today we're going to break down everything you need to know when it comes to running cataloges with your Facebook and Instagram ads we're also going to give stepbystep instructions whether you're a beginner intermediate or advanced level marketer so whether you've been running catalog ads for years or you haven't started yet this video is perfect for you and stick around to the very end because we're doing a massive massive massive giveaway [Music] so today I'm joined by Dan pantello founder of marpipe and the catalog cult so let's get started at the very beginning uh we have
the uh legendary Professor Charlie T thank you so much man it's great to be back in in here I love being in the the catalog cult Lair the last time we did a video here it was super big and so I'm really excited to talk talk about like what people should be doing in Q5 and 2025 and like how to maximize the efficacy of their Facebook ads with probably the simplest money printer known to mankind dude that amazing wow so much to unpack there so okay for kind of the I mean we did a video
about this before it was a big hit people seem to be really interested in Dynamic product ads yeah um for for people who don't know yet like really high level could you just give us like a uh you know super high Lev view what's Dynamic product ads why should people care yeah awesome so Dynamic product ads are basically this Carousel that you get to see in your Facebook and Instagram feeds so it's like you can swipe through the different products right and it really lets people see exactly the products that they're looking for as well
as shopping around your store without having to go to your website um I love to make analogies into the real world and basically a catalog ad is being able to walk up and down the aisles of the store but being able to do it from like your phone in bed or whatever right like so you get to see all of the products you're interested in the sizes the colors the variations the flavors whatever it happens to be for whatever business it is and it allows advertisers to be able to sell everything in the store with
one ad unit instead of having to make ads for every single product so a dynamic product ad is like one ad that's actually a bunch of ads yeah so it's one ad that's showing every and it's also customizable which is great and we'll get into that in a bit but you can also select what is eligible for that so it's like you know when you get a catalog in the mail and it's like a magazine with like 15 products or 15 pages or 50 products or 100 it's not everything that the store sells yeah but
it's like all the things they want you to buy right and you can kind of curate it in that way too for different business objectives whether it's and we'll get into this in a bit but like maybe you want to do your top selling products or the ones that are best to get new customers into the store whatever ites got it got it and like so there's so for like um like you work with several like high skew Brands sure right so um you know with just like high level right there's video ads there's regular
video ads there's regular image ads and then catalog ads are like advertising all of your products all at once um how are those like targeted yes so DPA ads or catalog ads are targeted by showing people what they're interested in and it really so there's three different types of ads you can have on Facebook or meta or whatever uh first one is just your manual sales campaigns yeah uh when we're talking about e-commerce so manual sales campaigns show people your content because it's something they want to see so you're earning attention specifically trying to give
somebody a positive user experience and the better the end user experience the higher the quality users that you are going to be able to reach for a lower and lower price your frequency will be lower your cpms will be lower and you're just reaching more people to get them interested that's intent creation at scale MH then you have Advantage shopping which is or Advantage Plus Suite which is really designed to show people your content because you're selling exactly what they want to buy so if I have a product where I have an ad for like
a pair of sneakers and I know that I'm trying to sell this one particular skew and then I can force that onto people's feeds because they're shopping for it so Those ads tend to be higher CPM higher frequency and fatigue faster interesting but it's I'm not earning the placement I just know your credit card is out so I'm trying to show it to you so a way of looking at that is a normal manual sales campaign is sort of like television or radio you're just trying to earn attention become popular whereas an advantage shopping campaign
is more like a bizar or a market where there's a thousand people out somebody's got their credit card there's a thousand people selling the same thing you're just trying to get them to buy from you M where a catalog at instead is saying meta is looking at all the data of all the websites you've been in they know what Market you're in so for instance I used to run the ads for New Balance and we would see that 2third of the first impressions that we would see so if you were if it was the first
impression you saw from us 2third of those were somebody who had abandoned cart with another sneaker company MH so if I'm trying to sell a pair of red trainers and it knows hey this person's been on rebok they've been on Nike they've been on Chuck Taylor they've been on Puma they've been on Adidas um or Adidas or whatever and like they've been on sneakers they know like okay this person is looking for a red pair of tennis shoes that uh has a certain like makeup that is a low top that is red that's a price
point of like $80 to $125 they might have also been in one or two stores in person and they haven't bought yet mhm so what they're looking for is this type of thing and so the DPA ad is a way of using all of that metadata from all the websites you've been on as well as all of your offline data and your buying modeling Behavior cuz maybe you also buy a pair of of running shoes every other April sure and your homies are buying more and you're spending more time in parks and you're spending more
time at the gym you spend more time inside of shoe stores and you've been shopping around they're using all of that data to be like look you're in the market for a pair of Red Sneakers here's another company you haven't been to here's all of their red sneakers that fit what you're doing and you can just kind of browse through so it's doing all of the hard work for you a product Discovery and making it really easy to give you a positive user experience to buy things right right right and is so like is that
kind of the reason why so catalog ads the way they look is like very bad yeah right right it's just product images there's no like there's no designer jumping in and being being like let's make this brand compliant or whatever like that right so it's like it's just a just just like um the first image on your PDP is what the ad creative is for your catalog ad um so despite like you know looking so basic and raw um you know is like is that kind of like why they work well yeah because the thing
is when you have really say some folks put a lot of time an effort in making really engaging videos but I have to watch the whole video for it to work which and then some people will but if I don't want to watch it then the video is lost on me some folks will make really highly designed images that are having features and benefits and all sorts of stuff which works if I'm in that customer journey and you're overcoming my objection but if I'm in Market where I'm just looking around for the right pair of
Red Sneakers or the right handbag or the right wallet or the right piece of jewelry especially if it's a more visual thing and I'm just like I need the thing that looks the right way right so if I'm on like page five of Amazon just going through the trying to find the right thing all I need is that product image because that product image is going to set set aside for me to be more interested and if we pair that with the name of the product in a price point yeah I'm checking all I'm doing
is being like my credit card is out I want to buy something can you meet my needs enough for me to click right and that's the purpose of why these really ugly ads convert really well because it gets everything across CU you're coming to the table with intent and knowledge and like preparation and research you're just ready to buy yeah and so it's just like another way of making sure that you can be in that person's feed with exactly what they're looking for when they're ready to make the purchase yeah so so okay cool you're
you're a that's that's kind of what DPA is and how it works high level yeah you're one of the best wizards of DPA I've come take that I appreciate it and so I want to Pro I'm going to put you on the hot seat and I want to prompt you with with uh with I want I want you to think of and give one tip for beginners to DPA right so like what's a tip like if you're new to DPA what's like a kind of basic no-brainer thing that that you should be doing or starting
out with a tip for beginners a tip for intermediates and then a tip for experts a tip for the person who's like yeah dude I'm I'm running like 100k on DPA every day right what should those people know love okay got it so for beginners when you're running DPA I would start off with a run of site basically have all of your products available okay I would have that be done in two different audiences I would have it be runed broad which is Dabba when you open up your DPA ad it can be prospecting or
people because theyve been your website hit the prospecting now you might say well how is it a prospecting ad I can't make attention all this other stuff your prospecting ad could very well be a bottom of funnel ad for one of your competitor's marketing funnels remember when I said New Balance 2third of our first touch was somebody had added a cart in one of our competitors in the last 48 days MH they might be the first time they ever see you but you're solving a problem nobody else has or you're visually appealing a certain way
whatever it is somebody's ready to buy you don't need to take the whole funnel their their credit card is out you're just like hey by the way you've been unhappy at X Y and Z how about us and like great I'm ready to go so that's an amazing thing that you should be doing also though I think you need to have what I call like a 10K audience like a bottom of funnel effort and one one of the things that I tell all beginners to do is go to your events manager MH and look at
your uh view content and your add to cart and it defaults a 28th day and it might say oh I have 177,000 of this this or 3,000 to that play around with the timelines and what I'm looking for is an audience where I have roughly 10,000 events got it so that could be view content it could be view content or add to cart I don't generally go below that but is there is there a look back window that's too long I don't think there's a look back window that's too long for this audience because primarily
what we need is an audience large enough for if we're successful we can scale okay and if it doesn't work we know that we can't get further down okay so it's a great like middle of the road you can drill down a little bit more if you want to but if that audience doesn't work you know to maybe move on right and so that audience might be a view content from the last three days and an add to cart from the last 10 or something like that you also have to remember that view content isn't
that audience that that event number isn't the audience size if I go to your website and I check out four different product pages I'm hitting four different view content events right if I add three things to cart that's three add to carts so an audience of 10,000 events might be 3 to 8,000 people but 3 to 8,000 people over like the last week or two weeks or whatever is enough for me to be like can I get this product across and if the DPA ad doesn't work there I usually know that there's a larger issue
at play got it and that's a great way for brands that are entry level to just say I'm going to try to steal sales from my competitors I'm going to try to close the deal on people who've been on my website which one works and then I can just push more money to that and if neither of those work that's a good litmus test as a beginner to be like there's some other issue here before I really dive into DPA I need to unclog some type yeah if you can't make that work there's a not
Facebook ad problem right right right right that we need to really work on and so I think that's for a beginner check those two boxes so just to just a recap take your whole product catalog right into a product feed which can be generated by Shopify if you're on Shopify it's just an it's a link you can export it uh or you can use a feed management platform and you drop that full catalog link into Commerce manager right to upload your Source feed to meta sure then you run uh two campaigns one would have two
ad sets within one campaign one campaign two ad sets one adet is dabah dynamic adsad audiences that's right yeah and the other one is a retargeting one yes that's focused on a 10 at least a 10,000 event retargeting audience and and I like 10,000 because if it works we can scale the budget if it really works we can we can go further up the funnel or further longer in time cool so for instance if the ad to cart 7day really works and I crank my budget and it won't spend anymore my frequency is sitting like
three and a half four a day I could go view content 10 day or I could go add the cart two weeks like I can go further back in time or further up the funnel so I can scale beautiful that's super actionable and I think that's a great place to start for someone who's just getting into DPA um and I yeah I we recommend the same thing so let's move on intermediate yeah so intermediate I think if I'm an intermediate player so let's say someone has set that up they're running some good spend through it
it's working it's one of the best performing campaigns in the ad account sure what should they what what what's the next step what's the next step got it so the next step is I'm going to probably start curating some of my product cataloges and what I mean by that is I'm going to probably start to see um I'm going to start to take a look into my product catalog and I'm going to do three different things first off I'm going to go to delivery in the breakdown section I'm going to go to delivery and then
product ID I want to understand and I'm going to probably export that and you can use Excel spreadsheets or just go into chat GPT but I want to know like what products are getting all the spend what items are showing up most often in my DPA ads and want to kind of cross reference that with like the conversion rates of those landing pages no no Facebook doesn't like readily show you that information it'll show you spend okay it'll show you spend show you spend uh depending on your ad account about 10% of people are now
starting to see more data which is exciting okay which we haven't seen for a couple years um but you can then cross reference that spend to in Shopify there's an easy report that will show sessions by landing page it's like number of sessions and then add to view uh you know add the cards initiate checkouts conversion rates stuff like that yeah so you can begin getting to cross reference hey is this uh item that's getting 35% of my spend one that converts really well or does it have like a 0% conversion rate God so I
can begin to optimize out items that are really bad or make a or make a curated feed of my highest converting items So So Meta won't show you like So Meta Meta will readily show you spend per product yeah so like let's say I have like you know uh 10,000 SKS it'll show me a breakdown of like you know which SKS are getting the most SM one's got three cents one's got $500 a day but it won't show me any performance metrics based on skew without custom conversion events yeah okay and I feel like we
get we'll get to that one yeah but but so so it won't readily show me like my CAC or Ro ass per uh you know per per skew uh so we need to sort of extrapolate and we need to like you know kind of uh mcgyver ports together to extrapolate like what's really working and you're saying the Shopify Shopify is a good place to do that so yeah exactly so what I'll do is I I might go to breakdown by product yeah and then say it's like last 30 days I'll go breakdown uh I'll hit
the breakdown button which is between columns and reports and then I'll go down to the bottom of it where it says delivery and at the very bottom of it you usually have to scroll a little bit it says product ID yeah like I can just see the dashboard going in my head uh and then like that'll spit out a report of every single skew every single line item it's just BAS basically every single square that could exist in a DPA ad yeah I'm going to take that and then I'm going to sort I'm going to
have that by spend and I have that report and I'm going to cross reference that with the landing pages just to make sure that the things that are getting a lot of budget are also the good ones MH and I can then either optimize out the items that don't work or what I could do is I could find hey these are some of my landing pages that convert really really well what if I made a catalog that was just those best performing produ the products that have a really high conversion rate let me just drive
more traffic to them say my average product has a 1% conversion rate but some are a four and sum are at like 0.5 or something like that like why don't I drive traffic to all of the things that are at two or above yeah and then I've got a couple dozen P of products that are my highest converting ones why not spend my money driving PE people to landing pages and products that convert really well right it's sort of like uh you know everyone every like Ecom operator understands the effectiveness of having like a best
sellers page on their site right where it's like you'll have like men's women's children's new arrivals uh and then you'll have best sellers absolutely and like I feel like that's always whenever I see a website that's always the hottest right everyone always clicks the best sellers and that's the highest converting page and so it's like it's like if you have a best seller collection on your site you should also have one for your DPA absolutely another example of this just cuz whatever I'm a nerd uh like if you you know back in elementary school I
played a lot of Magic Gathering and at one point in time we realized that you didn't have to play with every single card you owned yeah you know what I'm saying you're like this card sucks take it out so you start making decks it's the same thing you know what I mean like you don't need to play with every one of your toys all the time right like you can put your best foot forward that's a really good analogy so that one hit home for me just cuz like yeah so making so it's like making
performance categories where like and and I guess should you try playing with different on right so maybe like a category that's like top 10% best sellers or highest converters and then maybe top 10% Like items with the highest aovs sure exactly yeah so great example of that like I I'm doing this with some Brands right now where if we know our L if say our aov is 105 I'll make a catalog where every product is at least 120 bucks MH or another thing that might work is if I go into my Shopify reports and I
can see new customers and returning customers and I know what items most often drive a new customer acquisition who's likely to buy a second time what items start a customer Journey with a high repeat purchase rate yeah let me just make a catalog of those items because I know that that customer is worth more money and my LTV is going to improve if I just sell those products right um I've also done some uh clothing brands where we just focus on like what are all the items that are like summer items and now it's like
October let me just clear inventory right so like there's a lot of different ways that you can weaponize it and you can do it for inventory liquidation one is the really good one especially post uh post holiday season oh yeah absolutely just get rid of everything it's it's the like Halloween candy on November 1st right like make that catalog so that like you can get rid of the right cuz like items on your Shelf cost more money right every day like it's not like well I paid 50 bucks to get it yes but also that's
now inventory that's taking up turnover right and it's it's it's it's cash that's not in your bank account the worst place for money to be is in product on your shelf AB absolutely so you need to get rid of that some way so there's a lot of these different high aov or maybe potentially low CPA customer acquisition devices you can begin to start looking at each product performs a different business function for your business right so you can start to curate them and and my favorite art customer acquisition High aov long money so LTV products
uh seasonal things maybe new product drops Customs best sellers like you can begin to itemize that out your cataloges and you'll also notice that some of those work differently based on audience yeah so like your LTV products might work great against a retention audience so we talked about Dabba we talked about retargeting what about all your existing customers and you just show everybody that buys returning everybody that's a returning customer these are all the items they buy let me make a catalog that just those things so I can improve LTV yeah yeah and then and
then maybe for the prospecting ones you have a um for for your prospecting campaign you have like a cat category that's just like your lowest CAC items ab and that's just your acquisition yeah exactly so that you can pull a lever of I need to lower CAC great I'm going to push this catalog I need to improve LTV great I'm going to push this catalog I need to clear dead stock great i' I've got individual levers for those business objectives absolutely and if you're pushing serious weight behind DPA like you need to start focusing in
on how do I weaponize this for business objectives yeah absolutely and and by the way for anyone who's wondering like how could I how do I do that you can get into your feed management platform and dig through spreadsheets and just like try to put it together yourself uh or like marpipe we make that really easy you just aess a button there you go sorry I had to do the plug no no you should you should and that's that's great and also one other thing for this too and this is maybe the last bit of
intermediate before we get to advance yeah is that there are these things in your catalog management feed called custom labels mhm and you can make custom label zero true or false is is this item one of those that has a better than average conversion rate true or false so you could say okay great true now I have a custom I have a product set where the Only Rule on it is custom label zero equals true and now instead of the problem is whenever you make a product set you can't edit them but you can build
them around business rules so you can have it be a custom label makes things eligible or not eligible for a product set M mhm so you could do I did some brands that do a lot of drops yeah if it was a drop then custom label one equals true it says a drop item and so we would exclude all items of a drop from the catalog because we know those things are going to sell like hotcakes anyway so as soon as it's not part of the latest drop it becomes eligible for a catalog ad right
and now we're letting the email team and the organic team and the customer service whatever kill the drops yeah and we're not just letting the DPA kind of Steal credit and waste our money on that you know so we can really kind of weaponize it and and are you doing that manually are you going in and tagging things like one by one in a in a massive skew spreadsheet I I I will I generally think you should have software that solves that problem yeah yeah yeah right right especially if you're going to be doing like
thousands of if you got like 25 maybe but like what you start hitting 70 80 100 or more then you got to do it plus you can also have in stock out of stock exactly like you should have a you should have a rule that you can't have a DPA ad show an an item that is out of stock oh absolutely especially right now when people are selling out of their and stuff it's like it's like people are I see this all the time with like video so these like DTC brands that will have like
several hero products they will like produce like really high like really effective video ads to that drive to that hero product and that hero product sells out like that beautiful piece of creative is you can't do anything with yeah and then I'll see those same Brands where like that product will eat up 30 40% of their DPA ad spend and then as soon as it sells out will their DPA go to and and then their CPM Skyrocket and it's because you're showing people a bunch of things they can't buy so the user experiences are terrible
so not only are your CPA bad but now you're make you're reducing the quality of your relationship with Facebook and then all of your ad costs go up for like with the cost of inventory yeah which is terrible so let's recap the beginner tip was the basic setup that you want to start DPA with to understand whether it works for you which is uh you want to have your full catalog uh in in one campaign two adsets one is ABA and one is like a retargeting audience of at least 10,000 events sure intermediate tip is
let's start breaking into the feed itself instead of running the full feed against everything right let's start categorizing our feed and set and truncating it into sections that make sense for like what our goals are right so like let's um you know let's create like a best sellers category of the feed and and run just the best sellers maybe and test that against uh you know the prospecting audience versus the retargeting audience let's create a high aov feed test that against the retargeting audience low CAC feed test that against the prospecting audience right so we're
playing with the the deck analogy was so good we're creating different decks for different opponents that are like well built for it right rather than bringing every you're trying to use the right tool for the right job instead of bringing the entire tool kit with you every single day exactly Okay cool so let's break into like the expert level like so at this point if you got all of that stuff down you can also begin to track some of these items inside of Facebook mhm so we talked about how the feed doesn't give you that
data but there's no reason you can't use third party information to do it so you can use offline conversion events to say is it a new customer or not and you can go to our friends at Popsicle or elvar or anybody else to pump in purchase new customer as an option awesome so now you're going to see new customer acquisition cost by line item product ID inside of your DPA catalog wait wait so slow down slow down unpack that a little more okay so you can have a pixel event fire when a new customer is
created yes so in say your Shopify it says new versus returning if it's a new then it fires a custom conversion event that says new customer that'll show up as a column inside your Facebook dashboard MH so you when you have that breakdown by product ID you can also have it'll begin to show that line item of purchase new customer by product ID because it's not dependent on the Facebook pixels based off of offline data so it'll show you which new out of the SKS that you have you can see spend which Facebook will tell
you but then you can also see how many have acquired a new customer yeah so then you can you'll have a volume and then you can extrapolate efficiency of 500 spent 200 new customers you know you can get down to well that's $2.50 C that's great uh so you can begin to see that M three other things that I would do one is have product categories MH so if you have like a you know you could have bags belts wallets shoes all of the items that have that product category mhm could have a custom conversion
event that say category equals so in your feed in your website all your your products are you know listed under s product categories you can use custom conversion events that say all items that have this product category equals a bag buyer a shoe buyer something like that so you can begin to even at your entire run of site your entire product catalog understand what products are being sold inside the catalog and then also you can begin to then say wow bags are just sounding really hot kicks maybe bags is a product category that I should
be running as its own feed inside of the DPA or what's going well and what's not MH and so these custom conversion events based around product categories can be really strong new customers can be really strong and then you can begin to optimize uh instead of having the event that you're optimizing to be a purchase event it could be new customer it could be bag buyer you can really start to weaponize this for other things and then the last for the super Advanced folks that I've been focusing on is what is a what is a
value ad that occurs after the purchase So like um do you have an upsell after the purchase that is let's say a subscription or just anytime you're using like a oneclick upsell can you pixel that event occurring so then you could if you're doing enough scale optimize not only towards a purchase but a purchase of somebody who's going to take the upsell a purchase of somebody who's going to take the subscription a purchase of somebody who's going to buy the shipping insurance or whatever it is you can optimize for that more valuable customer so it
your pixel event that you're optimizing through the adset can now meet the business objective now you can really play between audience catalog and uh optimization event and then track all of those individual items and if you're pushing like you need to be doing some serious volume to make sure any of these things work but like if you're getting 100 to if you're getting 100 plus conversion events a day in any adet you could probably optimize down to a more valuable data point yeah and for Brands where I'm doing 50 80 100,000 up dat plus right
we've got all of these dialed in so then we might say we know this is our best customer acquisition category so we're going to let that go and it's our CAC device and we're measuring that the the CAC on that is you know 80 bucks versus 115 or whatever it is right but you need to be that is a really easy way to make these extraordinarily more effective so you can focus on what business objectives do we have and like then you can really get into the play of like instead of looking at Raz or
aov or CPA you can take average order value minus CPA to see your margin your your profit volume per transaction and you can understand well if my item that I sell for 10 bucks I make $30 on it and the item I sell for 80 bucks I make $30 on it why am I selling thing for 80 when I can get eight times as many customers and I can start pushing multipliers on volume of profit and like you can do some really fun stuff right right but that's where you can weaponize the catalog to achieve
different business objectives and then at that point the only other ads you're running are the ones that like drive your cash flow device yeah yeah it's ad accounts that are set up with this with this sort of intensity yeah are just like well oiled machines you see it and you're just like it you know it is definitely it takes work to set this up but once you have this ripping like the maintenance level is pretty low actually right because it's like with with account with an account that like just churns and burns ugc non-stop like
that's like a um really demanding furnace to feed right because like you need to be constantly producing all these assets and and testing them and and and 90% don't even work right and then but with with like with with DPA like once you have a setup like this it doesn't really fatigue yeah and that's the thing is that the DPA ads don't fatigue as an inherent nature of them and the other thing is too if you have a DPA ad where like I think all businesses need a cash flow device a a volume of transactions
device and a profit generation machine so you can understand I need more profit today I need more of a day one profitability I have a I have a tool for that I need a volume of transaction so my Blended CPA comes down I have a tool for that and I need a cash flow how do I sell a thing where somebody's more than like more likely to buy a second or third time mhm if your hero if your one campaign of a hero offer is set up to buy the customers that are most likely to
buy a second time you can use catalog ads to increase the volume of transactions so or the profitability of transactions so you don't need your one campaign to do all of the work which ultimately allows that campaign to be far less efficient right and you're just saying like I know this is long money I'm going to invest that and then you can have at account spending 3040 $50,000 a day where you have like two three campaigns yeah yeah that's the that's the per the simplest setups are always the best and beautiful thing of that too
is you do way less creative testing because your ads don't need to live and die by the performance each day because your catalog are doing all the heavy lifting and you're just letting your ads sit and mature and get smarter and smarter and smarter so the daily management of an ad account like that like I'm managing accounts like that where I will spend two or three hours a week managing an account which might drive a million in Rev on a weekly basis that's amazing and it's like yeah that's that's a marketer wet dream right now
yeah it's like you should be spending your time not in the weeds but setting up the machine to be more powerful like if you're a manager who needs the micromanage your employees it's because you haven't done a good job right and it's the ads manager you are the manager you're not the one being there doing auctions every quarter micr second whatever so the more work you need to do in your ad account that's a direct reflection of the quality of the work that you're doing yeah and I love people to weaponize the ad account to
make it easy so that you can focus on more important things CU at the end of the day the Facebook ad is just the top of a funnel yeah that then goes to intent capture and then inventory marketing and then a purchase and then an A and then an aov and then a second purchase yeah and your first purchase is the item where you make the least profit right so you should be just running your Facebook ads to acquire either volume of purchases or people are going to buy a second time and catalog can handle
everything other than the sale of the like your one hero skew because the catalog shouldn't be used to sell one item but figure out your best weapon and then use catalog for everything else now one last question for you I know that right before we we jumped on air you were like looking at some examples of of the of the of the ridge DPA because one of your clients was asking about it um tell me what's to be said for Creative in DPA I think it's really interesting because it's a normally boring space mhm you
can introduce concepts of pattern interrupt and you can also do value props in there so I think the one looking at was like a Black Friday sale mhm it's like okay so not just any AD but now this is a Black Friday sale from that brand and I'm sure that if you have a Black Friday sale where not every item it's like up to 30% off but some items might not be for sale you can really curate that a and I think the ability to understand how something better than a flatlay will work now we
we we started this off just assuming hey the ugly ad works so let's just run with it mhm but if you dialed all that in why not also take an approach and improving the user experience in a way that captures more attention yeah you don't necessarily have to do a badge that says Black Friday but what if it's a lifestyle set like what if you've taken the effort of actually doing lifestyle shots for like 200 SKS why avoid using that in your catalog ads like you can 100% do that and some of my favorite Brands
like Dandy delmare will do that where they do lifestyle shots for all the different drops and now the catalog ads sell the lifestyle on top of the product and it's like is a that is you know thinking three steps ahead yeah right and if you're doing if you have the photography why not use it it and if you don't have the photography you should be creating it for this purpose because it makes your DPA perform so much better yeah and so it's just like trying to really understand like you can get really simple but when
really simple maxes out you can then start to take luxury shots yeah and I think that's one of the things that you need to look at creative treatment in your cataloges as that's what I'm going to do when I've dialed in I've got my audiences I've got my product sets I've got my custom events I've dialed down so I know what my CAC is I know what my I I can understand CAC by product category I can understand LTV by product category I can control customer Journeys I can improve LTV I can improve conversion rate
I can improve improve you know I I I've tackled all the business objectives right right so now my next thing is well how do I make the ad better dialing it in right and what I would say is making the ad better is probably a lower inflection point than what you're what you're advertising but it is something that you should be focused on because there's only so good a white backdrop is going to do yeah right right and if you're a sale heavy or promotional brand sure um and you like let's say you have a
category let's say your intermediate tip was create categories right so let's say you create a category for uh best sellers but then you also want to create a category for things that are on sale right that how do you know in in the user experience when you see that ad in your feed how do you know that that item is on sale yeah right other than like maybe like the tiny little copy that that might highlight it right just like making that obvious in the creative absolutely I mean that's just like a really easy easy
lift yeah and it's just like to that point like if especially if you're a brand that has an affinity with your customer base like we don't necessarily have to be a startup brand like if you've got a brand with thousands of customers that like your product yeah having an on sale catalog people like oh it's on sale and they're going to go through that entire catalog just to see if the item they like is there yep and that's only going to improve your estimated action rate of the ad it's only going to lower your cpms
and even if they don't buy that you're just earning more trust and earning more excitement and earning more attention and like I'm a sucker for the converse like drops so all the new product badge I'm in there going through all of them constantly and like so it's a way of having a conversation and making your customers engaged with your ads yeah in a way that is exciting and not like just mundane and there's a reason that when you send if you were to make a catalog and print it up in a magazine and send it
to somebody it's not product shot label yeah right it's like there's there's a vibe to it right you're trying to create a collection you're trying to really tell a story and have a conversation that's above and beyond just a picture of the item so I think it's something that is hyper powerful if you're ready for it m I think that some folks think that the creative treatment is the secret weapon but actually the problem is the business isn't set up to sell catalog yeah and so like in an order of operations the intermediate the beginner
the intermediate and the expert is the order that I would go does it work at broaden with your 10K audience if so can we then begin to break down the data to optimize it from there can we then begin to optimize for those break down sections and then from there let's improve the creative treatment because if you put the creative treatment before you know if it even works you're going to invest a lot of time and energy and trying to solve a problem that that is unsolvable yeah yeah but then being said like it's a
great way if you figure out everything else to just kind of make everything 5% better 10% better and like at that scale where you're starting to do that 2 or 3% is millions yeah yeah there's there's one last Cherry all sprinkle in here only because um we uh we've actually been getting just like so many questions about this from Brands who run DPA So So Meta has recently rolled out video DPA gotcha right which is where you can and I don't know if you've played around with this yet a lot of Brands haven't because in
order to run it you need to have a video for every skew sure a l ridiculous nobody has it right so we we ended up we actually built a product to address that right we we with using marpipe you can generate a video template and and uh run every skew through it so you do have a v a like a skew specific video for every skew in your catalog and you can test that in in meta and the reason one of the things that we discovered was that um this is like this was so cool
I didn't realize this but um there's this like uh meta came out with with like this uh like when they announced video DPA they they said that when for for e-commerce stores that have a video of the skew on their product page the return rates are like substantially lower sure okay right so that I thought that was really interesting it's like you know it it's it appears that the thesis is the more you show people about the product right the less the more they are likely to understand it and less likely they are to return
it sure right and return rates are like the silent killer for especially during holiday season right and so being able to generate a video for your skus that like reveals more product information just like just basic you don't need to like do something fancy right just basic stuff about the product actually goes a really long way and like lowering return rates which which is like a second order effect I didn't think about oh no that that totally makes sense in the end of the day you're just having a more excited more informed cons consumer yeah
yeah and we live in a world where we expect free shipping and free returns sure and if you can meet that expectation where somebody's like everybody else has an image and you've shown a video that shows like oh what's the back of the thing look like or this is the construction or this is you know like okay just like I'm just excited right right like okay like I I I Now understand that this isn't the same as everything else because like this one thing is different and that's the one thing that like sets it apart
and I get really excited you get an emotional Buy in you have a more informed consumer and if your return rate is 10% you can make it five yeah you can add 5% to your Facebook ad budget and just go out and acquire more customers absolutely dude dude you know how I knew this was going to be a hit that cuz you came into the catalog cult wearing a coffee cult oh look at that yeah love this by the way this is uh from a great brand called picnic with wise uh love picnic bunch of
food based stuff but yeah we Cults here buddy I'll join the coffee cult if you join the catalog cult I like it sounds good buddy cheers so there you have it that was an incredible conversation and honestly I've already preent this out to like a dozen brands that I'm working with I was like this isn't out yet but like you need to see this so with that being said you'll find a link in the description down below to join marpipe or to have a conversation with Dan yourself now I promis a massive giveaway so here's
the link right there if you go there you're going to get something that I normally charge hundreds of dollars for for absolutely free and if you want to know even more about DPA and dive even deeper and do the success that you deserve there's a great video right here with that being said until next time I'll see you on the internet bye
