Hey! Hope you are having a great weekend as always. Another big week ahead. I am lacking inspiration from my week and don't have anything "new" to share that I've learned recently. Some weeks are a lot more of the same, tedious work. But I always get questions in what I recommend for smaller brands when I write about what is working at our scale. So today I have some thoughts on what I recommend if you're just getting started with Meta ads, or have some traction but not a giant budget. I'll do this in bullet format and just let the thoughts flow.

1. Make Your Margins Work and Know Your Numbers

This part is boring, but it needs to be said. Success with ads is as much about having the margin to be able to scale and still be profitable. You need good enough product margins and variable costs to be able to compete in the auctions. You need to know your gross margin, and your landed gross margin. Gross is just product cogs + freight in, and landed gross margin adds in all other variable costs involved in fulfilling each order. Shoot for 75% and 50% of revenue, respectively.

2. Craft A Compelling Offer

This part is more important than your ad account structure, bidding strategy and targeting. Your offer is the product you are selling, the terms, and any discount, bundle, or free gift. You need to make sure people want it, the AOV is high enough to scale. You should create a few of them. You can try a straight discount (not recommended), a tiered discount, bundles, a triple offer stack, and a gift with purchase. You should test a few and go with the one that has the highest margin per session. You should set up all the possible upsells to maximize margin per session as well.

3. A Simple, Consolidated Account Structure

Your account structure needs to grow and evolve as you scale up spend. However, at the early stages you should keep it very simple and consolidated. I still see too many accounts that have too many campaigns with a small budget, which doesn't allow Meta to optimize effectively. As a rule of thumb, make sure you can hit 50 conversions per week per ad set. You often don't need dedicated creative testing campaigns in the beginning because you don't have the budget to do so.

4. A Focus On Creative Testing

This is where I'd be focusing a lot of my time. Keep the account structure simple and test creative. You don't need a ton of it since you aren't spending a ton on ads. As you spend more, you should test more. To keep it simple, I'd test a bunch of statics and UGC style videos. For statics, I would find some templates and test a combo of different formats with different messaging. Go harder on messaging; using a combo of customer reviews as well as different value props that you want to test. The benefits here can we wide reaching; you can easily test messaging and roll over the winners to other places like website, landing pages, email, and more. Our top landing page headline originally started as a static ad headline.

On the UGC side, you want to find a mix between quality and quantity. You don't know what's going to work so you need to test a ton, but you need it to be quality. Something like Insense is what I reccomend. Insense is an all-in-one influencer platform and content creator marketplace where you can find vetted content creators. You can reach out to them, have the confidence that they know how to convert because they've been vetted; brief them, get content, pay them and easily get whitelisting access all in one place. Check out Insense and book a free demo so you don't miss out on a big Q1. Insense is offering $200 off your first campaign if you sign up soon. Sponsored.

5. Make The Traffic Convert

Creative is kind, but landing pages are queen. Whether you're driving traffic to a PDP, homepage, or a dedicated landing page you should be testing and continually optimizing. You should start by finding the right type of page for you, and then once you find the page type you can optimize aspects of it. We use Replo for all of our landing pages.

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That's all for this week. Keep it simple if you're just starting out and do a lot of structured testing. Any topics you want to see next week? Reply and let me know!

-Cody

1. Listen to my Podcast with Eli Weiss called Down To Chat ​
2. Get 1 On 1 Help On Mentorpass
3. Try My Favorite Landing Page Replo​

Some Additional Resources:

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