21 Good Practices to Properly Optimize Meta Ads

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Welcome to this issue of The DTC Insider newsletter. 👋

We strive to deliver the latest growth marketing news and trends in the DTC space straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

Topics we’ll cover today:

💠 21 Good Practices to Properly Optimize Meta Ads
💠 Google Launches YouTube Creator-Based Audience Targeting
💠 Finding the Right Brand Identity

21 Good Practices to Properly Optimize Meta Ads

Have you ever considered asking an expert media buyer about their strategies for growing a Meta ads account profitably?

I just did that for you.

I went ahead and asked one of our top media buyers at my agency to list our own set of good practices to set up and optimize Meta Ads.

And, well...she sent me over 20 of them! 😅

Here it is:

1. Keep your ad campaign structure simple. You don't need as many campaigns as a few years ago. Sometimes, it's enough with 2 or 4. Always use sales-oriented campaigns to get purchases, and not Engagement or Traffic campaigns, for example.
   

2. Define the parameters of success before scaling: ie. "we should scale campaigns with a 3x ROAS or higher.". This will help you scale while being profitable.
   

3. Watch your budget scale pacing: check the budget once a week, and scale by around 20% if those parameters of success are met (if you are too aggressive with the scale, performance can decrease significantly). If the ROAS is low, the budget can be redistributed. We'd only lower it as a last resource.
   

4. Monitor the performance every day. While you don't need to change everything every day, it's a good practice to identify bad-performing assets (ads, ad sets, or campaigns) and turn them off. Even though we check this daily, we always look at multiple periods to analyze performance before turning something off. We don't ever look at a single day's performance...ever.
   

5. Don’t use the “Existing customer budget cap" option in Advantage Shopping Campaigns (ASC). This campaign works at the account level and maintains the ROAS for the entire audience, if it starts to be limited with exclusions, it stops working. It rarely works well for new customers only. This campaign learns from remarketing or retention audiences, and although finding new customers is more difficult, it only does so when left open.
   

6. Have a DABA campaign (Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences). It will "steal" your competitors' customers, because it'll target people interested in similar products to the ones you sell.
   

7. Amplify organic posts in sales-oriented campaigns to feed the algorithm.
   

8. Retarget those who abandoned the cart with multiple ad sets based on recency: 30 Days, 7 days, and 1 day.
   

9. Retention audiences work too. Its scale will depend on how big your pipeline of new customers is.
   

10. Don’t exclude audiences using an uploaded list only, use web audiences too. 
    

11. Exclude buyers for a maximum of 30/60 days in prospecting campaigns, don’t use 180 or 90.
    

12. Test all types of audiences for remarketing (uploaded lists, pixel, or Shopify/Klaviyo/etc. syncs). Test big ad sets of all audiences separately until you know which one works. Ideally, Then, move what works to an ad set with all audiences to simplify the structure.
    

13. Use Sales campaigns to test prospecting audiences with non-advantage audiences. Advantage audiences work for a few days but then stop working, and these don’t allow exclusions, so the account overlaps much more and does not allow testing of new audiences. 
    

14. Re-test old ads that haven't worked before with new copy, a slight change in the creative, and even a new URL.
    

15. Tweak your best-performing ads to create new winners.
    

16. Turn on something that used to work in the past and test how it works now.
    

17. Use dynamic copy options to reduce ad fatigue.
    

18. Update "video views" audiences every month, adding new videos since the last one was created.
    

19. Keep Frequency up to 4. More than that is not recommended and can be lowered by uploading new ad formats.
    

20. Catalog campaigns require constant ad optimizations. Testing many combinations, formats, and product sets keeps them performing well. In general, using "all products" works better than category-specific product sets or specific products and simplifies the structure.
    

21. Catalog carousels work very well with frames, you have to exhaust all the resources and tests within the catalog ads so that there are always different proposals to display.

Of course, these are generic tips we use across clients.

If you'd like to get insights specific to your brand, we'd be happy to do that.

Now, I wish we could do this for every brand, but unfortunately, we can't.

(Last time we had over 20 requests 🤯 and had to postpone most of them.)

This time, we'll do it for the first 5 brands that book a call using this link.

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Google Launches YouTube Creator-Based Audience Targeting

Up until now, advertisers could only create remarketing lists based on viewers' interactions with their own linked YouTube channels.

Now, Google Ads allows advertisers to create remarketing lists based on viewers of specific YouTube creator videos 🙌

As you can imagine, this unlocks new possibilities for targeted campaigns.

How it works:

➝ Link YouTube creator videos to your Google Ads account.
➝ This will give you access to organic view metrics and the ability to create remarketing segments.

Key features:

➝ View counts: access to non-paid metrics for linked videos.
➝ Remarketing: Create audience segments based on video views.

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Finding the Right Brand Identity

If you started your second brand, what mistakes would you avoid?

This is exactly what we discussed in this episode of The DTC Insider podcast with Bob Verlaat, founder at Dore & Rose and Hears, among other brands.

Check it out 👇

We discussed:

👉 Applying Key Lessons from Dore and Rose to Starting Hears
👉 Finding the Right Brand Identity for Dore and Rose: The Journey and Its Importance
👉 Standing Out in a Competitive Market
👉 Acquisition & Retention Strategies: Entertaining Through Creatives and Channel Focus
👉 The Impact of a Great Product on Business Success
👉 Biggest Growth Levers: Brand Partnerships and Licensing
👉 Metrics and Company Areas of Obsession: How They Evolved Over Time
👉 What’s Next for Hears and Dore and Rose?

🎧 Tune in >

More episodes our listeners love:

💎 IQBAR’s Journey to 10,000 Locations And $50 Million with Will Nitze

💎 The Secret Sauce Behind BattlBox's Success with John Roman

💎 Supplement Brand Bootstrapped $10,000 and Built It Into Sales of $30 Million in Three Years with Ronak Shah

💎 Unlocking 9-Figure Growth: The Blueprint That Transformed Two Brands with Brett Swensen

💎 Navigating Growth Beyond Your Niche with Podium Nutrition’s CMO

Also Happening in the DTC space:

📰 TikTok Back to School Playbook 2024 for Small-Medium Businesses
📰 Instagram Chief Shares Tips on How to Improve Content Performance
📰 Google Adds Generative AI Insights, Shopping Ad Campaign Goals

Work for a DTC Brand?

Can’t scale your ad campaigns without seeing a dip in performance?

At BSR Digital, we have over 10 years of experience doing that, and that’s the main reason our clients see anywhere from 36% to 77% increase in revenue and profit within the first 6 months of working with us.

If you're ready to shake things up and turbocharge your growth, let's chat!

Book a discovery call with us, and let's brainstorm some game-changing ideas together.

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