Transcription
Welcome to the definitive Guide to the one campaign Facebook ad account setup. If you want to get to four, five, six, or seven figures a month in Facebook ads spend, this isn't only one way; it's the simplest and easiest way. We're going to never deal with ad fatigue; we're going to never deal with audience fatigue or ad sets dying or campaigns fading. We're going to make Facebook stable, projectable, and easy to manage in a few hours a week.
This is what I've been doing to scale brands for years; years. This is why I'm on my fourth brand that I picked up at mid-size and put it on a 9-figure runway in the last 5 years. This is everything you need to know: from structure, the audiences and ads that we're going to use, and the best practices to scale. So buckle up; let's get started.
First thing that we need to know when it comes down to the one campaign Facebook ad account setup is the structure of our one campaign. This is your account setup: one ad set of four to six winning post IDs and then two Dynamic creatives set up in the 322 method—that's three creatives with two sets of copy and two headlines. That's all we need; that's the entire account setup.
Now, our ads: we're going to have a mix of some ads that are designed to be top of funnel. These ads are going to have a lower CPM; they're going to demand more spend, and they're going to have a worse CPA, and that's totally fine. We want those ads. Those ads are going to bring in new people—people. We're going to have other ads that might be more of a mid-funnel or bottom-funnel ad, but we're going to run them all at the same ad set. In that ad set, some ads are going to get more spend; some ads are going to get more of a frequency; some ads are going to have a higher CPA; some ads are going to have a lower CPA. But we're no longer going to say, "Well, Facebook is dumb; it spends all the money on the ad with a higher CPA; it's stupid; why is it wasting my money?" The reason your blended CPA—not just from Facebook but across your entire ecosystem—looks the way it does is because of how these ads interact. Once we've solved the problem, we don't need to solve it again. You already have an ad that's a great testimonial of a target customer avatar saying how wonderful the product is; don't make 30 more. The success of those additional 30 ads is going to steal the performance from the ad that's already working.
You see people that say, "Well, you need to test 20, 30, 40 ads a week." Yes, they do, because they're testing so much that the ads that they have can never mature, so the new ads just steal sales from it, and it becomes this vicious, self-feeding cycle of cannibalism. You don't need that. Ideally, you're probably going to have three to four ads that are really, really good at targeting different types of customers. Some of these ads are going to get more spend with the worst CPA, and that's totally fine, because ultimately the number one focus of our Facebook ad account and this campaign is to drive similar types of customers at a higher volume and greater efficiency, which ultimately means we have a higher revenue floor on a daily basis—of more and more money coming in that we don't even need to spend money on Facebook to get. Ultimately, it translates into a higher Facebook ad spend when you scale your business; you can allow the Facebook ad account to scale. The more changes you make inside of your Facebook ad account, the more you're going to struggle. But the point here is we have one campaign with one control ad set and maybe two tests; sometimes you can have three or four if your spend is astronomical, and by that I mean $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a day. And if you're only able to drive a dozen or so conversions a day, maybe you can only afford to do one test, because the other thing is we need that test to be out of the learning phase. And I know there's a lot of folks that say, "Well, the learning phase doesn't matter," and you know what? They're right—if their ad accounts are not set up to leverage machine learning; they're not setting their ad accounts up in a way that ultimately takes advantage of how Facebook was designed to be used. So for them, the learning phase doesn't matter because they're not leveraging machine learning to begin with.
Now, something we have to break down here is audiences and ads. We're going to use one audience; it's broad age, gender, location. We're not going to use interest groups; we're not going to use lookalike audiences. And before you start getting into it, yes, I know interest groups and lookalikes perform. My broad? No, they don't. Oh, when I look at the ROAS and I look at the CPA and I look at the spending and all this stuff, it doesn't matter; look at the blended CPA across your entire business. If you are focusing on interest groups and retargeting audiences and lookalike audiences, what you're ultimately doing is restricting the pool of individuals to get impressions for your brand and your business amplification device. And while Facebook looks better, your overall revenue doesn't. The same sale that Facebook is getting credit for, it's also giving credit to TikTok or to search or to YouTube or to affiliate or to influencer or to email or a million other places, because you're still focusing all of your energy on the same individuals. And remember, your ads make their own audiences. This isn't about for debate; this is literally how Facebook works. Every single post understands who responds well to it and who doesn't. If your ad goes out to 1,000 people and 500 people love it and 500 people hate it, the next 1,000 people that see your ad are going to look a lot more like the 1,000 people that loved it. And over time, not only is that ad going to get shown to the people that really like it, but because you're removing the ads that don't meet your business needs, you're going to have ads that not only appeal to what Facebook wants—which is going to lower your CPMs and improve your placement in the overall newsfeed—because remember, the average person swipes the height of the Eiffel Tower on a daily basis, and the third post that's an ad is way cheaper to show somebody than the thing that's 20 minutes into a doom scroll. Not only are you accessing that, but the other thing to keep in mind is this also means that your results are more scalable, and these results are going to get better over time instead of depreciating over time, because when you use an audience, the audience of your ad and the audience that you're targeting only have so much overlap. And when they stop overlapping, but you still force spend, Facebook sees you as a larger and larger liability to their business model, which is why your CPMs are going up, which is why your audience is fatigued—yeah, air quotes on fatigue—because that entire concept is completely avoidable and 100% fictitious and 100% obsolete if you use broad targeting, because it never fatigues.
Now, the other side of this we have to get into is the ads. Some ads are going to appeal to a broad audience; these ads are going to be less efficient at getting conversions and far more efficient at getting attention. And you're going to have other ads that are way more efficient at conversions and way less efficient at getting attention, but they're way better at monetizing the attention you've already earned. Not only that, sometimes they're really good at monetizing the attentions that your competitors have paid for and the intent that your competitors have driven. Back in the day, I was running New Balance, and we did a big case study test with Facebook at the introduction of the Power Five—this is back in 2018, 2017, when broad was just being innovated. What we found was, and this still holds true today, over two-thirds of the money we spent at broad actually was targeting somebody that was on one of our competitor's websites and showed intent in the last 24 hours, and we were spending a lot of money—this is New Balance—that's huge. Think of how many competitors you have; think of how many ad cards they have of people that didn't purchase your retargeting ad; could just convert that person. It's not like the customer journey is actually 10 days old. If anybody ever tells you, by the way, that the customer journey is—well, that my customer journey is 10 days long—that's nonsense; it's or decades long. We were selling at New Balance; we were selling shoes. You've been buying shoes for—for potentially 20, 30, 40, 50 years. If there is any competition, you don't need to tell people you exist; you just need to let people who are already interested in buying know that you're an option and overcome the objections that your competitors ignored. Which is why, in the recession that's coming, you have a massive opportunity to steal market share from your competitors and big box retailers. The next year and a half is going to be defined by the best marketers with the best business models that respect AI and machine learning, and the people that fight that are going to be left on the roadside dead. This—this feels exactly like what we saw when Facebook introduced the conversion pixel. I was spending a million dollars a day on Facebook before we had a conversion pixel, and when it came in, there were people—just like today—folks who were saying, "Well, you need audiences." People back then were saying, "Well, we're just going to run traffic; we don't need conversion campaigns." Those agencies went out of business; some of them closed up floors of their office buildings in Manhattan and multiple locations around the world. There is going to be a purge of individuals who ultimately fight the wind. You don't need to do that; you can set this up instead and use Dynamic creatives with the 322 method to establish new creative testing within the single campaign. That's all you need to do. Remember, your new ads and your testing should be very focused on solving one of two problems: either you're going to try to take an existing control ad and do it better, or you're going to try to meet a new business need within the same business objective. That's it. That test could run for a week; it could run for a day; sometimes it could run for a month if it's doing well for you. Who cares? Let it go; you're making money.
Now, the last thing we need to talk about here is the best practices to scale. Now, when you're running the one campaign Facebook ad account, part of this is so that Facebook is really stable, which makes scale really, really easy. You don't need to worry about surfing performance and pushing up on good days and pulling back on bad days; you don't need to worry about really complicated automation and all of these other things. You're not turning ads on and off; you're not adjusting budgets; you're not running with AO; you're not doing all of this day-trading nonsense that has been obsolete for years, but it's pushed forward by so many gurus that fail so many of their clients. You don't need to do any of that. The best practice is to scale your one Facebook ad account per business objective style; it's simple. There are three parts. Part number one: when you have a larger revenue floor—meaning your average daily revenue goes up from non-paid efforts—you can invest more money in Facebook. Part number two: when the LTV of your customer goes up and ultimately say a customer goes from being worth $100 to $150 because you've improved second purchase rate and the AOV of some of the transactions in that journey are ultimately getting customers to buy from you more and more often, you can afford to spend more money on Facebook, even if you don't get those customers for the same CPA at the beginning; it doesn't matter. You can lose money—money—on day one and still make bunches and bunches of cash, because the customers that bought two months ago, six months ago, when they buy again, you wake up with money in the mailbox. You can spend half of that money on acquiring a new customer, even if that's twice as much as a new customer should cost, and you're playing with house money. And the honest truth is every 8-figure business that I've ever run does this; every 6-figure business that can't get to 7 hasn't figured this out. This is one of the things that everybody that makes it does, and everybody who doesn't, doesn't do. Are you doing it? That's a question you should ask yourself. The third thing that we need to get to when we're trying to scale is if your results are stable and profitable, you can invest more money, because it's not always about how your results are today. Part of the stability and projectability of results is—is knowing when to spend, so the question of when becomes really important. Now, the question of when isn't a question we can address if our results are not projectable and stable. And what I mean by stable isn't day over day, because those results are going to be all over the place; I'm talking about week over week, month over month. You ultimately understand more or less what direction you're going into, and can you improve the unit economics of your—your business model per customer at a rate that outpaces the rising cost of CPA? Because the answer is yes, you could spend more money. And if you also know that you're going to be in business in 3 months and the money you spend today might be twice as good as the money you spend in 45 years, spend it now. You don't need to spend based on last week's performance; you can understand your budgets with a when, and often that's way more important than where.
Now, the last thing we need to cover here when it comes to best practices to scale this one campaign per business objective is ultimately a golden truth: we have to make sure that our business objectives don't change within this account—within that campaign. We can shift business objectives in our business; we can ultimately say, "This is the best thing to acquire a customer that's going to buy one thing," and that's excellent, but maybe we've made a bundle and ultimately want to try to run the same thing but with a higher AOV, higher LTV, higher PSM offer. You can run it alongside and ultimately replace this campaign, but never do it within the campaign. That's really all it comes down to. Make sure that you're checking the social proof on your ads and make sure that you know your numbers. And my recommendation, if you want to start pushing your spend 5% three times a week, can fundamentally change the trajectory of your business; 10% twice a week is massive. So I'll leave you with this: the number one way of scaling your business is to stabilize the front end, to bring a higher volume and value of customer into your sales funnel, improve those unit economics, raise your revenue floor, and invest more money. It's just that simple. Until next time, I'll see you on the internet. YouTube thinks you might like a couple of these things; don't forget to hit like and subscribe. Till next time, bye.