Welcome back, nerds!

It's nice to see you again.

Welcome back, nerds! 🤓

10,997 people are getting this message fired into their inbox and I can’t tell you how proud that makes me feel. Somehow, people were still subscribing even when I ended this thing!!!!

That blows my mind and TRULY warms my heart.

But maybe… you all knew that it would be coming back 🤷‍♂️ Crazy.

The best part? We seem to all be succeeding in silence.

A caveat to who I am as a person, a founder, and CEO.

Quiet competency is a core tenant of everything I do and the replies I get from this newsletter lead me to believe others share this value.

Our chests do not hurt from pounding (yet) and we prefer to speak out when it helps others rather than ourselves.

Look, all that said… Thank you for being here. I’m excited to be back! As you may have heard, I don’t entirely know what the posting structure will be for these Dispatches but I’m thrilled to be writing again.

I took some time off from the newsletter to re-focus with my team and I had to be super selfish with my time.

For my sake, the team’s sake, and our partners.

I’ll continue with this notion - If there’s a week where we are heads down, then the newsletter will get pushed. Simple as that. Period.

Before, that wouldn’t have been okay with me, but as a new founder and CEO, you learn these things.

You learn to be more selfish with your time and truthfully it’s been one of the biggest unlocks in my professional career. Realizing that it’s okay to be this way, say no to things, and invest my time where it’s truly needed.

For any founders, agency owners, etc. I would seriously recommend an audit of your time. Consistently. Like, no BS… add it to your calendar.

We audit accounts every day but when was the last time you audited your time?

Now, the newsletter will also be moving to a Paid Version in August. Initially, that paid version was going to be $2.50 BUT after thinking through it further, I think $1.00 is fair enough.

A small fee, in my opinion, for renting premium space inside my head.

I’m not here to sell anything, I don’t want to change WHO you are or the way that you run performance marketing, I don’t need this as a revenue stream and we all know that Substack will take its share. I just want to share my thoughts, and get a small bit of compensation for doing so.

Fair? Then I’ll see ya on the paid side shortly!

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Housekeeping

As always, rather than feed you the idea that FB is some overtly complicated world of rocket science, I’m always going to simplify things.

It’s certainly not a walk in the park (especially recently) but there are things we share here that are just simple, straightforward, and to the point.

For some of you, you’re steady-rocking it already 🤘 and you know exactly what this section is about. Please skip and carry on.

For others, this is your first time reading a full dispatch.

Check it out… In this ‘Housekeeping’ section I add the recommended reading time and two disclaimers.

Going forward you can just skip this part but for anyone new:

I’m recommending a total of 6 minutes to consume this dispatch.

1. There is no one unicorn source (including this one) that will teach you everything you need to know about advertising. If that’s why you’ve decided to be in this community, you’ll soon be disappointed.

2. What works for one advertiser, might not work for you. These are merely observations of what myself and others see as working across platforms, accounts, and verticals. And, our interpretation of ideas. You need to test responsibly, at your own discretion, and ideate individually.

With housekeeping out of the way, let’s get into the fun stuff, shall we?

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What Are We Nerding Out On?

Let’s kick off with some good news from FB:

Starting on June 30th, 2021, Shopify will enable customers to send ALL of the currently sent events via Shopify’s native Pixel integration (VC, ATC, IC, PUR) with conversions API.

If you missed the last post about further updates from FB, click here.

This is huge news and when I couple this knowledge with the update that Shopify is creating audiences as well… I get really excited about paid media.

The events piece is also big news as this means that we can optimize for more than 8 events (again). A huge win when you look at setting up custom conversions for things like time on site and scroll depth.

We’re looking at those in Google Analytics right now and just started testing bringing these back into FB with Google Tag Manager (now that we can). Stay tuned for an update on that in the future.

iOS14 has brought a world of changes and a ton of hardship for many but I and our team always held onto the hope that the world’s best engineers and wildly profitable businesses that rely on advertising wouldn’t let Apple have the final say.

I have a less than contrarian outlook on things and it’s been important to keep that outlook, IMO. For our partners, laying back and just living in this new reality is never enough. We want to continue thriving.

Moving on, let’s get into the chunky bit:

I was recently involved in a thread where I think I stunned about 90% of people on Twitter by sharing something I thought was common knowledge.

So, I figured it would be valuable to share here as well.

After spending over $120M on paid ads and generating close to $465M in attributable sales, sometimes these little things… that are second nature or first-hand knowledge for me, might not have been passed onto others.

It’s the main reason we built this newsletter in the first place.

So, I hope this helps.

Very, very rarely is this addressed or talked about amongst people when it comes to FB ads. I don’t know the core reason for that so I’ll stay away from assumptions.

Essentially…

If you’re testing new copy, headlines, hooks, destinations, or offers using a historically great piece of creative, you want a NEW CREATIVE ID so that you get new learnings with that test.

Duplicating a FB AD and changing the copy or url DOES NOT reset previous learnings and they are still attached.

All learning on FB is associated with the CREATIVE itself. The specific piece that lives inside your library.

So, how do you work with this info?

1) Change the filename and re-upload the creative.

2) Name that piece of creative after your test.

Jake… can you give me a specific example?

Yeah, let’s do it!

We’ll piggyback off the thread and say we are testing a new quiz funnel.

This means we’re going after a different pre-click consumer and post-click experience. Therefore, a different paid consumer entirely, compared to the previous learnings attached to the creative we’ve been using.

We’ll want NEW creative for this. Even if we’re using old-as-new.

Unless I planned (I’ll touch on this shortly).

So, I’ve got a fancy new Quiz experience I want to test.

When creating ads for this, I’ll most likely want to re-upload winning creative that I know just slaps (aka works). I’ll re-upload that creative with a filename something like “QUIZ-asset_type-destination-date” This way, all of the creative used for this funnel test will be trained towards the buyers in a quiz experience (pre and post-click).

This is that planning piece. With the right file upload nomenclature, anytime in the future if I want another Quiz funnel test, I’ll use the winning creative from the prev quiz setup, re-upload with a new filename, and let em rip.

Another benefit here is that I can easily search my ad library when making ads in the future and find anything with the filename QUIZ, rather than all the other random creative names I see people using out there.

Catching on here?

I’d recommend doing the same thing for specific Landing Pages, Hooks, High-Margin SKUs, and Offers.

Mind map the creative library into account structure/testing.

To reiterate the main point here:

With FB, everything is trained on the Creative ID, not the Ad ID.

Speaking with others in the industry, they were always told something similar but it was never explained the correct way.

Historically, the Creative ID was referred to as the Entity ID. And FB recommended changing 10% of that creative (color, asset size, etc) to reset the Entity ID.

When in reality, you can just upload the same creative under another file name.

Moving Forward

You most likely can’t just NUKE all of your accounts and creative, but I hope this helps set up a new way of thinking about creative testing and scaling.

This idea should lead you into a new setup if you’re looking for more clarity. New creative IDs and dedicated tests in this manner set you up perfectly for a more granular UTM and reporting structure.

For us, that means a dedicated campaign for each ANGLE/OFFER/LP/CREATIVE

Here’s a pseudo look at what we do.

If we have, let’s say Campaign #1, for LP v2, our UTM would look as such:

utm_source=fbig&utm_medium={{placement}}&utm_campaign=tof_c1-lpv2_hv3lal&utm_content=v-founder-h1-c3-d2

As you can see, we manually enter the campaign name TO INCLUDE the ad set. In this case, a High-Value 3% LAL (hv3lal).

Sometimes, if we truly want to see that traffic in real-time on Analytics, we’ll add the asset name before {{placement}}.

Something like this:

utm_source=fbig&utm_medium=tof_c1-lpv2_hv3lal__{{placement}}&utm_campaign=tof_c1-lpv2_hv3lal&utm_content=v-founder-h1-c3-d2

Woah, isn’t that redundant?

Correct, but when spending $20-30k on a specific ad set I personally want to see that real-time traffic sources view in Analytics firing.

Now, for content, we can see that this is a Video asset (v) It’s the Founder video (founder) It’s using Hook 1 (h1) Then Copy 3 (c3) And Description 2 (d2)

That means nothing to anyone looking at it but when you have a database off-platform (Notion or Google Sheet) hosting your Copy, Descriptions, etc. Then you know exactly what is moving the needle and what’s failing, DESPITE what FB might be reporting.

Lastly, in Google Analytics, we can easily see what ASSET is performing the best with ecomm CR, Time on Site, etc. And, we can create segments just for this campaign OR just for this ad set.

Going forward with the new update from FB regarding custom events, we’ll ensure this info lives within FB as well. How? Create custom events for ToS and page scroll depth.

Which should be available by 6/30/21.

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With gratitude.

If this was helpful please let others know about what we’re building here. Truthfully, this newsletter has only grown as large as it has because of amazing readers sharing.

So, do me a favor and tap that beautiful (clearly marked) ‘Share’ button at the end to let your network know about this little world we have. Or don’t and keep it all to yourself. Your call.

I’m cooking up some cool stuff going forward like video interviews, etc. As well as, some templates of internal tools that our small but mighty agency uses for partner management, comms, etc.

I want to speak about ads but I also want to help other agencies/teams.

I finally feel confident in sharing these hard lessons I’ve learned so that others can avoid them. Truthfully, I’ll share them in hopes that the agency world gets back to a more beautiful place.

A place where you can build what YOU want for who YOU want without having the biggest team, most accounts, or awards on the wall.

Where the partners and your team are the focus, at all times.

Let’s keep building something different.

Let’s keep growing. Together.

Until next time.

Cheers,

Jake the Ad Nerd ✌️

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