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The DTC Insider - Weekly Newsletter - 26/07 - Issue #16

The DTC Insider - Weekly Newsletter - 26/07 - Issue #16

9-figure ad account setup

July 26, 2023

Welcome to this issue of The DTC Insider newsletter. 👋

We'll send you weekly emails, every Wednesday, trying our best to deliver great value to your inbox.

In this newsletter, you'll find:

💠 9-Figure Ad Account Setup (part 1)

💠 Unlock The Power Of AI-Driven Product Development

💠 9-Figure Ad Account Setup (part 2)

💠 How Authentically American Became the Brand of Choice for Fortune 500 Companies

9-Figure Ad Account Setup (part 1)

Ever wanted a sneak peek at a 9-figure ad account?

A few weeks ago, Obvi - a brand I truly admire and interviewed on The DTC Insider podcast in 2022 - disclosed how they structure their Meta ad account.

Let's take a look at what they're doing.

The column setup

This is crucial to understand the performance of the ad campaigns.

They have 3 column sets:

Soft metrics:

Reach
Impressions
Frequency
Amount spent
Outbound clicks
Cost per outbound clicks
Outbound click-through-rate

Conversion & intra-funnel metrics:

Number of add to carts
Cost per add to cart
Number of checkout initiated
Cost per checkout initiated
Number of website purchases
NC-CPA (New Customer Acquisition cost) - See this in TripleWhale
NC-ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) - See this in TripleWhale

Creative analysis metrics:

Thumb-stop ratio (3-sec video-view / impressions)
Hold-rate (75% video view / impressions)
Drop-off rates for the following ranges
0% to 25% video view-rate
25% to 50% video view-rate
50% to 75% video view-rate
75% to 100% video view-rate

Pay attention to how they set it up.

They have 1 column set for what happens before users land on the website.

Another one is for what happens after they land on the website.

And finally, a third one is to understand how video ads are working.

Now...let's see how they structure their ad account.

Ad account structure

Here's a quick overview of what they're doing:

Each product has its own unique testing and scaling campaign(s)
- Testing campaign
- ASC (Advantage Shopping Campaign) for video winners
- ASC for static winners
Within the testing campaign, they run tests in individual ad sets on ABO (Ad set Budget Optimization)
- Each ad set is its own angle
- Each ad set is also broken up by creative type (video/static)
- Considerations:
  - If you don’t have enough creatives to test at a given time, you don’t need to break them up as complex as above.
  - We try to put around 4-6 ads in an ad set at a single time.
They prefer to run testing with DCT (Dynamic Creative Testing) and once they’ve found a winner - they take the post ID and plug it into the scaling campaigns. Now, they don't throw countless assets at DCTs. They recommend the following:
- 3 videos/statics
- 2 primary texts
- 2 headlines

Budget

Here, they propose to do the classic formula to let each ad set exit the learning phase.

That means, 50 conversions in a 7 or 1 day period, depending on the attribution settings.

Using 7 days for the following example:

Daily ad set budget: 50 conversions * Target CAC / 7 days

Let's say your AOV is $100 and you need a 4x ROAS, that's a $25 CAC.

So, using the above formula:

Daily ad set budget: 50 * $25 / 7 = $178.60

SPONSOR

9-Figure Ad Account Setup (part 2)

Testing period

The key concept they propose here is to avoid creating much volatility in the ad account.

Nowadays, even the smallest changes here or there will throw it into the learning phase again.

To prevent this, here's what they recommend:

Launch all your tests on the same day every single week
Let them run for at least 7 days before you touch anything
There are exceptions but evaluate those on a case-by-case basis
- Example: Extreme cases like extremely high CPC, or spending hundreds/thousands without a single conversion.
Evaluate after 7 days, and use the data to inform your next tests

Attribution settings

This is what they do:

No view-based attribution
- They say we’re asking for Meta to over-report if we use any sort of view-based attribution.
- The only time they would ever run this is if you’re JUST starting a new brand and your only marketing channel is Meta.
For testing purposes they run 7-day click
- Lower budget, will take a longer window to get 50 conversions
For scaling, they run 1-day click
- Higher budget, more of a chance to hit 50 conversions in a single day

Audiences

Just go broad. Plain and simple.

Only set your age, gender, and location.

Exclusions? Only customers.

Scaling things up

How to know when something's ready for scale?

2 things they look for:

Did the test leave learning in the first 7 days?
Can it handle a higher budget?

Let me explain the second one...

After the testing period is over, they propose scaling the daily budget of the testing ad set by 19% every couple of days if things look good.

If things hold, then it's ready for scale.

If things break, scale down and see if things level out.

My takeaways

The first thing I can say is...WOW.

It's not a coincidence they're doing so well.

They have a detailed plan for every aspect of their ad account.

That being said, there are a few things I wanted to highlight:

Catalog Sales campaigns: I'm surprised they're not using this campaign type. It leverages AI to show products the user wants to see, by analyzing their behavior with your brand or others (ie. products they viewed or added to cart). It seems they want to be 100% in control of the products they promote and the budget they allocate to each of them, as they create at least 1 campaign for each.
Overlap: since they create at least 1 campaign for each product they want to promote and use broad audiences, I imagine their audience overlap must be really high. I guess this teaches us, marketers and advertisers, a lesson: "so what?". Overlap is high, so? This strategy helps them achieve their goals and still get awesome results, so I guess audience overlap it's not something that's bothering them at all.

I hope you learned as much as I did. If you want to read the full article, subscribe to the Chew On This newsletter and read it here.

How Authentically American Became the Brand of Choice for Fortune 500 Companies

Imagine starting a DTC brand and having Fortune 500 companies calling you to order your products 🤯

To be noticed by such companies is a privilege that many entrepreneurs aspire to.

And it's exactly what happened to Dean Wegner at Authentically American.

But that's not all...

What's great about this story, is that such achievement was possible because of one specific thing.

And it's not what you're probably thinking.

Dean is the founder of Authentically American, and he will walk you through his journey from serving in the army to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

In this episode of The DTC Insider podcast, we discussed:

👉 Army Experience and Entrepreneurship

👉 Challenges of Launching a Brand from Scratch

👉 The Power of Story

👉 B2C Business and Customer Relations

👉 Working with Fortune 500 Companies

👉 The WOW Product Experience

👉 Embracing Innovation

👉 Making the Most of National TV Features

👉 Leading with Purpose & Values

🎧 Tune in to our latest episode: https://thedtcinsider.com/

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