Two newsletters in back-to-back weeks. Can you believe it? It's 5 AM and my teething son woke me up, so I have a spare 30 min. This will be short though. Here is a random list of a bunch of things that are on my mind, are working now, and can help for Q4. Hope you enjoy.

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1. Meta exclusions are fundamentally broken. We were doing all the regular exclusions and validated with holdouts, 40% of spend was going to repeat customers. The only thing that helped was Wastenot. Our first test after it, less than 5% of spend was going to repeat customers. We actually decided to stand up a repeat customer campaign as a result of how well it worked. Lmk if you want an intro.
2. Rolling reach, new reach, and cost per incremental reach are the most important ad account metrics once you get above a certain size. We now track them religiously, and we make sure we are zooming out and ensuring we are reaching new people as we scale spend. We use cost per 1k accounts reached as a main KPI, both at the account level, as well as to help us understand creative winners.
3. Everyone says creative is the targeting. And it's for sure true, but I also believe the landing page plays nearly as big of a role in helping Meta understand who to deliver ads to. We've seen big swings by pairing creates to the specific panding pages.
4. The most important lever in creative diversity is your persona. Sure format, style, and aspect ratio play a role, but they move pebbles compared to messaging and persona swings.
5. Most brands are stuck in 2019-2023 feed style marketing. The successful brands understand short form, vertical "viral" video.
6. Partnership ads. Do them. It should be at least 20% of your Meta spend, but probably more. Can easily get to 40%.
7. We'e not on TikTok shops, but I wanna hire a bunch of TikTok Shop creators, give them an ad account, some trends data or inspo reels, and have them make content. Tell me why it wouldn't be a much better investment than most UGC agencies.

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I wrote this earlier, but got distracted and finally got a chance to polish it up and send it now. Hope it gets some ideas flowing.

Cody

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