Another happy Sunday! It's been quite the week here. JRB is opening up our second store this week so it's been a grind. Check it out if you're in the Greenwich Village area. I'll do my best to keep today short, sweet, and valuable. Few quickies. My podcast with Eli Weiss will be coming back this week for a season 3. We've got a few great episodes recorded and some awesome guests coming on. In the meantime, get caught up here. ​

Last December, I wrote a Twitter thread that quickly became my most viewed and liked. I started by saying how bullish I was on the state of Meta advertising and the strategies I thought were pivotal to succeed in the current environment. I wanted to do a follow up to that and share some of my findings so far in Q1. Gonna do a bullet point style issue, with notes on not just Meta ads, but other platforms, as well as creative and landers. Here we go...

Meta Ads Are Back And Better Than Ever

Ok, maybe better than ever is a little far. But Meta ads are back as much as they are ever going to be in a post iOS world. CPMs are not super high, whatever they've done to improve modeling and reporting is making a noticeable difference and the algo seems to be firing on all cylinders. In a really tough climate for consumer and DTC brands, this is one of the only things to be optimistic about. We love to be vocal and complain when things aren't going well and blame Meta, but I don't think Meta gets nearly enough credit for how they've fixed things in the face of iOS challenges. Never bet against Zuck. At this point, if Meta ads aren't working, it's no longer the algo or iOS to blame. You need better ads.

Advantage Plus Is A True Game Changer

Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns, or ASC, is Meta's new simplified campaign type that relies on machine learning and AI to simplify media buying and provide optimal outcomes. Across accounts I've seen including JRB, audits I've done for 6 to 9 figure brands, and Mentorpass calls I can confidently tell you that ASC is the most effective campaign type on average. A few years ago Meta used to let you check a box to allow detailed targeting expansion, which is essentially turning your audience into a broad one. Then about a year ago you could no longer turn it off, effectively turning any audience into a broad one. Now with ASC, you don't even have the option of doing detailed targeting. Across accounts I've audited lately, I haven't seen a single account perform significantly better with interests or lookalikes compared to broad. Even if there were a few campaigns slightly better, I believe all the time that went into testing audiences for a 3% improvement would have been much better spent testing creative, landers, and ads for a potential 30% improvement. If you don't have access to ASC, you should very soon. I highly reccomend testing it and switching most budget to it if you can. I also think ASC is going to kill retargeting for many brands. From what I've heard, the new machine learning model in this campaign type is so good at allocating spend, it can even do so with different levels of traffic. Meaning you can throw creative that works on more of a retargeting/middle of funnel audience and Meta will figure out who to show it to. The other cool thing about ASC is that I've seen it work well with many more ads in an ad set than a typical campaign does. I usually only like up to 5 ads in an ad set and find that even on high budgets, spend only goes to a few ads. But with ASC, I've seen it do well with many more ads. Not having to manually kill ads or place spend between ad sets and just throw it all together is huge, and allows us to spend more time focusing on what really matters.

Meta Knows More Than You Do

I believe you should be listening to Meta and leaning into their best practices as much as possible. They test all of their recommendations with statistical rigor, so it's safe to say they know a thing or two. Now what they reccomend isn't always going to work inside of your account, but it should be a good starting point. I see too many brands still following pre-ioS best practices. If you haven't checked out the performance 5, you need to. In general, you should be consolidating to get enough data to get out of learning, exploring broad audiences, using mobile first and social first creative with creators, and now look to measure performance outside of typical in platform attribution. Look, I don't have a gigantic data set and there are exceptions. But from my anecdotal observations across about 25 ad accounts so far this year, I find correlations. Those that are using broad audiences, rapidly testing creative, consolidating more than not, running at least 50% video in their account, and systematically testing creative are performing better than those who aren't. Do with this info what you will.

Whitelisting Nearly Always Performs Better

I see a lot of people talk about whitelisting, which is when you run ads from a creator's page rather than the brand page, but I don't actually see too many people do it. First, why should you care about whitelisting? As Meta recommends, we should be leaning into mobile first, social friendly creative. Anything you can do to make your content educational, entertaining, relatable, and native to social so it doesn't look like an ad is usually a plus. Right now Reels are big on Instagram, so the majority of organic content being consumed is vertical short form video. It just makes sense that your ads should look similar to this so they don't get skipped over. Whitelisting is one of the best ways to make your ads look less like ads. This can make them get watched for longer and clicked on more, which helps your bid in the auction and can lead to better or cheaper placements. I've tested pretty thoroughly and the same video from a brand page or whitelisted via a creator's page nearly always gets better thumbstop rates, watch times, click through rates, and a cheaper CPA from the creator's page. Ok, so why don't more people do this? Not only is sourcing or creating great mobile first creative hard, but negotiating whitelisting rights and then showing people how to set it up can feel like pulling teeth. Enter Insense. Insense is a UGC platform that allows you to find creators, brief, pay, and work with them in one place, AND easily handle whitelisting licensing. Insense makes acquiring great content and running it through the creator's handles a breeze. If you want to lean into best practices and run mobile first creative that you can whitelist, you need to give Insense a try. They were nice enough to hook my readers up with $200 off their first campaign if you sign up before March 31st. Get your $200 off here. Sponsored.

Running Traffic To PDPs, Homepages, and PLPs Is Lighting Money On Fire

Another thing that gets talked about a ton but I don't see it in practice nearly enough is landing pages. I have almost never seen landing pages perform worse than sending paid traffic to PDPs, home pages, or PLPs. Outside of creative, using ASC, and testing your offer, testing landing pages is some of the most important work you can put into your growth operation. Especially if you are looking to grow and scale; I've seen proper landing pages reduce CPA by 30%. We now build all of ours in Replo, which allows us to quickly test variations without code. Check out our new lander we just launched and have seen increase CVR by as much as 15%, which is huge.

What About Other Channels?

Here's the thing. If you are not spending a lot of money, or if you aren't performing well on Meta, you should not be messing with Tiktok or Twitter. Especially since Meta is back and ASC is ripping. If you are performing well on Meta, double down. Ask why you're not spending more and fix that. Maybe it's because your conversion rate decreases when you try to scale. Make better landing pages then. Or maybe you just don't have enough creative, so CPA rises as you spend more. Get more (and better) creative. The thing is, that other channel is a shiny object. You're unlikely to get better performance on a secondary channel. Even if you do, adding a new channel requires focus and often a new creative approach. That takes time, and that time is likely going to yield better results if you just put all of your focus into fixing Meta. The only time to mess with other channels is when the next dollar you spend is going to get you more on a new channel instead of the diminishing returns you might see from a current channel that is performing well. That's likely in the 8 figure range, and 9 figures of revenue for some brands. You won't get the same scale, but can find some good performance on TikTok and now Twitter. I'm overall short on TikTok, but they did just release their ASC equivalent and it's performing very well. Twitter is all over improving their product and making it perform for DTC advertisers, so there's some performance and incremental revenue to be had there as well. I'm also seeing strong AOV there, and likely expecting to see strong LTV from Twitter customers but time will tell. Just make sure you're ready for it.

Test Creative Before It Goes Live

What if there was a way to know how your ads will do before they launch? There is, so you can know how your creatives will perform before you need to put significant dollars into a TV or other upper funnel campaign. Swayable is a pre-testing platform that marketers use to measure how their ads will perform. If Facebook is the platform for testing performance ads, Swayable is the platform for testing upper funnel brand creative. Beloved sauce brand Truff used Swayable to test their TV creatives before having to commit to a fully TV budget. They were able to figure out which creative they should run, and they were to figure out who they should target thanks to Swayable. How does it work? Swayable tests your ads on thousands of respondents, and you get the data back in 24 hours on purchase intent, brand lift, direct response, and more. If testing creative so you know which ones will perform and who they will perform with is sounds helpful to you before large media buys, I can't reccomend Swayable enough. It's used by Amazon, Paramount, Uber, DoorDash, and AirBnB to measure persuasion before anything even launches. I managed to get Swayable to offer a 50% discount off your first campaign for my subscribers. It's limited to the first 20 people since it's such a great deal, so sign up for a demo here and mention my name to unlock it. Sponsored.

Ok I hope you enjoyed this one. Let me know if you like it! I have 1 more spot for a Meta ad audit for this month since I'll be traveling. If you'd like me to take a look inside your account and help you get things working better for a small fee, reply to this email please. If you go to our store at all, send me a pic or tag me Twitter.

Peace,

Cody

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