Right now, I am spending over $33,000 a day on meta ads, which adds up to over a million a month. And within the next 30 days, I'm on track to make about $5 million a month from it. Here, the lessons I learned scaling my company through each level of ad spend from 0 to 10k to over a million a month plus.
And I've had hundreds of business owners ask me questions about how I run my ads. But very few of them actually ask the right type of question. How many individual ad creatives?
How many total new ad creatives per month? The total number of angles, the number of funnels. One other metric that's actually super important if you get into higher levels of spend and all of these have to be tracked per month per dollar of ad spend per month.
And the point that I'm trying to make is that with the state of meta ads specifically right now so much of the success is on the creative and the offer not the actual media buying the person in the ads manager. Because right now the state of media buying is actually really easy. You're just in the ads manager allocating budget and Facebook decides how to spend it.
But the creative strategy is what actually will make you millions of dollars. So, first we're going to start with 0 to 10K. At this point, you're just going to pray to get lucky.
Most of the businesses in this range should not even be running ads. Most of the businesses in this range are wasting their ad dollars. And I've actually got mathematical evidence to prove it.
And none of the businesses in this range are making millions of dollars a month from their ads. If you are right here, don't even try to run ads. you would just literally be competing against me and other whales like me spending a million dollars a month plus with way more information.
You're probably not going to win. And I'll explain with math in the very next level, which is 0 to 10k per month. Now, before we get there, I just wanted to clarify.
According to datab box, anyone in these categories spending more than 10k per month on ads is a top 25% spender on meta. Not just across all spenders on meta, but specifically businesses between 1,000 and 100,000 employees. So, we're talking about the big dogs here.
You are already spending a whole bunch more than almost anyone else on ads if you spend more than 10k per month. And the reason this is so important is because most businesses don't spend this much because most businesses don't make this much from ads. Because most businesses, if they could profitably spend that much on ads, they would spend even more.
They would scale their ads. The reason there are so many businesses that spend so little on Facebook ads is because they can't get Facebook ads to work. and they continue throwing money into a fire as long as it's not too expensive with no real tangible results.
Today we're only talking about getting tangible results. And so this next level is 10 to 50k per month. That's anywhere between 300 and $1670 per day.
Total number of new creatives you probably need per month is around 5 to 10. You should have a process for putting out new creatives every single month in addition to the five or 10 that you total have running existing fueling this kind of total ad spend. You probably should have one to three total different angles and you should have at least one funnel and focus on just optimizing that one.
Your very first funnel, one offer to one type of demographic that you're running all of your ads to. Now, if you don't know exactly what these mean, I have a whole another video explaining what this actually means for our business and what it probably should mean for yours. I'll link it right here.
Watch it after this video. It'll make a lot more sense. Now, there's a standard disclosure to all of these five to 10, one to three recommendations that I make.
And the big disclosure is who this works for. This only works for me. This is my personal experience running ads at each of these levels.
I have a B2B social media marketing company. This is what I do. And if you are not me, if you don't sell the exact price point in the exact same way through the exact same funnel that I do, all of this stuff could be completely different.
And I'll talk about that in just a second. But before we get there, let me tell you what this range feels like. The challenge is is generally at the stage you're launching and validating an offer.
You're just getting started. These really are the baby steps. And the success is largely reliant on how well your offer works with cold traffic.
If you've only previously sold to people that know, like, and trust you, your inner circle, people that follow you on social media, people that recognize your brand, you're going to be in for a rude awakening around this range when no one knows who you are, and they probably don't trust your personal brand. You also have a pretty limited data and budget. Like, actually, this is not a lot of money.
So, you're going to have really slow learning cycles, especially if you're not good at making creatives and you have to have a 100 times more creatives. I'll break down the math of why this becomes really challenging, but you're just limited by the lack of data. And spending more money faster does get you the data back faster, but you then you risk putting yourself out of business, throwing a whole bunch of money at testing without being sure that any of it's going to work out.
Your real goal here is to speak to your target demographic and figure out how in that ad you can communicate to them what you do. This is going to be responsible for 95% of your front-end success, especially at this stage. How well you communicate your offer is still the most important part if you're just right here.
Now, for testing, you should start to get an understanding of what different angles and messaging work. So, you could offer accounting services to absolutely everyone. But if you know that a certain niche type of accounting or a certain type of customer in your accounting practice is more responsive to a single type of ad, you're going to want to find ways to double down on those, either the offer or the messaging or the customer demographic.
With this, you're going to be rolling out 5 to 10 new creatives per month. Five at the lower end of this spend, 10 at the higher end of the spend, and you're going to have lots of variety. Again, watch my last video.
I just talked about it. It'll make a whole bunch more sense. You also want to meticulously track KPIs at this stage.
So, the purchases, calls, all the front-end metrics, you are just testing with this budget. And testing is completely pointless if you don't gather data and try to interpret it. Let the data inform what is working and not working and continue to iterate.
That's all we're doing here. In the grand scheme of Facebook, this still is a testing budget. And if you don't learn from this stage in the process, you're not going to scale.
Now, a quick disclosure as to why this works, how this is possible with just five to 10 creatives new per month and five to 10 existing creatives per month. This works because we are really good at ads. I have the math to back it up.
I've personally made ads for some of the biggest brands in the world. Amazon, PayPal, Dr Pepper. I am in the ad.
I made the ad. They ran the ad. If you don't have that experience, if you are not this good at creative, if you don't have millions of followers on social media and aren't good enough at making content, you're probably going to have to do 10 times the creative output per month to figure this stuff out.
But if you can only spend 10 to 50K for the month, if that's the bracket you are in, none of those 150 creatives are going to have enough spend as a single creative to validate the creative. You're not getting enough data per creative to iterate on success. This is where most companies get stuck and they never are able to scale their ads because it's not actually about ad management and financials.
It's about what the ad is and how good the creative is. Fortunately, we're really good. But most of these benchmarks, most of these numbers that I'm giving you do not apply to any other company because generally other companies suck at making ads.
Here is the actual example behind that. If you have 30k in spend, let's say you have to do 10 times as many creatives as us. So 120 creatives, 10 times the amount of work, and you have 250 spend per creative, that's 30k divided by 120.
your customer acquisition cost is a,000. Let's say it's only $1,000 and that's all you have to spend to acquire a customer. Even then, you have to spend 3 to 5x KPI.
Any good media buyer is going to tell you that you should be testing on 3 to 5x KPI. If you spend less than that, you're not even going to know if the results were conclusive to know which ads worked at 3 to 5x KPI. should.
Meaning you're about $2,700 to $4,750 short per month per creative in testing because you're only spending $250 when you needed to spend 3 to 500 per month. Meaning if you drag this out, unless you increase your spend, you're going to be spending 12 to 20 months testing this one batch of creative. And that doesn't even make sense because you need this many new creatives per month at the low level of ad spend that you're spending.
And sure, you could look at front-end metrics like CTR or opt-ins or leads or calls booked shows. None of those at the end of the day are revenue. And if you're spending money on this, your goal should be optimizing for revenue.
Oftent times, the cheapest optins, the cheapest calls, if that's all you pay attention to, are the exact type of leads that won't be buying your thing. Talking from experience, this is literally what bankrupted my company last year, almost barely made it. 500,000 in unsecured debt made it out because we figured this out.
and any media buyer that is not taking responsibility for improving and paying attention to bottomline revenue is doing you a disservice. So, it'll take you 12 to 20 months to validate any single one of these ads all while spending 30k a month during this entire time hoping and praying something works. And if all you've got to spend is 30K a month, you will definitely be bankrupt before all that testing is complete.
And this is the math behind why most companies fail at spending ads. why so many companies fail to get to this 10 to 50k per month in spend. It's because they don't have enough experience making ads.
They don't have a decent media buyer that can understand these ads and they stay in the testing phase until they run out of money. And by the way, if this math doesn't make sense to you, you're definitely too dumb to pull it off. Moving on.
50 to 180k per month. This is 1,600 to $6,000 per day. You're going to need about 10 to 15 new creatives per month with 10 to 20 proven creatives from the previous month.
So, it'll take you a couple months to scale up here. Three to four different angles that are proven to work. These are angles in your offer and one to two funnels per month.
So, both of these are new. You're going to need a lot more new angles and a lot more funnels for those angles because you want the ad to match the funnel that they are being sent to for the most part. Some challenges here is scaling pressures.
Getting to 5K a day can be difficult. As you're moving into this higher spend bracket, you start competing for colder and colder audiences. I'll explain this in a second.
You also get into creative fatigue. like some of your winning ads that you had before start to fatigue. Very similar to scaling pressures, especially at the top end of this bracket where you're spending like 6K a day.
As you move past five, uh you're probably going to need to open up your targeting as to who you're speaking to. So, going from very niche plumbing business owners in a specific area to all home service based business owners, not just in America, but also Canada, for example. And targeting very niche in your creatives isn't going to work as you're moving into these wider audiences.
You're also going to get way more skeptical prospects. One way to consider this is through Eugene Schwarz's five levels of awareness. Before, when you were dealing with low levels of ad spend, you were targeting people that were very aware and product aware, and you can just talk about your guarantees, your claims and proof.
You can offer them a discount and get them through the door. As you move to more unaware customers, you're going to have to start telling stories and secrets and having a lot more dialogue trying to convince someone who is a lot colder. And if you don't know what a cold prospect feels like, here's what it is.
They send emails with the body in the subject line. They type in all caps because they literally can't figure out how to turn their caps lock off. They don't even know how to use their phone.
They open up the camera. You're like looking up their nose. And then you have to sell these people.
That's what that means when you're moving into colder audiences. Of course, it's going to get more difficult. Yes, you're going to feel the pressure.
Now, before we move down to 180 to 300,000 a month, I got a quick unfortunate reminder for you. If you are new to this, if you are new to making content ads on social media, specifically the meta platform, you're going to have to do 100 to 150 creatives before you pass this stage per month. New videos, that is three to five videos per day.
There's your friendly reminder. Now, at the 180 to $300,000 per month mark in ad spend, you're going to need about 15 to 30 new creatives a month with 20 to 50 proven creatives that you continue to cycle through three to four angles. You can stay the same here as long as they're all doing really good, but you should continue to experiment.
There's some limitations here in like what your business does that you may not be able to find 20 different angles, but you should go for at least five. Look for potentially 10 and constantly be testing new ones so that you can put a different spin on the same exact offer and reach a completely different audience. You're also going to stick with one to two funnels here.
continue optimizing and iterating on the most successful ones and potentially start to launch one maybe two new ones and start getting some data behind the new tests that are very low budget. Some challenges here is you're going to have a lot of creative fatigue. And I put that in parenthesis here cuz creative fatigue isn't real.
What you really need to get good at is appealing to wide audiences. It's not that your creative is fatiguing. It's that your creating has fatigued the limited audience with a small amount of ad spend.
When you're moving to larger amounts of ad spend with larger audiences, that ad is no longer interesting to the uninformed audience. Back to the Eugene Schwarz example, you're just moving to a cold audience, and you really start to feel it with every single dollar here. But your goal at this stage should be to optimize the angle and the funnel.
Very few tiny optimizations are actually going to make very large changes. You have an incredible amount of leverage here. You're spending $6,000 to $12,000 a day.
You're moving all of this data through the funnel. If you're not measuring what that data looks like and how small changes impact that data, you're just completely wasting money. You should start to focus on positioning your ads to be funnel specific around that 15K per month ad spend mark.
And know that like when you're making an ad, which funnel is it for? Which part of your offer is it for? Which VSSL or landing page are you sending people to?
What specific action are you hoping to have them take with that offer? Not just interested in your business services as a generalization. For example, we have a guarantee angle.
So, we offer a guarantee on our work and we have a guarantee specific funnel for that. Any ad that mentions or leaves with a guarantee goes to the guarantee funnel. So, there's congruency between the ad and the funnel.
When we have a scale your business angle, which according to this level of awareness is for our unaware customers, it's stories and secrets. They go to the congruent scale your business funnel. And so, targeting different awarenesses is going to come with different types of ads, different types of funnels.
And at these levels of spend, you have to remember that profit comes over everything else. If you're spending 300,000 a month with 20% customer acquisition cost, which you would be at right here, and making 240,000 a month profit from it, you have no reason to jump to 600K in spend while doubling your customer acquisition cost to 40% because you're going to end up with the same amount of profit. And while that sounds cooler to do bigger numbers with the same amount of profit, what you're not considering here is that this kind of profit comes with twice the amount of clients, meaning twice the fulfillment cost, twice the complexity, twice the overhead associated with this kind of revenue.
meaning you don't actually make the same amount of profit. You should stay lean. You should keep your costs low and just recognize that increasing ad spend for the sake of increasing ad spend is not going to make you cooler at business.
Every business only cares about the profit. And I'm speaking from experience here. Not scaling profitably is what almost caused me to go bankrupt last year.
And now whenever our ads creep up over 25% of our revenue, we pull back the testing. We allocate that ad spend to previous winners and instead scale the previous winners more instead of testing a whole bunch of new stuff for the hope of future growth. One more time for the people in the back with another tab open.
Scaling doesn't matter if you're not profitable. All right, next one. 360 to 750 per month.
This is where you're getting into 25K a day territory. You should have about 30 to 80 new creatives a month. 30 to 60 proven ones that you've got on rotation, a few different angles down, a couple of different funnels, and now a couple of brand faces.
Now, this is a fun little one that we've just been trying out with incredible success over the last few months. If you want a full breakdown on how we do this, make sure to subscribe. That video is coming in a couple of months.
just did an experiment with about 16 brand faces and it's going incredibly well right now. Would love to give you a full report soon. Creative churn, you have very strong scaling and testing protocols as you move through this bracket.
If you don't have like a data analyst basically looking at your numbers every single day, you're not going to be able to know how to scale based on the math and you should just be looking at the math at this point. Only the numbers. Have every single creative marked with an identifier and only treat them as cogs in the wheel.
You're managing hundreds of creatives at this point in just a few weeks of time. 80 coming in new per month, 60 proven ones potentially. You have to have strong systems to keep track of the data.
And you should only be making decisions off of the data. And at this point, time constraint actually becomes a serious challenge. Like this actual amount of media buying, like uploading the creatives, looking at the data, it starts taking up more time with daily check-ins and optimizations.
And despite what some media buyers say, you can't just blast it on Facebook and hope they figure it out. you do need to micromanage the process a little bit, especially at this level of scale. So, the goal here is to actually have a couple of new brand faces come in that can perform.
You can be testing and iterating new brand faces at a rate of one to two per month. You'll get to a point where eventually some brand faces might fatigue. You see cost rising and you have to just completely turn them off for a moment and bring a new spokesperson in at least with some of that budget.
And then this is where you also get into the VSSL problem. So, you have one of two solutions in executing with these brand faces. One, if you run a VSSL call funnel, which we do, you can have a UGC creator make their own version of the funnel.
But that's kind of complex because now they not only have to be really good at making the ad and make the ad compelling, they also have to be able to deliver the VSSL as good as you do. So the pre-call video, potentially any kind of marketing material, all of that same stuff has to be done by them in addition to the ad. And they have to do it as well as you previously could to be able to convert your clients.
Or simpler solution, which is actually much more difficult, create an offer that doesn't need a VSSL. Tons of products are sold online without a video sales letter explaining it. And if you can crack that, you can have dozens of UGC creators make dozens of ads for you where you are not personally the spokesperson representing your company and still have people convert.
That's what we just figured out last month. Super excited. Again, subscribe if you don't want to miss that video.
Now, the million-doll a month rate. And I wanted to interrupt this message with a quick disclaimer. So, we are here right now spending about $33,000 a day.
Take anything I say here with a grain of salt. Anything above that level of spend could be completely different. I wouldn't even know.
Like, we may not understand all of the risks and challenges at this stage because we are at this stage, but at this stage, here's what we're seeing. Rising cost. You're going to struggle with cost per acquisition as you move up market.
Your offer needs to be essentially mass market and all ads need to hit an incredibly wide demographic. Again, these people shouldn't be able to even use their phones and they should still be able to figure out how to get on a call with you and buy your product or service. You also have a lot of creative turn.
You're going to have to have tons of creatives to run, lots of creatives in a pipeline, like 80 plus, 70 plus per month that are new coming through. And these aren't variations. It's not like, oh, one hook like this, one hook like that, and it's two different creatives.
Like, the entire video, the entire concept needs to be different. You need to have an incredible amount of creatives to be able to get to this level. And again, very few businesses in the world ever have.
So, it's an incredibly rare place to be. You need to be really good at content to compete on this level, especially with meta ads. And the goals here are largely with business structure.
So you should have an offer that allows you to break even or potentially even lose a little on the front end and make it up on the back end. So most businesses at this stage have a similar business structure where they pay for a customer and then end up making it back a couple months later. Think traditional SAS companies.
It'll be really difficult to compete if you have to make a profit on the front end to stay afloat. There's a really popular saying that like you should be able to recover your customer acquisition cost on the front end. You pay for a customer and that customer buys you the next customer and then you roll the ad spend over and so you essentially scale infinitely.
That breaks. It breaks around right here. It is not always realistic.
Depending on your product or service, it's probably going to break. So instead, what you need to do is rely on future month receivables. If you got 10 million receivables in the bank, you can overspend this month on ads.
You can blow a million and not worry about it cuz you got another nine sitting in the bank and you'll know that eventually you will recover those funds from the customers that you signed this month. It also takes into account upsells and continuity. So knowing how much you're actually going to make your true LTV for a customer and not just that front-end first 30 days so you can roll it over into ad spend becomes incredibly important, especially once you start rolling into the big boy numbers.
If this video is helpful, you probably also would find helpful knowing every single dollar that I spent last month when we spent $700,000 down to the ad and even what I said in the ad. I've even got full downloadable transcripts of my ads. The video's right here.
Hope you enjoy.
