Transcription
In just 30 days, I increased this fashion brand's return on ad spend by 121% by just making a few simple tweaks, and it all started with the campaign structure.
See, over the last 10 years, I've spent over $500 million in Meta ad spend to drive well north of a billion dollars in revenue for the brands that we manage. And I've set up campaign structures that have been the catalyst in turning seven-figure brands into eight-figure brands over and over and over again. Brands like YoungNails, Glam Squad, Earthbound, and Titan Casket.
So, in this video, I'm going to give you the exact campaign structure that we're using right now across our entire agency to scale the most aggressive accounts. The accounts that want to grow as fast as possible.
Okay, so first things first, let me walk you through the account that we grew so rapidly by basically doubling the return on ad spend in just 30 days. Essentially, this account has only spent $14,000, so I don't want you to think that this is some massive mega account that we have the affordability to test everything on. And before this brand started to work with us, they were massively negative. So, this right here is just the last 30 days where we're at a 1.4 return on ad spend, which is just above their break-even return on ad spend. If we compare this to the previous period, they were at a 0.63 return on ad spend. That's a 121% increase in return on ad spend, and it truly all started with implementing the correct campaign structure.
Now, let me be abundantly clear, this did not happen because we ran a sale, it did not happen because we launched new products or we even had new ads. Literally, this came down to tactical implementation inside of the Ads Manager. And you can see right here, we were running 62 ads in the last 30 days. And in the previous month, as I just changed the date range up here, we actually were running way more ads, 165. So, this is a condensing down of the account, and I know that goes against what almost everybody says all the time, that we need more ads, we need more ads, we need more ads. We absolutely do need more ads, but we only need those ads if they are positioned properly. This is why setting the foundation first is so critical.
Now, I want to mention something that's very important. In addition to the campaign structure, we took a deep dive into all the breakdowns in the ad account. So, we went through all of the available breakdowns like placement, age, gender, and we made sure that all of these were oriented to the best performing high spending placements, platforms, landing pages, and day of the week. This alone allows us to focus more spend on whatever's performing the best. Because when this business came to us, they were bleeding cash. They were at a 0.7 or 0.6 return on ad spend. We've more than doubled that by orienting to the right places and by implementing the M4 campaign structure.
By the way, if you want the most updated information on what's actually working in Facebook ads, you could join the Facebook Ads Blueprint. This is the number one fastest growing Facebook Ads community. We have a full-packed classroom, which we call the Facebook Ads Blueprint right here, and you can unlock everything the moment you join. So, you can go through all the pixel setups, account structures, all of the creative flywheels, how Andromeda actually works, how to create avatars, examples, templates, literally ad building sheets that you could steal for yourselves, and then we have all of the deep dives and predictable scale including the brand new recently released vertical scaling, horizontal scaling, and then our twin engine scaling, which is exclusive to the blueprint.
Let's hop into the Ads Manager, and let's build our optimal campaign structure for 2026. First thing we're going to do is we're going to create a new campaign. We're going to call this a sales campaign, and I'm just going to name this ML_prospecting. This is going to stand for Moonlighters_prospecting cuz that's our agency, and that's what I name everything. For our campaign budget, this is going to be at your discretion. For this example, I'm just going to set our campaign budget for $1,000 per day. Generally, at the low end, it should be equal to one time your target CPA. At the high end, you should be scaling vertically as aggressively as you possibly can above your break-even target. Campaign bid strategy is highest volume or value. Budget scheduling is none. Make sure you have your engaged and existing audiences set up. If you don't have these set up, set them up in your manage advertiser settings.
Then we can go on to our ad set number one. For our ad set name, we're going to use a very simple naming convention where we're going to name it pack one {underscore} avatar {underscore} concept. What this is basically going to do for us is keep us very, very organized. Every time we launch a new pack, we're just going to change this from pack one to pack two to pack three. An ad set is a pack. I just call them packs. Something I've been doing for a very long time. Second is avatar. So this is going to be who we're actually targeting. Doesn't mean we're targeting them in the actual ad set itself. It's just who we're talking to with the advertisement. And then third is the concept. You could think of this as the angle. It's just what we're actually doing in the ad or ad group. If you don't have a concept or your multiple concepts here, just hit the avatar and then call this something. You need to know what the ad set actually is in a quick pulse check when you're looking at your campaign data. So we're going to select acquire new customers. And then in our excluded audiences, we just want to make sure we're excluding all past purchasers before the churn set. Now, your churn set or your churn date is going to be when that person does not come back when you consider them no longer a customer. For most businesses on the e-com side, it's 180 days. It's very typical. But if you're a business that has a like one-year cycle to repurchase, then extend that exclusion list from 180 to 365. Use your best judgment. It's your business. You know best. Here, we're going to go down to our conversion location. We're just going to choose website. And then for our performance goal, we're going to have two options here. We're either going to select maximize number of conversions or maximize value of conversions. Number of conversions is going to be standard for most businesses. If you are a brand that has one or just a few products or you're just pushing your hero couple of products, or your average order value of all your products is relatively the same, we're going to go number of conversions. I would say most of the time number of conversions is going to be the move, but if you're a business that has a variety of different products, different price points, etc., then you might want to try value of conversions. A little pro tip, if you're paying attention right now, run both in two different campaigns and see what actually works best for you. Most of the time running both simultaneously, especially if you have enough cash ready to roll, actually works better than just running one alone. So, back to my number of conversions, we're going to make sure we select our correct data set, and then our conversion event is always going to be purchase. There is absolutely no reason ever that we are selecting add to cart, add payment info, or initiate checkout. We always want to select purchase.
Next, for our cost per result goal, we're going to leave this blank. We're also going to leave value rules blank, although that is something that's going to be very applicable in the setup, which I will explain. Then we're going to go to our attribution model, which we're going to select as standard, and we're going to click 7-day click, 1-day engagement, 1-day view, and count all conversions. In our budget and schedule for pack number one, we're doing nothing here. All this stays the same, but stay tuned because pack number two is going to change this. For our audience, this is handled already. We can click show more controls, we literally don't need to do anything here because we're already excluding all the way at the top up here. So, this exclusions has moved from where it was down below all the way to the top now. For ad transparency, if this applies to you in your specific country, then of course select it. If not, move on.
Next is placements. We are excluding no placements, we're running all placements on, and Advantage Plus should stay on here. We're including skippable ads, literally everything is on. Now, I want to make an important caveat here. Of course, these are on right now to start because we don't know what's actually going to drive the performance. If you have very clear data that something like Threads does very poor for your business, then of course you can limit that down. But I want you to be very careful here. We like to go broad first, get the data, and then trim down from there. Next is brand safety and suitability. We're going to keep this generally on expanded all the time. There are some businesses that are trying to be very, very safe, and they move to moderate. But expanded is the default as of about a year and a half ago, and it works just fine.
Now, I'm going to take you through the ad settings. I'm not going to walk you through how to write your primary text and how to write your headlines, although I'll give you a few pointers. All the time, we're selecting our Facebook page and our Instagram profile. If you do not have both of these connected, connect them. This is critical. For our ad setup, unselect multi-advertiser ads unless you are a commoditized business. If you are a business that someone could buy your product from Amazon easily, select this. If not, unselect it. We're going to go show more settings, and we're not going to select anything on the schedule. For our destination, always include our main website URL. And a little pro tip, if you have a ugly website URL, use a display link. It just shortens it, makes it look a little cleaner. For personalized destination, this does depend. Most of the time, I'm down for optimized website destination. But if you're one of those businesses that has a lot of pages on your site, be careful. Take this with a grain of salt. And for browser add-ons, we are not selecting this. Go ahead and click done. We are not selecting promoted products here because that would assume that we are using a catalog ad. And then when we actually go to set up our creative, we can select our image or our video. We're going to push promotions on as long as they are applicable. We are not selecting anything branding related. For site links, this is hit or miss. You can make this decision on your own. If you think you have very important places to send people with site links, go ahead. If you don't, leave this off. Totally up to you.
Next is going to be text. Here's your general rule of thumb to follow for primary text. We want to have at a bare minimum two unique primary text, possibly three. The way that you could think about this is very simple. What I don't want to do here is say something like, "Buy my shoes." And then option number two says buy my shoes today. These are just far too similar, right? This is obviously terrible examples, but buy my shoes and buy my shoes today are the same thing. Instead, we want A to be very unique from B and so on. This will allow us to generate signal to understand what's better. I generally like to put three primary text, three headlines, and then if you want to, one description, although it is fairly optional. For a call to action, there are a few different options that are truly on the table now. First, get offer if you're running a sale or a promotion. Second, learn more if you need someone to actually read something, get to a case study, get to an article, that works just well. Order now can work a little bit better than shop now sometimes, but the tried and true is shop now. Shop now is probably what we select around 80% of the time for the brands that we work with.
Once we click next for image generation, we're going to skip this completely. Under no circumstances are we running with image generation just yet, although it is getting pretty good, so we're keeping an eye on this, and if it starts to work better, I will always let you know. We're going to click next, and we're going to go to our enhancements. Now, here's the quick rule of thumb for all of our enhancements. If it changes or modifies the image or the ad, we do not select it. If it changes things around the image or the ad, we're comfortable with that. For example, I don't want to select business AI, creating more pop-ups, a little bit of an awkward experience. I'm comfortable with overlays. I do not want visual touch-ups because it's modifying the ad. No ad music because it modifies the ad. No generate backgrounds. No ad animations because these again modify the ad. Cool with show spotlights. I don't want image touch-ups, and I'm comfortable with reveal details over time, and text improvements are basically on all the time. Finally, for translations, if you are a business that you know sells in multiple countries or different languages quite well, then don't shy away from going through the translate all. In this case, translating to all is going to expand your reach significantly because most businesses do not target all languages. Most businesses just focus on the one language that they're actually natively in.
From here, we can just scroll down. There's one more thing I would recommend checking, which is your essential enhancements. So, you can go to edit again here, which is going to open up yet again the same thing we were on, except it's actually going to show you these essential enhancements. Now, all of these I'm comfortable with, but this might change in just the next day. These change all of the time. So, just be careful. Take a look at these. Finally, we're just going to go down to the bottom and make sure you have your tracking enabled. Your website events should be on, and if you do see product tracking on, I would recommend these are enabled. This is fairly new. Product insights could actually show the purchases that were resulted from the actual ad that was clicked for that specific product. That's brand new. Lastly, URL parameters, if you are using some sort of third-party tracking system, this is an easy way to add in these parameters.
Okay, we have officially built campaign one, pack number one, and ad number one. Now, I'm just going to show you how the pack system works, and I'm going to create pack number two. Pack number two is critical because pack one basically just sets the easy foundation. Pack two is what happens when we launch our next round of ads. Every time we launch new ads, we launch them into a new pack or a new ad set. We never inject new ads into old packs. Let that sit with you. That is critical. So, for here, we're going to name this pack number two. It could be the same avatar, the same concept. It's just a new pack. It's new fresh creative. All of our settings are going to stay exactly the same, except we are going to go down to the budget and schedule section and click ad set spending limits and set a minimum dollar value bottom average daily minimum. Now, what this is going to do for us, the average daily minimum is going to force spend against this ad set for a short period of time to guarantee that this new round of creatives gets adequate testing budget. Easy way and formula that I like to use for this is setting this equal to one time my target CPA. So, if my target CPA is $100, I set this to 100. There is one rule to this. If you have a budget that cannot absorb that full target CPA amount, like if you have a smaller budget, you only want the maximum threshold for testing, and this is considered a test, is 20%. If you had a brand that you were spending $1,000 a day on, the most you could ever put your average daily minimum is 200. If you were spending 100, the most you could ever put here is 20. So, 20% of your total budget is the maximum you would put on your average daily minimum across all of the ad sets combined. Think of it very simply, we never want testing to represent more than 20% of our total account budget. And the last part about the minimum and maximum is that you only set this for 7 days. After the 7-day period goes by, we unselect this. You don't worry about the learning phase or resetting anything. If the ad set is functioning well and it's crushing it, it's going to keep spending over that minimum anyway. If it's a dud and it's under spending against that minimum, like if you've set it for $100 and it's hitting just $100 every single day, then once you take this away, it's probably going to fade down, which is okay. It just means you've tested something and it's not a winner. This is very, very normal, and we need to constantly be adding new ads to our account to combat this. If you have a super high hit rate, of course, you don't need hundreds and hundreds of ads in your account. We're just trying to manufacture winning ads you to scale.
So, we have officially built our core prospecting campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to target new customers and to target people who have visited your website. Now, we're not forcing it to hit people who visited your website, but we could always check on that by clicking on our breakdowns and clicking on our audience segments. What this is going to show us when we select this is our new, engaged, and existing audiences. This will very clearly favor new and engaged for this particular campaign, which you're going to focus on acquiring new customers.
Now, with this campaign made, there's only one core campaign left to create. And for this, we're going to click our sales objective again, and we're going to call this ml_retention. Now, our retention campaign is a campaign that is solely focused on getting people to come back and buy again and again and again. This is our existing customer campaign. So, for this, almost everything is going to stay the same except our daily budget's going to be really small for this. And we're going to work it up based on the frequency. So, look, you have to use a little bit of feel here. If you're a business that has hundreds of thousands of existing customers, you're a million-dollar business plus, then of course your budget here could be quite large. However, if you're just starting out or you're in the early stages of your business, this is going to be a small budget. So, for this, I'm just going to set this to $50 per day, and I'll show you the metrics we want to look at after. At this daily budget, really nothing else here from our previous setup is different. Campaign bid strategy is the same, our budget scheduling is done, our audience segment reporting is set up. We go down to our ad set. We're just going to be naming a few different ad sets here. The first is going to be a purchase_180_days. Now, keep in mind, the purchase_180_days, just like I mentioned before, could be purchase_365, it could be purchase_90, could be purchase_270. This is dependent on what your life cycle of your business is for when a customer churns. We want to capture that customer before the churn window occurs. So, for here, purchase_180_days, and our customer life cycle strategy is going to be get conversions from all audiences. It's actually not going to be all audiences, we're going to do limitations down below. Conversion location website, performance goal maximize number of conversions, data set is selected, conversion event is purchase, attribution model is standard, 7-day click, 1-day engagement, 1-day view.
Down to our budget and schedule section, this is going to be left completely blank, and our audience is where things are going to start to change. For this, we're We're to click further limit the reach of our ads, and then we're going to click again here, further limit the reach of our ads. At this point, we're going to have a fully customized audience segment set up. We're going to click custom audiences, and then we're going to select the purchase 180-day audience. So, we can see right here, we have our purchase 180 days fully set up. And I'm not really concerned about our estimated audience size being too small. They're just not fully showing cuz this is a combined audience from multiple data sources. We're also not going to be excluding anything. We're not going to be using this as a suggestion, so make sure this is not checked. And then we're going to go down to detailed targeting. This is going to be open app install open, languages all, because we're just hitting our existing customers. Just like all of our settings before, everything is basically open here. And then we're going to go down to our ad level. Now, for your ad level, here's my quick recommendation. Anything that you would normally hit in prospecting that's doing well could also go into your retention campaign. In addition, you could hit discounts, promos, or anything exciting like new arrivals to your retention campaign. Finally, you might want to also add a catalog setup in here as well, because catalog is a very easy way to display your products relatively cheap in terms of CPMs to people who've already bought and trust you already.
Okay, this leaves us with the core of our account. Now, you might be saying, "Whoa, only two campaigns? Like, what's going on here?" You're going to add more campaigns naturally. This is just the core. Think of this as the foundation of the home. If you run sales, if you run different products, promos, sets, everything else can slowly start to get added in to different campaigns. For example, if we ran to a totally different country than we're used to, and we had totally separate operations like a different fulfillment center, or different products, or different price points, or even a different website, we might not run that in the same prospecting campaign. And that's why accounts naturally grow and get bigger and bigger. But, as our main main main core, it really comes down to just two campaigns, and that's it.
Now, you could stack on on here. You could have a zombie campaign. You could have bid cap campaigns, cost cap campaigns. There might be more to stack, and we always go through all of that stuff in the Facebook Ads Blueprint, like actually when to do that. And you could see just right here, like we have cost controls, how to run sales from a structure perspective. We have all of the horizontal scaling methods in here as well. You could always add, but the core is these two campaigns. This is what I would do with nine out of 10 brands that we work with right off the start.
And I think this is a really important lesson for the brands that we're scaling the most right now. Every business is 100% unique. There is no doubt about that. Like brands, operations, people, everything is super, super unique. But what's not unique is ad accounts. Ad accounts generally function the same way. One is playing in an open system. You could do anything. You can go get a new supplier tomorrow. Your cost of goods might be different. You should generally not compare yourself to other brands in your category, except for inspirational purposes. But when it comes to your Ads Manager, that is exactly where you're playing in a closed system. It's like playing a sport. There's rules to play by, and you can really, really make sure you push to the edge of those rules to squeeze the most juice out of your account.
So, I hope overall this campaign structure gets you in the right direction. This is again what we've done for over 100 brands that we work with right now at The Moonliters, and it's what we also push to over 500 brands that are in the blueprint, which you could join right now with the link below. That is all for today. As always, if you guys have questions, let me know in the comments below. I try to reply to as much as I can, and I will see you very soon.