Give me the next few minutes and I guarantee you that you will learn something that can dramatically improve your return on ad spend in Facebook ads. After generating over half a billion dollars in Facebook ads over the last 11 years, I've basically boiled down advertising to a science. And I found that there are four main strategies that you can use to profitably scale your ads through the roof.
The first core principle is reducing your ad spend on testing. So you want to minimize wasted ad spend at all cost. So, the way that we're going to do this is we are going to set up a prospecting CBO campaign as the primary testing mechanism in your entire account.
The way that this campaign is going to work is that every single time you launch a new round of ads, we call them packs. So, think of a pack as anywhere from four to six ads. Anytime you're launching that new pack, you implement them as a new ad set directly in the campaign.
So, what we have here is our main campaign, which is Moonlighter Broad Prospecting CBO. Inside of the campaign, we have all very normal settings. Some things that you need to keep an eye out on are you want campaign budget to always be on.
The next and only last thing that you need to set at the campaign level is your audience segment reporting. Just make sure you have your engaged audiences and your existing audiences set up. Where this really gets interesting is at the adset level.
You're going to notice right away looking at this, this feels very overwhelming. There's 13 active adsets here and the majority of the spend is going just to the first two adsets. We are completely comfortable with the majority of the expenditure going to just a few adsets.
You might say, "Well, what about something that I worked really hard on? What about an ad that I really want to make sure gets an adequate amount of spend? " Facebook is generally going to be right 90 plus% of the time.
Facebook is going to do a much better job at reducing your wasted ad spend and focusing on the best performing ads. So, we have seen over and over and over again across literally over a 100 accounts at this point that this system allows the best performing ads to rise to the top. It just takes a few extra days.
So, deploying a little bit of patience here works great. And I'm going to share with you one hot tip so you could actually force spend if you really feel the need to. So you can go into your adset and scroll down to the budget and schedule section.
Then you're going to see ads set spending limits right here. Click and select adset spending limits and set a daily minimum. Be very very careful here.
In fact, in most cases, this minimum could be just $10. You do not want to give this $50 or $100 a day and force a bunch of spend on it. It's going to significantly hurt the rest of your adsets in this core campaign.
The reason this works so incredibly well is because now we have a hyperco competitive ad account. All of our ads that are prospecting are competing against one another, ultimately only allowing the top performing ads to actually rise to the top of your account. The second structural mechanism that I see to be most important right now across nearly every single e-commerce account that I've ever audited and especially accounts that we manage here at the Moonlighters is you need to have a scaling mechanism.
A scaling mechanism in short is a place to graduate your top performing creatives. A scaling mechanism has to be managed very meticulously. You can't just take creatives that you think are going to work and throw them at the top.
So, if you've been watching my channel for a little bit here, you've seen this chart before, but this concept changes constantly. What's critical here is we need to have at all times, this is a core fundamental for what we absolutely need to have. We need to be taking those packs of creative, take the best performing creatives, push them into a winner's bucket, and graduate them into a scaling campaign at the top of the account.
Your scaling campaign is a single broad campaign. It has no adsets. It has nothing else mixed into it.
No special targeting. Unless there's a very, very nuanced case for you where you can only target females or you can only target over a certain age. Generally, this is meant to be as broad as possible.
Now, there's two questions we get asked all the time. One, what do I do with the ads that I graduate? And two, how do I determine when to actually graduate an ad?
To answer your very first question, when you take a creative that is high performing, let's here pretend that creative number one is high performing. The last thing that you want to do is X that creative or pause that creative where it's actively working well. A general rule of thumb that you must follow in Facebook ads is never pause it if it's working.
Don't fix it if it's not broken. So, what does that mean for this? When we graduate this ad into the scaling mechanism, we leave it existing in two different places at the same time.
It's completely okay. Okay, the ad is proven to work. It has social proof.
Let it continue to run. Never jeopardize your performance just because you want things to be a little bit more organized. And to actually determine what ads you should graduate to the top of your account, I want you to go into your prospecting CBO campaign, go to all of your ads at once, and then select a time frame from the last time you did a graduation.
Meaning, if the last time you did a graduation was two weeks ago, then just select the last 14 days in your account. Sort by spend in your account, just like I'm doing right here. And then I only want you to take the top performing ads that are over the return on ad spend that you need and the highest spending in the account.
So you can see this is one of the most obvious examples. This ad here at the top has spent in the last 14 days just $766. But that's the majority of the spend for this campaign and it has done so at a 5.
49 return on ad spend. That is leaps ahead of everything else. So we obviously want to take this ad.
We want to hard duplicate it into the scaling campaign. A scaling mechanism is fundamental. Without a scaling mechanism, you have this blob of hundreds of creatives competing against each other.
Your scaling mechanism should generally represent the majority of the ad spent in the account. But it doesn't mean you start it that way. You start a scaling campaign with a low budget and you grow that budget over time.
The ideal situation for any scaling campaign is that is the core of the account with somewhere around five to maximum 10 pieces of creative. These are all really, really, really great creatives. they have proven to work and in most cases you should never have to pause any of the ads in a scaling campaign unless they're off-brand or unless something core changes in your account like you sell out of that product.
By the way, if you want all these principles laid out for you really clearly so that you can share them with anyone on your team or really your agency even if you want to. You can click the link down below where I have the PDF of our entire M3 method including all the breakdowns that we're talking about today. really everything that you need to do to focus on minimizing your wasted ad spend and increasing your total return on ad spend.
You can go get it down below in the description 100% for free. Moving on to the third principle that I think is most critically important and this really ties in number one and number two. So don't just skip ahead to this if you didn't go back and watch because this is key.
You need to have swim lanes in your ad account. And what that means is structurally speaking, you need to have clear divisions between prospecting, retargeting, and existing customers. This has literally never been more important.
Every single account that I've audited in the last 30 days has had the same complaint. We hit a wall when we drive to a certain amount of ad spend. So, the brands that we are auditing are having these same issues over and over and over again where they get to a certain amount of ad spend, whether it's $1,000 a day, $10,000 a day, even $300 a day, and they hit a wall.
They can't get over that return on ad spend anymore, and they don't know what to do. So, you'll notice there are four main campaigns in this account. We have at the top a prospecting evergreen campaign.
We have a retargeting evergreen campaign, a retention also known as existing customer campaign and then we have our scaling campaign which is positioned at the bottom here. I want to start with just the prospecting campaign. Now every single adset in this campaign is going to have very similar custom audience exclusions.
This is going to make sure that this campaign is 100% new customer focused. If we scroll down in the ads set to our custom audience exclusions, you're going to notice I've excluded website visitors 180 days, purchasers 180 days, and then I've also pulled a list from Clavio, our CRM, for purchasers over the last 365 days. So basically, anyone who's visited our website over the last 180 or purchased from us over the last full year will not be targeted by this campaign.
That allows me to know with 99% certainty that this is going to target completely net new customers who have either not ever heard about the brand or at bare minimum have never been to the website. I like this. I know that for me, if I put new dollars in here, I'm acquiring completely net new customers.
The next campaign is our retargeting evergreen campaign. We go into this, we're going to see two primary adsets. The first here on the left side is visitors 180 days and the second is add to cart 180 days.
The example I'm showing you here is actually for a brand that doesn't have a huge amount of spend per day. So, we're keeping these broken out and very broad, right? They're 180day audiences.
So, if you're spending very little, you can group these together and push visitors and add to cart together. And if you're spending a lot, you can keep these broken out and actually reduce these time frames from 180 days to something like 90 days or 45 days. So, you're always targeting the most relevant people.
What you're going to notice in these is that they're going to have unique settings compared to the first prospecting piece. Retargeting is meant to only target people who have been to the site or done the action that we're targeting for but have never purchased before. They have never handed us a dollar.
They are not a customer officially yet. And the way that we want to define this within our custom audiences are to include whatever we want to target in this case add to cart 180 days and exclude purchasers 180 days and the same clavio list for purchasers 365 days. This is going to make sure that this again is only focused on acquiring new customers but these new customers have done something notable like added to cart or visited our website.
The next campaign that is all focused on existing customers is called retention. What we have set up here in our custom audiences are two main customer list the same that we excluded previously. So we have total breakdowns in the ad account.
In this case we are including purchasers 180 days and purchasers over the last 365 days from our Clavio integration. The key of this is that now we have complete breaks in the ad account. We now know for sure that prospecting is focused on net new customers.
Retargeting is focused on people who have been to the site but not purchased before. And retention is focused on existing customers, getting them to come back and purchase over and over again. Each of these is going to have a different return on ad spend.
And it's very, very important that you treat them differently with different budgets and with different targets. The fourth and final principle that has basically become the most important principle here at the Moonlighters is we need to make sure we're spending money when we're most likely to make money back. We need to make sure we're focused on spending money on the best performing days, the best performing ages, the best performing platforms, placements, landing page, etc.
, etc. This has never been more important because Facebook is a master at spending your exact same amount of money every single day. You cannot allow Facebook at this stage to spend the same $1,000 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
You need to be putting yourself in a position where you are spending the most amount of money when people are most likely to convert. This gets complex quick. I would highly recommend that when you do this analysis, you look at Facebook ads, Google ads, and your Shopify data as well.
The example I'm going to show you is all three at once, so we can compare and see if we need to make adjustments. Hopping into our spreadsheet here, we're looking at the last 90 days of data. And what you're going to notice really quickly is that we see a little bit of red here, meaning there are some days that clearly outperform other days of the week.
What we generally want to make sure we're doing is we're putting more of our spend on days that are higher performing. In this case, we could see that this brand outperforms on the weekends versus the weekday. So, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday have the highest return on ad spends in the meta account.
All we now need to do is increase our budgets to the tune of 5 10 or 15%. And see how the account reacts. I would like to do this for at least 4 weeks and then reassess from here.
We see the same similar trend on the Google side. We actually see Google pulse up starting Thursday, Friday, Saturday. We see really poor Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
So we need to again make sure we're cramping down our budgets again 10 20% and increasing our budgets on the weekends. And then finally, we always want to cross-check this data with Shopify. We never want to just make a decision on platform data.
We want to really be 100% sure that this is for sure happening and therefore we always want to check the Shopify data. So what I have here is total orders, total spend, and total shop sales. And the trend 100% continues to exist.
We see very clearly Friday, Saturday, and Sunday have by far the most shop sales. We're seeing ROI, which is total blended ad spend divided by total Shopify sales. We're seeing that outperform on the weekends.
Therefore, we really need to make sure we are overspending on the weekends and underspending on the weekdays. I know you guys might ask for this template, but this is something we only give to Moonlighter clients. It has taken dozens of hours of work.
We've refined it. It is extremely extremely detailed. So, if you do want to work with us and actually get your ads managed professionally, go down into the description.
We have a link there. You can apply to work with us today. Now, in this video, we hit a ton of structural principles, things that you need to be getting right.
But the next logical step that you absolutely need to be following is how to create a killer Facebook ads testing structure ultimately so that you can take dozens of new ad creatives, launch them into your account and build on the strategies that we just hit here. You can click the link right here where I break down my entire strategy. This is a long form video where you can get a ton of detail, a lot of value in this one.
And finally, if you have any questions, let me know in the comments below. I reply to all of my subscribers.
