18/03/2024
Auditing a $22M Ads Account!
It's not very common to audit an account spending more than $10M a year. I just got contacted by a prospect to see why their ads are not working.
Here is what I noticed needs to be changed in their ads account. I am sharing it publicly so others can benefit, too.
Client overview:
One of the top supplement brands working in four countries. They are selling on Amazon, Website, and through retail partnerships.
1- Not spending enough on Creatives
Most brands are ready to spend millions of dollars on ads but don't want to spend even 1/10th on the creatives. The owners want to spend all the money on the campaign budget, as they think they will make more in return for whatever they spend.
When you spend close to a million dollars a month, your ads are repeatedly seen by the same people. It causes Ad fatigue; you must show them something new to keep their attention after a while.
New creatives give you two benefits: first, they keep the audience engaged, as no one wants to repeatedly see the same boring content. From the technical side, people will start 'hiding' your ad or at least start ignoring it. When they do so, Facebook counts it as negative feedback and has no choice but to increase your CPM.
2- No Video Ads
All the ads in the ads account (at least 99% of them) are image ads (single, catalog, and carousel). You can't expect people to buy the supplements because the packaging looks nice.
For supplement brands, what I have seen to be working is videos by influencers. People will only buy supplements from companies they trust as it directly impacts their health. The fastest way to develop trust is to use influencers. People trust the companies trusted by their favorite personalities.
3- Less Number of Campaigns
Keep the account clean, but you should not do it at the cost of optimization. The screenshot shows that some campaigns have spent over $2 million. The problem is the many adsets in these campaigns, which makes the analysis impossible.
If you want to keep the number of campaigns minimum, the adsets inside those campaigns should be similar. If you mix look-alikes with interest targeting and then retarget adsets in a single campaign, how will you analyze the results after a month? By looking at the adsets? What if they are in thousands?
Naming attribution should always be silly and straightforward; you should be able to look at the campaign name and tell what is inside it.
4- Website
The website looks good; it has both one-time and subscription options, looks neat and straightforward, and has almost all the elements. If it had celebrity endorsements, it could have boosted the trust score and the conversion rate.
5- Using 1% LAA
With such high budgets, using smaller audiences can only work in the short run. Audience Expansion? Even if it is turned on, you can still spend less than $3,000/day on 1% LAA for weeks; it will start getting expensive soon. At least give a try to bigger % audiences; you can get back to 1% if needed.
6- Look-Alikes Stacked with Interests
The account currently uses 1% LAA, narrowed down by interests. Here's what I suggested to them:
Invest in creatives, go broad, and Facebook will find the most relevant people for you. LAAs have started working again recently, but stacking them with interests used to work 3-4 years ago. Now, all the platforms want their ad management to be automated. A broad audience beats all other audiences in the long term if you let the campaign optimize.
7- Cost Cap
The last thing most people think about is that the technical aspect of Facebook is dead. Yes, it is to some extent, but it is not like you should not touch any of the options that Facebook provides. Manual Bidding still works, or at least saves your ass on bad days!
There are some brand-specific suggestions, too, which I am not sharing to maintain privacy.
![Breakdown of our best-performing video ads after generating more than 500,000 leads for this client. 🔥[ ⏰ 5 seconds] Sta...](https://img4.marketers1.com/868/661/374435748686616.jpg)
