Happy Thursday! Yesterday my team and I had lunch with our Applovin reps to do some Q4 planning and I wanted to share some of the tips they shared. We've recently been scaling up the channel with plans to really make a push in November so their ream was nice enough to come meet in person and help us plan. I wanted to share some of the tips I was able to that they shared with us. Hope this helps. And stay tuned till the end, because if you like this I have something for you.
1. Creative Is Key - It's not just on Meta. Creative is also key here. The best brands on the platform add 20+ creatives weekly. Volume is dependent on your spend, but creative is key. Diverse, persona driven problem solution creative is what they have seen perform best. You can also test turning your top paid social static ads into up to 60 second animated clips.
2. Look at spend as main determinant of success for creatives, not ROAS. Their model is extremely good at knowing which ads to show, when. You might get a lot of spend on some creatives but poorer performance. The average customer needs to see several ads before converting; so a lot of the purchases will be attributed to the lower funnel ads with less spend, but the ads with high spend and worse performance are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Don't pause those ads.
3. Landing page variety is key. They have seen brands have huge unlocks just by duplicating creative sets across a variety of landing pages. It seems here model liquidity is key, and landing pages can play a key role. I love this one because there is almost no lift if you already have a bunch of successful pages. We usually run traffic to landders/ listicles but we also have PDPs, homepage, collections, and quizzes in the mix now.
4. They often see very high cohort LTVs from Applovin. It's an older audience base than most channels, which usually correlates with higher income.
5. If performance is there, scale can be massive. They shared we're tghe 8th biggest beauty brand currently (but we plan to change that) but the large spenders are spending 6 figures a day easily. This is true from what we've seen, and we've seen the model gets better at identifying new customers at higher spend levels.
6. We're seeing the best new customer performance on Kits. Not 100% sure why; they are doing very well overall but thought this was worth noting.
Want more tips? Not just AppLovin, but pushing into new acquisition channels through Q4 into 2026.
My friends and I are hosting a free Operators Masterclass about Q4 Channel Expansion and you're invited.
25+ DTC nerds together to talk expansion:
- HexClad
- Ridge
- True Classic
- DUDE Wipes
- Portland Leather
- And more
Plus, David Herrmann is going to join the Connors and me for a special MOperators Hotline live.
There's a live event on October 29th, weekly drops of Operators Titans episodes, a full channel expansion playbook written by the Operators, and we're giving away 100 Axon (Applovin Ads Manager) codes where you get $5k in spend when you sign up and spend $5k.
If you want to learn how to diversity your channels and profitably scale spend in Q4 and beyong, you gotta sign up. Do it here and please send to your team. Sponsored.
I'm off to watch the new episode of Nobody Wants This. Excited it's back! Have a great night.
Cody