7 new lessons learned from a senior advertiser

Warning: This newsletter is written assuming that most of you run Meta ads.

Okay, now that’s off the table.

I invited Marin Istvanic to The Performers’ mastermind call to share his secrets. I’m sharing with you seven of his best insights, all of which were new to me. 

But who is Marin?

He used to be a freelancer but has been Head of Performance at Inspire agency for the past 7 years. He leads a boutique team specializing in paid social for select clients. His systematic approach to media buying and creative strategy has scaled major DTC brands like The Oodie and Vessi. 

Here are the 7 lessons I learned from our calls (#4 and #7 are my favorite & you’ll have his ad inspiration & swipefile in the bonus section): 

#1. ROAS is old, New Customer ROAS is the real deal

Most clients care about new customers.

Your job as an advertiser is to find new customers, not convert existing ones to buy more.

Optimize based on New Customer ROAS, not ROAS.

Example below:

If Marin optimizes for ROAS then he gets 3.81, but with NC-ROAS he gets 3.43

How did Marin figure out the NC-ROAS?

He uses Converge as a tool to send data on new customers back to FB so he knows which customers are actually new.

#2. Ad account structure that might surprise you

Main campaign:

• 1 testing campaign

• 1 audience campaign

• 1 manual bids campaign

• 1-3 advantage plus shopping campaign

The goal here is to find the winning creative and scale it. Sometimes, the testing campaign has a higher budget because Marin isn’t waiting to put it in the main campaign directly but rather scaling it.

All testing is done with a broad audience that excludes buyers, and then he tests the audiences.

Another thing, testing is done on adset level (ABO), which has either a new concept, angle, creator or format. 

Let's say we have a concept, such as us versus them.

So let's say he would compare us versus competitor A, us versus competitor B, us versus some other expensive product. 

When it's an image, it's mostly like a different layout or different design or different colors or different headlines. When it's video, it's mostly different hooks, but sometimes different lengths or a thumbnail. 

After some time, he sees which ad is performing the best, takes the post ID, and puts it into scaling for our next campaign.

This was slightly new to me. Especially, testing new audiences with different buckets like lookalikes, demographic interests etc. This means once you have a winner, always keep trying different buckets and try to find a winner.

#3. Additional campaigns that make sense

It’s recommended when you’re testing different funnels like listicles, the personal story, breaking news, etc. Run a different campaign with the proven ads so you see the cost per result.

It could also be tested with catalog campaign, IG reels/story-only campaign, or web+shop campaign.

#4. If you’re not running ads with additional pages/handles, you’re missing out

50% of their brands’ ads are coming through the brand page. The rest is coming through these, like, fake pages.

So basically, depending on the niche, they create a fake Facebook page that feels more genuine. Let's say it is a community, let's say sleep, let's say the world's best gift, or a footballer story or stuff like that. Or an expert. Let's say this is a veterinarian; this is a doctor.

It feels like the ad is coming from some page that you're following. It's not you promoting yourself; it's actually someone else promoting you. And we usually find that they have a higher click-through rate unless your brand is very well known. 

Protip: You can also promote advertorials and blogs, rather than product pages.

It’s different from whitelisting pages; I’ve discussed it here. 

Wanna learn more about his Facebook page strategy. Check his thread here.

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#5. Creative tagging is where you find gold

You need to tag your product in the ad right to figure out – what’s working:

• Possibilities

• Angles

• Creators (btw check this creator platform to help you find them)

• Styles

• Formats

• Whitelisting

• Proper naming convention 

And this will help you with a graphic like this:

Why is it important?

You can figure out from the top level:

• Which angles are working

• Which creators are working

• Which video editors are working

• Which agency is working

• Which landing pages are working

All of these tagging will give you insights into your product that Facebook ads usually don't provide intuitively.

#6. Don’t miss out on testing thumbnails

Marin did an analysis of his ads in dynamic creative tests and found out that algo can’t read the video but can only read the image.

This means you need to test thumbnails with the same video to figure out what works.

He tested thumbnails heavily. He found the following thumbnails below to test

He wondered how many good videos were lost just because of a bad thumbnail.

Here is his framework for picking thumbnails for ads:

• Always pick the thumbnail manually

  • Test each creative with at least 2 thumbnails

• Pick thumbnails that either:

  • Communicate the angle

  • Often the 1st scene in the video

  • 1 weird frame from the video that catches the attention

  • Custom thumbnail

  • One of the winning styles (from the images above)

Wanna learn more about the thumbnail strategy? Check out his thread here.

#7. Dig deeper, don’t just iterate

This is my favorite lesson from Marin as an advertiser. There were a ton of lessons, but what I found that puts Marin in the top 1% of advertisers is that he digs deeper with the data. Testing thumbnails and having multiple Facebook pages were the aha moments for me.

There’s so much competition right now. If you really want to win on Meta, you will need to dig deeper.

This means:

• Deeper Facebook metrics analysis

• More understanding of what people are commenting

• When you have a real winner then find out why this ad is really working. 

Here’s how I dug deeper to find out why an ad is really working. 

Lastly, some ads that are working for Marin, I’m sharing so you can steal (yes! Steal from the best):

• Winning statics with few captions

• Founder-style podcast ad

• Before & after ads - Get my swipe file here

• Ads that use the color red

BONUS:

If you want to dig deeper and learn from all his insights in our mastermind call. I have his video and slides to share. Reply to this email, and I’ll share it with you. 

That’s all from this week. But check out Marin’s Twitter; he shares his most recent learnings there.

Happy Growing with Paid Social,

Aazar Shad

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