Media Buying Course: The NEW Way to Scale Facebook Ads in 2025

I've partnered with Meta to bring you what most advertisers will never see: the internal performance playbook from the Meta Performance Summit. If you weren't spending over a million dollars a month, you weren't in the room. But I was. And now I'm handing you everything.

And here's the thing: Meta doesn't want you guessing. They want you scaling profitably with confidence and predictability. And that's exactly what I'm going to walk you through right here, right now. If you're spending $50 bucks a month or $50,000 a day, this is perfect for you. This is going to give you clarity, confidence, and control. And the best part is, you're going to get all the decks, all the slides, all the handbooks, and all the guides. And you're going to get it all completely free here in this video. I've also added timestamps down below so you can save this video and come back to the parts that are most valuable for you. So whether you're scaling up, starting over, or trying to have your best year ever, let's do this together, right here, right now.

So, we're going to start with Reels, partnership ads, and creators so you have the playbook to make better ads today. Then we'll get into incrementality, what it means, how to measure it, and how to stop worrying about attribution and ROAS and all that nonsense. Then we'll get into AI. You'll learn how to take advantage of the machine to get it to do the work for you. I usually charge thousands for this kind of stuff, but today we're getting into it for free. I hope you can tell how excited I am. Let's get started.

Let's talk about breaking through on Reels. And this is all about creating impactful content and strong creator partnerships. So, I think a great place to start is at the beginning. Let's start with the three rules for a winning Reel. Now, I'm going to tell you a little secret from inside Meta that might not be a secret anymore. The Reels ad format, it's not just a content play. When used properly, it can be a cheat code. And if you get just three things right, you will consistently beat static and traditional video by double or triple your efficiency. And to be completely honest, some of these rules have dramatically changed over the last few years. And the last one, the last one has fundamentally changed over the last 6 months. And that will change everything and how you think about your Reels.

So let's start with rule number one. Rule number one is simply just stay in the safe zone. This is impacting your CPMs, your conversion rate, and your organic reach. The safe zone used to be a formatting tip, but now it's a delivery filter. Your ad will literally be penalized in the auction if you break this layout. For your reference, here's the internal slide from Meta for what that safe zone is. From the engineering team to the top creators, so that you know how to make not only your ads better, but all of your organic content also be seen by way more people. You can't have things over the bottom where the UI sits, or off to the side, or in the upper corners. You have to stay in the safe zone.

Rule number two is a bit of a change from what we've been told. You need to be full-screen vertical video, 9:16 only. You can't get away with 1x1 or 4x5 videos anymore. Much like the safe zone, if you're not getting this right, you won't reach the right people. 9x16 fills the screen and feels native. The product, engineering, and delivery teams all independently ran dozens of tests across CPG, e-commerce, lead gen, and SaaS businesses. And the results are undeniable. Leveraging full-screen native vertical video instead of image ads on Reels placements reduced CPAs by nearly 35%. And also wildly outperformed other videos that weren't formatted for this format. And I'll show you a slide later that gets to the specific numbers on that here in just a minute. The crazy thing is, most advertisers are just recycling their Instagram content directly into the Reels placement, expecting everything to go the same. And the honest truth is, it's just a completely different beast. It used to be an incremental placement. Now it could be the lifeblood of your entire funnel. Don't be most advertisers. You can do better.

And that brings us to rule number three, which is a fundamental shift from what they were telling us just 6 months ago. And this will fundamentally change how you plan your content. And it's as simple as this: make your content for sound on. Reels are scroll-stopping when sound is part of the story. If your ad doesn't work with sound on, you are losing performance. And no, stock music doesn't count. Use voiceovers, creator dialogue, and music synced to transitions and edits in your videos. Meta's data has shown repeatedly over multiple blind studies across the engineering, product, and delivery teams that adding sound is a core signal in the Reels delivery algorithm. Silent videos equal silent results. We used to be told that you should design for sound off. Here's what I honestly think, my little editorial. I think just having sound on on your phone in public has become widely more socially acceptable. If you've ever been on a plane or ridden the subway in New York City, you can confirm this to be true. Drop in the comment section down below if you've ever had an experience like that. But also, when they told us to design for sound off, AirPods weren't ubiquitous. And I think ultimately, that trending audio has changed the way people expect to experience video on their phones. So, simply put, if you're silencing your videos, you are silencing your results.

Now, here's the data to back it up. Creative is the variable that multiplies success. 9x16 video ads with audio in the safe zone resulted in, on average, 34.5% lower CPA than image ads on Reels, and 15% lower CPA than non-9x16 video ads without audio on Reels placement. And for those of you trying to read the fine print here, there's one very important metric. And let me read this off to you: This approach outperformed with 99.9% confidence. What else do you need to hear? So, if you want better performance on Meta, the first thing you fix, it's not your budget. It's not your targeting. It's not even your offer. It's your actual ad format. Reels work when they look like Reels: 9x16, sound on, and in the zone. Everything else is optional.

So, let's play a game now that you know the rules. You don't even need to see the Reel to know which one of these is the real Reel. So, comment down below as we play along. I'm going to show you a preview of two different Reels, and you can tell me which one is the real Reel. Okay, I have confidence in you. I know you can do this. Let's play the game.

Now, we're going to start with a pair of Reels from Sweet Green. Now, remember, you don't even need to watch the whole Reel to know immediately which Reel is the real Reel. So, let's play along. Can you guess the real Reel? This is Reel A, and this is Reel B. So, in the comment section down below, can you guess the real Reel, A or B? Now, we'll get to the answers in just a minute, but let's play another round of this game.

Now, for a second set of Reels, we have an example from Pure Gym and Feral is fashion. Now, again, remember, you don't need to watch the video. A single still image of that Reel will let you know which Reel is the real Reel. Here's Reel A, and here's Reel B. So, can you guess which one is the real Reel? Again, drop it in the comment section down below.

Now, before we go on, we have one other example. Let's recap the creative essentials: 9x16 video with the audio on, and everything in the safe zone. This is a pair of ads from Cororo. One more time. And this one's a little bit trickier. Can you guess which Reel is the real Reel? Is it Reel A or Reel B?

Now, before I reveal the answers, I just want to cover one more thing. This is the language of Reels. You can see a 16% improvement in CPA and a 13% higher ROAS. Now, of course, these are the metrics from Meta. I would not tell you what was going to get you a higher ROAS because we care about real money. But again, internal slides leaked from them to me to you for free. And by the way, if you want these slides, they're available for free 24 hours a day at disruptorschool.com/metasummit.

All right, which Reel was the real Reel? Well, let's go back and let me tell you the answer. For our Sweet Green Reels, it was Reel B. You know why? Reel A is not a 9x16 video. The border across the top and the bottom, dead giveaway. And by the way, you notice those borders are orange because of the colors of some of the stuff in the image, but Sweet Green's brand is not. And this could be happening on your Reels all the time because it's taking cues from your imagery, not from any brand guideline.

Now, the second batch of Reels, it was Reel A from Pure Gym. And the dead giveaway here is the text on the bottom of the screen. It's outside of the safe zone. If you look at it, the "for work" is behind the logo. That's why you need to be in the safe zone so that you don't violate these rules. And we're not saying that the Reel on the right, Reel B, won't work. What we're saying is you're going to get penalized for using it: higher CPMs, lower conversion rate. Essentially, you're going to buy worse quality traffic for a higher price. You can still win, but it's a lot easier to win by doing it the right way. And quick tip, if you want to change your performance on this ad, you could literally just take the "for work" and put it above the bag instead of below so it stays inside of the safe zone, and your CPMs would drop overnight.

And the last one, remember I told you this one was kind of tricky. It was Reel B. Why? Because Reel A has the brand logo in the upper left-hand corner outside of the safe zone. If you look at it where it says "Reels" in the upper left-hand corner, the brand logo is blocked by those words. You're violating the user experience. This might crush on YouTube Shorts, but it is not built for Reels native, and you will get penalized. Quite literally, removing that brand logo would fundamentally change the performance of this ad. Cuz also remember, you don't need the logo on the Reel because also the logo's in the lower left-hand corner. Remember, they show you the page the ad comes from. Putting your brand in the image is not going to improve performance, and often it's going to be the reason the performance isn't nearly as good as it could be for the reasons that I just told you.

So, now let's get to section two: Why your Reels still flopped and how to fix them. So, let's say you followed the rules: 9x16 native video with audio that means something when watching that video, and all of your text and overlays and everything is in the safe zone, but your Reel's performance still tanked. Your organic isn't getting any distribution, and your ad CPMs are through the roof with the worst performance you've seen forever. Here's why: Most brands try to act like creators instead of actually just using them. The problem is that Reels are not TV spots. They're not mini commercials. They're not a cutdown of your product video. They're not a trailer of your landing page. They're content. Every ad is content. Every ad is just organic content that you pay to show to somebody. They all exist in the same place. And in fact, if your ad looks and feels like an ad, the odds of anybody ever watching it are basically zero. Nobody's signing into Instagram or Facebook to see your advertisements. Well, to be fair, I am. But that's 'cause I'm a huge nerd and I actually really enjoy commercials. I have ever since I was a kid. But you aren't. We got to remember, your ads are a burden on somebody's experience. It's the giant ugly billboard blocking the beautiful sunset. They have to feel native to the scroll. If they look like an export from Final Cut Pro, you can kiss your money goodbye.

So, here's the fix: It needs to be relatable, digestible, and entertaining. And let's get back to the language of the Reels. Right now, at the Meta Performance Summit, they broke it down with three specific categories. First, it has to be relatable. It has to look like something I'd make or watch on my own. Second, it needs to be digestible. This is snackable content. It needs to be short, punchy, and easy to consume. I'm not trying to enjoy a three-course meal. Just give me the Ferrero Rocher, and I'll be on my way. And it has to be entertaining: funny, surprising, visually interesting. That's why talking heads and the "get ready with me" style and the "what's in and what's out" and stitch and reaction formats really dominate. It's not just the format, it's the language.

Now, Meta has run some global tests on that, and they gave us decks that are dozens of pages long. I've read them all. You don't have to. Here's the information that you need. By the way, if you want all of the decks, the link is down below. There we go. All right. Now, here's what you need to know. When comparing product-focused Reels to Reels prepared by creators, there was a dramatic performance difference in the ad account. The creator Reels all had three things in common: First, higher view-through rates. Second, more shares and saves. And third, not a shocker, lower CPAs across the board. And this was across every niche, every vertical, every business use case. Like, remember what I showed you before, 99.9% confidence in the stat outcomes of every test around the world. This isn't information that's interesting. It's a secret weapon to the performance you know you deserve. Remember what we talk about here: more success, less stress. This is the playbook. And remember, this isn't magic. It's empathy and it's understanding.

So, what I want you to take away from this is that Reels don't just work because of the format. They work because of the feeling. So, the next time you make a Reel, don't think to yourself, "Add." Think, "Would I send this to a friend?" And if the answer is no, then you should probably start over.

So, now let's talk about your next secret weapon: partnership ads. And I hear you. I've been doing this stuff since the early 2010s. But it has fundamentally changed. And if you take advantage of it now, you're going to get preferential treatment. Not something they didn't explicitly say, but if you watch my podcast, and we'll drop a link to it up here, that I did after the summit with Drew Denny, Ben Heath, and Caleb Krauss, Mr. Paid Social. One thing we all noticed, and I may or may not have had a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, a govern little like side from some people on the inside. If you're using partnership ads, you're getting cheaper CPMs with better placement. They're trying to get people to use the tech. I saw preferential bidding with DPA was brand new. I saw it with CBO. I saw it with DCT. We even talked about it on the other channel when ASC first came out, why it was working so well.

Now, the reason for this is pretty simple, and it was Facebook back in the day, and it's Meta now. But when they want to invest in new technology and a new customer experience, remember, changing consumer behavior is one of the most expensive and difficult things to do. The way that they do that is by putting their thumb on the scale of the cost of the inventory and the quality of the inventory so that advertisers embrace it. I remember when I was running the first catalog ads, and it was weird. Nobody had ever seen a carousel, and they just kept making the CPMs lower and lower and lower and lower until it became so cheap it was hard to not ROI. And then 6 to 9 months later, everybody loved scrolling through catalog ads. To this day, that was 2017. To this day, catalogs are basically an essential tool for any e-commerce business. We're seeing the same thing happen in partnership right now. It is a cheat code to take advantage of today. And what I've heard from people overwhelmingly is that by this time next year, that cheat code might go away. And they expect mass adoption around Q4, Black Friday, and full distribution into the marketplace with everybody copying what all the best people did on Black Friday. You can take advantage of it today 'cause you're here. And that's what this channel is all about.

Okay, that being said, let's dive into some more about partnership ads. Now, I told you that Meta is investing in getting people to adopt this technology. But what does Meta actually want you to do with creators? Well, I have the decks. I have the literal scripts. I have the internal documentation from the team that they're giving to their reps and what they suggest people do to their creators. And again, if you go to the link down here, right right there. Okay. Awesome. You're going to get everything I'm going to show you today, plus more tools, including the internal document to fill out briefs for creators. So you can literally just copy and paste your way to success.

Okay, let's get to the fine print. So let's start with the part that nobody else will tell you. Meta doesn't just want you to work with creators. They want you to run partnership ads. If you're not doing that, you're wasting the best inventory on the platform. So let's take a second here and establish something. What is a partnership ad? Simply put, instead of running an ad only from your brand's page, you run the ad from the creator's handle using paid media. It's still your budget, your targeting, your CTA, but it shows up as creator.sponsor. So, not only does this feel native, but you're earning trust by borrowing authority from those creators, and it triggers all the best signals inside of the Meta algorithm. And probably my favorite thing about this is that you don't have to make the choice of it coming from their account or from your account. One of the old hacks back in the day was take the creator stuff and run it from your account. Also, now you don't have to make that choice. You can select a button, and it will show it to the end user in whatever gives them the best experience.

Now, maybe when I see something that says "this creator" and three other things, and it's clearly an ad, I'll reject it right away. But if it's natively from them, I'll click on it. And maybe for you, it's the exact opposite. The thing is, our experiences are going to be very different. This is what Zuck said: "Around every ad is going to be AI." It doesn't mean that you're never going to upload ads anymore. It means that you're going to stop making the minuscule choices that ultimately inhibit your performance, and instead, they're going to give the end users the best possible experience, which gives you the lowest CPMs for the best quality inventory so you can get lower prices and better conversion rate so you can see more success with less stress. Let's go.

Now, it's one thing to say all of that, but again, I've got the internal documentation, so let's run the numbers. Partnership ads are the most performant and transparent way to run ads with creators. They've saw a 19% reduction in CPAs with a 53% higher click-through rate. Adding partnership ads to more placements, including Reels, improves that performance versus just using Reels business as usual. And this means 18% lower cost per click, 25% better CTR, 22% better through-play rate, and 21% higher 3-second video play rate. The point is simple: When you run ads, you're buying attention. Using partnership ads is the cheapest way to buy the highest quality attention, and that means your bank account will thank you.

Now, let me tell you why this is happening. Because it's one thing to just say, "Well, they're cheating for you and like this is going to go away." There's actually some really important technology that I want you to understand that's going on back here. I promise it's super simple. The algorithm isn't just using your own brand's signals. They're also using the data from the Facebook and Instagram pages that you leverage. It uses both sets of data to rank and deliver your ads more effectively. If you're using a creator with a very high overlap with your audience, odds are that's going to be good performance, but not terribly incremental. However, fun cheat code: If you're using a creator where the overlap with your existing audience isn't that big, then the overlap is pretty small. And what's great about that is you're going to reach a whole bunch of new people that the machine thinks is going to really like what you have to say. And it's going to pick and choose who to show it to based on their proclivity to be interested in whatever it is that you're selling, which means you're going to be able to reach new audiences easier than ever before with CPMs that feel like a throwback to the Obama administration.

So, let me tell you how to get started. First, they recommend that you use the Creator Marketplace on Instagram to find a ton of talent. I think that's also a great tool. If you don't like that tool and want more of a managed service, my number one recommendation is to use incense.pro. I've been using them since 2018. It's run by this guy, Denil. He's a good friend of mine. I trust them implicitly with my money, and so should you. You can also turn highly performing organic UGC into an ad with one click by going to the Partnership Ads Hub inside of your Business Manager. And let me give you a quick tip: the best performing ads, they don't look like ads. I hope you've gotten that point by now. They look like content made by somebody who actually likes your product, service, or offer.

Now, I'll tell you this: Meta wants this so bad. They've built huge workflows around this. There's like three different ways of getting the job done. Creators get paid. You get cheaper CPAs. This is something Meta is leaning into for their own survival, and something you can leverage to stack paper in your bank account. The feed gets better, everyone wins. So, stop boosting your own posts and start promoting creators with your ads.

So, now let's break down the three rules of a highly converting creator ad. Running a partnership ad isn't enough. If the content sucks, it still won't convert. So, here are three rules to get your creator content right before you even hit publish. And full disclosure before we get into this, I have a lot of experience paying influencers. I used to have a six-figure monthly budget. I paid Kris Jenner over six figures for one post, and I'm now getting paid to make content for people. And so there's a lot that I've learned over the years of millions and millions and millions of influencer and UGC and celebrity ads.

Rule number one: The creator needs to know why them. And it's not just to make somebody feel good. There's actually a very important exchange of information here. Don't just send a product and say, "Make a video." You've got to tell them why you picked them. And this is important because they need to know what part of their content or voice fits the product or brand. You have to let them know what you love about their work. This will unlock better creative every time. Basically, if you just send me something and say, "Make a video about this," the odds of me making the video that you want are very bad. But if you tell me what you like about my content and what you're looking forward to the way that I do things and how I can best represent your efforts, I'm going to do a much better job. This eliminates stupid edits and wasted time and money. And to be fair, if you don't know why you're hiring somebody, don't hire them. Don't say, "Well, you were the most expensive one, so here you can waste my money." That's just dumb.

The second rule here is you have to let them tell the story. Too many brands treat creators like actors. And I'm totally guilty of this. Don't give them a script with like 15 bullet points and tell them to read that. Or if you do, don't expect it to be any good. Brief with an idea like a "what's in and what's out" or "my skincare routine" or "get ready with me" style video concept. Let them own the format, 'cause you own the outcome. The more you micromanage, the worse the product is going to be that you get from them.

And rule number three, don't overbrand it. Your logo doesn't need to be on screen for 45 seconds. Your discount code doesn't need to flash in neon. Creator content works when it feels real, like something they'd post anyway. So, your job is to give them guardrails, not handcuffs. And I want you to remember that creators aren't influencers. You're hiring them for the content they make, not the audience that they have. Now, maybe they have an audience, and that's great. But if you're hiring Kris Jenner, it's not because you're a huge fan of her content. It's because you're trying to access her audience. Creators, on the other hand, are often people who are very entertaining, very engaging. These are just people who make good content. And all you're saying is, "I love your content. Can you insert my message into what you do, and I'll pay you for it." They can be your best performance partner, if you let them. And when you do, Meta will reward you with lower CPAs, higher CTRs, and ads that never fatigue.

So, we've talked about creators. Now, it's time to get into the data to performance, and most importantly, incrementality. So, let's start by simply answering the question: What is incrementality really? And I know this is going to ruffle a couple of feathers, but to be fair, the people that are going to be upset by this are the ones that know this is true and have been hating on me for years for telling you why you don't need them. And so, now that Meta has the official documentation to support what we've been saying, I'm here to give it to you for free. Let's get into it.

The simplest way of thinking about it is incrementality measures what actually worked, not what got credit. So, let's start at the beginning and why your ads didn't work. Even if your ROAS said they did. The fact that they are saying this makes me so happy. And you know that the other folks, they're going to be fighting tooth and nail saying that they're just trying to take all of your money. Literally, Meta is telling you that you've been giving them too much credit. And I'm here to show you exactly how they have told us to make sure that you understand where they're getting way too much credit so you can spend your money for better results. And I fully, fully expect this to mean that some brands will pull back their budgets from Meta, and they should. And in our podcast that I mentioned earlier, Ben Heath said, "I think that's like very brave for Meta." Yeah, 'cause I guarantee there will be businesses that start measuring incrementality that aren't now. Mhm. They feel like their ad results are worse than what they had previously believed, and they cut budgets. Like, that will definitely... He thinks it's really brave of Meta to come out and say this because if I know perhaps 35% of my sales would have happened anyway, I'm not going to spend nearly as much money tomorrow. And the honest truth is, that's happening across a lot of accounts, and almost assuredly yours.

So let's solve it. Let's unpack a little bit more about that quote: "ROAS is a lie we've all believed." If somebody clicks on your ad and buys something, Facebook has claimed victory. And that sounds great. But what if they were going to buy anyway, no matter what? Or saw five other ads right before that one? That click just got the credit, but it didn't cause the purchase. I got to show you this slide. Meta's internal data says 35% of spend is wasted on non-incremental sales if spending is prioritized based on last click. And unfortunately, 78% of advertisers are using last click as their source of truth. What I love is that the machine is telling you that's a really bad idea. When the people who manage billions in revenue and ad spend tell you that last-clickers and cost-cap absolutists are destroying your bank account by making you pay for sales that would have already happened and wasting a ton of money, you better listen. And for those of you reading the fine print, let me just show you this one fun little number. This data set isn't small. It's on $740 billion. That means that over $200 billion was wasted by people focusing on last click as their optimization decision. $200 billion. Meta isn't giving this data to us because they're trying to trick you. My opinion, they're giving it to us so that people trying to trick you can't do it anymore, so that you can be way more successful.

Now, they went on to talk about some really interesting trends about why clicking at all might be a terrible data point. And this is really important for all of you 7-day click-no-view crew. I've been telling you to use views for years. And here's a very interesting stat to back that up: "Shifting shopping behaviors limit click-based measurement insights." Gen Z consumers are two times more likely to buy without clicking an ad compared to other groups. And 60% of time spent on Facebook and Instagram is now video. The point is simple: People are watching the videos and being entertained. They're not clicking on it to stop the video. They're enjoying the content and then just make purchasing decisions after the fact. This is the stuff that really matters. And this test was run across 91 retailers comparing their one-day click versus their one-day view metrics. The results are astounding. And that's why I've always said attribution is about teaching the machine who to show your ad to, not about what ad gets credit for the sale, because there's no way of you actually knowing what caused it.

Let's get into what incrementality really means. Incrementality basically answers the question: What sales happened because of the ad, and only because of the ad? Now, if you want to find this out for yourself, you can run some very controlled experiments. And I'll show you exactly how to do all of this stuff later. And it's included in the decks. Like, everything I'm showing to you today can be found for free right there. Okay? I know I keep putting that up on the screen, but it's so important. Like, if you weren't spending at least a million dollars a month, you weren't even able to get an invite to this event. I'm giving you everything they gave to everybody else for free. And most people that attended didn't get most of the decks. I'm making sure that you get more access than anyone. That's what I'm here to do. Help you see more success and less stress.

Now, the way that they're running these incrementality tests is pretty simple. They have a test group that doesn't see your ad and a control group that does. And the difference in performance is your true impact. Pretty simple. No attribution guesswork, just real results. Now, why this really matters is if you're scaling based on fake numbers, you're going to really lose a ton of money. You're going to scale the wrong ads and eventually break the machine. You're going to kill the ones that are working, and it's going to feel like chasing ghosts, and that's not good. So, if you're serious about performance, you have to stop asking yourself, "What ad gets credit for the sale?" and you have to start asking yourself, "Why did this sale happen?" That is incrementality. That's the difference between a performance marketer and a brand that's growing.

Now, let me give you a quick example to understand all of this. This is called the Pedro versus John test, and it's a $10 million mistake. So, fictitious world. Let me introduce you to Pedro and to John. Pedro saw your ad but was going to buy anyway. John, on the other hand, saw your ad and only bought because he saw it. Who do you want to spend more money reaching? Here's the problem with Pedro: If you optimize for clicks and views and ROAS, you'll end up spending millions to show ads to Pedro. And that feels real good in the metrics, and it's completely useless to the bank account. Now scale that mistake across every campaign, across every platform, across all marketing efforts all year long. You've got brands spending hundreds or thousands or even millions of dollars trying to reach people who don't need convincing. And this is where incrementality comes in. This is how we fix it. The only way to isolate John, the incremental lift, is to run a proper test. Hold out 20% of your audience. Show the ad to the other 80%. Measure the delta. And this isn't new. This goes way, way back, like before the snack pack. The point is that this is now available for free in your Ads Manager right now as conversion lift and incremental attribution measurement tools. And really, this isn't optional anymore. You wouldn't launch a product without testing it, right? Why run a $100,000 on ads without testing to see if it's actually driving any behavior? Meta literally gives you the test kit. You just have to use it, and it's free.

I remember back in the day when Uber decided to do a little bit of a hold-out test from their usage of, I'll leave the name out, but a native advertising platform. They cut seven figures a month from advertising on that platform. That gave them a tremendous ROAS. Sales didn't drop by a penny, but the ad spend dropped by seven figures. That was an 8-figure hit to the bottom line of the business until they tested it. And I could tell you to imagine how much money you're wasting right now, but I've already given you the data. Odds are, it could be as high as 35% or more. If you're like a last-click only person with no view attribution or somebody using cost caps and bid caps on everything, your number could be closer to 60 or 70%. So if you begin to use incremental attribution and leverage the conversion lift studies to verify it, you're basically going to see this: Pedro is going to give you all the clicks. Pedro will always click, and John is who you actually want to pay to reach. Incrementality is how you stop wasting money on the Pedro of the world. No shot at Pedro. Vote for Pedro. I didn't come up with this study. I'm just reporting it.

A quick editorial here before I tell you more about how to run a lift test. I want you to think of incremental attribution as basically optimizing for new customers. If you think of it that way, now it all makes sense. You have standard attribution, which is the most amount of sales, and incremental attribution, which is "bring me new people." That's it. You have a ton of people deliver a ton of content. They're wildly overcomplicating incremental attribution, but it's simply optimizing for new people. That's it. It's that simple. I'm going to repeat this one more time: Incremental attribution is optimizing for new customers. Done. Full stop.

Now, let's talk about how to actually set up this test. And the good news is Meta has already set it up. It's in the lab waiting for you. You just have to run the experiment, and it's free. Now, simply put, incrementality is the new North Star. Now, I just want to tell you, in the decks that you're going to get, you're also going to see some of these slides that I'm showing on the screen real quick about rules-based attribution modeling and how to calibrate multi-touch. We're going to dive into how to do that more later. It's just we're going to get into how to do the conversion lift. And I didn't want to not let you know you're going to get that stuff as well, but I want this video to be like less than five hours. So, if you go to this site, you're going to get this deck for free, as well as all of the other ones, and just there's more information here than I'm even able to get into this video.

Okay, I'm going to show you a simple breakdown of how to actually run an incrementality test in your ad account. So, you're sold on incrementality. You don't like the idea of wasting 35, 50, 60 cents of every dollar. Now, let's talk about how to actually set up this test and use it. And the good news is you don't need any other tech or just spend any money. Meta has included it in the lab. You just need to run the experiment. So let's pull up another deck on the screen. This one is "Measure What Matters: Scaling Through Incrementality." This is a complete how-to doc for you. And instead of just telling you what to do, I'm literally going to show you the tools that they give to their engineers and the best reps in the world for people spending millions so that you can do this in your ad account for free today.

The important thing here is that every lift test should be designed to answer one question: What's working that wouldn't work if we stopped spending money? So, if you want to set this up inside of your Ads Manager, you want to go to the Experiments tab and then select "Set up a Conversion Lift test." You then simply choose your campaigns. And best practice here is to set a 2 to 4 week test window. You reserve 20% of your audience as a holdout. That's your control group. They get no ads.

Now, I got to read this off because this is the actual guidelines from Meta, but I want you to know that you don't have to do this. I just want to make sure that you know exactly what they say you should do. But editorial, you don't need to do this. But let me give you the very big specifics. And I'm going to read this off of an internal email that I can't share with you. Okay. Meta recommends $50,000 per cell. That's control and test. Meaning you need $100,000 and 50 conversions per week with enough traffic to reach statistical significance. The bigger the brand, the easier this gets. So that's their language. Now, remember, this is an email designed to go out to brands that are spending at least a million dollars a month. You can do this if you're spending $100 a day. All right? Don't get scared by the numbers. I just want to have full transparency around like who this information was designed to reach so that you know the leg up you have on everyone else in your boat.

Now, the important thing to remember here is that you're not reinventing the wheel. You're just using real data to stop guessing. Lift tests aren't hard. They're just rare. And I think we should make them the standard. In my businesses, I run a lift test every month. Remember, it said two to four weeks. I start one on the first of every month. And I actually look at the impact of the lift test month over month over month to really get some barometer and direction on what I'm doing outside of just the ad account so that I can put the bank account in context with the Ads Manager and really get a good idea on whether or not my strategies are hitting.

So let me tell you where most marketers mess up: what to do after the lift test ends. They run the lift test and then they don't know what to do with the results. And remember, data is only as valuable as it is actionable. Otherwise, it's a complete waste of everybody's time. Step number one, read the delta. Delta. After your test ends, you're going to see something like this: Test group got 4,800 purchases, and your control group got 3,600. The incrementality is 1,200 purchases. That's the number you're optimizing for. It's not ROAS. It's not click-through rate. It's not avoiding view attribution. It's what actually got more sales to happen.

Now, you can take that test and apply it to the rest of your measurement. And this is great for you that are using Blout, or Livar, or Triple Whale, or Northbeam, or God forbid, Highros. This is where we can begin to calibrate the attribution model. If your multi-touch attribution said Meta drove 100 sales, but the lift says it drove 150, you have a 1.5x multiplier. Meaning that you can multiply Meta's impact across your marketing model to fix underattribution.

Now, the actionability of this is pretty simple. If a channel, creative type, or campaign shows tremendous incremental lift, pour gas on that fire. If something flopped or failed or looks good on the platform but drove no lift, cut your budget there. Now you're scaling what's real. And fun fact, I've done this for years. And you know what gets all the budget cut? All the cost controls. They usually go down to about 10%. 'Cause usually about 10 to 15% on your cost controls is incremental. The rest of it is a complete waste of your money. Remember we said 35% of budgets are being wasted and 78% of people are still on last click? That's because some people are 100% on cost controls and wasting damn near all of their money. And I'm not saying that those marketing efforts don't help. The point is though, that they generally succeed by taking credit for stuff and making sure that you're active, but they're not the reason things happen. And when you run these kind of tests, you find the right balance. And instead of being an absolutist, you become somebody that has a real strategy. And unfortunately, I talk to victims of that cult on a consistent basis. Remember, data gets the credit, and lift gets you the budget. And incrementality, that's how you win the room and drive way more results.

Any advertiser that gets more and more efficient but doesn't drive more results, meaning the ad platform looks better and better and better, but the bank account doesn't move, that person is wasting everybody's time and money, and ultimately that person is a liability to the success that you deserve.

Now, you could go back and screenshot this video if you want to see all these slides. And there are also plenty of slides. I don't even have the time to show you. Right here is the link if you want to type that into your browser to make sure that you get all of the decks that we're talking about. And you can literally go grab it right now. Come back to this video and follow along without having to pause my screen and try to put it all together. I highly recommend that you do that.

Now, when it comes to the actionability of data, we have to look at the measurement frameworks that scale. It's not just about running one test. It's about integrating incrementality into your day-to-day operations. Honest truth is, attribution arguments are some of the biggest wastes of time in marketing. Facebook says one thing, Google says something else, Shopify says something completely different. So, who's right? Answer is none of them. Every platform is biased. Every model has flaws. Remember, attribution isn't about credit. So if you want to think about this in a different way, remember that attribution is a data set to teach the machine what you want it to do more of. And your job is to make sure that what you're asking it to do more of actually helps the bottom line. That makes all attribution conversations completely moot. You don't need to waste any more time. If people still argue about this stuff, it means they're way behind you right now. You've just leapfrogged everyone. If you're making decisions based on click reports and reporting dashboards, you're reacting, not leading.

So, the only real solution here is simple: Build a measurement framework that calibrates those models for incrementality. And I know that's a lot of syllables, and I don't expect everyone to do this, but it is something that anybody can do using simply just Google Sheets and the spend column. I promise you, you can do this.

Now, for those of you that have invested in more, let's talk about your three-layer measurement stack. Layer one: platform attribution. This is directional, fast, and cheap. And you can use this for day-to-day feedback. Layer two is MTA or MMM. That's multi-touch attribution or media mix modeling. This is great for a cross-channel perspective and excellent for budget splits. And layer three is the lift test. This is the gold standard. You use this to calibrate and validate everything else. When all three are in sync, you're unstoppable. I highly recommend that you don't just pick one, you try to align them all. It's not about choosing a favorite. And I've been in the room where everybody's arguing about the favorite version of every one of these. And the choice that ultimately gets made is the one that makes the highest-paid people in the room look good. And it has nothing to do with actual results. It's about aligning your measurement stack and...

Using lift results to adjust your MTA models. You can use MM to guide budget allocation and use platform data to measure pacing and speed. This is how the smartest teams in the world make the most important decisions. They don't trust just one number. They build systems to find the truth. And truth scales way better than clicks ever will.

Now, getting into scaling and scaling with confidence. You don't need better ads. You need better feedback loops. And that starts with setting up reoccurring repeatable measurement rhythms. I gave you an example of this, but let's dive in deeper.

At a quarterly level, you run a lift, calibrate, and adjust. Once a quarter, choose a priority creative or channel to test. Run a conversion lift or go hold out and compare your results to your attribution. Apply a multiplier where needed and reallocate your budget for the next quarter as results deem necessary. This becomes your growth ritual. And also, please have some sense of year-over-year results and seasonality. If you're looking at Q4 as how to spend money in Q1, you're going to be barking up the wrong tree.

Next is monthly. Then monthly spot check your model drift. Every month you should be asking, are platform conversions trending away from modeled conversions? Are there signals that suggest that we are over or underperforming? And did last month's performance align with business outcomes? Use this to catch attribution drifts before bigger impacts really hurt the bottom line.

And weekly, you focus on platform and MTA feedback. Use Ads Manager for speed or MTA and MM to get validation. Make decisions weekly and evaluate performance monthly and always filter through incrementality every quarter. And I hope you're hearing me here when this isn't about dashboards. It's about trust. When you know what's working, you scale faster, can defend your decisions, and stop relying on hope.

This is how grown-ups run media. It's no longer about rorowaz. It's not about cost controls for platform level performance. That's child's play. The people who do that love to talk about 20, 30% year-over-year growth, whereas the grown-ups are pissed if the business doesn't double every year.

So, now we get into the really fun part, the automation evolution that Meta has brought to the table. And I want to start with a little bit of a history lesson here and then really get into some actionable stuff. Meta's tools are evolving and we go way back to the brilliant basics days and then the power five which I got to be a part of helping put together as one of the original members of the disruptor group back in the late mid-20s to the Advantage Plus suite and more. And we're going to dive into what the future is going to look like here. But the most important thing is that your strategy more than ever is what matters. the ability to click the right box or use the right tool. Like the hacks just don't work anymore. Hacks are for hacks. And I'm going to show you how to never need them ever again.

So, let's start with the real reason why your Advantage Plus campaign isn't working right now. I know you see everyone's running Advantage Plus now, and everyone's confused as to why it works for some brands, but it doesn't seem to be working for others. And if you're watching this, it might not be working for you. And the trick here is it's not the tools, it's the input. While it's great to have automation, the Meta ad system needs you to steer which direction it's going to go. It's going to crush, but without direction is just going to run in circles aimlessly wasting time and money. And that is heartbreaking.

I remember back in the day like pre-2018 when you were using audiences and manual placements and using like to do creative testing and audiences. CBO didn't even exist. Now it's all automated. It's all AI. And and if you're still doing some of those things, I urge you to start thinking like it's Meta in 2025 and not Google in 2015. There's literally no value to you segmenting each individual thing. Because remember, going back to the data conversation, if you're looking at attribution-based data on a click to make decisions, you're looking at something that does not comprise all of the information from something that happened in the past that is incomplete and out of context to predict future behavior. That doesn't make sense. And that's the reason you get wins all the time, but don't ever actually move forward.

Advantage Plus handles the creative, the placements, and the budgets, but what you put into the machine still matters. And when when Zuck said all ads are going to be AI, this is really what he's talking about. It's not that like you're just going to put in a website and the media bar doesn't have anything to do. It actually means that you have more power than ever because instead of you having to be the person doing all of the work, you're the manager. It's the ads manager. Basically, what this means, more than ever before, you're in charge of the factory, but you don't have to go through every single stop across the assembly line to do all of the work. In fact, your job is to make sure the people doing the job at every step of the assembly line don't need you. If you have to micromanage your team, it means you're a bad manager. And what you need to do is focus on building a machine and a tool set and a team that doesn't need you so you can spend your time doing more important things like working on the business or just enjoying life. This is all on autopilot now if you let it. So you have to give it good inputs. This means great data, optimized events, and winning creative. If you do that, it will do amazing things for you. But if you feed it garbage, you're just going to get really volatile CPAs, CPMs, chasing ads that fatigue all the time and never be able to scale.

Think about it like this. If you have to fire your employees every single week, and by that I mean turn off ads, and you're constantly hiring new people, launching new ads to do a bunch of different jobs, different campaigns, you're never actually going to have anybody that's good at their job. You're basically saying, "If you get lucky on the first week, I'll keep you on the job." up until you fail. And I'm going to try to hire people every single week to make sure that you fail. That's a terrible way to run a business.

So, quick history lesson. Let's go through the evolution of this real quick. We started with the brilliant basics. And then around 2018, we got into the Power Five. And that brought with it CBO and DCT and advanced matching, which means that you never needed to use audiences ever again. This was and still remains to this day the single greatest leap forward in the ad account. It basically took Facebook ads from being a fancy version of Google Display to the single greatest ad network ever. And it hasn't functionally changed ever since. There have been no massive changes in how the machine works. What they're doing now is just building tools that leverage that infrastructure in a way that requires less and less work for you so that you can see more and more success.

Then we get into the Performance Five and today it's called the Performance Best Practices. But this is the introduction of the Advantage Plus suite and incremental attribution and the Opportunity Score and the Performance Scorecard which is super cool. I'm going to show you that here in a little bit. But you can see that it's shifted from a targeting platform to a feedback engine. It's not about how segmented and smart and clever and how much work you can do. It's about how simple you can make it to give the highest volume of high-quality signals to the machine so it can do the best work for you. And that's really the game now. Create signals the machine can use and then work on the rest of the business. A good business is what scales an ad account. If your business sucks, there is no way the ads manager is going to fix that. Business models win. The number one hack to your ads manager is a better business model.

So why isn't it working for you? It's because you're still thinking like it's 2017. You're controlling bids manually. You're uploading 20 creatives at a time. You're still split testing audiences. Stop it. Like this isn't coming from me. And yes, I've been telling you this for the last seven years. This is coming from Meta themselves. Like the people that determine who your money gets spent on. The people who determine who sees your ads, the people that basically build the system that determines whether or not your business is going to succeed small or get huge, they're telling you what they want. And if you respect that relationship, you're going to see much better results. Respect in relationships is really the key to success in life.

So let go of the day-to-day control and take charge of your inputs. where you should be really investing all of your time and energy isn't in making the machine really complicated. It's in not having to. It reminds me of the Matrix. You know, at one point Neo says, "You mean at some point I'm going to be able to dodge bullets?" And Morpheus says, "At some point you won't have to." And that's really what this is all about. You won't need a complicated account because you've been working on getting a higher volume of higher quality data into the machine. You're telling them what success means for you and you're staying out of the way and working on the business instead of destroying your opportunity by micromanaging the ad account.

Meta AI doesn't replace you. It rewards you if you feed it what it needs. So the way I want you to think about AI is this. In 2018, Facebook changed the way the ads manager was done. So it went from manual labor to work being done by machines. It basically built an assembly line with a factory. And now with AI, basically what they've done in this wonderful analogy is they've turned that factory line into something that's electrified. That means the work gets done cheaper, more regularly, and easier, but it hasn't actually changed any of the workflow. What works is the exact same 7 years ago as it is today. We just have electrified machines doing the job. And once you start thinking about it that way, I think everything will fall into place.

Remember, Meta's AI is super powerful. But it doesn't do the strategy. That's your job. AI equals execution, not insight. It's the electricity running the machine. It's not actually building a better factory. AI optimizes what you give it. It doesn't invent your offer, write your hook, or understand your customer. It doesn't know your margins. You do. It's a multiplier. And that means if you're good, it can make you great. And if you're sloppy or lazy or trying to take the cheap road built on unsustainable hacks, it's only going to make you broke faster. I've always said Facebook ads and the Meta ad suite is a volume knob on the rest of your business. It's only going to crank up what you're already doing. And that's a huge opportunity, but it's also the reason that most people are failing even faster than before. Doing things the wrong way only makes it more difficult. And that's why I think the platform has never been easier. I've never spent less time to make more money than we are right now. And I've been in this game for over a decade.

So remember, you still own three critical levers. The offer. It needs to be compelling. No tech is going to overcome a bad offer. Number two is the creative. If your ad sucks, you can't earn attention to then later monetize. Remember, ads don't make the sale. They just earn the attention of people that your business model turns into repeatable cash flow. And three, signal quality. If your data is junk, the performance you get will be trash. It's really that simple. Get your match rates up and really begin to optimize around what's important to you. Build out custom conversion events. Again, the stuff I've been telling you for years and years and years. It's incredible. The machine is now allowing you to really feed into it. and some of the stuff that my friends over at like Portland Leather Goods and Original Grain, a bunch of other brands that I've been working with for years and years and years, my DMs are all the people. One of the things that we've all noticed is that when you build custom conversion events for the things that are important to you, the machine gets better at delivering you that result. And it can really be as simple as new customer. More on that another time.

And here's the thing, Meta wants you to get this right. That's why they rolled out things like the Performance Scorecard and Opportunity Score and even Value Optimization and Incremental Attribution. So, what do the best media buyers today all have in common? They don't guess. They don't tinker. They set up smart systems so the machine can specialize. Remember, specialists make more money. AI isn't your magic bullet. It's the engine. It's not the factory. It's the electricity that allows you to let it run 24 hours a day. Don't be afraid of AI. You should be afraid of ignoring it because the brands that learn how to work with the machine run circles around those who are trying to cheat it. Simply put, you are never going to be as smart as the algorithm. You do not own the audience. And if you try to fight Zuckerberg, you're going to lose. There's a reason why everybody who relies on hacks constantly complains about the machine breaking. And really all that happened is they're really complex thing broke. Remember the mantra here, simple scales, complex fails every single time.

And I know I've been bringing up the Opportunity Score and the Performance Scorecard and all of that stuff. We're going to get to more of that here in a little bit. And again, if you want any of the slides from this presentation and all of the decks from the summit, the stuff that you need to be spending a million dollars a month just to be invited to and even then you don't get this to take home. If you want it for free, there's the link right here. I'm hammering this home because I want you to have this. I want you to be successful. I want you to see more success with less stress and have the playbook that will bring you to the place that you want to be.

Okay, now let's get into something really important. If your ads are inconsistent, here's the thing you should check first. Your data match rate. You got to use the Events Manager like a surgeon. Now, if you really want to get into the data, we got to go to your Business Manager and then the Events Manager. And that's going to bring up a wonderful graph with a whole bunch of data. Now, let me tell you the three things that actually matter.

Number one is your EMQ, your Event Match Quality. This might be a 5.4 out of 10 or a nine out of 10. The higher the number, the better the data. If you're getting something less than an eight, you should invest in a solution for your Conversions API to match browser events. This is not a nice to have. This is uh if you don't do it, you won't be in business next year.

Now, number two is all your events and you're going to see that match quality against everything being tracked. Make sure that all the things you're trying to track actually show up here. If you're tracking upsells, make sure it's there. If you're tracking new customers, make sure it's there. And we also, generally speaking, are going to see more page view than view content, more view content than add to cart, more add to cart than initiate checkout, and more initiate checkout than purchase. If that doesn't feel like what you're seeing, odds are the data is not firing in the right way. Easy fix.

Also, you're going to see the ability to create custom conversions here. And I really, really, really recommend that you begin telling the machine what you care about. That's what the custom conversions are for. I do this all the time for understanding different product verticals. Like with Portland and Leather Goods, they track the circle bag. For Kings Loot, they track the sale of the Kings Loot wallet. For myself and Disruptor Academy, I track the people that are signing up for Disruptor Academy on school because the interesting thing is the products you're promoting aren't always the offer that people take. And that's really important to know. In fact, with my ads for Disruptor Academy right now, if I get a 100 sales, generally speaking, about 75% of those are people signing up for Disruptor Academy. Meaning 25% of those are people who saw a Disruptor Academy ad but bought something else from disruptorschool.com. That's really important information. If you begin to tell the machine what's important to you, it'll begin to prioritize delivering you those results. It's really, really that simple.

So, here's what the top brands do differently than you're doing right now. A quick little punch list for your success. Assign a signal owner internally. Somebody should be responsible for the quality of the data. You need to review this data weekly. Just a quick check. Do all the numbers look more or less like they did last week or better? If they don't, if they look worse, odds are the bank account is about to look really bad. And if you wait until the bank account looks bad to retroactively see something that you could have avoided two weeks ago, that isn't a good way to run a business.

You need to send browser and server-side events. This means Conversions API and the pixel. If you're not using both, you're just wasting money. Now, inside of this, remember that the machine will deduplicate the events. So, it's not like if a server and a browser sees the same purchase, you have two. So, don't worry about that.

And lastly, you need to prioritize real events over vanity ones. Don't worry about last-click rorowaz. That doesn't mean anything. You want to worry about new customer versus repeat, whether it's a hero product or overall purchases. Like, these are the things that really matter. These are the data points that allow you to make actionable insight in the direction of your business and help you teach the machine how to do the job better. Remember, the ads manager is basically a programming language. Tell it what you want and it'll do more of it. The dog doesn't understand English, but when you get it to pee outside, that's just a repetition of reward and punishment. That's all we're doing here.

Remember that the top advertisers don't buy media. They build systems that let the machine do all the work for you. This is where AI really comes into play when it comes to Meta ads. So, here are three things you should do right now to get better results today.

Number one, connect your CRM to your Conversions API. Make sure that you're getting the email addresses and phone numbers and first name and last name and all of that fun stuff. That's the simplest thing. Like I know so many people struggling to get out of the $500 to $1,000 a day budget that don't have this that as soon as they do they get to $2,500 to $5,000. Like it can't happen overnight.

Second, pass back real actual profit values, not just reported revenue. If you want to understand what are more profitable and less profitable transactions, it's really great to pass back the profit you make on every single item. And this is a great addition to the Value Optimization and is super powerful. And to dive into a little bit deeper, here's a slide more on Value Optimization. And what I want to point out here very simply is that Value Optimization isn't just giving me a higher AOV. You can now optimize for profit by telling the machine what you actually make on the sale of each individual product. And you can even assign values to leads and non-conversion events. It's really incredible.

And lastly, number three, clean up your match rate and your product feeds. Make sure the data you're giving the machine is as high quality and as actionable as possible. And to be fair, this isn't advanced. The best people in the world are already doing this. And it's really simple for you to do. Like, if you do this today, you can take the rest of the week off. You'll make more money than if you don't.

So, my recommendation to you, don't chase hacks. Fix your signals. Because Meta's AI isn't magic. It's math. and clean math makes more money. If you want to see more money, if you want to get more success and less stress, you have to start prioritizing the way the machine works and work with the machine instead of trying to undermine it and cheat it and hack it and break it because that's your unfair advantage. Most people will not try to work with the machine. They'll still try to cheat it. And the more you work with them, the better your results will be. And that's really what separates the people who complain about the machine breaking all the time and the people who complain that they're running out of inventory and the amount of taxes they had to pay this year were so much more than last year. Quality problems. That's what I'm trying to give you.

So, let's get into why Meta's best features still need a human and probably always will. Meta is smarter than ever. It can write your headlines. It can build your creatives. It can adjust your budgets for you. But it still can't do one very important thing. It can't think like you. Automation is not strategy. It's a tool. ASC and Flex Ads can test dozens of ad variations at once. Incremental Attribution can measure for lift and optimize for new customers. And Performance Scorecard will show you exactly what to fix. By the way, hold on. In just a moment, I'm going to show you what that actually looks like. So, stick around. I got you. Don't worry.

But none of these tools will ever tell you what your true volume of profit is. None of them are ever going to tell you what offer is best at getting somebody to buy a second or a third time. They don't know what your LTV or PSM look like. And they don't know which segment is best for high profits today or high volume of revenue over repeated cash flow cycles that might last 6-9 months or a year or more. They don't know these things. So, it's just a tool. But how you use it is still very much up to the person actually using the tools. the machine will never be able to do that. And that's your job. AI doesn't replace the work. It just makes the work easier to do. Remember our analogy about the factory. It's great that people aren't out in a field trying to do the work. We've got machines inside that'll bang it out. And the fact we added electricity means that people just need to monitor the machines instead of doing the manual labor themselves. But having a person monitoring the machine, having a person build the machine, having somebody understand what the machine should do and what good and bad looks like is still essential.

So, I've been teasing it enough. Let's get into the Scorecard and the Opportunity Score. So, this is your Performance Scorecard, and it tracks your best practices like signal health, creative quality, and setup structure against what is best practice and what you're currently doing. And remember, sometimes following 100% best practice isn't the best for you. There's an 80/20 rule, like most things. But in this case, let's take a look at this Performance Scorecard and just see if there's some easy wins on the table.

Like right away, we can see 42.3% of ad spend is on a campaign that is currently in the state of Advantage Plus. Remember, Advantage Plus is no longer a campaign type, but it is a state that your campaign is in. How much automation are you leveraging versus how much manual control do you have? This is saying that less than 50% of their campaigns are in a state where the machine is using the appropriate level of automation for optimal performance. We can also see these are organized by automated campaigns, objective, and goals. We have an audience. Apparently less than 70% are using the Advantage Plus audience function.

Now, if we look at the budget and bid section, the Advantage Plus budget, they recommend over 90%. This accounts as at 60, meaning that over 40% of the money they spend is sitting in an campaign. That's that's that's not always necessarily a bad thing, but it's really hard to justify. Like, you shouldn't be using for creative testing. You definitely shouldn't be using it for audience testing. Like there are some use cases, but man, if that use case is over 40% of your budget, I mean, hey, look, good on you. But that's a that's an edge use case, right? 80/20 rule. That is like the 20% of the 20%. You know what I'm saying?

We can see some other great stuff here with the creative and placements. 93% of their creative is mobile first. However, only 46% is using Advantage Plus placements, meaning that over 50% of the money they spend are using manual placements, meaning they've avoided the lesson of the breakdown effect from 15 years ago that's still relevant today. That's an easy win. It looks like less than 70% of their Reels are using the creative essentials. They're getting taxed on CPMs buying lower quality inventory for a higher price to get worse results on over 30% of their ad spend when it comes to Reels placement. Like that's probably not good.

And interestingly enough, down in the signals section, CAPI, they have only 83.9% CAPI coverage. This means that they're not getting close to the right volume and quality of data. And you can see this right in the line below it around the match quality. If you look at improve event match quality, the EMQ score, they're at a 7.1. You should be over an eight. This is easy money. Fixing this, which you can do for pretty cheap, relatively speaking, is a great way to dramatically improve performance damn near overnight. And probably the biggest red flag that I see here out of anything is the catalog match rate. 56.2%. That means that nearly half of the products available on the store are not matched up to the catalog. Meaning their DPA ads are missing half the possible sales they could get. Like what if your DPA was performing twice as well? This is an easy way to know that that's an immediate red flag. And we know that that's 20% of our ad spend. Meaning that 20% of our ad spend is performing at basically 50% as it could. That's a 10% overall hit to the bottom line. If you just improve that, everything gets 10% better. That's a really great opportunity.

So, we have the Performance Scorecard and we have the Opportunity Score. And I want to dive in through a little bit of that because very importantly, a perfect score isn't necessarily the best campaign you can run. Again, the 80/20 rule, but making it better is probably going to put you in a better place. And the way I want you to think about this is like a credit score. You don't need perfect to get good enough, but if your score is a 500, you got some work to do and your life will be a lot better if you do it.

So, diving deeper into the Opportunity Score really consists of two key elements. You have your score and your recommendations. Basically saying 0 to 100, how good do we think you're doing? A B minus is fantastic if you're coming from an F, right? So, like you don't need an A+ to get good enough performance. And honestly, like I said, 80/20 rule. I'd rather get a B+ and have 10 times the opportunity than an A+ and pat myself on the back while making a lot less money. So, just context to everything.

Okay, these are recommendations, not necessarily guaranteed wins. But unlike other recommendations from other platforms, uh if you follow this, you're probably going to be a lot better off. And these recommendations aren't like if you spend 10 times more budget, your cost per click is going to come down 5%. like no this is real actionable information and I can assure you because not just of the word of the people on the stage but also many private conversations and meetings that I've had with multiple teams this Opportunity Score recommendation engine is updating with every time people take it. So basically if you follow the optimization score recommendations you're going to be able to follow along with what the best people are doing. It's rating the recommendations based on the success that people are seeing. So, this is a great way for you to stay up-to-date and adapt to changes. And the recommendations are going to get better and better and better and better and better. And I can attest the recommendations I saw 6 months ago versus 6 days ago were dramatically different. And sometimes it's just really easy wins. So, take advantage of them.

And to dive deeper into this, the Opportunity Score recommendations are curated using three key principles. They're proven, they're personalized, and they're prioritized. Meaning that the suggestions you get are built on data designed for you, and they're given to you in the order of impact. That's great. Don't tell me I need to do 15 things. Give me the five things that I need to do like this week and tell me what's most important. Like, this is a punch list to just making better performance. I love that they're giving this. And full disclosure, like I actually really trust and believe in the vast majority of the suggestions. And sometimes like when you're using navigation, you know, I'm actually not going to take a left here. I'm going to go straight and then around the corner in the back cuz it's going to save me 3 minutes. But look, Google Maps just doesn't know. Sometimes you're smarter than the AI. You don't have to do what they say. but leveraging the suggestions and having somebody there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year offering you the advice of what the best people are doing so that you can make more informed decisions is a huge benefit to anybody. And not using it just feels negligent. And the most important thing is you can benefit from the Opportunity Score before, during, and after you create a campaign. And that's great because their suggestions evolve as your performance changes and the market shifts, meaning that you're always up to date. And that is what we're trying to do. More success, less stress. It's really all about getting there.

So when you see this stuff in your ad account, I want you to understand they're not badges. They're diagnostics. And the higher your score, the more likely your ad dollars are going to be spent more efficiently. It's not a 100% guarantee, but again, going from a 50 to 100 probably is going to be a dramatic improvement in your bank account. They drive that 0. Meta themselves will tell you that a higher score doesn't guarantee performance. It just means that your engine is tuned. But if you suck at driving the car, that doesn't mean anything. So, just take it with a grain of salt and understand that this is an opportunity to get better.

So, let's go over the best strategy cuz it really is still very simple. Remember, simple scales, complex fails. Here are the five things that you need to know.

Number one, focus on clean signals.

Number two, use a profitable offer. Make sure that what you're promoting is the best for your business. And don't promote 10 different offers. Use the best one. Let the machine get really, really good at the job you're asking it. Instead of asking it to get lucky doing a lot of things poorly.

Number three, let Meta optimize the delivery. It's just smarter than you are. Looking at out-of-context retroactive data based on a click and attribution is not a way for you to tell the machine what to do tomorrow. That just never makes sense. And we are nearly a decade into the space where doing that is the reason that you're struggling.

Number four, test incrementality quarterly or monthly. I told you I do it every single month. They tell you to do it at least once a quarter. Do what works best for you.

And five, scale what works, cut what doesn't. And we've talked about this over and over again about how to optimize and scale your campaigns. We're looking at the PCE, the Profit Cost Efficiency, right? Look at where your CPAs are below average and your GPTs are above average. Just spend your money where it's best for you. If you're promoting three different offers, odds are one of those is far less likely to get you somebody to come back and buy a second time. And if the profitability on that isn't nearly as good as the customer journey you be buying someplace else, you should probably get rid of it. Don't make a nickel when you can make a dime. And don't make a dime when you can make a dollar. Understand what your business needs are. And then tell the machine to do that one thing. You are probably not spending nearly enough money to focus on the machine doing multiple business objectives. That's a luxury and trying to live a luxury life on a shoestring budget just won't work out.

So that's your playbook. Everything else is noise. Meta tools are more powerful than ever. But the brands that are winning, they're not just using AI. They're leading it with strategy, clarity, and consistency. So remember, what's the mantra here? Simple scales, complex fails.

You want to know what every 8-figure brand ad account that I've worked with has in common? It looks really boring. They're not testing 40 audiences. They're not running 12 different campaigns. They're running a hero campaign. They have a catalog and they're leveraging some sort of retargeting feedback loop. And inside those campaigns, clean naming, broad audiences, and stable budgets. They're not reallocating budget from one ad set to another and another. Every ad set in an campaign is essentially just a new campaign. So, you might think you're very simple because you've got three campaigns that are all running on but each one has 50 ad sets. You have 150 campaigns that are all competing with each other, all cannibalizing each other, and all making the machine really dumb and making your life really hard so you can make less money. That doesn't make any sense.

And here's why. When the machine is simple, when the signals are clean, and when the AI performs, you scale. So, let's get to some of the dark side of this and the risk of overengineering. More variables equals more noise. More noise equals slower learning. And slow learning means worse optimization. Simply put, the more complicated your ad account, the harder it is for you to have any idea what you're going to do and basically the worse all of your decisions are. And that's why overtesting, microbudgeting, and constant tinkering are the death of the performance that most marketers want to see. Not because they're bad ideas. They might be great ideas, but they starve the system of statistical confidence. If the machine is making all the choices, no matter how good any of your ideas are, if it can't execute them, it doesn't matter.

So, let me tell you how to scale with AI. If you want AI to do more, then you have to do less. Give it fewer campaigns with fewer objectives and more conversion data per objective. Let the machine specialize so that you don't have to micromanage. The future of Meta ads isn't complicated. It's clear, creative, and systematized. Simplify the structure, feed it clean data, and let the machine do its job.

Look, even if you disagree with all of the points that we've said here today, if your success is dependent on your ability to work 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, day trading, everything, you're never going to win. You can't possibly make the right choice that many times, that often, that many days. And if you ever get sick or want to take a vacation, that means you go broke. It doesn't make any sense to prioritize human effort in a digital world.

So, I hope that you've learned a lot here today. And again, if you want all of the decks from every presentation from the entire Meta Performance Summit for free, go right here. I'm giving them away. And if you want to turn this playbook into actual results, just simply apply what you've learned or go here to the Disruptor Academy and I'll walk you through every single step of the way. Remember that the future of paid media is creative, measurable, and AI-driven, but only if you know how to use it. So, let's go build the most powerful and profitable version of your marketing yet. And if you're ready for even more stuff, here's a great video for you. I hope you really enjoy it. Once again, thank you so much. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Ask any questions you have. Drop them in the comment section down below. And until next time, I'll see you on the internet.