Oren here this week. Tis the season — the brand announcements are flowing, the influencers are influencing, we are inundated with guides and decisions as we roll into the biggest selling time of the year. As always we’re hear to help navigate through the noise and provide a creative perspective.

This week I talked about becoming a creative archivist, and testing tv ads for the holidays with Amazon Sponsored TV while Clayton hunts down personal Stone Island collections in the current and former EU.

Next week, I’m off to Hubspot Inbound filming a “this year in branding” show with the Brand Brothers while Clayton heads to London for a proper HYPER scene report.

And we have a special surprise coming shortly, our new report with the Vaan Group on Beauty and Body is going to be dropping, so keep an eye out for that (and will release here when ready). Are our houses full of cosmetics packaging and hard drives crammed with hours of user interviews on the space? Yes. This is the life we signed up for, and on that note…

Let’s begin.

Getting Started, and Going Advanced with Meta Ads

As we get closer to the holiday season, the conversations in our DMs and emails switches more from getting products going and making creative to how to make sure everything is dialed to make sales.

Over the last few years I’ve worked consistently on brands that spend five and six figures a month on Meta/Google etc, supporting both ecommerce and retail, but starting from scratch with a brand new account I wanted to have a clear view on how a small brand can scale, so I signed up for my friend Mason’s Meta Ads at Scale program and have been carefully reviewing everything I think I know and what I take for granted to begin to scale on Meta Ads.

As usual, I want to share as many tips and insights as possible both for people new to the process, and those who are dealing with advanced challenge. A guide to meta is below, and some content on this kicked off this week with this video.

Getting Started

I talk a lot about creative growth, and mastering skills in an era where you have to be both a specialist and a generalist. One of the most frequent skills I encourage people to get a baseline of efficacy at is Meta ads, but its the one that anyone more creative definitely struggles with due to its technicality and the general insanity of the interface and options. More on the overall concept in the Youtube video below.

Here I’m going to break down some simple resources to learn to begin go to know, and then go deeper into a guide for more serious advertisers.

First — where to start. If you know nothing and want to… before any courses, cohorts or spend, start at the source. The actual Meta overview collateral is actually thorough, simple, and great. Throw a few hours into this, setup a business account and put $150 to work on generating some traffic, or emails, and you’ll be surprised what you can learn.

Second - If you’ve ever been confused about meta advertising key terms, here is our breakdown of the basics in the simplest language possible.

Campaign Terms

• Targeting: The process of selecting specific audiences for your ads based on various criteria like demographics, interests, or behaviors.

• Interest Campaigns: Ad campaigns that target users based on their interests, behaviors, and demographics.

• ASC (Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns): Automated campaigns that use machine learning to optimize ad delivery for e-commerce businesses.

• Cost Caps: A bidding strategy that sets a maximum cost per desired action (e.g., click, conversion) that you're willing to pay.

• Retargeting: Showing ads to users who have previously interacted with your brand or website.

Ad terms

• Dynamic Product Ads: Ads that automatically show products from your catalog based on user behavior and interests.

• Ad Placements: The specific locations where your ads can appear across Meta's family of apps and services — ie on reels, on stories, in-feed, in chat, in search etc

• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): A metric that measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.

Customer terms

• Prospecting: The practice of reaching out to new potential customers who haven't interacted with your brand before versus returning customers.

• Lookalike Audiences: Groups of users who share similar characteristics with your existing customers.

• Custom Audiences: Groups of users you create based on your own data, such as customer lists or website visitors.

Challenges

I’ve worked over time on scaling several luxury and high price point products with Meta ads. You can begin to get some insane numbers when optimized with the right fit of product or creative buy nature of the higher price points, but the biggest issue is that these numbers, liek the below don’t separate retained customers continuing to convert versus new customers, which paints a radically different story… which leads us too the next section.

The Current Convo

For the Pros, the current Meta Ads convo everyone seems to be having is around ASC and new vs returning customer attribution.

As I mention in the video above, anyone spending serious dollars on meta has concerns that ASC campaigns are still serving existing customers, despite exclusions. This means the metrics we’re all looking at on ROAS and retargeting vs prospecting will continue to be in a gray area that frustrates teams that NEED these insights to scale.

Black Crow's new Paid Ads Growth Pack shows:

New customer rate - The percentage of your total Meta website purchases that are from New Customers as reported from Shopify.
- Calculated as New Customer / (New Customer + Returning Customer) 

New customer return on ad spend - ROAS but for New Customers only.
- Calculated as Black Crow New Customer Conversion Value / Amount spent 

Cost per new customer - Customer acquisition cost (CAC) but for New Customers only
- Calculated as Amount Spent / Number of New Customers 

all within the existing Ads Manager interface!

If this is a challenge you’re facing, Black Crow is offering their Smart ID feature (identity resolution and enhanced Meta Conversion API [CAPI]) for free for the rest of the year that is worth taking a look at. They're also offering a $100 gift card to Shopify brands with $2M+ in GMV just to get a demo.

Learn More

_{This segment brought to you by Black Crow.}

What were your favorite campaigns this year?

Ashwinn, Jordan and I are compiling a “best of” the year in organic social, merchandise, collaborations and more that we’re going to release with Hubspot in the coming weeks!

And we want your input on what you loved (and feel free to throw in anything you hated) this year.

There’s an option to drop your name in and we’ll shout out the best responses in the release :)

Share Your Opinion

Kitchen sink

I’m working on something in this same realm for next year, but unfortunately will never compared to Tabi chess.

AI (assume) for vintage ads a use case I can support

Brands should let designers and creatives share the samples and things that didn’t make it. I want to see and appreciate them all!

A little studio info

Unsolicited Cut30 testimonial (the next one starts Sep 24)

The temptation I have to run Fridgescaping for a short form video…

Hyper Reports

Check out our market reports. We spend many hours researching markets, categories, and brands & products within the consumer space so you don’t have to.

• How to Source Blanks 101 — HERE — a guide to finding and producing your own merch

• Reports on Running, Golf, and Tennis — HERE — a guide to each sport, the market opportunities, and how to launch your own brand

Inquiries? Shoot us a note here: [email protected]

We’d love to chat!

Oren & Clayton ❤️ you