Transcription
I've spent over $300 million on Meta ads, and these are the eight hacks that I wish I knew sooner.
Starting with hack number one, and this is a thing that nobody's talking about, and it's the exact reason why your video ads are tanking right now. Everybody thinks that you need slick video ads and UGC creatives in order to crush it on Meta ads in 2026. And they couldn't be more wrong. Everyone looks at my video ads or look at other people's video ads and think, "Man, that's exactly what I need to do in order to scale." But you see, since Meta launched Andromeda, this thing is a hungry panda, and you need to feed it with an absolutely absurd amount of fresh creatives in order for your ads not to fatigue. It is so hard to produce the volume of video that is required in order to have your ads not fatigue. Take for instance my own ad account. I have over 17 VSSLs that I am running right now as ads. And that is just an absurd amount of volume. However, I can run thousands of different static ads much cheaper and much quicker than producing videos. And so, if I had to pick on one type of creative format to do, whether video or statics, I would pick statics all day of the week. I have an entire creative team and it is still a challenge for me to pump out the volume of video creative that I need to actually feed the ad account at the scale that I'm running. One way to do that is using my platform Kong, where you can basically at a click of a button produce 180 headlines, two body copy variations, and then you can go and basically pick from a whole library of proven ad creatives.
Another reason that statics in my opinion are superior to videos. Facebook realized that there's only so many video ads that they can show each user per session on Facebook. And so their algorithm is actually has a bias towards static ads because they can show way more statics to people within one session of Facebook. And so that's what they're optimized for, right? They are a business optimizing for revenue. If they can show more ads to the same person on the news feed, you're going to basically be the one that's going to benefit from that. I spent weeks and weeks in pre-production and planning and shooting and then had my video team edit these super high-polished VSSLs. Then I looked at my ad account and I can see that there's these down and dirty native statics that I've created that literally are outperforming a VSSL that took 2 and 1/2 months to produce. And that's why I'm so bullish on statics. So this is how you can apply this specifically to your business. Go over to whatever calendar that you use to manage your week and dedicate one hour per week where you take your winning offer, your winning product or service, and you have one hour that you dedicate to creating fresh creatives every single week.
Which brings us to hack number two. And this one is a filthy little one that I have recently found out that goes absolutely wild. So, everyone knows about finding your winning creative or your winning ad. But what most people don't know is that with Andromeda, it is looking and analyzing your image, your copy, your offer, your landing page, and all it's trying to do is find that person to serve them your ad. So, if you want to target different people, you actually have to put that in the creative and in the body copy. So what I do is I get my best winning ad and then I have a look at what are the 20% of clients that represent 80% of the revenue in my business. I look at the niches that they operate in and then I basically put those niches in the headline or the body copy of the ad. Here's how to get 462 leads per week on autopilot. Then it might be, "Here's how to get 462 dental leads on autopilot," "lawyer leads," "property investment leads," whatever the niches are that you specifically want to target. You simply just take your winning ad, you duplicate it out, and you insert that keyword. This thing alone will dramatically drop your cost per lead, and it will open up different pockets of audiences on Meta that if you just had a generic ad, you would not be able to reach. It's not some magic word. It is a category word that is what we call an identity trigger and it also feeds the algorithm to know who it should be going out there and looking for. But the number one thing that you must understand when it comes to Meta ads is that you are not selling your product. You are not selling your service. All we're trying to do is funnel as many of the people that would be applicable to whatever it is that we're selling and bringing as many of them as we can to our landing pages. So this is what I want you to do right now. As soon as you finish watching this video, I want you to go over to your ads manager and I want you to find your winning ad. Then I want you to duplicate that ad out and just add either a demographic to that ad or add a specific keyword for the industry that it is that you want to target. Then you launch those bad boys, go in, look at your CTR, you'll see that performance is dramatically better. And that is hack number two, the one keyword hack.
All righty. So that's playing the game on like beginner mode. Now, let me show you how to really scale this thing up and absolutely rinse your Meta ad account, which brings us to hack number three. So, here's what most people do. They find their winning ad. They turn off all the other ads in the ad set that aren't performing as good as the winner, and then they're like, "Let me just ride this one all the way home." And then they start scaling their ad, and then it fatigues, and it dies, and they've rested all of their performance on this one winner. This is amateur hour. This is the last thing that you want to do. Instead, once you find that winning ad, take that ad and we want to pump it into AI. Either Claude, Kong, Chad, Jibit, whoever it is that you want to use to do it, just do it. Then what we're going to do is we're going to spit out hundreds of different variations. And the way that I like to do this is I give it my winning ad and then I say, "Okay, I want you to read this ad and I want you to be the author. If we show the next ad, I'm going to ask you to write to 100 people. Not one in a hundred would be able to tell you that this is written by a different person." That is the premise. And now we get to cook. Then we start to prompt it and say, "Okay, now write this for 25-year-old women. Write it for a 30-year-old woman." Now, when you read it, it should pretty much read exactly the same, but there should be certain things on there that relate to that person that it is that we're trying to target. The best way to do this is to one, start with your body copy. To apply that same strategy to your headlines and then move forward to your creative. And then typically you take all of those winning ad creatives, you chuck them in a CBO, you let Facebook's AI do its thing and it's going to basically pivot the spend towards the creatives that are getting the best results in your campaign. Now, this hasn't always been perfect. Often times, you would do it and then there'd be a whole bunch of ads in that campaign that wouldn't spend. I take all of those ads that get no spend, but I have high conviction around that they are good ads, and then I launch something called a zombie campaign, where I take all of those dead ads, put them into an ad set, and then I launch those. And then typically, I can juice out another 20% of ads that are all winners there. And that is hack number three, the winning format clone.
However, everything that I've given you so far is absolutely worthless unless you get this next step right. Because if your ads look like ads, then they are already dead on arrival. Let me tell you a story that is just far too common that I hear every single day. Somebody sits down, they're putting together their Meta ads, and the first thing that they think about is, "Mubry, how do I make my ad pop off the feed? I want it to really stand out and like hijack people's attention." And guess what people hate more than anything is ads. That's why there are hundreds of millions of people that have downloaded and installed ad blockers. So instead of making our ads look like ads, we are going to do the absolute opposite. And we are going to look at what is the type of content that people are natively consuming on these platforms. I am running a 46-minute YouTube video with minimal editing right now. It's got, you know, millions of views organically on YouTube and I'm taking that winning creative and then I'm just running that as an ad because I already know that that content bangs organically. It's already proven it with millions of views organically. So then what I'm doing is I'm just moving that over to the paid ads engine, pouring gasoline on it, and lighting that puppy on fire and letting it scale. And that's exactly what it is that you want to do. You might not have a video on YouTube that's got millions of views. That's okay. Just look at what is the native content that people are consuming in your niche already. Another quick hack to do is you can create what we call a burner account. So you basically sign up for a clean slate TikTok and Instagram account and then go follow all the different influencers and pages in your niche and like their content. Then every time you log into that burner account, you're going to basically see the most popular content in your niche rise to the top of your news feed. And if that's what's getting promoted in the algorithm, then that's exactly the type of ads that you want to produce and then run them as paid ads. And I can guarantee you that this will outperform your current best performing ad, which is hack number four. Don't make your ads look like ads.
All right, so now I'm going to show you how to target buyers that your competitors don't even know exist. So when it comes to Meta ads, people usually approach it in one of two ways. The first way is they try to get super laser targeted with the type of people that they're trying to target and they do basically what we call interest stacking. They take all the interests in the niche. They like golf. They like Mercedes-Benz and they stack all of those things up and they're like, "Man, that is one ultra-layered targeting and I'm going to find only the best buyers." Then you have the second school where these guys are just like, "Pick a country, go YOLO, and target them." But this is where most people get it wrong. They don't understand that the more context that it is that you give Meta, the better that they can actually go out and find those people because the creative is the targeting now. But most people, they run short-form copy. It's a very basic ad. Therefore, the context window that Meta has is very, very small. So instead, what I like to do is I like to basically have very long-form copy that literally gives the algorithm so much data of exactly who it is that I'm trying to target so that they can go out and find those people because if they have a limited context window for your ads, then the amount of people that they can target for that creative is also going to be limited. So stop trying to outsmart the targeting. And the most highest-paid engineers that have one incentive, which is to get your ad in front of the right people. So you keep on feeding it Zuck bucks. You're not going to beat these guys. So let the algorithm do all the heavy lifting and spend all your time and energy on producing creative. However, don't believe me. What I want you to do right now is to go into your ad account to find your best winning creative that you probably got a bunch of interest stacking on there and duplicate that ad and put no targeting. So just pick Australia, just pick America, just pick the UK for instance, and let that puppy cook. Let both of those ads run side by side. Your interest stacking versus your broad, and then in 7 days time go and have a look at your CPAs and you will be shocked. And that is hack number five. Broad targeting with super specific creative is the new Meta.
Okay, so this next hack is exactly what happens after you actually get somebody to click. Because most advertisers, they spend 90% of their effort on the actual ads and only 10% on optimizing their landing pages. And this is a huge mistake because if there isn't congruence based on what they clicked on to what they see on the landing page, they're just going to dip, right? You're going to have a very high bounce rate. You might be getting super high CTRs, low cost per clicks from your actual ads, but your CPAs and your conversion rates will be in the toilet because it doesn't match that scent. So, this is what I like to do. Meta is the best split-testing tool that exists on planet Earth. Your headlines are exposed to, you know, a thousand times the amount of people that actually click on your landing page. So therefore, you're getting so much more statistical significant data based on which headlines work. So I'll be running, you know, 20, 30, 40 different headlines for an ad variant. Then I'm going to find what the best performing headline is. I'm going to take that headline and I'm going to mirror that on my actual landing page. When I do this, I usually increase the conversion rate by a bare minimum of 15 to 20%. Just that one thing, not only in the headline, but in the sub-headline and also the lead-in of that copy. I have a rule at any given time, I have to have at least three split tests running. Otherwise, I have a severe sense of anxiety. What you want to always make sure that you're doing is taking your insights from your best performing ads and making them present on your landing page and then running them as split tests to just inch out 10, 20, 30% higher conversion rates across the board. So, what you want to do right now is open up your ads account, have a look at your top three performing ads, and look at the headline of the ad and the headline of that page side by side. And if it doesn't match, if they aren't congruent, fix it within 24 hours. Look at your conversion rates and thank daddy. And that is hack number six. Match your ad to your landing page.
Okay, so now let's talk about how to turn every $1 that you spend on ads into $3 or $5. Think about it this way, right? You've run an ad, you sent people to a landing page and they haven't bought. And then what you're doing is you're like, "You should just buy." Like, "I'm just going to serve that people with more ads." There is a reason why that person didn't buy. So you want to think about what are the reasons that people don't buy. The number one reason why people didn't buy is that that offer wasn't right for them. Their product wasn't right. That service wasn't right. So what I like to do is if I've got multiple products or services, I like to retarget that audience with different offers. And you will be shocked at how good this works. Somebody might be coming in for one thing. You'll be like, "Hey, they're only in the market for protein powder" cuz that's what they clicked on. You might be at like a two or a three ROAS for your protein powder. Then you start retargeting the people that didn't buy on that page with creatine. And you'll see maybe you're at a six ROAS. I know it doesn't really make sense, but just trust me and thank me later.
All right, it's time for the deep dive. So this is what retargeting campaigns look for our clients. Exactly what we want to be doing is we're going to have our top-of-funnel ad. We're going to be sending them through to a landing page. Then in an ideal world, they are running one of my kinds of funnels, right? A high-value content offer. And the reason that we do this is for multiple reasons, but the most important one is because we get so much intel from the market. Because we outbound call every person that downloads one of our free reports, we get them on the phone and we find out all their pains and fears, hopes and dreams, why didn't they book a phone call in us? Why they didn't buy? We take all those things and the first ad that we like to put together is an objection handling ad. We take all the reasons that they didn't book in a phone call. Then we need to address that. Then in addition to that, we're going to take proof testimonial ads. We're going to run them as carousel ads where we retarget those audiences and basically show them more proof that all the claims that we've been making in our ads actually deliver. Then we're going to have a third component. The third component is where we take up other subsequent offers, services, products that we could sell them and we're going to put them all into a CBO of our best performing ads for all of those products and we're going to retarget them as well also to those audiences. If you do that, you will be printing. And then the last one is an audit of some description, something where you dress up your call of value in itself where whether or not these people buy, they are going to walk away from that phone call with some piece of value. Do that now and enjoy the upside. And that is hack number seven. Retarget with a different offer.
All righty. So, this last hack, this is a thing that separates people that run ads versus people that run businesses. I spoke to a dude this morning who was at a 40 ROAS and I'm like, "Bro, why are you not spending more money?" He's like, "Oh, I just, I, I don't know." But then more often than not, when I then convince somebody to spend more money, what they say is, "Oh, I tried spending more, but the cost per lead went up to $50" or "my ROAS went from a 15 down to an 11." And I'm like, "Okay, cool, but did you make more money within a 30-day period?" And they're like, "Yeah, but the ROAS number as a percentage went down." >> Who cares? With a ROAS percentage, I need that net cash. What you really want to be doing is looking at what the blended ROAS is, not on an ad account level, but on a business level. And that's the thing that you're optimizing. But even more important than blended ROAS is realistically net free cash flow. What you want to do is find what that break-even ROAS is. What is a realistic number that you can spend as the maximum to acquire a customer? And you want to keep feeding the beast until you get close to that number. You want to scale your ads as hard as you possibly can. Even if the ROAS goes down from a 10 to a five, but the difference is between spending a thousand bucks a month to spending a hundred grand a month. You make so much more money at the end of the day. The only way that you get confidence to scale a business is based on data. And you want to make sure that the integrity of your data is sound. Data gives you confidence. And if you have confidence, you move with speed and conviction. And that is the way that you go out there and literally wipe the floor with the competitors and take the market. Another very tactical thing that you can apply is block out 3 hours a month in your calendar to just look at your numbers. Looking at the numbers, feeling them, smelling them, actually knowing them. Not what your data analyst says, not what your media bias says. You physically going in and verifying the data yourself. The level of confidence that that gives you, it is very, very rare that there is another activity that you can do inside your business that's going to be more impactful than this. And that's hack number eight. Track the metric that actually matters.
And these are the eight hacks that I wish I knew sooner. Now, you might be thinking like, "Subrey, why do you make all of these videos? Like, you've already got this big business, you're a multi-millionaire, all of this stuff." Like, I grew up in a single-parent household and money was always a problem. And I always said to myself, if I get to a place where I have the means and the money, I want to be in a place where I can send the elevator back down. And that's exactly what I do in this content that I'm putting out on my channel. Because if this information can help you solve one of the problems in your life that money can solve, then every single video that I produce is worth it. So, if you're enjoying this content, if you want to see me keep making it and even making more of it, let me know what kind of content that you want to see. And if you enjoyed this video, you're going to absolutely love this one, which is on Facebook ads, and it's how to create you money from Facebook ads. Like, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next.