I spent $500M on facebook ads and learned this

Over the last 11 years, I've managed over $500 million in Facebook ads to drive somewhere north of a billion dollars in revenue across hundreds of businesses. Everything I have learned through has been through trial and error, and it has taken a long time to get to the point that I'm at now. So, to help you bypass 11 years of my learning phase and save you maybe $500 million in ad spend, here's 40 of my absolute best pieces of advice when it comes to Facebook ads, things that I still do to this very, very day.

First things first, when it comes to account structure, you want to make sure that every single part of your structure is broken out perfectly by prospecting, retargeting, and retention so that you have clear swim lanes in your ad account so that you know when you're investing that money is going to the appropriate new, retargeting, or existing customers. Second, make sure you have really good, clean naming conventions in your entire account. This sounds like a two-year-old piece of advice, but to be completely honest, you would be shocked how many ad accounts I audit to this date that literally have terrible naming conventions.

Things are not broken up properly, and as a result, brand owners think that they're prospecting, think that they're attacking new customers, but in fact, they're misanded everywhere and everywhere in between. They don't know how to organize their budgets because of this. Third is to group your products, if you have multiple batches of products, by margins.

Margins are so critically important. We are ultimately going to be driving for profit when we're learning to scale in Facebook or scale in any e-commerce venture, period. And the way that you could actually drive way more profit in your business is by, of course, driving more ad spend to products that are more profitable.

Think about it this way. If you only drive ad spend to the product that has the slimmest margin, but you know you can sell a lot of, you are going to need to sell so many more of that product. Even if the price continues to go up on that product because your margin is so slim, that's just the profit at the end of the day.

You want to make sure you're always maximizing for opportune profit. Have clear exclusions. Exclusions are one of the most important things you could do to set up your campaigns and your ultimate account structure properly.

Without clear exclusions, you have a complete mess in your ad account. You don't know when you're spending more money if it's actually going to new customers, engaged customers, or existing customers. The next big lesson is that when it comes to those retargeting and retention campaigns, so we're talking about anyone who's been to your site, anyone who's added to cart, and even anyone who's purchased from you, make sure you're managing those not just on a return on ad spend, but you're also managing those on a frequency.

Frequency is a metric in your column set in Facebook that you can see just about anytime. It is your impressions divided by your reach, and it's going to show you how many times on average your ad was seen. This is a critical metric when it comes to retargeting and especially retention because it's going to specifically show you if you're overd delivering your ads to certain cohorts or to certain audiences.

You don't want to show your ad 20 or 30 times to the same person over and over again. They're probably going to get sick of you. The next piece of advice here is to always use lifetime budgets when you're running sales.

And what we've noticed is that when we're using lifetime budgets in sale periods is that the budget will slightly distribute to better performing days of the week. That is a very important thing, especially when you're running a short time frame of a sale because the hard part about sales is that you can't always interoptimize during your sale because there's just not enough time. Next, and one of the most important things to understand when you're running Facebook ads, especially at scale, is that you have to do geographic analysis.

This is most applicable for people running in multiple countries. If you're running in multiple countries, don't just group all your countries together and cross your fingers. If you're early stages of this, group those countries together, but always check the performance of those countries and then break out the best performers.

And the way that you break out isn't by taking, let's say, the United States is your best performer. We don't just take the United States and rip it out of the campaign. We rip everything else out that's underperforming.

And then we separate those two. Each could work in their own silo. United States can get scaled.

And then the other countries can continue to try to run. And they're only getting budget if they're beating the United States. Next, and one of my favorite lessons of Facebook ads is to have a scaling mechanism.

There are so many accounts that we audit every single day that come to us and they don't have any way to take their best performing creatives and push them into a scaling campaign. You need to have in some way, shape, or form a scaling mechanism within your account. The way that we do this is we have our prospecting CBO campaign that serves as both a testing and a core of our account.

and we take the best performing creatives from the prospecting CBO and we graduate them to the top of the account in an advantage plus shopping campaign. It is a single adset campaign that eats a ton of budget and is only consumed with the top top top performing creatives. The next piece of advice that I wish I can give every single person is to stop injecting new ads into existing adets in all cases.

Unless you are literally just starting out and this is your first 2, three, four, five ads that you're running, you don't want to interfere with the adset learnings. Because if you think about Facebook, you learn at the ad level, adset level, campaign level, and account level. So if you interfere with the furthest down the funnel learning stage, which is the ad set, by injecting new ads into the adset, you also mess up the campaign and even potentially the account level learnings.

And not to mention, you're messing up all of those learnings that are happening on those other creatives that are already spending your cash. Now, this piece of advice basically applies to everyone that I have ever talked to that has ever run Facebook ads. Do not overoptimize and do not optimize too early.

People will run ads, spend $100 on those ads, pause their ads down. You have to give this machine some time. People often make irrational decisions in their Facebook ads, pause things down way too early, and then what winds up happening is that campaign or that ad recovers just a few days later.

Meaning, you had impressions that you received, and they just take a couple days to actually convert. Because most people don't just see an ad and instantly buy. They see an ad, they see a second ad, they see a third ad, they think about it, then they make a purchase.

One thing that I've learned a lot is that when it comes to Facebook ad copy, it is heavily, heavily underutilized. Facebook ad copy makes a huge difference and ultimately it's really hard to test because you have different headlines on different creatives. We know creative is the bigger variable here.

But there's a way to connect creative to the proper headline and the way that we want to do that is by using dynamic creative. That doesn't mean that's not dynamic creative optimization. That is dynamic headlines, dynamic primary text.

There's an option in Facebook for you now to add five primary text, five headlines, and even multiple descriptions and allow Facebook to shift those around accordingly. Just having multiple headlines using all five primary text can go a long way because it could match the right primary text to a specific consumer and in our tests, this has helped drive more performance. This piece of advice has completely shifted in Facebook ads over the last couple of years and I have a firm thought on it really over the last year to year and a half and I think this is going to continue to evolve.

You always want broad and interest targeting in an ad account. Ad accounts that are 100% broad are great for scaling but have a really really hard time driving efficient return on ad spends. Advertisers that only use interestbased targeting have a really really hard time actually scaling their spend.

they do a really good job of driving efficient return on ad spend. So what we want is a clear combination. We want to make sure that we have interestbased targeting, single interestbased targeting, and we also have some broad audiences to kind of create that mesh.

The broad is going to serve at the very very tippy top of the funnel. The interest targeting is still at the top of the funnel, but it's just a stage below the broad targeting. That's why interest and broad targeting together work better.

The next piece of advice, and it's perfectly aligned to the previous piece, is that you always want to use single interest adsets. I see over and over and over again, people stack all of their interests. For some reason, people think it's a really good idea to just take all the footwear brands and put them all into one interest.

My question back to you is, how are you ever going to know which of those interests is actually driving the performance for you? The answer is, you're never going to find out. The only single exception to this is when it comes to retargeting, because there are some cases in retargeting where it is okay to group those together, especially if you have a smaller brand.

When it comes to improving your audience, it has never been more key to upload your CRM data. So, this could be your Claio data, Mailchimp, whatever you are using to collect emails on your website, push these in to your Facebook platform. Now, all of these programs now have integrations to make this super smooth.

So the way that we do this is you have a 30-day site visitor audience for example that you're using your pixel site visitors 30 days and then in the same audience in your inclusions you are also including the same 30-day site visitors from Clavio or from your CRM. So it's just an enhancement now you have two lists of the same people essentially doing the same thing but maximizing your coverage just in case someone was not captured properly on the pixel or vice versa we now have double coverage. It improves the match rates and we see that when we implement this accountwide, we have increases in performance.

A huge lesson and this lesson actually comes from working with hundreds of direct to consumer e-commerce brands at the Moonlighters. Most brands don't actually know why their goal is their goal. People create fake targets in their head.

They say, "I want to achieve a four return on ad spend. " Because in 2015, I achieved a four return on ad spend. 2015 was 10 years ago.

And if I'm honest about it, the only way to set your goals is by actually deducing down with your cost of goods, with your margins, with how much you want to pay yourself, with how much you want to pay your employees, and then understanding what do I need to achieve. So, make sure that when you're setting your goals, make sure your goals are actual to your business. And if you don't set your goals properly, I can almost guarantee your business is not going to scale either as quickly or if you scale, your bank account might not show the right numbers at the end of the month.

This next piece of advice has completely shifted over the last couple years. We saw a huge rise in UGC content over the last few really four or five years. Only run the UGC content when it feels completely real and authentic.

If you are overpaying UGC creators or just influencers in general that don't actually use or care about your product, people could feel it. There is a gut sensation when someone is selling you something versus when someone is sharing something. One of my favorite pieces of creative to deploy is the testimonial ad.

This is the ultimate authentic version of the UGC ad. The testimonial ad is the result or the impact that your product has had on someone specifically. Sitting them down in a chair or right behind the phone or right behind the camera and saying, "This is what happened when I used this product and being really, really clear on what those benefits are.

" The next thing that I wish I learned earlier when running Facebook ads is to be clear in your creatives. Do not try to fool your customers. Don't try to fool someone into thinking that something is real when it's not.

Don't overpromise and underdel. Literally spit facts to people. Do not try to overhype your product.

People see through it. To be quite honest, the most effective way to actually advertise your product is show it using real results. Explain your benefits.

Explain why you're better than your competitors. Or if you're not better than your competitors, then explain why you're more valuable. Maybe it's in price, maybe it's in shipping, maybe it's in speed.

Next, when it comes to creative, you always need to have a mix of videos and images. We have seen over and over and over again, and honestly, the amount of questions that I have fielded just on this YouTube channel alone in the comments, I've seen so many people ask me, should I run videos? Should I run images?

Should I run reals? What formats should I run? You should run videos, images, gifts, carousels, product carousels.

You should run every format possible in the Facebook ecosystem. And the reason that you need to do this is because Facebook is going to showcase your product to all people depending on what that person likes to digest. For example, if I'm someone who only responds to catalog ads, that I'm going to be a person who receives way more catalog ads than someone who responds to reals or videos.

And when it comes to what creatives to actually create, the key is to create different kinds of creatives depending on where the user is in the funnel. This is a really big point of conflict for most people. A lot of people just throw all their creatives into all their adsets and hope for the best.

The way that we like to manage accounts, the Moonlighters, is we are always taking all of our creatives and testing them and prospecting. You're then speaking to people slightly different in retargeting, but not all the time. The only place where we definitely have to be different is in our existing customer cohorts.

Our new sales, new products, events, anything related that's new. This is one of those tips that I feel like you could only experience if you actually go through it. Never run an okay ad.

Only run ads that you know for sure look and feel good. Brands that have really strict parameters on what they feel they're comfortable running and just a general high standard. That standard not only relays to the consumer to show that you're a high quality product and brand, but it also relays to your whole team.

And one of the final tips when it comes to creative advice that's been given to me over and over again that has actually changed and advice that I've used quite a lot is run text on images. Whether it's video, whether it's static images, text should be heavy. If you remember just four years ago, you weren't even allowed to have text on any ads.

It was crazy. You couldn't even put a call to action button or say what the product was. Then they started to allow product callouts.

Then they allowed big text on images. Now, we're at the point where almost every single image on Facebook, especially ad images, contain loads of text. Put text on image, be clear, and make sure that ultimately you're relaying to the consumer exactly what the experience is going to be like for them and what they're going to get as a result of clicking that shop now button.

Now, let's talk about my favorite topic, testing and optimizing. This lesson has changed so much over the years. When it comes to looking at attribution settings, I generally recommend that everyone turns on 7-day click, one-day view.

Now, there are some caveats to this, but generally 7-day click, one day view is going to give you the most amount of data in your Facebook ads platform. However, when you are actually optimizing and making changes on that data, you want to look at the 7-day click. If you look at 7-day click one day view, you're going to get mashed a little too hard with existing or engaged customers that just merely ran by your ad and then made a purchase anyway.

Maybe they saw an email, whatever it was. You always want to make sure you're optimizing on a 7-day click. Now, you'd be shocked to hear that rorowaz, cost per acquisition, even purchases and purchase value are not leading indicators.

Leading indicators are the rest of the funnel that actually allows you to understand what's going to happen in the future or allows you to not make irrational decisions in your ad account. You always want to be looking at CPMs, CPCs, CTRs, frequencies in your ad account. You never want to just take out face value your return on ad spend.

In more cases than not, a bad return on ad spend or a lowered return on ad spend or some sort of fatigue is actually shown more in CPCs, CTRs, CPMs, frequencies than they are in just your return on ad spend alone. And often times people make bad decisions by pausing down adsets, ads, even campaigns, completely hurt their top of funnel when in reality they should be focused more on what's continuing to drive the top of funnel and then drive revenue downfunnel to the purchase. So, one thing that's important to understand about Facebook ads is that it is not equal for every single day of the week.

Most people spend the same amount of money every single day of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, $1,000 a day, every single day. Why would you do that if your consumers are more likely to purchase on different days of the week?

What we always do on our side, and this is one of the best pieces of advice I can give, is look at when your consumers are most likely to purchase. Understand your buying cycle and then favor your spend to better performing days of the week. This alone can improve your return on ad spend in your total account upwards of 20 30% and give you massive scaling opportunities.

The supportive ad in a Facebook account is an ad that spends a whole lot of money and drives slightly under your average return on ad spend. It's an ad that spends 10 or 20% of your total ad budget, but if your target is two, it's at a 1. 8.

And the moment you shut that ad down, you'd be shocked that you only have a couple of better days of performance. So, what we like to identify here is what is a supportive ad versus what is a revenue driving ad. A supportive ad supports the rest of the account.

A supportive ad is usually an ad that spends a whole lot of money, slightly under your KPI. It has very good CPCs, very good CTRs, low frequency. It's good at driving net new people to the very top of the funnel and then ultimately the rest of the account is boosted up by this.

So people might not purchase when they see this ad for the first time, but what they will do instead is see other ads down the funnel and eventually make a purchase. So the lesson when it comes to supportive ads is don't pause ads down too early. If you're running in a proper CBO environment, you will not be in situations where the wrong ads are getting too much spend.

So, you're allowed to have ads that are supporting the rest of the account even if they're not driving the right return on ad spend. None of this means anything and you're not going to be able to act on this at all if you don't have correct column sets. So, in all cases, you need to make sure your column sets are set up properly in your Facebook ad account.

Customize these. Make sure that they have a funnel approach. And the way that we like to do this is including all of the core metrics first and then all the secondary metrics second.

What that often looks like is spend, revenue, rorowaz, CPA, and then anything else that's related to the business like add to carts, initiate checkouts, clicks, link clicks, CPCs, CTRs, frequency, the list goes on and on and on. But making sure that you always have in sight your most important metrics that you're measuring. Even though Facebook metrics in the dashboard are good, one of the hardest things, and this is a lesson that I've learned just over years of doing this, is that you need to have external reporting.

You don't necessarily need very advanced third-party reporting or reporting that is so over the top that you don't even look at it. What you do need is a very simple sheet. I prefer Google Sheets that automates your reporting so that you can see your topline metrics not just for meta ads but for all the advertising platforms that you're running.

And that same exact data next to Shopify revenue. This way you can see your total ad spend for Facebook, total ad spend for Google, total revenue driven by Shopify and you can blend your metrics. This gives you the health of your total business, not just your Facebook ads account.

So, you have a dashboard, you're measuring everything properly, but what should you actually march towards? When it comes to setting goals, whether it's return on ad spend, cost per acquisition in Facebook ads, people have conflicting goals. They want a net new CPA of X.

They want a rorowaz of Y. They want their CPCs to be under Z, etc. The list goes on and on.

What I have always stood by and this was taken from my days at Barkbox is you have to have a king goal. A goal that is the most important goal above all other goals. So that if every secondary metric is wrong, if CPCs are $50, if click-through rates have went from 5% to 0%, if your all of a sudden CPMs go from $20 to $100, but your return on ad spend, which would be your king in this example, is above its target, nothing else matters.

you're doing a good job. This is a baseline for not only you managing your account, but for everyone else that might look or touch your account. It is so important to understand what that baseline is.

Measurement is really, really key. And when it comes to that measurement, especially when we're talking about Facebook ads, Google ads, Shopify, or just e-commerce in general, it is super important to measure blended. This is just a key that you have to follow.

These are the golden nuggets that really take things to the next level. You need to make sure you're actually managing to the Shopify goals that are actually going to impact your bank account rather than the goals that are in Facebook ads such as return on ad spend. One is going to impact the bottom line of the business.

The other one is going to impact a platform vanity metric. One of the questions that I get asked so often is how often do I monitor ad performance? I'm going to tell you the two things I monitor every single day and then how often I actually make changes on my side.

I always check spend and revenue. I want to check my core funnel metrics. That could be anything like CPCs, add to carts, purchases, revenue, spend every day.

Make sure we're pacing. Okay. However, I won't make changes in the ad account unless a something is really, really wrong or b on a weekly basis.

Do not overoptimize. It will really hurt your ad account. And speaking of overoptimizing, the lesson that I have learned has been to monitor the full funnel, not just the core metrics.

That full funnel is going to tell you so much more information than you would believe. If your ad to carts are flat and your add to cart ratio remains the same, you are probably having purchases that are going to line up in just a day or two. You might just have to be patient in your ad account.

At this stage, you're probably recognizing that all of these tips are unique. There's a whole lot to go through here. And this is where the big old mindset actually comes into play.

Facebook rewards consistency. You have to avoid panicking during short-term dips or short-term changes. Understand your seasonality.

Understand your buying cycle. Facebook wants to see you spend consistently. They want the algorithm to be fed.

That's going to allow it to double down on the insights that it's receiving. They don't want to see things being paused all the time, that's a negative for the algorithm. Speaking of that algorithm, the algorithm is smarter than you.

Anyone at this stage that thinks that they could outsmart this algorithm, it's kind of humorous. at scale managing dozens and dozens if not hundreds of creatives across dozens of adsets with multiple campaigns. There is physically no way that you could manage every single piece of that better than a super algorithm that is doing it for legitimately hundreds of millions of dollars every single day.

A great piece of advice that I've followed really consistently, especially over the last four or five years, is don't chase hacks. In most cases, sure, a little hack, a little thing here and there, does it help a little bit? Fine.

But what does it actually do? When that hack stops working, you now put and trained your ad account and your pixel and your entire algorithm to only function in that way. So the next time someone says, "Duplicate this ad 27 different times and put it into all different adsets and set all of those budgets to $2 a piece.

" Think, is that driving a little alarm in the back of my head? Or is my gut telling me, "Yeah, I don't think that's the best idea. " tough news that I've had to deliver over and over and over again, especially for brands that have tried to work with us, but ultimately brands that we've had to say, "No, we can't actually service you," is that no ad can save a bad product.

If I don't believe your product is good, we will not work with you here at the Moonlighters. But furthermore, if you think your product is doing the job, I don't know if it's that great, etc. , etc.

, it's time to get real with it and probably revise your product. This lesson has never been more important now because these algorithms have changed so much. Be patient.

Do not make irrational decisions in your ad account that are going to have a downfall effect and really have negative impact on even a short-term scale. Patience in an ad account allows you to make less decisions and therefore less bad decisions. The algorithm is not going to be right 100% of the time, but what it is going to be right is more than us.

Don't think you could outperform it. Just make sure you're really patient when it's doing something that feels maybe a little off or a new ad that you're launching didn't get all the budget. Give it a little bit more time than you would expect.

And my final final tip here, work with a pro if you don't think you can do this. In many cases, I see people treat ads like it's something that anyone can do. And yes, you could all set up an Advantage Plus campaign.

You could all follow every single structure, every single piece of advice that I'm giving right here. But I hope that most people listening to this are actually pros trying to sharpen their knives, not just someone who's trying to run ads for the first time or someone who already has a $50,000 budget and is trying to just get a little bit better at it. Think about it like this.

Hiring a professional in every other category of your business is a nobrainer. The same applies for ads. Just because it's easy to start, set up, and spend your first couple thousand dollars does not mean it's easy to scale.

The entire point of this was truly to give you every single little bitty piece of advice that I've acquired over the 11 years and $500 million in ad spend that I've spent on Facebook ads. If you want to see more guided tutorials for exactly how I set up all the Facebook accounts, how we optimize, how we graduate, how we scale accounts, then click this video right here where I'm going to break down everything very clearly step by step for you. By the way, if you have questions, comment down below.

I tried to reply to every single comment for subscribers and I will see you all in the next one.