Alex Vence

March and April were a bloodbath for our ads. NC ROAS fell while CPMr climbed. The funnel was leaking everywhere. Instead of blaming the algo or pivoting to some shiny new channel, we fixed the foundation. In May, sales grew 25% YoY and we had our best month ever. What changed: 🧵 1/ Stricter Exclusions Shoutout to @Phil_Kiel for the gut check here. Our funnel was slowly leaking and New Customer PP was deteriorating. CPMr was increasing steadily. We implemented stricter exclusions and paid closer attention to these KPIs 2/ Volume Creative Testing We cranked up the velocity. Started getting killer, high-volume creative from @Insense_Pro / @DanilSalukov and @kevinrunsnyc You can't out-media-buy bad creative, and when the algo gets hungry, you have to feed it faster. 3/ Flipped the Attribution Model This was the unlock. Thanks to @wimonsool for the push to optimizing inside of Triple Whale using Linear Paid Attribution. When your ads break, don't panic. Tighten your exclusions. Test creative faster. Fix your attribution.

Everyone says CBO dumps your budget into just one or two ads. I keep hearing it, but something about how I do my media buying seems to... not do that. Huh, interesting... I'm normally suuuuuper private about anything like this, but I wanted to share this screenshot because I haven't seen anyone share anything like this before. Here's one CBO campaign last month, $800+k spent. These are just the 30 highest-spending ads. Top ad spent $80k, but look down, ad #30 still spent $5,800+. This campaign has over 200 ads that spent $1,000+ last month. The budget is spread across a deeeeeeeep bench of diverse ads supporting each other and relevant to different users in different stages of their journey. Now look at the 3 ads I highlighted. High CPAs. Ugly on this screen. Could I have turned them off based on what you're looking at? Sure. But this is only June. It doesn't show the stretch before, when those same ads were crushing. And it doesn't show what came after. Those 3 combined spent ~$30k in June. Guess how much they've spent in July so far. . . ---------------------------- But before I tell you that, let me ask you a quick question: Would you be able to prove to me what changed on the site you're running traffic to last week or last month? That's why I built URL Love It, to monitor, catch, and flag the page changes that impact your ad and business performance. Join the waitlist to be the first to join and get prelaunch pricing, launching soon: URLLoveIt.com Ok, back to the story... ---------------------------- Did you guess? $94. Not $94k. Ninety-four US doll-hairs. I didn't turn them off. Meta stopped spending on them. (TBF, I lowered the cost cap on one of their ad sets too) And because they're still on, if Meta finds a reason to spend on them again, they're sitting there ready. If that never happens, fine, costs nothing to sit there. Not every ad is built to be your last-touch closer, but that doesn't make it useless. It might be assisting the conversions your "good" ads are taking credit for. Can I prove that with hard data? NOPE! Can you prove I'm wrong? NOPE! We can't see how users interact with ads without leaving the platform. So when someone tells me their experience with CBO (or any other ad function), my honest first thought is: what are YOU doing to make it do that? It's usually: see a high apparent CPA, panic, turn it off, heroically report it as a win to their boss/client, get thanked for their vigilance, go tweet about how elite they are at media buying, and the cycle continues. They keep believing what they believe because they never question or challenge it. The only ads that rise to the top and stay live are those rare "unicorn" ads that can somehow spend and have a low apparent CPA. These are great, but not every ad can be a unicorn, and your account needs a few of them, but also needs a ton more workhorses. And every ad you turn off is one Meta can't optimize between anymore. This creates a vacuum that requires you to replace it with other new ads to hold your spend, or your CPA drifts up, or you spend less. The more ads you leave on, the more room the system has to spend. OH, and this is why so many of you see your "graveyard" or "zombie" campaigns doing well, it's because you probably shouldn't have turned them off in the first place lol Check the screenshot. What do you see, what would you do differently? What am I missing? How would you optimize this differently based on what's here? I'm always down to hear it.