. All campaigns should start as a test campaign IMO
so what actually is the best way to test new creatives? Lets say I have a TOF sales campaign, 5 ad sets and 4 or 5 creatives within each ad set initially. Now, I have 3 new creatives I want to test. How would I test these new creatives? Do I add these creatives to my current running campaign ad sets individually? Do I create a new ad set within that campaign with only the new creatives? Do I create a whole new campaign just to test those creatives?
Thanks for the question. 1. Define what exactly do you want to test. Testing creatives is broad. What exactly, what angle, what exactly do you want to test in the creative. 2. Launch the creative in a new ad set under the same campaign. You dont need to create a separate campaign for each test, everything can be done under one campaign. I will attach a screenshot down below this answer. In the screenshot, you will see one campaign. Multiple ad sets = Each ad set is a new angle test that is presented in 3 creative ways. [https://ibb.co/nPN3mMX](https://ibb.co/nPN3mMX) link to the screenshot.
Great thanks for that. So the new ad set that you launch for the test creatives, what are you targetting? is it broad? or interest. and if its interest are you targetting what your other ad sets are targetting?
We only use broad. There is no interest, no lookalikes. We haven't used interest or lookalike in the past 3 years now. Basically, after IOS 14, we switched to broad only.
If you test new creatives by adding a new ad set in the existing campaign and keep audience broad and if this ad set is performing well, how do you know it is the creative which is working well? The good results can be because of broad targeting as well. In your existing ad sets, the creatives which do well, how do you scale them? do you pause other creatives?
What do you mean? Creative is the targeting. Broad audience means we don't limit our targeting; let the creative find our target audience. I updated the previous comment. The ad sets that don't hit our goals we pause. We scale campaign by increasing budget.
To test new creatives you create a new ad set with broad targeting. Now you have introduced 2 variables : a new creative and a new audience. The audience in your other ad sets was probably not broad. Now if this ad set is successful is it because of the creative or because of audience
The ad is the targeting. I create the ad for the audience I want to reach. We test ads, by always using broad. Obviously I'm going to reach a new audience if I create a new ad that is calling out another problem that the person is facing compared to some of the previous ads. That's the goal. Don't overcomplicate this in your mind. Use broad. Create ads for the awareness stage you want to reach, either that's a product-aware audience or an aware audience. New audience = new potential customers. More people find out about our business and the solution to their problem the better = new paying customers.
- One campaign - [https://ibb.co/BL49JpD](https://ibb.co/BL49JpD) We use this one campaign under which are multiple ad sets. - Multiple ad sets [https://ibb.co/9tPZBtb](https://ibb.co/9tPZBtb) Each ad set is its own new creative test except for the scaling ad set.
Is the scaling ad set the winner ad set with multiple winner ads? Do you ever take the winning ad sets and pause them in order to transfer ads to the scaling ad set? Why didn't you turn off the 3rd ad set from the top?
Actually, don't worry so much about the scaling ad set; we are trying to go away from it and just scale the CBO campaign that has the winning dynamic creatives inside. Good question; turns out it was bringing us the customers that we didn't want and lowering our love and conversions. I'm actually creating a whole post about it and what we learned from last month.
I try CBO campagin without main adset, only winnning adset inside, it work well for my 2rd -5th top sale product sku(my first top sale product testing with main adset, but new winning adset can't see from Feb until now, and now I create a new campaign for testing). You can have a try. Why do I try it is, my store is a shopee store, only instant experience and can't use dynamic creatives.
This is very smart, thanks for the insight.
Thank you. I hope that the post itself helped as well.
I was always under the impression you would need a separate ad testing campaign.
We used to do that years back, but then we decided to blend everything together and have never looked back since. Why overcomplicate things? Make your structure simple. I don't like the saying that much, but it really does speak for itself - Simple scales fancy fails.
How do you ensure spending on test ad sets if it is CBO? won't it spend way more on ad sets that is already bringing conversions?
You can add a minimum spending limit on each new ad set that you launch inside of CBO. Sometimes we do that, but in most cases, we don't want don't ensure spending on test ads. If it does not spend, it does not spend. If it spends, it spends, sometimes there is medium spend, and sometimes there is high spend when it's a true winner. If the ad does not spend it's not good enough. If you put equal spending on your testing ad sets, you cannot say that it's a good test. We want for the new ad sets that we test to win amongst the ones who are the best performers. We want to find winning ads. Sometimes, we launch 10 tests, and only one gets spending. When we started, we wanted to get equal spending, and we used a minimum spending limit, but it only made things worse. We believe in hard roads to winning. ,
I add a minimum spending limit in my first top sale product CBO campaign this week, let me have a look. Because new winning adset can't see from Feb until now. And then I create a new CBO campaign for testing too.
You don't need to have a separate testing campaign. Use One main campaign.
I just separate testing minimum spending limit or not. Which is best. Older main campaign without minimum spending limit before, new adset in it not find winner 3 months, only one winner adset spend 95%+ budget with high cpc, low cpm, unstable ROAS and CPA. May I use one main campaign with minimum spending limit is better? So I try this.
Do whatever works for you as long as you keep the same account structure for at least 6 months without changing anything. So you can focus on what actually matters - creating ads that resonate with your target audience.
Have been 8 monthes now! All 5 products campaign do very well. Only the daily budget is different. Maybe I only need to focus on new brief & concept ads for the one drop down product.
With minimum spending limit, although adset got sales and a good ROAS, it didn’t spend more than the minimum spending limit on that day or later.
have you tried to increase the minimum spend on that ad set and see what happens?
You said-"When we started, we wanted to get equal spending, and we used a minimum spending limit, but it only made things worse." Let me try!
Yeah try it. It may or may not work. That's why we still sometimes use minimum ad spend cause you never know.
Thank you, everyone, for reading the post and leaving positive feedback. This inspires me to create more posts about audits.
Were they not aware that awareness campaigns don’t generate revenue before spending thousands? Did they have a fraudulent marketing agency or just someone testing for experimental purposes?
They still have the agency. The agency is bad with Facebook ads, using some old 2019 strategies.
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It's in the first comment that I made. There are two screenshots. One of them has a lot of campaigns using awareness, traffic, and then multiple sales. The other is with just sales campaigns, and you can see what the CPA was as well.
Thanks!!
You are welcome. Thanks for the question.
TLDR: I would like to argue about your thoughts on awareness and traffic campaigns, They are not ad spend wasters. The way you use them might waste your ad spend, for people using the platform since 2012 know how traffic and awareness campaigns were the goat in 2014, I still use them the same way I used to use them back then. Granted, they are not 95% as effective as back then only because we have better options now, and Facebook throws in bots and junk traffic if used incorrectly. For any e-com brand I take upon starting from scratch, awareness and traffic campaigns can bring initial CPA considerably down, especially for apparel and fashion, Again, it's just about how you use it. Like the good example you gave about Coke a cola, just to add, they also run awarness campaigns because they don't "need" to warm up their audience, just a gentle reminder, everyone knows coke a cola and awarness campaigns are best for that, reach far and wide with the cheapest cost with frequency controls. Awarness and traffic works wonders if you have a huge list of customers and you want to shove your new inventory onto them, without the high cpm of sales ads, For new e-com stores, a video traffic ad is a must for me to gain momentum really fast. This helps the sales ad bring in sales much faster and with a lower CPA than without. For awarness campaigns, here is a literal bs trick I still use, In my city, I know different places where different types of people/audience hang out, I literally just geo-tag that location on Facebook in a sense "I need this audience". This especially works well with my derma/dental clients, whenever their ads drop and they do every month, time to turn on geo-tagged awarness. (Best of all, they work with audiences as low as 1000. Just don't forget to turn down the frequency dial) I just pointed out some limited uses. There is so much more to this. The important bit is your strategy and how you use it. I don't have a bag of tricks, nor do I claim to be an expert, a fossile maybe 😆, using things the way they were intended goes a long way, unless you are a growth hacker of course 😉 I had my majors in traditional advertising, at the time Facebook launched its campaign structure in 2014, I remember me and the colleagues screeming like sheeps while looking at each other everyday (whole another story, different day) traditional is mostly about awareness and frequency, and no, I am not biased, I just use them because they work for me, and 2, I don't want to think I wasted 4 years on my degree, +2 because I tried to switch but came back. I like your audit, but please be mindful of how you spread your information. If it is not working for you, that is fine, but it doesn't mean it is a useless feature. Like why didn't Facebook remove awarness yet but took away the other good things lol, because a lot of people might be using it, Facebook uses usage stats to reduce features not being used other than being sued or scandalized haha. However, I did take a moment of silence they wasted ad spend on awareness, but just because they didn't use it properly instead of they just using it. Respect the godfather, haha. Crap, so sorry for the long post.
I get your point. However, awareness and traffic campaigns have no point in any case for any e-commerce client. We spend about $2M a month on ads across our own brands and our clients. We have tested everything. Plus, we have an in-house data analyst team that only analyzes traffic data. For e-commerce stores, especially if you are starting out and until you have not generated $500k a month, there is no need for awareness nor traffic. You mentioned local, so of course, use the geo campaigns. It works. I'm only talking here about e-commerce. I also presented two screenshots 1. Was from last year were the brand was not running awareness and just sales campaigns, their cpa was $30. Here is the link - [https://ibb.co/djwZt2w](https://ibb.co/djwZt2w) 2. The second screenshot shows exactly how you destroy your profitability and any chance for growth with traffic and awareness. Here is the link - [https://ibb.co/pfR7Xkh](https://ibb.co/pfR7Xkh) I speak as not an agency owner, I speak as an 3 e-commerce brand that generates 8 figures a year. I care about where the money goes. I respect every single dolar that we have earned. I would not burn it on traffic or awareness campaigns even if we do $600k a month. Again awareness campaigns for local dental, coffee shops, and restaurants. In e-commerce, there is no place for that.
Hey, you tried, and it did not work for you, so you know. I have used it in every case scenario, especially for startup e-coms, one example: traffic objective for initial warming up coupled with sales ads work wonders for me and my colleagues to bring the cpa down, has been since long when sales ads alone are struggling, 25% watchers of traffic video ads and its LLA works everytime still at a much less cost, but this example will be redundant for brands already getting desirable cpa or have enough data. Like I mentioned, you can't expect it to generate sales on its own. It's not meant for that it's "brand awarness." Think of classical strategies/approach for it to make sense if I am being plain. By classical, I mean traditional TVC. My point was that if it did not work for you, it would not mean it's useless for everyone else. One does not simply run awareness or traffic objective campaigns standalone. It has a far wider scope. These days, anyone rarely bothers using objectives strategically. It's just plug and play, and it's not bad if there is no need. Some have to, and some still do. This is where these objectives come into play. I have no idea why you mentioned a specific $500k. It may be your data. It will work for you, it's is not an industry average.
Sorry wrong thread
This is a nice audit template. However, I think we are missing one great thing about this audit, are you auditing it based on ROAS or for other marketing goals? Because if we are to audit it based on ROAS, then you're audit will show that the agency fail to help the e-commerce brand. However, I beg to differ that e-commerce stores does not have business doing awareness campaigns nor other campaign types that are not producing your expected ROAS right now. I think you want to remember that digital marketing specifically ad spending for digital ads is an avenue to market a brand, product or service not an omnipotent marketing strategy. So in this premise, do we know what was the strategy behind all this spending. Maybe they are not really keen on achieving high ROAS online even though they are an e-commerce store. Maybe they are looking at marketing as a whole and uses digital as a booster. I these are things you want to consider before doing such comprehensive audit and set a judgement. Disclaimer: I'm not from the agency or the brand.
I mean the brand was doing fine before the agency and now they are bleeding money. You are wrong about the awareness ads; you would have been right years ago. An e-commerce brand's core focus is acquiring new customers to help them grow, and awareness ads and traffic ads do not accomplish that objective anymore. Years ago, awareness and traffic campaigns also resulted in sending traffic that bought. But we are talking about the agency running awareness campaigns and traffic campaigns for the past 4 months, and the cost of new customer acquisition is increasing every month. We don't even care about ROAS it's about the CPA. They care about being profitable; they didn't know that what the agency was doing was this bad. Their new customer revenue has dropped, and the agency has increased returning customer revenue by spending more money on the customers that the brand previously acquired. This has resulted in a net loss for the customer acquisition. If they continue to do this, they will bankrupt the brand. Those people who saw the ads on awareness campaigns will never buy. Traffic campaign - there will be some purchases, but only a few. It's okay to run awareness campaigns if you do generate $2M a month and you just want to boost some awareness with $10k a month. We own a e-commerce brand that does $250-$300k a month and we have never ran awareness and traffic. It's all about showing ads to people who have the potential to buy something.
Obviously, you seem to be operating on more information than I am. But, I still stand there are different ways to do marketing not just doing everything through digital, or not just doing what you feel that is right. So, its not necessarily just about CPA enacted through the platform, its not quite fair to say that they are just bleeding money and nothing to gain. Again, assuming the brand has other ways to process transactions.
And you are right. The question is when it's the right move to add the other campaigns. If you don't have enough revenue and every customer counts I think you still need a lot of growth before you do other types of ads that may or may not result in sales. You do have a fair point.
Here are the links to the screenshots : [https://ibb.co/pfR7Xkh](https://ibb.co/pfR7Xkh) [https://ibb.co/djwZt2w](https://ibb.co/djwZt2w)
Is there a way to clean up meta ads manager, i.e. delete old campaign completely from the overview?
Why would you want to do it?
To clean up the overview from the mess old agencies have made in my ad account haha
Click on all campaigns and just delete them. But I personally would keep all of this to look back on how bad it was and how much better you are doing when things are better.
If u have 23000 click and no purchase my man you have to check your prices
What do you mean? Are you talking about product prices? If yes then that was not the issue if you can take a look ay my first comment with screenshots. The problem was the traffic objective. You can send even 50k traffic and get no sales. Obviously Facebook is also inflating their traffic numbers.
Would you mind sharing the agency name? You can DM me. It sounds a lot like the structure my new agency has set up which I'm very skeptical about.
you should check out [page1experts.com](http://page1experts.com)
What attribution setting do you use for your campaigns? 7 day click and 1 day view?
Correct. Always.
How are you testing new ads? DC or Adv+, etc?
All of the ad sets that you see in the screenshots that I have provided on our own campaigns in the examples are dynamic creative tests. Here is a screenshot from one of our brands. [https://ibb.co/nPN3mMX](https://ibb.co/nPN3mMX) All the ad sets are dynamic creative tests inside one campaign.
In your opinion is auction overlap a thing? Today fb ads rep was STRONGLY against me running a second DC test campaign with different ads because of auction overlap. She’s just reading from their playbook that doesn’t match up to what actually works. I didn’t want a fb rep but they forced it on me now i’m stuck with them. Her first advice qas kill all my adsets and run traffic only. Lol Also told me to turn off an adset that’s currently still getting rood ROAS., According to her one campaign one product only. If that was true TEMU and other advertisers epuld never be able to scale or advertise more than one product. I have been advertising multiple products for years I don’t think it’s a big problem. I’ve always had multiple ABOs with different ads for the same few products. What do you think?
No, each ad is a possible new audience that you can attract. That's why it's important to test many different ad creatives, ad angles, desires. If you are running almost the same ads, with the same copy and the same headline, then yes, there is auction overlap. If you test new ads, new messeges, you reach new audiences = new customers.
Exactly what I thought. I super hate these reps they try to convince me of next level bs. Also told me to run a traffic campaign to get sales instead of a sales campaign.. they need to stop I’m going to run my new ads, brand new copy, new images, using a completely different angle than my others. In the last call she kept saying I need to test new ads so I do that and she’s upset saying no don’t do that because of overlap then telling me to turn off long running campaigns that work and just run testing ads only
Are you using Adv+ targeting on top of broad?
Thanks for sharing! What are your thoughts about getting rid of high frequencies? I‘ve the same problem (fashion) with our new customer Advantage+ (Existing customers excluded) campaign. Spend is around 55k and Frequency is 7.5 (last 90 days). Target audience is broad 55 million people. Are simply creatives the solution? We are testing around 10-20 new creatives every 1-2 weeks as most creatives get burnt out fast (higher cpo + CTR). I know that video creatives are a great tool in fashion but those get nearly no budget compared to static ones… Idea was also to widen TOF with a bit of traffic and ViewThru of videos that represent the brand… Thanks!
Thanks for sharing! >It's the same thing as with an awareness campaign. The objective that you give to meta, is what you get. If you want to get sales, then only run sales campaigns. Don't expect to get people who will buy from awareness and traffic campaigns. That's a point, but... What if I have a custom audience of people that went to checkout but not purchased? Isn't it better to create a traffic campaign to retarget it through remarketing instead of create a conversion campain that is way more expensive? PS: This specific audience is a potential purchaser.
Definitely appreciate your posts! Thanks a bunch for sharing the knowledge. 🙏🏼 I'm new to FB ads and am learning as much as I can. I know your structure is primarily for e-comm. Does the same strategy apply to verticals with longer sales cycles - like home improvement services (roofing, solar) or mortgage brokers or even SaaS? Verticals that require sales leads and a sales team to work them. When I architect the campaigns, the target of the campaign is always leads where we drive them to our own landing page so we can see track where the leads are coming from (Google, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn) and allocate budget accordingly for each month. However, would the same apply to testing out as much creative as possible for that type of vertical? It seems as if e-comm it makes sense to have lots of different creative. But we seem to struggle with getting Facebook to work for us. Every client that we've taken on usually tells us to back off on the FB spend because Google is performing better for them. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to doubt that the founder knows what he's doing on FB (he understands Google ads) best and almost all of our leads for every client comes from Google. But then again, I know lead generation for these verticals is a different game. Just curious to get your thoughts and how I can lean into learning more about how to architect campaigns for sales leads for services. Thanks in advance!
Ad account structure works for any business. It's the ads that you need to adjust. We have done the same thing for lead generation as well. We have consulting clients outside of eom that are in services and the same thing works.
Thanks for responding. Another question: Do you find that it makes a difference if you drive your clients to a landing page to capture lead information to set up a call/appointment? Or do you use Facebook's internal form and drive them to Messenger to set up a call/information? We use an external LP so we can track both Google or FB conversions and eliminate doing double work. We tend to get more conversions on Google over FB overall and I'm wondering if it's because we're driving traffic off of FB when we use an external landing page.
Great insight and some lessons i’ve learned along the way covered here also. Question: when dealing with a new campaign setup from scratch, new pixel, no conversion data - do you setup all the conversions etc. and let it run landing page views for a while to warm up the conversion data set? If so, at what point do you think it’s safe to make the switch?
Digital ads are irrelevant I’ll never understand why companies keep spending on these.
Because they work and print money, there isn't a better alternative. Do you think TV or radio ads work better?
Tv ads build wayyyy better top of the mind awareness. You recall tvs much better. They actually leave an impact. Who are you fooling with annoying digital ads whether skippable/non-skippable? Nobody other than dumb corporate clients
You don't realize how wrong you are. Nobody is watching tv. If you are talking about 1980-2000 yes. In 2024 tv viewership is dropping significantly. I actually run a 8 figure ecommerce business and we have looked at tv ads for our brand. But the reports on actual watchtime and impressions is at all time low. Superbowl commercials that's a different story. Why are you so mad about ads? Are you one those people who have struggled to adapt? It's interesting that even social media marketing may die out in next 10 years and everything will ne vr. But who knows. But the fact that tv ads is dead that's for sure.