Strategizing to Conquer Rising Meta Ad Costs with Jessie Healy, Phoenix Ha, and Sarah Levinger

Dive into strategies on how to navigate the rising costs of  Meta advertising. The discussion covers making ad accounts more efficient, utilizing data and tracking, and employing psychological and emotional insights for better creative. Key topics include optimizing campaign structures, understanding attribution models, leveraging first-party data, and crafting diverse and effective ad creatives. Listeners also get practical tips on monitoring key performance metrics and a chance to access valuable freebies to enhance their e-commerce marketing efforts. The episode wraps up with a reminder to subscribe, leave a review, and consider booking a strategy call for personalized guidance.01:17 Strategies to Combat Rising Ad Costs

01:31 Phoenix on Data and Tracking
01:39 Sarah on Psychological Driven Creative
01:46 Jessie on Media Buying Process
02:36 Jessie's Background and Experience
03:23 Key Metrics to Monitor
06:26 Improving Ad Efficiency
10:59 Campaign Structure and Setup
15:47 Phoenix on Attribution Models
16:07 Understanding Attribution
16:57 First Click vs. Last Click Attribution
18:33 Linear Attribution
19:38 Full Impact Attribution
21:28 Lighthouse Optimization Model
23:38 Click vs. View Attribution
25:25 Third Party vs. First Party Data
27:05 Unlocking First Party Data
28:29 The Power of Attribution in Advertising
29:48 Understanding Customer Journeys and Creative Strategies
32:37 The Importance of Identity in Creative Advertising
37:32 Effective Creative Testing and Ad Strategies
44:16 Navigating Health and Wellness Advertising Challenges
47:17 Q&A: Creative Testing and Account Structuring
54:00 Freebies and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker: 0:07

You are listening to the E-Commerce Impact Podcast, where we share the latest marketing strategies to grow your e-commerce store and have more impact.

0:21

I have got three amazing humans here to talk to you all. So just to introduce everyone. So Sarah Levenger. Founder of Tether Insights, they run research panels to go after emotional and psychographic data to make your ads and, and your marketing perform better. Phoenix Heart is the founder of Ad Beacon and they make sure that media buyers make decisions off data they can prove. And I'm gonna introduce myself just in a little sec. But today what we're talking about is how do we beat these the rising costs of meta? What's happened, Mark Zuckerberg announced at the, at their latest earnings call that they have increased the average price per ad by 14 percent year on year. That's last quarter compared to the quarter before. So that means our cost base has risen by 14 percent in a year. If any of your other cost space were rising by that much, you'd be freaking out. And to be honest, we need to freak out about this because it's not going to change. It's not going to go away. We need to all. we run our ad accounts more efficiently. How we make our ads more effective, how we have our setups more effective. So that we don't just lose more of our margin to matter. So today we're each going to talk about a little section of that. So Phoenix is going to get down and dirty with how you can use data and tracking and insight to make sure that you're making the best use of your ad accounts. Sarah's going to talk to you about how you can make better psychological driven creative that performs better and is therefore more efficient. And I'm going to talk to you about a bunch of different ways that that you can use the actual media buying process. So your campaign set up. The structure of your campaigns and a few little hacks that you can use to make sure your account's more efficient. So with that being said, let's dive in. If you have any questions throughout the presentation, just chuck them in the chat and we'll keep an eye on it. And at the end of each little section, we'll go and look at those. So let's dive in. So, oh yes. And before I before I go on, make sure you say to the end, we have a bunch of freebies for you. If for some reason you do have to jump off and you're like, Oh, I really want those freebies. Just email me. My email address is right there. Sorry. It's a long one. That's e com growth experts. com and it's jessie. healy email me and I will make sure we send you out those freebies. So there we have it. And let's dive in. So why should you listen to me? So I am. I can hear an echo here. I'm just gonna take my headphones out. So I'm the former head of performance marketing for Etsy International. I have spent over well over 50 million on digital advertising in my career. I'm an exited e commerce agency founder. So I had an agency for about six years in the UK. focused on e commerce growth and mostly meta ads and a little bit of Google ads. I exited that agency and I'm now an e commerce coach. I've worked with over a hundred brands on their meta ads, helping them to scale. And I've kind of been through it all with all of them figuring this whole crazy marketing system out. So that's a little bit about me. Successfully scaled a bunch of brands to seven, eight, and even nine figures actually. So what can we do about this situation? Campaign structure. So before we dive into campaign structure, one thing I wanted to touch on is that It can be very tempting when you're running your ads to get like a little bit too addicted to looking at kind of those micro KPIs, for instance, your CPM. So your CPM is your cost per thousand tells you how much you're paying per thousand ad impressions. And it can be tempting as a media buyer to think that's risen. All I need to bring that down and everything else will work. And actually, I think that's not the way to approach media buying. The way to approach buying is to look at holistically all of your data. Compared, you know, in one, like in a one 360 view and. You need to ultimately look at like what's happening to your revenue and what's happening to your cost of acquisition, not just like that kind of one metric CPM. So I'm not here today to tell you all the hacks to, you know, you can go on YouTube and see all the hacks on how to lower your CPM. That alone won't make your ad account more efficient because all of these metrics work together. Sometimes you pay a higher CPM, but it's a better quality audience that you're reaching. And therefore you get a lower cost of acquisition. because you're reaching a better quality audience with better advertising and the clicks are better. So don't look at CPM alone, but yes, that is a metric that you should be monitoring and keeping an eye on because if everything else is working great and your CPM alone rises, then that alone is going to raise your cost of acquisition. So that's one metric to watch. A really important metric to watch is the cost of acquiring a new customer. So your total ad budget divided by your total number of new customers. Keep an eye on that metric and that. If that's rising, you've got a problem and you've got something that you need to fix. And that's where some of these strategies are going to come and help. Blended ROAS. So not just your in platform ROAS, your in platform ROAS lies to you. And Phoenix is going to talk a bit more about this as well. But you want to look at your blended ROAS as well. So look at your like high level, all of the, all of the money you're spending on ads. And look at what, what that's driving in terms of revenue and, and work with those two numbers together. And don't just look at your platform numbers in isolation. You want to see your total revenue. You also want to look at your new versus returning customer numbers. So if, and this is one of the things that like we've noticed a lot with meta over the recent years is it's, it's pushing more towards middle of funnel, it's pushing more towards retargeting and often not bringing you as many new customers. So that is a metric you want to track and you want to track. Exactly that your traffic, how much of your traffic is from new people versus returning. So don't let, we said at the beginning that this presentation was about, you know, we don't want to play Zuck's game and just let him take all our money. We want to really like dive into this data and understand what's actually happening beneath the numbers. And if he's just driving you a whole bunch of traffic, that's already been to your site. Your account is not going to be as efficient at acquiring new customers, which is how we achieve growth. So that's really important. And also looking at that incremental revenue. Okay. Did I, if I spent more on ads, did I get more revenue? It's as simple as that sometimes to really understand whether your. The way your media buying is working that being said, here are some thoughts on how you can lower your CPM or increase the efficiency of your account is probably a better way of putting it. So one thing I would definitely encourage you to do is broaden your targeting. You may. Hopefully you're already doing that. Hopefully if you follow us, you kind of already know that broad targeting has been the way for a number of years now on Meta, but I can't tell you how many ad accounts I open up to audit still these days. And I'll see six different campaigns all targeting micro interests and lookalikes and all the budget split across a whole bunch of different campaigns and ad sets that is going to raise your cost. Trying to niche down in your targeting is gonna raise your costs, make your ad account more efficient, less efficient, and generally your ad account's gonna perform worse. If you are still doing lots of micro-targeting, I encourage you to consolidate and go broad and compare what happens. Look, there are no. Like there are no one true answer and media buying or in the way you do your marketing, but I would encourage you to test this at least test it properly. Give it a good amount of time to run, get it, give it a good amount of time to optimize, but broader targeting is really key. Consolidate your ad spend. So again, when I see the budget split between loads of different ad sets and campaigns, that's when I know that the ad account is inefficient, it's going to be wasting So you want to consolidate as much of your spin to one campaign, maybe two campaigns. And I'll talk about structure in a second, but consolidation is super, super important. Another thing to think about, and Sarah's going to talk a lot about creative and how we can get it to perform better. But one thing that specifically will make your your media budget go further as creative, that's a bit more provocative or interactive. So you may, if you've been media buying for a while, you may have noticed that when your ad is a little bit spicy, when it gets a lot of comments, when it maybe makes. Pushes a few buttons or triggers a few people, you will get a better performance from it. So depending on your brand, you might want to think about how can I make my creative a little bit more spicy, like a little bit more triggering for some people, because that will bring more comments and more comments is something that Metta really loves and Metta will serve your ad more often if it's got more comments and interactions. Little hack. And again, I don't like hacks because I don't think that a solution to everything, but if you are suffering from extremely high CPNs and you've tried everything else, one thing you can do is use the post ID of your ad and republish it as an engagement campaign, just for the purpose of getting all those comments. You can also push it out to like existing customers. You know, I have as many people comment on the ad as possible, and often that will kind of lower the CPM and make that ad perform better. The other thing that's really important is increasing your conversion rates to improve data flow, right? So meta is an algorithm. It works on data. If it's got lots of good data about who's converting, it's more likely to be efficient and to work well. So if your site is not converting very well, the traffic that's coming through those ads. is not sending a signal back to meta, then the then the machine just doesn't work as well. So we want to make the machine more efficient by giving it more data. So working really hard to improve your conversion rates is going to make the whole machine work better and be more efficient. So there's a ton of things you can do. You can look up resources, et cetera, to improve your conversion rates. But really monitor that metric and do as much as you can to improve it. Another thing just to think about is using all placements. So the more control the algorithm has to be able to place your ad in many different places, the lower your ad cost is going to be. Because if you're restricted to certain placements, you have to be more competitive in the, in the auction. To be able to compete against other other advertisers. Whereas if you have a flexible ad type that, so it's like less than 60 seconds, so it can run on reels. It can run on stories, et cetera, if it's size. So it fits almost everywhere on every placement, then your ad account will be more efficient as well. So all placements as a useful kind of little hack there, and then thinking about ad quality and ad feedback. So. You know, balancing what I said about being provocative, like you don't want to be so provocative that people are like, Oh, I hate that ad. I'm hiding this. I'm reporting it. You want to be just that little bit spicy to get some comments going, but you don't want to make people angry because ads that people hate, that people give bad feedback on again, that will make your ad account less efficient. So that's some ideas there around just. generally making your account more efficient. The structure and setup I use at the moment is and this changes, you know, over time we change this, but at the moment this is the structure that's working. We're expecting some changes from Meta in terms of them forcing us to run everything through ASC. And that's sort of coming to light at the moment and rolling out. But one of the things I would the, the way that I structure things at the moment is generally I have an ASC for scaling ads, and that's got all my best ads, all my best creative in there. And then I have one single campaign. Budget optimized campaign for testing ads. So and in that campaign, I'll launch a new ad set. Every time I have a new ad test, I'll do micro variations of that one ad, and I will run each ad test as its own ad set, but I let the algorithm allocate the budget between those ad sets. And then if it, if it doesn't perform, then I'll turn it off. And so at any one time I might have. three to 10 different ads being tested within that CBO. So it's super consolidated. It's two campaigns. Essentially the algorithm is making almost all of the media buying decisions and I'm just feeding it with new creative all the time. So that's the structure I'm using to be super efficient important watch out and see, and Phoenix, we'll talk a little bit more about. I'm going to talk about this kind of side of things in just a minute. But important watch out is pay attention to optimizing towards seven day click one day view attribution because allowing me to attribute for that one day view can sometimes mean meta pushes out more of your ads towards warm audiences, which again. Can make the ad account look good, but it's, is it the best efficient use of your budget if you're wanting to attract new customers and grow your, grow your business? So something that I look at, if I'm seeing a lot of the attribution is going through one day view, I will change that sitting and optimize. Just towards seven day click and see how my data performs. See how my account performs. I've had a lot of success recently with making that switch and we're seeing a lot of new customers come through as a result. Watch out for your new versus returning customer breakdown. A meta may be overspending on existing customers. So in ASC, you can you can sit a new customer cap, so you can sit that down really low so that hardly any of your budget is going towards, sorry, existing customer cap So you can see your budget so that your new customers almost all your budget is going to new customers and you kept the number of existing customers that are seeing your ads. That's a really good thing to take control of to stop me from just making your ad account look good, but not actually driving your business goals. Another thing you can do as well if you're seeing Meta just spending a lot of the money on your existing customers is to test hard exclusion. So you can upload a list of all your past customers as a CSV. You can use the pixel as well and you can tell force Meta to exclude any of your past customers, your website visitors, etc. Generally, you know, we still want to give the algorithm some freedom to target people. But if we're seeing a lot of your budget just going towards existing customers, these hard exclusions can be something to test. And then I guess the other thing I would say is always measure the impact on total revenue revenue growth, not just in platform data. Or you can use a tool like ad beacon, which is, which Phoenix is going to talk about in just a sec to really understand what's truly going on in your data, because we cannot trust the platform data anymore, which leads me nicely onto part to get smarter with data and tracking Phoenix, are you. Are you do you want me to just like with like I can just go through the slides. If you just tell me great, that'd be great, Jesse. Yeah, and I just wanted to like, just add on to what you said about your last slide. So optimize optimizing for seven day click for seven day, click one day view. I've seen both sides, right? I've seen that one day view can definitely go to warmer audiences, but then it does give you more reach. So you have to make a decision. And then also with the new versus returning breakdown that actually might go away soon in meta. And I hope it does. To hope it does because I've plugged in, we've plugged in ad beacon so many times to accounts where ASC is saying that it's actually driving far more new customers versus returning. And then we plug it into ad beacon, which actually has your customer data. So we really do know if they're new versus returning. I'll know if Sarah Levenger is a new or Jesse Healy is a new versus returning. And often those metrics are so skewed and imagine like really in. Translated metrics and meta and they're filling in the gaps saying it's new versus returning. It just becomes a headache. So everything you said, a hundred percent. I agree. Totally. And yeah, like I said, like it's always a test, right? Like nothing is like, this is how you should do things. You should test and then you should use data to see what's truly going on, which without further ado, let's, let's jump into it. Wait, we don't speak in absolutes here? What a strange. I thought that's what we did here. No bros in this. Got it. My bad. Yeah, the agenda for today. I think it's important to get the foundation set. So what is attribution? We'll go back into view versus click. We'll go into third party versus first party. I think these things are really important to go over before we go in depth in depth and we will. And part of my job is education. So let's go and educate. You know, when you go to the next slide. So what is attribution? I think it's a very big word. It's a scary word for those who don't know and for those who do, let's just have a review. Attribution is basically who gets credit for a sale and or lead within a given amount of time. There's two factors, credit and time. And I think people forget about the time factor. So if you don't mind, go to the next one. It's important, actually, if you go back one more time, it's important to understand your customer's journey by channel than scale, because what will happen is what if you made a sale and there's all these different touch points, the question is who gets credit? Was it pin or is it? That's an Instagram, right? Was it Instagram or was it email at the very end? But there were all these touch points in between and how much credit should each one of these get? And there's a lot of different ways to go about this and measure this. And I just want to walk you through the different types that most people in our industry go off of and when to best use them. So then we can go to the next one. So there's a first click attribution and I'll go into click versus view in a little bit, but I definitely think it's important to just. Talk about click for right now. And, and again, it's if you clicked a tangible click. So in this example, Facebook was the first click, right? So we're going to say there was a hundred dollars sale. We're going to give Facebook a hundred percent of the credit, which is a hundred dollars. In this case, we call this a discovery channel. I apparently can't spell. So it's a discovery channel. And this is how people find you. The first touch is this assumption that that's the first time they've actually interacted, right? The view aside is maybe you saw it, but let's just say interaction via click. In this case, it was Facebook. So some people would say, first click, 100. Go ahead to the next one if you don't mind. This is just the inverse. You can, we can go here. It's fine. This is the inverse. So let's just say Pinterest is the last click. So we just negate all the ones prior to that. Pinterest is the 100 sale. And we say, okay, this is the one that people click done right before the purchase. If you were a brand, often we make the mistake of saying, I only care about last click, but that's like going on a date and saying that the end result, which is the relationship. The marriage just magically happened. There were dates that happened prior to that conversations that happened prior to that, that led to the commitment of the sale, the commitment of the sale of this ring, right? So that is the idea behind it. And I just want to put into context, if we always just go off of last click, you have to remember there was a journey that led to it. So take it with a grain of salt. This is a good conversion channel. But if we go to the next one, this is going to be linear attribution. Linear just says, well, I want to give everybody the same amount of credit, right? So even if Facebook had two touches in the whole point or in the whole journey, it's still going to get that incremental credit. Right. So this is really important in order to give it the right credit to proportion to the amount of clicks. And people use this. I suggest using this in terms of reporting omni channel. Now, if you're just one specific channel, right, you only advertise on Facebook and you barely do anything on organic, then probably Facebook's what's driving all the sales or meta, if you want to call it that. But if you diversify your stack, it gets very complicated. Very quick. And this is a good way to understand the purpose. So, right. If in this case, the conversation I would have is Facebook's a really great introductory channel. It looks like take talk is the one that really gets people to convert the last step, but look across the way people are searching around. You don't mind go to the next one and oh, one more. So this is interesting to me because this is full impact attribution. The most common question I get asked is why is Facebook so wrong then? They're so smart. Why do you think you've solved it and They haven't solved it. It's a lot there and we'll go into that. But I think when it comes down to it, it says full impact attribution. This model I'm about to teach you is the closest attribution model to meta, and I will show you the problem with it. Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, all these platforms want the credit for the sale. Why? Because they want you to spend more money on their platforms. It's very simple. And the problem with this is full impact says every single touch point with 100 percent credit. But I told you there was one sale and it was just a hundred dollars. But if we use this model, every single one of these touch points will say a hundred dollars. And at the end of the day, what do we 1, sale that didn't happen. So how many times do you go into your Shopify WooCommerce BigCommerce store and it says you made 25, 000 met at all these platforms are like, I made you 25, 000. Each of them said that. So now we made how much? Really made way more. No, we didn't. And this is a big problem. This is just one of the aspects that I think is hyper inflating the revenue that's that's reported in these platforms. I had a fever dream one night. And it was like in the middle of the night, all my clients were like, okay, Phoenix, you've got first, last linear and full impact. Like, which one do I use to make decisions? These are great, but like which one? And I couldn't answer that question confidently, which was really frustrating to me because I didn't want to rely on just what Meadows was, which is full impact. We know it's inflated. So in the middle I woke up, my husband's like, who cares when I told him this? And I was like, look, what if I took linear, but I made it just by channel. So. If I know that Facebook only cares about its hand in the sale, fine, because you have to still make decisions in the Facebook platform, right? What if I just said, I only want to know the touch points that Facebook had in the ultimate sale at the end of the day, but I wanted to give it proportion credit. So the idea is that if I'm just doing Facebook, I'm going to eliminate all the other. Channels like Snapchat, Google, Pinterest, et cetera. And I'm going to give it fractional credit based off the amount of clicks to that a hundred dollars sale. So here there's two touch points, Facebook, it's 50 credit. The first click second click is 50 credit because you can only control. What you have access to. And we have access to true conversion data on the back end of Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce. I want to know how much Facebook helped for that with these clicks. So Lighthouse optimization is not a proprietary attribution model. It's just simply an optimization model we created to show you, Hey, this is the actual impact it had. And I'm very, very much advocate for this. And this has been my heartbeat for some time. There's the next question of contention. But Phoenix, views have a lot of weight. You can't tell me that you're not going to make any decisions off of views. I'm like, I didn't say view metrics. I said view attribution. There's a two very different things. View metrics are like how long someone viewed your ad. And I know Sarah's going to go in depth with this as well. How long someone viewed your ad click through rate hook rates, which is, you know, synonymous with thumbstop ratio. These are all metrics. These are hard metrics that meta provides that are not biased. View attribution is what did I say? Getting credit for a lead or a sale within a given amount of time. That blend of metrics is like your protein powder. It's proprietary. It's their secret sauce. You don't know what that is and that's a problem. So imagine it could be your grandmother watching a, an ad for a certain amount of time mixed in with X, Y, Z metrics. You don't know what that is and there's no way to prove it. And each, I would say Google, Pinterest, Snapchat, all of them have different definitions of what view attribution is. So now imagine trying to put all those things in one basket and make a decision. That's a joke. So I say there's view attribution versus click attribution. Which one should we go after? I am a huge advocate of click attribution because now I can at least make a decision. Great. So I like to make this analogy. I'm driving down Sunset Boulevard. I live in LA. So ish. So this is pertaining to me. Let's just say I saw an ad of a Glamnetic since they're under some fire right now. I love that. Glamnetic is an eyelash company, right? The magnetic eyelashes. I see a billboard. Okay. Saw the billboard. Then I saw a YouTube video, but I never clicked on anything, right? Because you can't click on anything from a billboard unless you have like a specific code or a specific link that's only attributed to viewing that billboard. Same with a YouTube video. I'm not going to say the billboard didn't sway me. I'm not going to say the YouTube video didn't sway me, but it didn't make any actions. But then I saw a Facebook ad about Glamnetic and I clicked on it. And then I viewed it on Tik TOK, but then at the very end I clicked on, you know, Google search in ad beacon. We only care about the Facebook ad and the Google click, right? The Google search click. But the thing is, is if I, Think about Billboard, YouTube and TikTok. How much weight should that get? I don't know. I don't know. Just because they viewed it doesn't mean that they actually made some type of tangible action to convert. So you can only make decisions off of data you can prove. And click is clear because the definition of click is the same. Everywhere is a tangible action. So what we decided on a long time ago is just click. And this is why I really advocate for just having seven day click in meta as well, and still that is handcuffed. There's some issues to data privacy and security. We're not able to see as many attributed orders. So that's why ad beacon is really helpful, but I will tell you that is a good step in the right direction. Now, let me kind of explain to you the impacts of third party data. So we consider. Meta, a third party app and we consider your data first party data because that's your data. So this is the diabolical issue we are going through right now. If you are working with large budgets, large budgets, or if you're inching your way to get to large budgets. Here's the problem. Your platform is going to tell you you made 746, 000, all these platforms, if you actually added it up. And if you're an agency and you're, you're reporting to your brand and you're, if you're the brand, you know, this pain, it doesn't make sense because in Google analytics now it's saying 548, 000, but then your e com store says we only made 474, 000. Which one do we actually care about? It should be the one in red. We should only care about the 474 because that's the one that you put at the bank account at the end of the night. You feed people, you put money on people's tables with this. It's food, right? That's the analogy that is so important. And if everything doesn't add up at the end of the day to your e comm store, what are we doing? And I think that's the most important takeaway from this. When you use third party data, you're driving in the dark with your eyes closed. A lot of people are saying, we're just going to make do with what we have. Okay. Here's what you have a huge inflation of metrics that are going to hurt you at the end of the day and responsible media buyers. Like Jesse are going to guide you in the right direction. It's a sobering truth. You can't have flawed data. You can't have inconsistent reporting. And how are you supposed to optimize campaigns? How are you supposed to make decisions if you can't prove anything? So this has been a huge heartbeat of mine. I'll show you what first party data unlocks. So I have strayed away from single source of truth. So I apologize for putting this on there. I think that it is a source of truth just because. I don't want to sit with absolutes anymore. This is a new era guys, but tracking is a one to one connection with ad beacon. We're able to really show you every step. So if you see here, like reported row as versus what we're seeing, you can see on the right hand side that Roberto, he's not real. I promise he. Well, maybe he clicked on all these things, right? Here's a Google ad. Here's a Facebook ad. I can feel with confidence that he had a journey that led me there. And now I can make decisions and I feel good about him. And especially if you're a media buyer, you can speak to your clients confidently. And if you're a client, you can see it confidently and you can move on with that reporting. So these are really important things to take note of what it opens up. Everything is connected in one place. Optimization, customer journeys, LTV reports, clear channel breakdowns. You need everything in one place. And that's why the first part of the data that you have unlocked so much. And it just needs to be put into a system that makes sense. So The last component, the last slide is, I just want to show you what first party data really, really, really does unlock. And I think that what's important for us to make decisions off of is people need to ask, like, why are people winning? And Sarah and I talked about this a couple weeks ago. It's like, everyone's saying they're winning right now. Not everybody's winning, but the people who are somewhat winning are using platforms like AdBeacon because you can't Confidently scale without this type of proof. So if you see right here the way you would look at this is ad name says police week, right? You can see the amount spent, et cetera. But if you click on that little shopping cart, you can actually see that Eddie W bought at this time. These were all the clicks that led him to the sale. And this was the product that he bought. And we'll also know his contact information. It unveils so much because now we'll know, is Eddie a new customer? Is he a returning customer? Is your best customer? Is he your worst customer? And then it just unlocks so much. So I just, at the end of the day, my heartbeat for you is if you're spending money on platforms, at least have some proof. But yeah, that's, that's all I have to talk about. Just a little, little, little touch of attribution. Love it. Does anybody have any questions for Phoenix before we move on to the next section? Cool. Awesome. Alrighty. You answered everything. It's all clear. All attrition, guys. Yeah, I mean, I think as I can just echo like what Phoenix has been saying like. If you're looking only at platform data, you really are just operating so blind. So it's yeah. Alrighty. So Sarah, over to you. How can we get smarter with creative to make our ad accounts work better to make our ad budget go further? Yes. Oh my gosh. Creative obviously is my favorite thing. I'm going to echo a little bit of what Phoenix said. I think it's incredibly important nowadays to understand that the customer journey is not linear, like it's never, ever going to be step one, step two, step three, all the way over to purchase. And I think most marketers nowadays know that, but one of the things that I see in the ad accounts, which I find kind of funny, our ad creative does not reflect that belief almost at all. Almost everybody that I work with specifically when they come to me for research or understanding their consumers from an emotional and like psychographic standpoint, almost every single one seems to struggle with the same problem. Sarah, we're rinsing and repeating the same message over and over and over. And we don't know how to get in more customers at top of the funnel. This seems to be a big problem these days for both large scale and small scale brands. I've seen nine figure brands with this problem, and I've seen startups with this problem. Everybody seems to like struggle with it in some capacity. And I think it's because we have forgotten as marketers what our job actually is. So in general, when we're trying to get customers into a brand, all we are trying to do is build something that resonates deeply with them as a person. So your creative needs to be able to be a mirror. You have to be able to reflect what that person is outside of your ecosystem so that by the time they do start to get into your ecosystem and they follow you on Tik TOK, or they click something on Pinterest, or they go over to Facebook and click on your ad, they already aligned so well with you that they can't help it. So I just did a training today where I was blowing some people's minds. One of the best examples of this is Pixar, Disney, game of thrones the Simpsons, right? All of these different. Pieces of content, these brands that were created were created on content and the content was a hundred percent built just so that people could enjoy it. When Simpsons first started, they didn't have merchandise to sell. They didn't send anybody to a website. They didn't even have any merchandise in production. All they did for years was continuously produce something that people could enjoy, something that people could come in and actually consume, right? Pixar is the same. Disney is the same. Game of Thrones is the same. All of these different entities focused on creating something that people could consume and become a part of their identity so that when it came time for them to produce merchandise and sell to this audience, people couldn't handle, like they couldn't stop themselves from purchasing. So, How do we do this in creative? How do we actually make a good deep connection with a customer who either knows a lot about us or doesn't know anything about us in an ad account where everything is too expensive and we're competing across the board with way too many people? How do we do that? Very first thing you got to know is how people actually make purchases. So from the core of a human. Everything is built off of your identity, which is usually typically arranged within the first seven years of your life. After that, you basically just practice everything that you have been taught in those core years, and it just becomes kind of a part of your person as you get older and older and older identity is at the core of everything. Now I focus heavily on identity when it comes to creative, primarily because identity shift throughout the day. So oftentimes you'll find that Metta will just, woo, spend all of your budget randomly within the first three hours of the day. And you're like, what the hell? Like I had all of these different parameters set. You shouldn't have done that. Metta is going to do this randomly because again, it's going after who it thinks is going to purchase from you. Who it thinks is going to purchase from you. Not who might actually purchase from you, but just like it's trying its best to try to weave its way through this web of consumers. Right? So what we're doing now is we got to start to pull back in control on our side and go after identities and people, because we don't have control over where our ads go as soon as they get into the system. They go where they go, especially if you're doing things correctly and you have it set up to capture the widest audience, they're going to go where they go. So the very first thing we need to do, figure out which identities are we trying to activate? Cause like I said, different identities will come up at different times of the day. For instance, Sarah has several identities. I'm a mom. That's one identity. I hold, I'm an entrepreneur. That's another identity I hold. I'm a wife. That's the third identity I hold. These are cores, right? Secondary identities might be, I love humorous things. Anything that has a cat meme in it, I'm probably going to laugh at just because that's part of my identity. I also love cooking, right? That's a part of my identity. That's a secondary identity. So over time, as you start to get to know your customers better through primarily pictorial surveys, which is the way I prefer to get this information, but. If you go through and you dig deep enough, you can figure out which identities your customers hold and start to blend them together so that we can qualify people better so that no matter what time of the day Meta is spending to try and get customers in, we're going to hit the right identity every time. That's the key. To good creative this year. And obviously creative is the biggest lever we have. It's also the easiest way to keep your costs low across the board. If you can qualify someone better at the top, they will become more attached to you at the bottom. And this is something I saw on, on Twitter. I don't know if you saw this Phoenix, Jesse, you probably saw this too. There was a couple of different, very large scale brands this week that wrote huge threads on, like, I don't know what's going on. Meta seems to be only pulling in people from the bottom of the funnel. Like we just, our costs are rising and they're like, freak it out. And I was like, well, it's because you're only rinsing one identity. Yeah. Feel bad. No, no dig on that. But like, you can't go after the same customer over and over and over and over and over and expect your business to grow. That's not how businesses grow. You have to open your TAM. You've got to get into different markets. There are millions of different people that could purchase your product for tons of different reasons. If you activate the identity at the top of your creative, by the time they get to this, this portion of purchasing, they will already have adopted you as a part of their identity. And they'll become customers for life. I digress. This is why I love what Phoenix does because she's tracking customer journey journeys, people. There's everywhere. So one of the best ways to do this is to go after like I said, I, I run pictorial surveys to try and figure this out mostly because on the picture side, humans are built to think in pictures. We have to actually be taught how to think in language but as babies from birth, you are, you're a picture thinker. So if you're running any sort of survey, if you're running any sort of quiz, first thing you need to do is try really hard not to ask questions that are going to lead answers or make it biased. You also need to shift over to try to, to get more of that emotional data out by serving people a way that like, it makes it easier for the brain to emotionally think, first of all. After you get that data out, then we're going to segment down. So every piece of creative you have needs to go towards a specific identity of person, one at a time. Right. So we're going to talk to mom, Sarah, we'll talk to entrepreneurial Sarah, and we'll talk to like wife, Sarah, separately in the ad account. Once you start to see one of these take off where it's like, dang, entrepreneur Sarah responds really well to our ads. Then I could segment further does entrepreneur Sarah and humorous Sarah. Does that fit better? Because now I can blend those two together and drop my costs lower and lower and lower. Creative is actually really easy guys. It's really, really easy to produce good creative. If you know, your customer is down to like the bottom of themselves to the point where you can understand if we blend a message that goes to entrepreneur Sarah, with a funny something cat meme, she's going to respond. Cause that's just, okay. So. Protests on how to do this. I think as if you have like small budget or if it's incredibly difficult for you to get good creative, like I don't have a creative team. I'm doing this all by myself. I'm just like a lone founder out here trying to like, just swim through the dark waters. Best thing that you can do is get on the phone with a customer if you can and talk to them about their experience. Now, this is something I tell people constantly, every community, every single market. On the planet has very specific experiences that pertain to just that topic. For instance, as a mom, I had, I personify my kids all the time. When they were babies, I would give them voices and I would like talk to myself as talking to the baby all the time. Every mom I know has done this. They'll personify their baby. Similarly, my husband's into 3D printers and hockey and all kinds of different things. There are specific experiences that that community has that only that community would know. For instance, he's into hockey, but it's beer league hockey, which I didn't know this, but beer league hockey is apparently like a different breed of hockey player. They're, they're very kind of macho dudes, but they're also just like, they don't care like literally at all. They just go out there because they enjoy like fighting for an hour and then they come off and they all have a beer together. Very strange experience. But in general, if I was a beer league hockey guy and I saw an ad for a hockey stick or hockey gloves or hockey anything that could show that experience. Very quickly can I connect with that and start to click through the ecosystem, right? I think it's important for us to realize that in paid advertising We are actually competing harder with people's levels of inattention than attention if you could create that good connection great But oftentimes we're competing with people's inability to concentrate. We're also competing with indifference People are more indifferent to us than they are like interested in the entire industry, right? So in general, when we start to create good pieces of creative, I want you guys to go study your customer, get on the phone with them, get a survey going, understand who they are and ask questions about what they do in their life outside of your brand, your industry, what you sell. Secondary to that, I want you guys to go study organic content. Organic creators are incredibly good at telling stories, at keeping attention, captivating audiences, and building massive followings that help them sell what they're selling. Very first thing they did though was create content. They don't sell anything. Inside what they're doing for very long periods of time. Often if you rise from like zero to like millions and millions of followers, you just did it because you liked creating the content and you were kind of funny. Right. Or you had something very odd that you were doing that people just couldn't get enough of. So go get on the phone with a customer. Get some of that emotional data, understand their lifestyle outside of the actual ad account. Go study organic content. Please just scroll for a little while and see what these people are doing. See what captivates you, right? Oftentimes it's the sound that stops people faster than the actual video does. Prioritize sound, especially on video. And the last thing that I want you to do is once you have all this data, you understand, like, here's some stories that I can definitely work off of. Here's what I know about my customer. Then when you go into the ad account and start building your actual creative in there, you need to have a wide range. Of ad types. So you don't have, or you don't end up having to do what the big brands are doing is like, we've rinsed the same message to the same exact audience for the last four years, and now it's not working anymore. And we had nothing could work. You got to expand out your creative types. I'm not talking format, by the way, format has nothing to do with this. Format is not a strategy. Selecting format is not a strategy. Your strategy needs to come together. with selecting the right type of creative. So, I typically run four different types of creative in the ad accounts. Top levels almost always trigger events. So we're talking to, Sarah, did you just lose your job? Sarah, did you just have a baby? Sarah, did you just move? Like, talk about what's happening in their life. Secondary is exploration ads. This is to the customer who knows a little bit about the industry, but hasn't, hasn't gotten to the point where they're ready to purchase. So exploration ads are a lot of this style of ad where we talk about the actual experience. Like one day she was going to her mom's house and she had a really hard time because, like, her shoes just didn't, like, fit right and she really wanted some comfortable walking shoes that didn't look ugly or like old grandma. Those are the type of exploration ads where we're just telling stories, right? Evaluation ads are where almost every brand on the planet lives, and these drive me crazy. Evaluation ads are typically like, we have a sale, last chance, limited time offer, 30 percent off. Evaluation ads are fine, but please don't make your entire ad account evaluation ads. They need to be just a subsection of that. And then the last section should be purchase ads. These are the ones that are direct. This sale is going to end in 24 hours. Black Friday sale only we're going out of business. I don't care what you're saying at the bottom though. Those are the purchase ads. Again, every brand I see lives in like this evaluation purchase. They don't expand out into the exploratory. Let's just tell a cool story or, or upwards to the funnel where it's just trigger ads, where we're just talking about the experiences of everyday people, four different types of ads in the ad account. And typically I try and run these year round. If you see an ad that was in the exploratory phase start to drop off, replace it. If you see an ad that's somewhere in like the upwards of the trigger event phase, fatigue, replace it. Don't just say, Oh, those don't work. We got to go back after these, like just hardcore sales. You're going to rinse the audience too much and then you'll end up just burning out your customer base. Get on the customer. Please do that. And then go through and actually build some sort of a base of like consumer research, right? So you can refer to it constantly. Get yourself a resource for that. Study the organic content. Make sure you're going through and actually understanding what do we actually compete with? Cause we compete with a lot of indifference and a lot of organic. That's what we're actually competing with. And then last on here, run four different types of ads year round in the ad account. You got to get some diversity in there. Not with format. But with type, right? Type of ad so that we can start to create some good wins. So in general, my company, Tether Insights, we only study consumers. That's all we do. And all of it is running towards either emotional or psychographic data. So I pull in all of this data specifically for your audience, your industry, and their beliefs about themselves, about the What they think about the world, like how they get resources, how they gain success. So if you're interested in learning more about your consumers, you can always come talk to me. But in general, the more we know about consumers, the better content we can create, the more content you create and the more identity focused it is, the more they'll consume it and the more they'll buy. Do you think Sarah, like, and this is a great conversation. I know I'm going a little off the cuff guys. Sorry. We've got time for it. It's amazing. So with the health and wellness restrictions right now, I just feel like, yeah, this is, this is a topic health and wellness with all the restrictions, you know, the. The recommendations have always been like, okay, now we have to do only top funnel efforts. Like brain awareness campaigns kill me. I hate brain awareness campaigns, but it made me think of you, Sarah, in the sense of just speaking to customers directly. Like I do think that content and creative is king. Therefore it, it basically does the targeting for you. But what were your, what are your thoughts, Jesse and Sarah? Because both of you Sarah for right now, both of you, I have my thoughts on the tracking side, which I'll go into in a minute, but I want to hear yours on the creative. Yeah I, meta has been interesting lately and I've gotten a lot of supplement brands who come in and say we weren't affected at all. And I've had some come in and say we're dying. We're never going to be a supplement brand again. So we got to figure this out. When it comes to identity call it, calling out a specific identity. The only way I've ever seen brands do this is to actually directly go after it where they say, are you a 30 somethings woman who wants to lose weight? I get nervous when that happens because I'm like, Ooh, that's incredibly forward. Also, it makes it very, very difficult for you to pull back on what you're claiming. Right. Because you, you told her at the beginning, are you looking to lose weight? Some of those elements are going to come into play when meta starts flagging stuff, because you're qualifying intensely instead of just going after her person. If that makes sense, like we're going after her. Like, very intense issue, like her need. So, I, again, I, I default to let's qualify people by understanding the experience that they're going through. Not by just asking, are you this specific person with this specific need? On the meta side, yeah. Do you want to run with your kids? There you go. That's identity focus. Yes. Right. Like there's ways to get around it because you actually can't address it, especially with like a HIPAA compliant specific account because I've worked with those too. But anyway, Jessie, what are your thoughts with like health and wellness and all that and targeting? Oh God. Yeah. It's really, it's a minefield because it's weird. I've had, I've got a brand that sells like menstrual cups that's been classified as health and wellness. And it's like, what the hell? That's makes no sense. That's no disease related to being a woman as far as I know. Yeah, I mean, we just have to kind of, we just have to kind of keep seeing what happens. And I, my hope is that meta will slowly get through and recategorize people. Correctly. And that might, what I hope is what people have said is that Meta doesn't want us to advertise specific diseases because that identifies our personal data related to that disease. But if they were not selling a product that's specifically calling out a specific disease, we should be able to get that categorization removed and therefore run as normal. But the problem is Meta is like, You know, it could take a year or more to get your categorization. Correct. So that's what we're fighting against. We have got a question here from Orrin about how do you structure the account for connecting with your creative? So if you only have one campaign with one, AFC, ASC, he's noticed that sometimes Meta just grabs hold of one creative. Yeah. So the way I get around that and like Sarah Phoenix, you guys might have some thoughts on this too, but as generally I don't recommend just having ASC running. So I would have a separate campaign, which is for testing. We're putting budget towards that testing. And in that campaign, we have different ad sets testing your different creative. And I have found that Meta is more likely to test that creative and like roll through all of those different creatives than it is in ASC. And then the winning creatives, we'll move them into ASC. And generally when you've got like a full funnel of creative inside ASC. You will see like those more storytelling kind of ads will get some of the budget and then the kind of bottom of funnel ads will get some of the budget too. So naturally that kind of funnel system, it should work inside ASC, but it doesn't always. So sometimes you have to then create additional campaigns, but yeah, what in terms of the testing and getting those multiple different creatives out for testing, I recommend doing that inside a CBO. So campaign budget, multiple ad sets. Each ad set is a different creative test. You might have multiple like micro variations within that ad set. That's how I'm doing it at the moment. Again, every account is different. You might have different methods. I don't know if Sarah and Phoenix, you guys have thoughts on like how we make sure. The new creative gets tested and also the kind of different types of creative get kind of play in the ad account. Yeah, I'll jump in. I never creative test and we'll see anymore. Case study being I had an account that I did one ASC test campaign and then one scaling campaign with just one ASC with catalog specific or DPA and every single time the catalog one. Every single time and then it would just demolish the creative. But then if I hadn't in an ABO or CBO, it would be like flourishing. So what I do is I scale with ASC and I test with CBO or ABO. I know Mitch Barham is in the chat. I don't know if he's. still here, but he does the same thing. We talk about this all the time. We do a live on Tik TOK and we talk about, he hates ASC audience or advantage plus audiences because they just don't work for him. And you just have to be very careful if you're running an entire account on ASC because, and I'm, I know that we're inching our way towards that, but, But yeah, I don't know if you have thoughts around it, but I, I'm like in a weird crack in the industry. Cause like I'm a consultant, so I see a lot of weird stuff. So I, I, I get into these accounts and some of them are running entirely ASC. I see some accounts that are running entirely on just dynamic creative. Some of them are split out still by a testing campaign, a scaling campaign, and then just like a rando campaign. Like the interesting part is I think. We need to remember that as much as Meta is like training customers to come in and get our ads and like click and buy, customers are training Meta as well. The actual ad account, like their behavior is training our algorithm to prefer a specific type of creative. So. Some of these ad accounts that I've been in keep saying, well, Sarah, we can't run statics because our ad account will only take video. That's mostly because your rinse and repeat method has trained the algorithm to only find people that like video. So in general, I think it whatever works for the brand, I think is kind of the important piece here is whatever setup is getting you sales is probably the best setup for you. I don't think there's typically one right setup. Because at some point your setup is going to fatigue and you'll have to just shift things and change it. You'll have to do that continuously. So keep, keep, I hate that word, but like keep testing. Cause yeah, I mean there's like principles, right? Like don't go super micro and split your budget across a million different ad sets, but you might have to if your ad account is behaving in that way of like just pushing to a certain creative type. Then you might have to have more campaigns than maybe like the best practice advisors. And you just have to look at the data, follow it, see how your account performs and kind of like hack your way through it in a way to get the results that you, you need to get. And someone asked about how, how are we measuring like the different types of creative? And I said, ultimately the measure is like the whole account. Level ROAS, right? Or if we have something like AdBeacon, you'd be able to look at that and see like from meta as a whole, how is my CPA and my ROAS, because all of those different campaigns and different ads are contributing in different ways to an ultimately an end result. So Sometimes looking at the individual ad performance can be like, not very productive. And you want to just look at like, okay, with this whole setup and with this set of ads, how is my account performing? Oh, just just revved me up. I'm so excited. What would happen all the time? And this is just like, I don't know, maybe like certain types of people are just like, Very meticulous like I am. So I had an account where, okay, so often we as media buyers will take one creative and we will duplicate it multiple times in an account like 15, 16 times across so many different audiences. So ad sets, et cetera. And what we might change in a variable is copy headline, right? But, or they could be the exact same and then you use post ID, et cetera. Anyway, my point is, is that what I noticed is that people were Reporting to brands, how one ad was performing and saying, we need more of this creative one ad is not a creative analysis. One ad is an ad analysis of how it's performing under a specific. Yeah. Demographic or I would say audience that you've chosen in campaign. So what we've done in ad beacons, we pull the image hash. So let's just say it's image. We do this video and we separate copy, we separate all of that. And we said, okay, there's 15 versions of this specific image. This is how it's trending in terms of revenue. CT R, et cetera, because then you'll be able to know this is what's working. This specific image, whether it's on body, off, body specific, female model, male model. What drives that I think are the leverage for, and then you can do, oh, is it actually the variation with copy that actually did this? Or is it just the copy that did this? And then as you start to deduce down, you'll realize, oh, I've been doing this all wrong. And now all those agents. Is that we're telling brands, we need more video. We need more video. If they're not the ones producing at the agency, that takes a lot of time and effort, a lot of money to produce video. When that wasn't the winner to begin with, it was actually the copy or whatever it may be. So. Some things to think about. Yeah. We had a question about cost caps and bid caps, which I've, I actually don't use them a lot in the accounts I work on. It's a very contentious thing but you know, like there's people out there that are getting fantastic results with them. So I wouldn't say again, it's about testing. My mom identity is calling at the store, go get it, go do it. Yeah. And I'll just switch on to the the freebies there. Just give me one second. I'll show you guys a chat. Yeah, no, first and foremost, I just want to say like, there is no one way to media by Jesse said it perfectly. I've talked about this with Sarah speaking in absolutes does nothing. So as much as I love Taylor holiday, who I know personally, and Charlie Tickner and the types that are out there that, and Andrew Ferris, like all great people, you just have to remember what is working for your account tested all personally, budget cost caps and bid caps. I don't necessarily. I don't advocate for it. And the reason why I don't advocate for it is because I don't trust Meta's data. So why would I trust Meta to put caps, right? That, that's my principle. That's who I am. So just consider that. And yeah, if you guys want 20 percent off of that, we can just type in the code Phoenix likes me. Cause I do. That's amazing. Oh, Jesse, you're muted. Well, good muted you. Yeah. I popped in the chat, my freebie as well, which is a profit calculator. So, so many brands come to me and like, what should my customer. My customer cost of acquisition, customer acquisition costs. Oh my God. Be CAC and I created a kind of calculator, Google doc that you can use to a Google worksheet you can use to calculate it all out. And there's a little video with training on there. So you can get that from that link. And Sarah, you were going to give, you were going to look for your freebie. Did you find it? I totally found my freebie. It's, it's been a long time since I it's been a long time since I've been on one of these where I needed a freebie. So anyways, this is the freebie that I have. This one is specifically a course that will teach you how to create emotionally focused ads, specifically statics. Cause I like to test statics before I go into more expensive types of ads. So if you guys want to learn how to, how to do psychographic ads you can go to this link. Love it. That's amazing. Well, thank you all for coming. It was awesome having you here. And I loved jamming with you ladies. It was the best. To more no bro, get togethers and chat, because I think I learned a lot today so yeah, guys. Awesome. We'll see you soon. Bye. Bye.

Speaker 2: 56:12

Thanks so much for joining us here on the E-Commerce Impact Podcast. If I can ask you one favor, can you please make sure you subscribe, and if you can leave us a review, it helps us have a much bigger impact with what we're trying to do here at the E-Commerce Impact Podcast. Now, if you're ready to take your e-commerce store to the next level, then go to www.ecommerceimpactpodcast.com and click on the button to book a strategy call with me. On my team, we offer a free order of your advertising and a custom growth plan. So you really have nothing to lose by getting in touch and jumping on call with us. See you soon, and watch out for the next episode in two weeks time.