Transcription
You can follow all the Facebook ads advice out there and still feel like nothing's working. And that's because 99% of the Facebook ads advice that's out there is entirely wrong. I know this because I've spent over a decade managing Facebook ads for Gary V, BarkBox, and now over 100 brands at The Moonlight House. Hold names like Jake Paul's W and even upcoming brands like Earthbound. And every single account I've ever managed has followed the same five steps. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to walk you through my exact five-step system and I guarantee by the end of this video, you'll learn something that you could actually implement into your ad account that will positively improve your return on ad spend.
The very first step is to reduce your ad spend on testing. So you want to minimize wasted ad spend at all costs. And the way that we're going to do this inside of the ads manager starts with our prospecting CBO campaign. So our prospecting CBO setup is actually very simple. We have one single campaign that hosts both our scaling and our testing together. I know that sounds a little crazy, stick with me. In our campaign, we're creating a sales campaign. We're then going to call our campaign something very simple like prospecting underscore CBO. This is going to be the core campaign of our entire account. Most of the campaign settings here are fairly simple. We have normal campaign details, we're using campaign budget also known as CBO. We're setting our daily budget relative to how much we're spending right now or if you're just starting out relative to your product price. For this case, I'm just going to set our daily budget to $1,000 just as an example. We're using campaign bid strategy as highest volume or value and then make sure your audience segment reporting is set up. Here we want to have anyone who's engaged with our business. This is going to be site visitors, people who have added to cart. For existing customers, we have anyone who's purchased from us over all time. We want to enhance this with our Klaviyo list and we want to use our pixel. Now, if you haven't done these already, consider these red flags, do these right now.
Now onto our ad sets. Every time we have a new round of creative as I like to call them packs, these are going to be launched in a new ad set. I like to divide my ad sets by avatar groupings. This means that every single ad set is a new avatar and every time I have a new round of creative, I launch a new ad set no matter what. So, if I have two different kinds of creatives, I'll put them in two different ad sets. Truly avatar separation. The naming convention that I like to use is avatar underscore concept. So, anything that's related to the concept that I'm actually running with. So, this could be something like moms underscore before/after, right? It could just be like something very generic in here as long as it's specific to the grouping of creative that I have. For our conversion settings, we're selecting website, maximize number of conversions, select your correct data set, and then always choose the purchase conversion event. We're not setting any cost per result goal. In this case, value rules is something that comes later in our deep dives, which we'll get to in a few minutes. We're setting a standard attribution model, and then in our more settings, we're making sure we have 7-day click, 1-day engage, and 1-day view, and we're counting all conversions. We want the maximum number of signals inside of this campaign. We are not selecting dynamic creative, we're not selecting flexible media, we're literally running normal ads like 99% of brands actually do. We're going into the budget and schedule section, and there is something that we need to talk about. In here, we have the option to set ad set spending limits. Now, this means that we can set a minimum or a maximum using either a dollar value or a percentage. Here's something that I like to do. Every time I launch new creatives, I like to set a 7-day minimum budget equal to my target CPA. That's going to sound complicated at first, but very simply, this is how we force spend two new creatives without having to separate it into its own campaign. It's one of the easiest things you can do, and you only let it run for 7 days. After that 7 days, you have to remember to shut it down, or in many cases, shutting it down is going to allow it to scale more cuz it's already overspending the minimum that you've set. As a general rule of thumb, and this is where things get tricky, you never want more than 20% of your total budget being tested. This means if you're only spending, say, $100 per day, you never want to set this minimum right here more than 20 bucks. On the other hand, if you're spending thousands and thousands of dollars a day, as we do for the brands that we work with at The Moon Lighters, then setting a TCPA equal to the minimum is a very easy thing to do. Set it for 7 days, let it go after that 7-day period. So, in this case, obviously, if this is my first ad set, I don't need to do this, but if this is ad set number 5, 6, 7, then yes, I'm going to set my average minimum to my TCPA. Then going down to the audience, we're just going to keep this completely broad, except we are putting exclusions in place. So, we're going to go here and exclude custom audiences, and particularly, we are excluding our retention-based audiences. This is a new step that's going to come up in a few minutes. Essentially, what you're doing here is just excluding anyone who's purchased from you in the past. Once you do that, everything else here is going to stay all broad, all on, no changes.
And speaking of exclusions, this leads me to step number two, which is you need to have a separate retention campaign. This is going to be the spot where you actually talk to your existing customers different than you talk to your prospects. See, clear separation in a Facebook account is critical if you actually want to scale. Most brands group everything together and have no idea if they're hitting their existing customers, what they're telling their existing customers. They're not able to parse out promotions. It gets very confusing very quick. And the biggest flaw that happens is you increase spend, you hit a wall, and your return on ad spend drops. All of your efficiency metrics tank because you are overspending on existing customers. By separating them, we know that when we increase spend on prospecting, it's truly going to new customers. When we increase spend on retention, yes, we're hitting our existing customers a little bit more. This is hyper relevant for times like sales, new products, and promotions, but it might not be relevant if someone just bought your product 5 days ago to keep smashing them. So, just like before, we're setting up a sales campaign. We're going to call this campaign retention. And then every setting that we just set is exactly the same at the campaign level. The only thing you're going to need to modify is your budget. Keep this small, manage it on a frequency, and scale it up over time. This can go from $5 to $10 to $50 to multiple hundreds depending on how big your brand is. If you only have a thousand lifetime customers, set this thing to like five bucks and see what happens. It's not going to hurt. You could actually very easily scale it up later on. In the ad set settings, this is where things are going to change. So, all of your conversion settings are exactly the same as before. We're not setting any special value rules. We're using the same attribution settings. We're not using any ad set spending limits, but we're going down to our audience, and we're going to click further limit the reach of our ads. We're then going to click switch setup, and then we're going to insert our custom audiences. So, whatever we've excluded from prospecting is going to go in here. Generally speaking, this is going to be a list of your purchasers over the last 180 days, and then a list of all-time purchasers. Best you import this from your CRM and use the pixel at the same time. And now you're probably wondering, "What ads do we actually put in the retention campaign?" It's actually very simple. You could put any high-performing ads inside of your retention campaign. And then if there are unique offers, angles, or avatars that you know you need to hit because they've worked for you historically, insert them into the retention campaign. We do not break out by packs in the retention campaign. We just keep everything into one or two ad sets depending on the groupings that are necessary for your business.
And now that your core is built, what normally happens is you begin to expand. You start to create more ad sets, more ads, more creative gets entered into your account, and you wind up in a position where you have too much bloat. You have too many ads active. You don't know what to kill. You don't know if you should kill anything. Sometimes you make irrational decisions and you kill too much, and this leads me to number three of our five-part system, which is create a systematic kill switch. The purpose of a systematic kill switch is so that you always have room for new ads coming into your ad account. See, it is very, very hard to only be spending a hundred, a thousand, even ten thousand dollars a day and have thousands of active ads depending and relative to your spend. It's not okay to only have a few ads. Ad accounts that only have a few ads we see suffer in the Andromeda era. It is literally documented that both creative volume and diversity are important to the health of an ad account. So, how do we strike a balance? Why do we see the biggest advertisers have thousands and thousands of active ads? How do they manage this? What do they do? It's actually not that complicated. First, your general approach is that you don't want to kill ads. It's way more important to work around settings that are available because you set up a prospecting CBO system in a pack-based ad set modular system that now allows you to tweak things. So, here's an example of a prospecting CBO campaign for one of our clients. In the last 30 days, they spent a hundred ninety-six thousand dollars in total spent that drove three hundred twenty-six thousand dollars in revenue and this is a monthly recurring business. Now, in this case, you could see we've run 31 different ad sets. You can see all of the top spending ad sets are active. There's a few ad sets at the top that take most of the spend. This is very common. So, I'm going to introduce you to your maximum spend threshold. This is essentially what you can think of as your kill switch. Now, of course, there's certain ads that just stink. They get a lot of spend. They drive zero purchases. They're two, three, four times over your target CPA or your target ROAS. But, what do you do in the case when something's just at the line? And I think that's where most advertisers actually fall. You need a two return on ad spend to be efficient. They're driving a 1.9, but they're taking up 70% of the spend. What the heck do you do with that ad? It's actually not too complicated. Because we have everything broken out in the ad set level, we can click on the ad set settings, scroll down to our ad set spending limits. We can set a minimum or maximum and we're going to use a percentage here. So, let's say this ad set was currently taking up 80% of the total spend in the account. So, instead of running this to 100% it's taking up so much of the ad account right now and it has no threshold for maximums, we're just going to cap it 20% lower than it is. If it's getting 80%, we'll set it around 60%. There's no perfect science to the percentage threshold that you need to limit it, but we're just putting in a percentage drop so that it forces some of this now spend to go to different ad sets. For example, in this case, this one ad set is taking up around 45% of the total spend across this entire campaign, $83,000 of the 196,000. Let's say hypothetically this wasn't working as well. Instead of allowing it to continue to spend 45% of the budget every single day, what I can do is limit this to say 35%. That's a big chunk off of what it's currently spending right now, and then that extra 10% that's currently spending is going to be distributed to other ad sets down the campaign. This is going to help alleviate some of that return on ad spend that you might not be getting from that top campaign without killing that actual ad set that's driving most of the revenue for the ad account and most of the impressions, that true top of funnel. And the last thing, kind of a pro tip if you're watching this far, is a lot of people set up zombie campaigns. Now, we go through a zombie campaign set up in our school community and for a lot of brands that we work with.
And speaking of new ads, step number four is having an avatar, and angle, creative approach. If you were to look right now at any major scaling ad accounts, you'll notice that they're actually targeting a bunch of different ad angles. So, an angle is something that one customer resonates with that the other customer would never resonate with. For example, if we look at the Groom's advertising Facebook ads library, which you can go see for yourself, they have a lot of different angles. And a couple angles that I'll call out here are number one, they have a whole selection of ads about their hair health and hair growth. So, basically tying their product to keeping your hair healthier. My hair is fuller. Your hair's new bestie. My hair's already thicker and growing like crazy. Right next to that in the same ad accounts, they have an angle on better pooping. So, clearly different angles, and you can see this over and over in their accounts, right? Ozempic's new bestie, lose weight not your metabolism. They have an angle over here around their competitors like AG1 who they're really going against. And clearly this works. They just sold for $1.2 billion, one of the biggest direct-to-consumer exits of all time. Now, I've been talking about this for a while, but what you really need to understand is that avatars plus a template basically create a concept. That concept matches to an audience. So, how this works in the Andromeda era is that if you call out your avatar properly and you actually make creative that solves that avatar's problems, so your product is the solution to their problems, the ad creative gets served right to them. This is why we don't need targeting as much as we did just a few years ago. So, the goal, just like I have here, is to build avatars and angles, or templates, whatever you want to call them, that then creates your concepts, and those match to audiences. Some avatars and some concepts will do better than others, but it is completely okay to stack these. In fact, it's advantageous to stack these. Old school Facebook would tell you just spend into my best return on ad spend. So, if this concept was getting a 9x, everything in old Facebook would say, "Kill all this. Kill all this. We only want to run the $30 at a 9x return on ad spend." I'm cool with the 9x, that sounds great. But, the reality of it is we could actually run all of these as long as they're above our target cost per acquisition or target efficiency metric such as return on ad spend. So, if all we need is a two, then great. We're going to spend a thousand dollars at a two, 200 at a four, 30 at a nine, and maybe another thousand at a 2.5. These stack on top of each other. They are not competing. They are truly isolated.
And this leads me to the fifth step, which I like to call deep dives. Deep dives can be taken in any direction possible. There's a hundred breakdowns in the Facebook ad account. I'm going to show you my favorites. I'm also going to show you some custom reporting that we use to make this way easier to understand. Generally, anybody can go into the Facebook ad manager, click on breakdowns, and then select age, gender, day, placement, etc. But, then you need to pivot that table. You need to break a lot out. So, for our brands, what we have is fully custom reporting. I'm just going to show you the data section of this. So, if I go into Meta and I go to my age section, what this is actually going to show me is my I by age for any time period that I want basically instantly. I could then see gender, I could see placements, which I think is extremely valuable such as feed into the feed actually what device was being spent on. Can see countries, audience types, which is a critical breakdown as well. Now, one of the most important things that I like to look at is day of week. And when we look at my day of week analysis here, we can see that there are different days of the week that perform significantly better. For example, Wednesdays and Thursdays for this brand drive a 5.7 and a 5.5 return on ad spend compared to Saturdays and Sundays driving a 3.5 and a 3.56. Obviously, I want to stack more money on the better performing days of the week. And we can see that equally when we look at conversion rate. You can see the same thing when we start to look at CPMs, right? CPMs are more expensive on our worst performing days. So, generally, what we want to do is stack as much cash as possible on the best performing days of the week. This is a common occurrence for most businesses. Now, reporting like this is a little complicated to build. We do this for all of our clients, but you could also still pull this by just exporting everything from your Facebook Ads Manager. As long as you're looking at it regularly or regularly enough, you will be way ahead of your competitors.
Okay, you know my five steps. This is what we do for every single brand that we work with. If you want to be one of those brands, go to the moonlighters.com/apply. Or if you just want to absorb a bunch of free content, then click on this video right here where I go through my creative strategy 100% for free. That's all for today. Always let me know if you guys have questions in the comments below and I will see you in the next video.