🏔 Hitting Growth Goals

I have heard a lot of things about October from a lot of people. CPMs going up due to the election (thank god it’s finally over). People slashing budgets due to performance not being there. I could go on.

And I am not here to toot my own horn at all, but we did hit our projections across the board for October. And for our brand we launched earlier this year, we saw major growth which I talked about in the last couple of my emails.

This week will be short, because I don’t have a ton of updates to share as we ramp up for the holiday season. I will say that just a few days into November we are seeing a marked increase in overall revenue and efficiency and we have not run any sales promotions yet.

I see this as good news for the whole of holiday. And you should view this as good news overall.

Testing, Testing

One of my biggest issues this year across our portfolio has been the ability to test our creative and get learnings from them. For those who understand and have experience media buying, most know that the way to test creative has traditionally been testing in ABO format — this is ad set budget optimization format.

This setup is used because we want to give all of the creative an even shot at getting spend, which is supposed to help with learnings. The fact is, I’ve seen this work well at times. We have sometimes found creative that has some really strong soft metrics, such as thumb stop rate (what % of people stay past 3 seconds), or hold rate (what % of people stay at least 15 seconds.

But the problem with this setup has been that most of the creative is showing up as failed and extremely inefficient. Now this doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re looking for those home run hitters in the account, but my problem is that we were seeing such inefficiency for a lot of creative that I genuinely thought would do well.

For example, we had one mini-clip that was eight seconds in total. It had a thumb stop rate of 57% and a hold rate of 14%. The click through rate was the problem, and I felt like the issue was that it was not long enough to really convince people to click from the ad to learn more about the product.

But when we tested the longer-form creative in the ABO test, it flopped. The thumb-stop was completely different, same with the hold rate. I was confused. How could the same exact first several seconds be the same, but still there was completely different results and data??

I didn’t feel the ABO setup was giving iterated creative a fair shot. I also felt like we were way too inefficient for my liking anyway. So we decided to move to ASC testing format.

Now I will agree that overall, the UGC tests are showing a similar result. I don’t really want to focus on that right now. I want to focus on the overall shift in performance from the image and mini clip tests.

This is wildly different and more efficient. I love this approach because it is giving us a lot more data to work from as well as giving us the ability to know what is actually working and not working in the account. We didn’t completely change up our strategies on the creative side when we began testing this structure, we just decided to change how we are testing.

I would recommend testing out different ways to test if you do decide to test creative in ASC. For example, you may want to test out customer cohorts, or specific angles. I think that is fine and we will go through this process to test this out over time. What I do know is that this is extremely promising for us to have a much more efficient and reliable way to test creative in the future that doesn’t feel like we’re lighting money on fire + we’re actually getting learnings from what is working and where Meta is deciding to put spend toward.

Some key items to note if you do decide to run creative tests in an ASC format:

• Make sure to set your customer cap % at 0

• You can run this with cost caps, but then your campaign may not spend

• Generally we will pull promising/winning creative into our other campaign/s that are scaling campaigns (most of them cost-controlled) but leave on the winning creative — you never know if the creative will work in the scaling campaign 🤷‍♂️ 

• Goal is to ‘unseat’ the winning assets

Our current slate of brands

• Flewd

• Brand X 🙂

What’s working

• All things ASC 🔥 

• tROAS 🔥 

• Cost Caps 😎 🔥 

Winning Creative of the Month

Mini Clips for the win

I already talked about mini clips in a previous newsletter, I believe it was 2 newsletters ago. Very solid insights and results. We’re spending a lot on some of these with a mix of other types of creative (diversity is key!). What I love about mini clips is how easy you can produce them + also be able to test different headlines and angles quickly. It’s a really great way to also capture seasonality or test out angles you may not have tested if you had to go through a full production schedule with high production or UGC content.

Sponsored - Foxwell Founders

There’s not a better community for marketers out there outside of the Foxwell Founders group. Highly recommend checking them out if you are an agency owner or even a brand owner. I have seen many who work as heads of creative for brands in this group as well, and it’s a really wonderful group, I highly recommend.

Performance Update

October was an incredible month for our brands. I am super bullish for the rest of the year (duh) but I am also super bullish for 2025. We are building the best team focusing on health and wellness and it has been an absolute blast seeing my team continue to execute for our own brands and our client brands.

We have major goals for Nov and December, which I’ll share below. And we achieved our goals for October, so I’m a happy camper.

Here’s what we ended up at for the month of October:

Flewd

• Revenue - 721k

• MER - 2.88 MER

• Spend - 250k

Brand X

• Revenue - 92k

• MER - 2.65 MER

• Spend - 34.7k

November Goals:

• Scale spend up and hit our overall revenue goals for both brands and hit efficiency targets.

• Lock in for holiday season and crush every facet including retention, paid, creative.

• Support my team to give them what they need to succeed.