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Book a CallThis is a guide on how to manage ads and be proficient in media buying. It's all pure technical stuff, and it gives you the best possible odds to find winning ads as soon as possible, and then scale them as far as they can go.
First off, media buying is fully dependent on good ads. Ads that hit specific pain points in your audience, and arm the reader with enough information to make a buying decision. Of course your product needs to be desirable as well. Your first focus should be on creative strategy and thereafter making good ass ads.
We all know that good ads and creative strategy are key. But even with good ads, if you cannot manage your way around the ads manager and read the data, you are doomed.
Media buying is a language of money and data, and you need to know it. It arms you with a dangerous weapon, as you can now scale harder than anyone who skims over media buying.
The real value happens when you have winning ads, and through the correct media buying techniques (this document) scale them to the moon and let the winners' data fuel you with 10 new winners and millions to be made.
The best founders I know are geeks at the technicals of advertising. You should be too.
We, the advertisers, are the customer. But the product (most important) is the user. If you create a bad user experience, users leave the platform. Fewer users means fewer advertisers wanting to advertise, and that's bad business for Meta. So the #1 focus is: keep users on the platform. Do not scare them away. A secondary focus is to help advertisers make sales, but Meta knows this is best achieved through a great user experience. The smoother the buying experience, the longer users stay, the more advertisers sell. It's all connected.
If an ad says "how busy moms can make healthy meals for the whole family," then that ad will show up to busy moms who care about healthy family meals. We even run some agency ads that are completely broad with zero targeting. They talk about advertising services for businesses spending $20,000 or more per month on ads. What shocked me: the ad converts really well with highly qualified businesses.
I mostly get video ads, because I stop more often to watch them and click more on them. That's good business for Meta: their customers (advertisers) make good money showing me video ads, because I buy. That's why you want images, videos, and carousel ads. And not just that, you want different angles, concepts, and variations, because there's no one size fits all. When the algorithm knows what each individual likes to see, it can actually show it to them. But only if you give it enough options, not just a few generic ads.
With few ads you give the algorithm less to work with. Fewer ads means fewer data points and worse personalization. The algorithm has one job: show what people like, stuff that keeps them on the platform and gets them to buy. If you only have a few ads, you paint the algorithm into a corner where it can't deliver relevant content to each user. But if you've got 10, 20, 50 variations, the algorithm finds the exact match for each person. High relevance, low cost.
More variation = more relevance = lower ad cost = higher ROAS. You're letting the algorithm optimize for you, but it can't do that if it's only got one card to play.
The funnel runs TOF (top of funnel), MOF (middle of funnel), BOF (bottom of funnel). BOF creatives will obviously yield the best results, and it can often be a static ad with an offer.
Many advertisers struggle with scaling their ads, because the reality is that the only "winning ads" they have today are bottom of funnel ads. They are running high-CPM, high-frequency, low-CPA ads because they, for example, have an offer. You want to have ads delivering top of funnel predictably and then improve the other parts of your business. If you then want more efficiency and lower funnel, you can launch a DCT solving that problem within the 1-campaign strategy.
If an ad makes the blended CPA go down, then it's good. You should work on your blended CPA across all platforms. Remember that Facebook, for example, sits on top of your funnel. It is about your net output in the business.
Have a middle-of-funnel (MOF) campaign that targets page views, engagement, and so on. You need to uncover the 10 key questions people in this stage are asking. These are usually simple questions you think are obvious. For example:
Pro tip: Hire someone to act like a potential customer. Have them go through reviews, your website, competitor sites, and take notes on what questions come up. Answer those questions. You won't catch every objection yourself because you're too close to the product.
Then build the MOF campaign like this:
Also run a bottom-of-funnel (BOF) campaign targeting cart abandoners, trials, and similar audiences:
Creative strategy is the most important part of the modern-day marketer's toolkit. Why? Because without good ads, no level of skill in media buying can save you. You must have ads that resonate with your target audience.
Most important is realizing that Meta has a really strong algorithm, and it will show ads that are relevant to each individual person. It knows that I like image ads that are very straight to the point. It knows that my mother likes video ads that explain a lot. It knows that my grandma likes carousel ads that are super emotional. It knows that my dad likes very dark ads, long video ads for example. It knows everything.
Given this, if you want to succeed as an advertiser, you need to have something for everyone. You cannot just have 5 good ads running. You need very big creative diversity: tons of different angles, styles and formats, with something for everyone. Nobody should think that one size fits all, even when it comes to creative strategy.
A/B testing is old and outdated. There they rave about testing headlines, button colors and images. A/Z testing is about testing stuff that is very different from each other.
For example, when we know that getting time off on weekends and evenings is something football trainers really long for, we build multiple ads around that one insight, each with a different concept.
Test these after you have found a winning angle. Each of these is a concept:
Test in this order:
We believe that a test is not always as accurate as one might think. The bidding market can vary from day to day. The target audience can be different. There are countless variables that can cause an ad to perform well in a test but not at scale. With this knowledge in mind, we have determined that the best way to utilize the ad platform is as follows:
How you test also depends on the size of your market and budget. Some throw everything into a CBO and hope it performs well. The downside is that they clearly do not get spend and learnings. Obvi (a big brand), however, tests in a simple ABO, excluding page views and purchases, and transfers ads to the winning campaign if they perform well. It's still unclear whether they keep the winners in an ASC, CBO, or ABO.
You can either aggressively scale winners and jump them out of the learnings they have got, which makes sense if the ad is proven and will get out of learning quickly. But on anything evergreen, you rather want to increase the budget by 15% every other day. You will have doubled your revenue before long.
Media buying only pays off when the creative pipeline keeps delivering. See the concepts we produce for top-of-funnel at scale: street interview ads and UGC.
Or look at the results in our cases and find more guides on the blog.
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